Mr. Moderate

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. … That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, … That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

From the Declaration of Independence

From the above we can discern that our founding fathers felt it was appropriate to have a government which would:

• Protect the life and safety of its citizens;
• Protect the liberty and freedom of its citizens; and
• Protect the happiness of its citizens and their ability to pursue additional happiness.

All-in-all, those would seem to be pretty good reasons for people to have a government.
Continue reading ‘Why Have A Government?’ »

One of my major complaints against President George W. Bush is his egregious blurring of the line between “terrorists” and people, groups, and nations who are merely “enemies.” You see, the whole problem for President Bush is that it is very difficult to find some particular activity engaged in by “terrorists” which has not also been engaged in by the United States or its agents at some point in the past half-century. Thus, if we apply the Bush definitions to the United States of America (USA), then the USA is a “state sponsor of terrorism.”

I mention this because, after the recent Hamas takeover in Gaza, it appears that the USA, Israel and its allies are scheming to cut off water, electricity, food, fuel, and everything else supplied to Gaza on the grounds that Gaza is under control of “terrorists.” This of course misses the point: there are 1.4 million men, women, and children trapped in Gaza and the efforts just discussed seemed designed to terrorize them all, or to even kill them all for lack of food, water, health care, and any other “necessities of life.” I know that President Bush has no heart, but what about the rest of the world? Is there nobody out there who will dare to call Bush and Israel “terrorists” for preventing the Palestinian people from surviving this decades-long occupation and seige by Israel? Isn’t this really a Palestinian Holocaust in the making? WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE, WORLD!
Continue reading ‘Hi, Fellow Terrorist!’ »

President Bush and his military leaders (presumably acting under Bush’s orders as Commander-in-Chief) are streaming out hopeful words about the prospects for the US troop surge making things better inside Iraq. However, the BBC reporters on the scene in Baghdad offer this gloomy assessment:

One measure of how bad things have become is that Western diplomats will no longer visit the Iraqi Defence ministry, even though it is inside the Green Zone.

In fact, militia infiltration is believed to be such that no-one walks anywhere in the Green Zone for fear of being snatched off the street.

So, if the coalition cannot even guarantee its own safety in the heart of its power base, what hope for the rest of Baghdad?

The so-called “Green Zone” is the heart of the US occupation, and is heavily walled, fortified, and guarded by American troops. So, if things are getting to be that bad in the “Green Zone,” then it really is legitimate to ask not only what hope there is for Baghdad as a whole, but what hope is there for the whole of Iraq?
Continue reading ‘Where The Surge Is’ »

One thing is already certain about the 2008 election results: there will be fewer moderates elected than either liberals or conservatives. The very nature of our two-party biarchy suppresses the middle and accentuates the extremes. Each extreme tolerates the other extreme as a place for incorrigibles who will never “see the light.” But any attempt at achieving power by moderate forces (such as Ross Perot in 1992) will be viciously attacked by both extremes, and this naturally serves to drive most people away from the political middle.

Accordingly, moderates are quite used to being forced to pick between “the lesser of two evils.” Moderates do not usually get to vote for a candidate or cause that they wholeheartedly support. Instead, moderates are usually forced to “hold their noses” and select the least-objectionable from two highly-objectionable extremes. Its no wonder that only about half the people of voting age will even bother to vote on Election Day even if the office of President of the United States is there for the choosing.

Is there any way to make moderates arise and gather in their destiny? I certainly wish there were, but after 15 years of hard work and moderate activism, I’m largely out of possible ideas. Largely, but not totally.
Continue reading ‘Moderates Arise!’ »

Let me say at the beginning that I favor Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), and my “vote for nobody” campaign should not be enacted unless IRV is also in force at the same time.

Given IRV, then among the list of candidates should always be included the option of voting for “None of the above.” In an IRV system, each voter marks N candidates in order, and with my “vote for nobody” option, “none of the above” would always be presumed as the N+1th option marked by the voter unless “None of the above” was previously marked by the voter. Valid but totally blank ballots would always be presumed as a vote for “none of the above” in the first position. In the event that “None of the above” should actually win (achieve a majority vote) under the IRV system, then all current candidates are barred from running again for a specified period of time and a re-run of the election is held with an entirely new list of candidates. The process may be repeated as many times as needed to achieve a majority victory by some candidate. In this way, the elected candidate will always be the choice of the majority. And if no candidate can obtain a majority vote, we are not left with the lesser evil, but instead get a new vote. Think about it: actual majority rule! And there would be no real advantage obtained by any candidate who could manage to generate “spoiled ballots” as those would be counted as votes for “none of the above” and would count against the leading candidate possibly obtaining a “50%+1 vote” majority.

The one thing which is most broken here in the United States is the health care system. I believe that the reason it is broken is rooted in the economics of health care. When it comes to individual doctors treating individual patients, I believe that the free market economy, as ruled by the law of supply and demand, ought to produce a good outcome for everybody. However, for almost a century now, there has not been a free market in health care.

If we look back a century and a half or more in America, all it took to become a doctor was enough learning from books to absorb the concepts of how the human body worked and what could be done (based upon what was known at the time) to repair whatever was deemed to be wrong. Many of my ancestral cousins in the old south were deemed to be “doctors” because they had enough learning from books to be able to treat slaves and assist mothers to give birth to babies. Of course, so little was known about “proper health care” in that day and age, that the concept of medical malpractice rarely entered the picture. Even today, it is difficult to find one “expert witness” doctor who will tell a jury that what another doctor did was absolutely wrong and caused injury to the plaintiff. In the distant past, juries were supposed to use common sense in deciding cases, and “expert witness” testimony was rarely used.

But my real point here is that the law of supply and demand is broken now when it comes to health care. All of the changes in how medicine is practiced have led to a situation where there isn’t any real free market in health care, and thus it is easy to understand why costs are out of control.
Continue reading ‘Economical Health’ »

The postmodernist creed is defined by “incredulity toward metanarratives” and “the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation,” asking “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” “[A] metanarrative (sometimes master- or grand narrative) ‘is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience.’” In simpler terms, postmodernism denies the possibility of useful generalizations and also denies even the possibility of deriving any legitimate conclusions that might be drawn from bulk analysis of data. Since the end goal of scientific inquiry is all about deriving metanarratives and conclusions of that sort, it can be reasonably asserted that postmodernism is committed to the destruction of scientific thinking.

The fundamentalist creed can be summarized as a belief “that human existence is innately sinful but offers redemption and eternal peace in heaven - thus representing a belief in a universal rule and a telos for humankind.” The fundamentalist thus asserts an extremely specific and highly detailed metanarrative which the fundamentalist asserts must be believed exactly as stated without variation, in spite of the fact that many variations clearly exist. The fundamentalist similarly denies the legitimacy of scientific inquiry on the grounds that any knowledge obtained from scientific inquiry will necessarily either duplicate the metanarrative of the Holy Bible or else it will not, and in either case such knowledge is at least useless and possibly dangerous. Thus, the fundamentalist is also profoundly committed to the destruction of scientific thinking.

My personal metanarrative is predicated upon scientific inquiry as the sole possible producer of legitimate beliefs, and that the foundational belief produced by scientific inquiry is that all living things are ethically obligated to survive, and to ensure the survival of as many diverse forms of life as possible. (See HERE for more.) Needless to say, I believe that my personal metanarrative is the only sane belief system of the three I present in this post.
Continue reading ‘Competing Metanarratives’ »

The intense political debate in our nation over whether we are “winning” or “losing” the war in Iraq actually misses the point. The real fact is that we never intended to win in any real sense. President Bush went into Iraq with one goal in mind: to capture Saddam and see him executed by his enemies. Even that extremely limited goal proved very difficult to achieve, as Saddam avoided capture for many months, and the total destruction of the Iraqi governmental structure took years to rebuild to the point where Saddam’s political show trial could take place with at least some semblance of decorum. But the replacement of the chief judge in the middle of the show trial simply proved to the world at large it was no real trial, but a kangaroo court of the worst kind. The appeal process proved that when the appeal court insisted that one more defendant be sentenced to death when he had been spared after his original trial. It isn’t recorded in the public news media what punishment the judges received for failing to follow the script set down by the Bush administration.

But to get back to the war, it was never stated as an objective that the United States would somehow annex Iraq as a political dependency, such as it had done in the past with Cuba and the Philippine Islands. It is true that, in the earliest days, there was talk of using Iraq’s oil money to pay back the United States for giving Iraq its freedom from Saddam. But that idea foundered when it was pointed out that the Iraqi government was not likely to keep up payments to the United States after the US military leaves Iraq, and the US military was spending $100 billion per year in Iraq to protect an oil output worth only $30 billion per year. Besides, the main idea of repayment was to pay back construction loans, but again, the US is still destroying more each year than it builds overall. So, even in that limited case no legitimate argument exists for expecting the Iraqi government to make any payments to the United States.

The real issue, which nobody points out, is that even if Bush’s war plan is the greatest success any general could conceive of from here on out, the United States still loses the war by any rational measurement. No matter what happens, the US military will eventually leave Iraq. And no matter what happens, Iraq will still be next door to Iran. And no matter what happens, Shiites with a natural friendship towards Iran will be in the majority within the body politic inside of Iraq. So, no matter what happens, eventually Iran will have far more influence within Iraq than the United States will. With a victory like that, who needs a loss?
Continue reading ‘Iraq: Winning Is Losing’ »

I have written two recent posts, one about the lost art of logic and the other about young Earth insanity, where I discussed a recent poll reported in USA Today that claimed 66% of Americans now believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” In this third post about that same poll result I’m going to discuss the long-term implications for this rise of fundamentalist religious belief in our nation’s population. What it really amounts to is a national death wish, as such beliefs require the abandonment and rejection of scientific thinking. This leaves science to “those other countries” which have no religious restrictions on scientific advances, most importantly nations like China. As China becomes the leading scientific power over the next few decades, it will take over the leadership of the world, and will eventually be in a position to dictate its policies to the west, including the United States.

Is this what you folks really want to see happen? Do you want to abandon the world to a Chinese hegemony of scientific power?
Continue reading ‘America Rejects Science; Adopts Suicide Plan’ »

After roughly two months of experimentation and occasional blogging, I’ve decided to give this a shot at creating an actual conversation. So, I’ve enabled the ability to register to post comments on the site. I will eventually even entertain the idea of adding additional posters so that this can become a multi-party dialog.

Mind you, I’m afraid of the spammers, so I will be moderating comments. I don’t want this to become known as a place to post advertisments for the enhancement of male or female body parts or bettering their interaction with one another in some way, shape or form. And, if the spam gets to be too tough to handle with Wordpress, I may be forced to go back to not allowing random passers-by to register at this site.

I would really like to have an intellgent conversation with you folks out there in the blogosphere. I am horribly upset at the divide in American politics and I despise the policy offerings of the extreme left and extreme right who feel that they have the only possible options to offer to the voting public. Instead, I firmly believe in the power of the middle ground. So, somewhere between the “lock ‘em up” attitude of the far right and the “anything goes” attitude of the far left lies the middle ground where we need to try to lock up the really bad people and not waste our time and money persecuting the rest of us folks.

So, welcome to my world, where I’m still “stuck in the middle with you!”