"The Undefeated"

Sarah Palin?  "The Undefeated"?  Really?   Didn't she turn tail and quit her job as governor?   But that's not fair::  she didn't quit;  she left a boring unpromising low-paying job as a public servant in order to become a highly paid media star on flextime.  Which was where she was before entering politics, a TV presenter. 

On Knowledge, Faith, Argument, Education

As for religion, why should we draw lines and say, "This is a matter of fact, which can be argued with, but this other gets into faith which we ought not to argue with"? Business is supposed to be reality-based, science, the same. Why not religion? Why not faith?

Who was it that said "The unexamined life is not worth living"?

IMO we each ought to question every aspect of our (and other's) beliefs, not just once but periodically, like housecleaning. It ought to be a part of high school curriculum to question everything, values, mores, theories of government, of religion, nothing excepted. In h.s. government class, there needs to be a part where students criticize democracy, capitalism, any established shibboleth. In science, have a segment where students have free rein to criticize any scientific tenet.

I am not saying that classes can be disorderly and anarchic, but that there needs to be a time and place for everything. Some facts can only be learned by rote. Other concepts need to be discovered. Some subjects call for creativity while others don't. Sometimes debate is useful. At present, IMO, schooling blurs the lines, so you have kids responding to a fact question by exercising creativity or giving an opinion; the real purpose of education is to teach kids to know the difference and to clearly distinguish between what they know and what they think they know and what is uncertain or arguable.

It is common to grade a test so that getting 90% of the questions right means getting an "A".  What grade do you give an airline pilot who gets 90% right?  Dead?  Probably. 

And there are so many areas in which our problem is thinking we know when in fact we do not.  True ignorance is not in not knowing, but in not knowing you are wrong.

The most important thing to get out of school is to know what one knows and what one does not know, and to be able to distinguish what is definite and knowable from what is unknown or a matter of opinion.

It is creationists who say that biology classes ought to let students question the validity of evolutionary theory. Well, okay, nothing wrong with questioning. But talk about teaching students to question religion and those creationists get all het up and say that is off limits. Why? Can't take what you try to dish out?

Stosselpoopery

Stosselpoopery as in nincompoopery.

What ever happened to John Stossel?  I hadn't heard about him for years since enjoying his segments on a TV program called 20/20.

A link posted in a forum took me to a blog he has over on Fox Business.  From ABC to Fox.  Quite a fall.   Drugs?   Alcohol?  Depression?  Loss of motivation?   We may never know.    And that blog confirms it:  the clever and insightful John Stossel is no more.  He has joined the brain-dead at Fox.  The Zombie Network.

Here's the blog post I'm talking about:  http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2011/04/25/where-did-all-anti-war-protestors-go   

It never occurs to Stossel that those who protested over Afghanistan or Iraq trust Obama more than Bush to bring those occupations to an early conclusion.   But there's more than that to what Stossel terms "the anti-war movement."

For me, I opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and of Iraq from the outset, especiually the Iraq invasion.   Why?   Was I "anti-war"?   Not really.  What I was was "anti-roll-over-and-play-fetch,"  which was the role the Bush administration and overwhelming political correctness tried to force Americans into back in 2002-2003.  We were to be the good doggies, and Cheney-Bush the ones who had us on a leash.

Ever had a tenacious salesman in your living room, one who simply would not leave until you signed his contract?  A really, really, hard sell?  And what does that tell you about the product the salesman is selling?   That was the Bush-Cheney administration before invading Iraq.   Quite obvious at the time that there was something wrong with what they were pushing, or else they would not have been pushing so hard.  Obvious that we were being conned by all the scare tactics relating to 9/11 and al Quaeda.

And most everybody went along, almost all the "liberal media," Oprah Winfrey who basically talked down someone who wanted to oppose the Iraq invasion on her TV show, even in the senate and house.  To oppose invading Iraq was to be ... unAmerican.  Only a handful of well-known people dared speak up.   The story of the emperor's new clothes updated to 2003.

So, I was anti-invasion, not anti-war.   I was anti-occupation later, because the occupation was so horribly mismanaged in the early years, politicized, with positions parceled out to the party faithful on the basis of their support, not on the basis of ability.  

At the same time, I did not favor full military withdrawal.  I mean, if you bomb a nation back to 1850, do you just go away and leave them to rebuild by themselves?  Don't you have a duty to stay and lend a hand?

The Chinese say that if you save someone's life, then you are responsible for them.   I  say that if you destroy someone's house and kill members of their family, and discover it all was a mistake, then you have a heavy burden of responsibility and that you can't turn your back and go home and forget about it.

Back to Stossel.  He does not see the nuances in opposition to Bushgressions and Cheneycasualties.  He struggles to string together words to throw like scraps of raw meat to ravening Fox-readers.  RIP John Stossel.

Will the GOP Find a Young New Lover?

So you're 30+ years old and mother of three squalling brats and carry 30 extra pounds and your second hubbie has gone to parts of persons unknown and won't be back, and your apartment smells like dirty diapers. You can dream, can't you? So you read the National Enquirer about celeb love and breakups, and buy those little romance paperback books that have hunky men enbracing buxom lasses on the cover. Will a white knight like that come and take you away from all this?

You sigh and know that white knights are uncommon around here, and if one were to get lost and knock on your door. he wouldn't be interested and wouldn't come in because of the smell and the noise.

So you leave the kids with mom and hit the bars, knowing that when the hour hand moves past 12, everybody gets prettier.

So it is with the Republican Party. Kissed too many beaux, slept with too many, had too many kids, drunk too many beers and eaten too much fast food and what is left is not too attractive to anybody in a position to be at all choosy.

Short and unsweet analysis. "2012 and the republican rescue fantasy" http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/2012-and-republican-rescue-fantasy From the article:

"COLUMBIA, S.C.

"Talk to enough people around this key primary state and you'll learn two lessons, over and over again. One is that there is absolutely, positively no unity among Republicans about any presidential candidate or potential candidate; there's no such thing as a frontrunner. The other is that in the back of their minds, many Republicans are hoping that somewhere, somehow, a superhero candidate will swoop down out of the sky and rescue them from their current lackluster presidential field. They know it's a fantasy, but they still hope....
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/2012-and-republican-rescue-fantasy#ixzz1LoqxbBTg

More on Osama

After four days, we have some facts.  Kudos to our government for fessing up.

There was llittle resistance.  The woman was killed along with the AQ messenger before entry to Osama's house.   There was no resistance by Bin Laden of his son. 
 
This was an assassination by a Seal hit team from the outset.

Apart from theoretical matters of legality and morality, it's hard to second-guess that decision.  After all these years, we still don't know what to do with Khalil Sheikh Mohammed.  We sure don't need a breathing and untried Osama & Son in perpetual confinement at Guantanamo like some "man in the iron mask" ordered imprisoned without trial by a French king while we hold off Amnesty, Int'l visits by bayonet.

Simpler and cleaner with lower risk of future terrorism to just kill them.

Does it bother me?  Sure it does.  Those polls like to ask "Do you think America has lost its way?"   Well, yes;  sure.  Partly if not mostly for the way out leaders have bent the laws.

We are not as far from an extra-constitutional dictatorship as we would wish.  Here is proof that ours is not a government of laws but of men and expediency.

We were told that captured terrorists, terrorist-affiliates and suspects were soldiers and not criminals, that our domestic laws did not apply to them, and so they were carted off to a legal no-where at Gitmo, where an extra-constitutional system was set up to supposedly try them, when and if we got around to it, maybe.

But is it okay to assassinate unarmed soldiers? That's what happened this week in Pakistan.

Truth is, we have done this before, in WWII and since. We did it in conflict with American Indians. And it is a legal and moral dilemma only if we think about it. Most Americans are not thinking about it. We never have much.  The price of gasoline is forever on our minds more than morals.

The Problem With Political Polls...

Nothing better illustrates the problem with polls than the current chaos of the Republican Party.  Is Donald Trump the current GOP favorite for the presidency?  Or is he merely the best-known name?  Or is he merely the one jokers name when they are asked questions in a poll?  Are the respondents teasing the pollster?  Have Palin and Gingrich really fallen so far? 

We don't know.

Obviously, a long time before an election polls are especially inaccurate.  But polls have built-in inaccuracies.

The most accurate poll is the exit poll, where those who just voted are asked how they voted.  Exit polls are far superior because, most of all, only those who actually voted are polled.   When most voters don't vote, political polls have to be taken with one huge dose of salt.   

I think this can partly be corrected by polls asking respondents "how strongly do you feel about the upcoming election?"  and weighting the response accordingly, on the assumption that those who feel most strongly about an election are most likely to vote.  Which is not always true, especially a long tie before the election.  

Or only those who always vote can be identified -- I nearly always vote--and their opinions given extra weight. 

There are other problems with polling.  There is the fact that every response is voluntary.  Can one assume that those who are too busy to waste time answering a bunch of questions do not show a distinctive voting pattern?  Then there are the

Osama.

Nothing has really changed and the spin continues.   The real wars are still being fought, and they are between American and American.

How do I feel? Relief that it has finally happened. No jubilation, no celebration, no fist pumps. No joy in Mudville.

Justice was not done. Partly because there ain't no justice, partly because if justice were done, how many of us and our leaders would be left standing?

Most interesting thing about Bin Laden was the interplay between him and our nation. The ways we enabled him, the ways he fed disease within us. A curious symbiosis. 

One wonders what will happen and how or if we will cope now he is gone. 

We need our villains, and if there are not enough to go around we must manufacture them.  Osama came along in a post Soviet Union vacuum, when the country needed a unifying object of fear and hate.  I think the hatred we have seen of conservatives for liberals, Republicans for Democrats, and vice versa, since 2004 was an indicator that the value of Osama as such an object was on the wane.  Will we turn on one another now with renewed anger?  That may be.