What We Believe

101 wrong ideas with respect to reality of the way that we Americans do things.

By Roy D. Follendore III

June 23, 2005

The American Civil War eliminated slavery on our planet. Of course it didn't and slavery will never be eliminated because it is a concept. Concepts like terrorism, can never be eliminated. They never have and they never will be. If that were possible then other concepts like freedom would also be eliminated.
The comprehensive policy by the Federal government to suppress Native American populations no longer exists. Of course it does. The policies related to who and who is not a Native American is racist. The legacy is that our Federal Government created a system that is incongruent with the ideals upon which our Constitution is based and nothing is being done about it because doing anything brings up the debts that all non Native Americans owe to indigenous people.
The responsibility for the reproductive management of a species requires less time than the human race has existed. Species like the spotted owl have been around much longer than man. Does anyone really believe that we have the capability to manage reproduction of a species for another fifty million years? What about the right of a species to evolve? We maintain the strange notion that we are fundamentally different from other forms of life because we are more like God, so that allows us to take on the responsibilities of God.
Marriage is more about caring responsible love than nasty sex, unless it involves the same sex when it is all about sex. Sex is a critical part of each of us the moment we are born and we have to be taught that it is disgusting. Sex is our social battlefield and there is always someone who wants to someone to bend to their sexual belief system. At least one might think that we could have a rational belief system. Alas, it seems not!
Jesus was born as a human but never desired sex. To be normal healthy human being is to desire to procreate. From an adult intellectual perspective it stands to reason that if Jesus was a functioning male, then he had erections and felt the need for intercourse. If this is not true then perhaps the myth that Jesus was a human being may need to be reconsidered.
God must look like people because we thought "him" up. One day some guy decided that "someone" must have made all of the things that we see. Based on this biased question the issue came up; What does God look like? Surprise! God looks like us. What a selfish, self reinforcing thought process that was. Because God looks like us, God must think like us as well. It is no wonder that some of us actually think think that they can communicate and barter 'him.'
Biodiversity is not important to the existence of humanity. Individual human beings are essentially made up of biological components and that means that we are biological examples of biodiversity. We have never been able to isolate ourselves from the biodiversity of nature and yet we continue to disbelieve and place so little importance on it.
Blind technological growth does not result in the depletion of natural resources and the corruption of the environment. Every civilization has felt the destruction of their natural environment because of technological growth. Let's face it, history is not simply forgotten, it is also ignored.
The punishment of the guilty is more important than the murder of the innocent. No one likes to talk about this subject because it is loaded. Exactly how much is justice worth? Is justice worth a child's life? How about ten children? How about thousands? Human beings seem all too willing to go to extremes to protect the life of a child in one moment, while being willing to murder a thousand children in the name of justice at other times. We are willing to give up our best humanitarian efforts toward the innocent in that moment that it takes us to decide to go to war.
American troops who eventually will come home are not going to be screwed up and pissed off. Of course when our troops come home they will of course be angry. They will be angry because they have to exist in denial of the reality that what they have done in the name of patriotism was wrong. Imagine that. Some will eventually come to understand what has happened. Others will never admit that anything we did over there was wrong. It was the same in the first gulf war. The fact is that the impact of this war on terrorism is a delayed reaction on this nation, just as it was after every other war.
Right or wrong, our allies should stand by America. Well, in fact assuming that you have principles, no they shouldn't. They would not be our allies if they did not have a value system. Just because we may have screwed up our value system, does not mean that our allies should be compelled do the same. If standing by America means that our allies have to send in troops just because we, do then they certainly are not doing us any favors. If standing by us means that they agree with everything that we do or say when we are absolutely wrong, then we should not have respect for them. Finally, if we have the capability to make up the minds of our allies, then they are not allies at all. They are our colony.
It is possible to insert troops into a soup of ancient tribal warfare without causing violent animosities. Does any of our military and political leaders know anything about tribalism? No they don't. Do they know why tribes exist? No. Do they understand the implications of destroying a tribe? Nope, they do not. Why should they? This is a case of it does not make any difference so why understand reality. This is a case of it ain't American and these guys have got smart bombs and Predator aircraft so why should they care? It is just easier to stick to the belief that violence is everybody else's fault but ours.
In our free market economy the average America citizen can actually own their own home. The underlying question to this myth is that homes now cost so much that we never actually own them. Home ownership has become nothing more than a gimmick for investors. It has turned in to a speculation of equity. Homes sit vacant because of this. Eventually when home values collapse as of course they eventually must there will be a tremendous depression in our country. Apparently no one cares.
Technologies we choose to use against others are not going to be eventually used against us. Every single technological weapon we invent represents a double edged sword. This is the reason for the arms race. The fact is that we can be assured that the swords we use will be used against us.
Civil war should not exist in Iraq because a minority religious sect was given power over a majority. Has anyone in America ever actually looked at the causes of the Civil War?
Seniority and excellent corporate performance reviews means that employees are not going to be picked to be laid off. We need to be talking to the people being laid off if we are going to get this one straight. Everyone seems to have faith in performance reviews and no one actually understands what they do. One thing is certain, they are not a barrier to being let go.
All of the junk email, malware, adware and virus attacks are inevitable consequences of Internet connectivity. This is BS. The reason that there is this trash is because there is no leadership. There is simply no authority to deal with these problems. We allow it to happen.
American citizens can be assured that that our internet email is not being monitored by the NSA. Hello! NSA if you can hear me please respond. What am I saying, of course you can hear me, you built the internet. You have connectivity to every packet being switched. Please say hello to our uncle Sam for me, NSA and be sure to enjoy our tax dollars eves dropping on Americans.
The need to establish trust between management and employees means that drug tests should be mandatory for employees working in all jobs. Wow what a great idea! Why not establish trust with the entire American population? Why not test for AIDS and proper religious orientation. This is a bunch of crap. It breaches the relationship of respect between employees and employers. It is a way of maintaining a distance between the controllers and the controlled. It is away of maintaining the perspectives human beings as replicable widgets.
Servicing the Hubble telescope is just too risky and a waste of taxpayer money. Someone please look at the breakthroughs in our understanding of space and connect the dots as to its importance. The Hubble has been and is the most important scientific instrument ever created for observing our universe.
Manned space programs are a waste of time and money because it does no one on earth any good. Huh? Isn't Earth barreling through space? Isn't the entire potential human race connected to earth which is whirling around in space? Shouldn't everyone to want to look out the windshield when we tool around.
Civilian and Iraqi causalities occurring during a military invasion and occupation of another country are not important. Well this is probably true as long as we speak of them as causalities instead of human beings. Apparently if it is us there is a difference. The fact is that Congress, NATO and the UN should pass a law that requires accountability of all causalities inflicted by nations on each other.
Traffic jams can be handled by simply building more roads. Sure! This is the perfect politicians perspective. Where do we think that traffic jams originate? Traffic is a recursive problem, not a static one. From what I have seen Republican politicians seem to think they were invented by God. "I say unto you, go into the world and multiply traffic."
Our economy is OK, the stock market and the rate of inflation will not be affected by increasingly outrageous oil prices. Read the news. Inflation is here. Gas prices drove it. But an administration that is responsible for it is simply not talking about that. The spin is that it was Rita the Hurricane. In reality it was Bush the heretic. Perhaps from the religious view God is not pleased with with Bush's revelation to the Arabs that he is on God's mission. Republicans can definitely blame inflation on God, again. Poor God, the Republicans seem to blame everything on him/her. The ability of the body politic to place economic blame on the concept of God smacks of Rome and the Crusades. Don't like where this perspective is headed, then change it. Keep the church and state separate and our politics out of religious affairs, just like our Constitutional fathers agreed.
The answer to America's moral decay is in the construction and support of our churches. If America were to suddenly ban churches, or for that matter simply tax them, there would suddenly open up buildings that could shelter the homeless. There would be many more places for clean and healthy day care centers. The landscape of this nation would be changed. The fact is that every crackpot can build a tax deductible church. Churches are largely blights. They are competitive rhetorical community centers that too often they take in loads of cash and give absolutely nothing to communities. The rhetorical garbage that comes out of churches were directly responsible for endorsing the, burning of thousands of old women at that stake, the Spanish inquisitions, crusades, the dark ages, unending wars, hate, selfish over proliferation, and so many other sins, foolishness and other insanity throughout history that it is impossible to calculate. Churches are a method of dominate political control. The church has replaced the idols and icons to which people once prayed. Now they pray within them. If people really need to pray to God then they don't need a church or a congregation. I say that if you believe in God then be surrounded by the environment that God created and pray for the mistakes that perpetrated on it in God's name!
The proliferation of Wal-Mart super stores is good for American consumers. There is this basic thing some have called a business cycle. It has to do with the way that money flows from the consumer to the merchant and back to the consumer. For the cycle to work there must be a way for money to flow back to the consumer. Traditionally this has been through a diversity of local merchants. When Wal-Mart arrives into a community with a new super store, this cycle is suddenly greatly diminished. The money that comes from the consumer is sucked off to the bank accounts of Arkansas billionaires. Of course the local taxes are collected, which allow the politicians to look good and be happy, while small local businesses are ruined. Of course the cycle does complete itself in the form of food stamps and low income housing subsidies. Everyone is taken care of by Wal-Mart's monopoly of local business.
Allowing illegal workers to take low paying American jobs does not hurt Americans. If you are not a low paid American then you probably feel that you have every right to feel this way. If you have a company whose profit margin is totally dependent on cheap labor then you probably think that you are entitled to the lowest labor rates possible. But if you are an American who has no other way to earn a decent standard of living, then you are an un-American criminal if you use illegal labor. The reason why third world countries exist in poverty is because they have established greedy business cycles which maintained systems of poverty which do not pay fair wages. Socially there becomes no way out of the endless loop of poverty. Every time that an illegal employee is paid, their crime is reinforced and our crimes are introduced into our society. American jobs should be for Americans first and it should be a crime to for a businessman to hire an illegal workers. The penalty for hiring illegal workers should be doubled when there is an expectation that an American would have done that work for a decent wage.
God is on the American side and no one else's. Most religions are based on competitive bigotry. I know that this is particularly true for Baptists. The I am right and you are wrong about God syndrome probably has a lot to do with the mindset of blind faith. I personally don't know anyone whom I know for a fact has spoken with God. As I once tried to explain to a Muslim colleague of mine, it is possible that Mohammad was a messenger of God, assuming God exists, and God wanted him to be a messenger. In fact, it is possible that anyone one could be a messenger of God. This is the whole point. If God as religions express him actually exists and God wanted to be on America's side, there would be absolutely nothing any of us could do about it. There would also be absolutely nothing that we could do if God suddenly decided to abandon our side for another. Who says that God can't be on EVERYONE'S side. Are we actually going to tell God that simply isn't acceptable? Religions can't control God, they simply attempt to control the 'notion' of God. They attempt to control the doctrine of blind faith which is supposed to be socially acceptable and they do this by popular congregational opinion. Any church in any country can do this. So much for God being on the American side.
America can control, kill or imprison all of the insurgents who hate us in the middle east. If we simply eliminate the 'evil doers' then we win, right? The Romans thought the Huns were the insurgents who could be eliminated in this way. Hitler thought that the Jews were the evil doer insurgents could be eliminated. In spite of the peace that has come to Northern Ireland the Catholics and Protestants still probably think in their hearts the other are evil insurgents. We could talk about North and South Korea, or Israelis and Palestinians or Russia and Chechnya's special 'evil doer' relationship but I think you get the point. It is impossible for a nation to do much more than suppress the opinions of another distant and/or totally different society for a short period of time, and to do so always involves great cost and sacrifice. Short of genocide, no nation has ever had the capability to dominate another forever and there were always repercussions to the nation attempting to do the suppression.
Our enemies should not be willing and able to fight us any way that they can. What a crazy attitude this one is. We Americans graciously teach others the techniques of how one should deal with their enemies. In a society where life is cheap, there is little appreciable difference in the minds of our enemies between a suicide bomb and a smart bomb. What largely enables American combat philosophy to avoid combat suicide strategies for battlefield victory is our level of sophisticated technology. Whether we believe that an enemy nation 'should not' do this or that is not pragmatic. The reality is that they do and shall, and always will. Mechanically 'they' can and will succeed, if they maintain their will long enough to do what they can to defeat us. This is no secret; They know this and have based their strategies on it. Fortunately for everyone the mechanical view of war is not everything. It is entirely possible to defuse the most impossible conflicts and this does not happen through disrespect of the ability of others ability to fight us.
Citizens of other countries won't attack us just because we invaded their country. Of course they would, did and will! We would too if someone invaded us. We Americans would use every means at our disposal to eliminate the foreigners from our precious United States. Do we disregard the same nationalism in other societies so much that we are so blind that we can't see how much we have in common with our enemies? The idea of a peaceful unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq was not just a military mistake, it was shear stupidity. It is an insane notion that what we are doing over there is in any way peaceful or that we are 'building democracy.' What we are building is another Iran, and an Islamic empire.
American government officials should not be held legally responsible for their decisions in office. Why not? Why shouldn't the decision of personal liability be greater than it currently is? If there is no personal liability then there is no requirement for the conscious regard for the welfare of the public.
Local governments have the right seize citizens homes for commercial purposes. Homes do not bring in tax income to local governments. Property taxes have created the notion that people do not really own their homes or the land that they purchase, even if they pay the purchase price in cash. Homes and property have been relegated to schemes for economic equity. We home owners never quit paying for our homes and when we attempt to pass it on to our children when we die we must pay once again. It is logical that the right to seize homes has become the right of our local governments. Native Americans certainly saw this one coming a long way off.
Citizens should have no fear of Government access to private information if they have done nothing wrong. If you go online to enter a job application with the Federal Government today you are asked if you are participating in a 'faith-based' initiative. This question is designed to preferentially screen you in the same way as if you were a veteran. If you fill out the application, which will essentially allow every part of your personal life to be systematically explored, authenticated and recorded for posterity, you have every right to have fear that what you have donated could then be used against you. This has happened many times in the past, in many countries and it has happened across our nation. Information on the personal backgrounds of Americans have been used to systematically discriminate against citizens who also happen to be Asians, blacks, Jews, Irish, French, Catholics, Mormons, native Americans, Germans, Muslims, socialists, labor union members, states rights supporters; you name them. So what makes anyone think that the essential nature of Government is any different? Of course in an age where the Supreme Court is being packed with Christian fundamentalists by a President who is demanding the right to use Federal troops in local communities we should all be fearful.
Americans will be safer when we give up more of our freedom and rights. If a puppies are safer when their personal freedom is taken away after they are picked up and await the gas chamber in the the dog pound then maybe such a philosophy could possibly be true. Giving up our rights to freedom does not make anyone in America safer, it just delivers more power to authorities to dictate what the term 'safer' means. The Nazi's told the German people that they would be safer when they gave up their rights, just as the Communists told their people the same thing. Native American Indians were forced from their land into barren desert reservations through the pretext of making them safer. The extermination camps of the planet were created through this idea. The fact is that the only control that citizens have on government is our freedom and our rights.
Our Federal Government does has not sold itself to big business contractors. America is a awash with the politics of big business contractors and the fact is that they dictate our domestic and foreign policy. We have a system of government where our highest elected officials have to be wealthy in order to get elected. They have to have the economic support of big business in order to get into the public spotlight. Within our system of politics, honest men and women must bargain and make deals with industry and religious organizations that are embedded within political parties before they get the opportunity to be elected. To a large extent it has come to the point where when American citizens vote, they are choosing where the money will flow to, and not the person who will guide them.
Protesters should only be tolerated when they do not disrupt anything more important. The basic question being placed in front of cities by protestors is this; What should be more important? The protester is the agent of change and there is nother more that Americans who think they are on top fear most. The whole point of protesting is gain attention to issues that people don't generally feel are as important. Since protestors are pretty much always disrupting things that are considered more important this means that in practical terms, protestors are not tolerated.
Americans are more patriotic when we 'support our troops' in Iraq by keeping them overseas. Support of our troops does not require that we must support them in Iraq. So why Iraq? Is the idea that we citizens are somehow 'required' to support the retention of troops in a place where we feel they should not be? Is the idea that unconditional support for what are troops do is a requirement for being a good citizen? Neither of these are or should be conditions for being good Americans. Freedom makes this so. Blind faith is not the same thing as patriotism. True patriots serve freedom, not faith. This is exactly the same freedom that our 'troops' exist to serve.
Wiring people together through the Internet somehow makes humanity more intelligent. It doesn't. It makes the things that are probable or inevitable happen that much more faster and more efficiently. Having said this, there very well may be a connected intelligence. We can see this form of intelligence in the relationship of ants and we can now demonstrate it in robotics. But if connected intelligence exists with respect to man, and I think that it very well might, then it must be just as variable in its potential as the individual human mind. It will be a primitive aspect that operates as a survival mechanism and as a society we should neither trust nor necessarily depend upon it for our moral judgment and character.
Mankind can continue to expand and use up resources because we have dominion over nature. There are finite resources and biological as well as mechanical reproduction can outpace the ability of man to successfully recycle those resources. As a consequence we are all ultimately on a race to use up what we have. When that point happens a number of social and economic events will be triggered which can change the nature of our society. Religious tendencies will probably recoil from the 'advances' that civilized scientific man has made and we can already see the evidence of that. The problem with that is that by then the damage will have been done. The interdependencies of natural cycles on earth may already be irreparable to sustain mankind. Scientists will tell us that those resources exist outside of the twenty or so miles of atmosphere that is above our heads and within our solar system. But the fact is that the treasure of this solar system is our earth and the qualities of nature that we destroy or use up now can never be replaced.
We should trust mathematics because logic tells what is true. But the science of mathematics is not really about truth, it is about equivocal values and these are not the same ideas. The only truth that pure mathematics offers is the fact that logic can produce equivocal values. It is easy for technologists to bury the simple fact that truth must be assigned in mathematics. The person who assigns the concept of truth to mathematics, must first know the truth. Mathematics can undoubtedly help to discover truths, but in doing so it also presents the possibility of almost undetectable falsehoods for the majority of people. With respect to the creation of truth, mathematics is essentially a modern alchemy.
Within the academics of engineering, proficiency in writing is less important than proficiency in mathematics. Mathematics is a essentially a second order language, and by that I mean that in order to be properly used, it must be translated into our natural way of thinking. As children we are taught to speak before we are taught to compute and there is a reason for this. Things that exist around us are interpreted by our minds. There is an overlapping granularity about things and the decisions that must be made to manipulate them which can not be directly expressed within mathematics. This means that in order to cooperate with each other we must first be able to coordinate through our first order of communications. Human beings must speak about the meaning of mathematics in order to understand and properly apply it and this must ultimately be accomplished external to the laws and procedures of mathematics in order for the validity of the result can be interpreted to be more than a self fulfilling prophecy. The use of first order language to check logic is a matter of conceptual verification and validation. I suspect that many wonderful valuable mathematical solutions are being sorely hindered by the inability of mathematicians to communicate as effectively in writing as they can through logic.
Schools can 'raise the bar' of academics by making mathematics more difficult. Grades have essentially become synonymous with the mathematical assignment of values. We teachers and professors like to say that we 'give' a student a grade, but then we support our decision through calculation. When we say we wish to raise the academic bar through mathematics, what we are actually doing is changing the calculated means by which we assign grades. This is philosophically pointless unless one assumes that the purpose of education is the calculation of grades. Every act that teachers witnessed by students ultimately becomes part of the curriculum that students are taught. When we choose to increasingly evaluate students strictly through a calculated means, they must accept this and assume that it is appropriate when it is not. They then leave academia and use the same grading techniques for evaluating and raising the bar for such things as organizational assessment of personnel performance and it does not work. The reason is that productivity is a complex issue having to do with degrees of freedom, which are only measurable if all of the factors are being properly assigned, integrated and calculated. Learning is a form of personal productivity having to do with knowledge. The grades that Albert Einstein received in university for instance, did not reflect the degree of importance or productivity that his learning the material through his interpretation would have on science. His ultimate degree of personal productivity became the whole point of young Albert's education, just as it is with all students but this is not what was and is being generally calculated through class grades. Without the connection of grades to an interpretation of productive individual capability, the act of statistically raising the bar on mathematics becomes a mindless means for changing a calculation for the sake of calculating.
Grades exist to tell teachers how well students have learned. Actually grades represent points for student teacher communication. The point of a teacher professing knowledge is to guide the thinking of the student. To do that requires reference points in time. The learning process is not linear. The individual human brain is constantly in the process of assembling enough data points to reach enlightenment. Memory and the capability of use analogies are part of the fundamental qualities that make some students faster at learning. Some students therefore gain far more from the study of a particular subject than others. This is because they can be associating far more than the information that is being taught and graded from the syllabus. Teachers realized that they needed a way to talk about bouts of improvements and students needed to have the sense that their capability to understand and apply knowledge was improving. Statistical theories that maintain that grades actually represent the standards that students must learn well came along much later. What statistical grades actually measure is conformity. This means that grade point averages often have little correlation to individual functional capability. In fact, the most creative and capable individuals generally have the worst grades precisely because they don't fit in the statistical mold. These individuals actually produce a inordinate statistical proportion of new intellectual breakthroughs. It is the discrimination of 'exceptional' minds which do not conform to the norm which continues to baffle educators because of the assignment and burden of truth that they have placed to the statistical application of mathematics in grading.
Students who come out of schools with higher grade point averages are superior thinkers. There is no doubt that students who have higher grade point averages have demonstrated that they are probably better able to fit in better. The question is if they actually has to do with a the quality of thinking. As far as being superior thinkers, this is not true. Superiority depends on too many factors which are not defined within explicit channels of a grading process, such as those found in throughout a students the early academic years and well into university academics. In fact, many universities and colleges, grades are largely a means of eliminating an excess of graduates within a particular field of study. Ask too many questions, or the wrong kind of question and you get a bad grade because you don't fit a criteria. The trouble is that from a teachers perspective, grading is a minefield of career undermining problems so decisions are often left up to the compilation of a notion relying on 'unerring' statistics. Give a test that can be computed and the problem of appraising the thinking of a student becomes a matter of number crunching. If discrimination factors are not rationally evaluated then the product of a high GPA is not going to be based on irrational consequences and therefore will have little to do with a goal of producing superior thinkers.
People with PhD's are smarter and know more than other people. Most people wrongfully assume that the process of obtaining a Ph.D. is the same as that of earning an undergraduate degree but this is simply not true. There is no true obligation on the part of a college or university to award a Ph.D. for doing all of the required work. In fact, the criteria for obtaining a Ph.D. requires a kind of mentoring relationship by an advisor Professor who pretty much determines the quality of the work being performed. This process of course has it's up and down side. The up side is that when it works it can truly benefit the Ph.D. candidate. The down side is that there can be a great deal of political and social perversion in the process of evaluation. Some pretty unqualified folks who should not get a Ph.D. do in fact get them. As a consequence, I have found that when you meet a person with a Ph.D. you will find that they are usually either very intelligent or they are ignorant buffoons. It seems as though normal people have been filtered from the Ph.D. candidate pool.
The concept of zero tolerance actually works well in schools. But in fact it does not most of the time because it can't. The message that we are sending our children is that schools don't care about the facts, or truth or right and wrong. We are communicating to the children that the school that we send them to is an uncaring, and immoral institution. Kids are all about those things. There is cause and effect embedded within children's behavior and sometimes it is necessary for kids to defend themselves.
After some period of time, people looking for work should not be counted as unemployed seeking work. There are lots of reasons for people losing their job. The unemployed are exactly that, unless of course they are independently wealthy. We are counting a lot of people as independently wealthy. People want to work but what they are not finding is adequate work. They are lost in the system of statistics, trapped and treated as commodities in an age of inflated Internet employment tools.
The punishment of crimes is important and the rehabilitation of criminals is not. The "conservative" approach to crime is the easiest; just lock everyone up who is accused. America has become a nation of secret and hidden prisons. We incarcerate rather than rehabilitate our prisoners. We pay commercial businesses to run our jails and prisons. We pay others to lock the doors and throw away the key. But there is a tremendous cost to doing this. Even for the guilty existing in prison, human beings should be provided secure, humane and decent treatment. Those who are too violent need the choice of humane medical treatment. Every prisoner needs to be given the opportunity to continue to be educated and should in turn be required to educate their fellow inmates. Rehabilitation is a full time job that requires a fair and decent model and punishment should only be a fractional part of the process of incarceration.
Children should be treated like adults in a court of law. Children are children because they have not had enough experience, or the proper experiences to make proper behavioral judgments. When we set standards that involve the basic rights of citizens we can not then turn around and say that some children are adults. We must not forget that kids have been put into this world without choices. They are essentially survivors who responding to their environment, sometimes by what ever means is necessary. This does not mean that there are not children who are insane, but this is a separate issue that if not properly and adequately addressed by law, should be. The court system is simply not the place to punish children as adults.
People who believe in Jesus are more moral than people who believe in Mohammad or Buddha. These deities are myths in the sense that they are universally understood as being representatives by different cultures of the Universe in which we all exist. If you are able to get your head around the fact that this is a different intellectual concept than 'faith' then you may have a fair chance of understanding that Jesus, Mohammad and Buddha were all speaking in their times about the concepts of truth and fairness, justice and meaning. Taken into context of the the time and the culture, they agree on essential moral values but they communicate these ideas in very different ways.
People who believe in God are more moral than atheists. Those who believe in God must do so by virtue of faith. This is the universal test upon which religious organizations depend. When we speak of morality we are not necessarily speaking of faith. To intellectually and intentionally bias ones thoughts and decisions in favor of a concept of good over evil is not necessarily a statement of faith. There are sound philosophical reasons why doing so is important. Very often those who convince themselves that they are acting on faith, are actually acting upon reason. The truth is not being recognized is that morality is essentially based upon reason because there are expectations of cause and effects involved in the consideration.
Random searches of cars at airports deters potential terrorists. The key word is 'random.' Take a careful look at the definition of this word and you might learn something. The concept of randomness can be defined in very different ways, all of which involve the avoidance of explicit prediction. To involve randomness in a search for terrorism is to deliberately involve issues of common fate. The nature of the set from which the random searches are taken determines the potential of success in using such logic. Statistically the very act of successfully applying the concept of randomness, one must first know a great deal about the set and this voids the notion of randomness. This means that true statistically random searches are going to be a total waste of time, money. Within large population sets, what we call 'random searches' are simply a means for the disguise the true intent and objectives of the police. The civilian population is essentially being trained to accept surprise interrogations. With respect to the total population, there is little reason to believe that this might deter terrorists.
People are better qualified to decide on how to use classified information if they have security clearances. First of all, the notion of security clearances are based on the idea that there is an inside and an outside to information. Secondly, data, information and knowledge can be simultaneously classified and unclassified. The reality is that information has no boundaries. Moreover, most of what is classified can be inductively and/or deductively reasoned from knowledge, information and data that is already within the public domain. Ideas clash and they also converge within our societies. The basis of this notion is how two identical ideas can present themselves in two different places at that same moment. There are enormous amounts of data, information and knowledge being passed openly throughout our planet and the majority of classified information has been created and has been transmitted through open channels. When you think about information theory, data, information and knowledge is not inherently classified any more than individuals are inherently cleared to read classified information. It is for these reasons that security clearances, at least in terms of how they currently are used, have become the boundary of organizational performance and success. What is taking place from an organizational communications perspective through security clearance processes is the deliberate omission of ideas and personalities that may clash with the preexisting status quo. Those who control this process have a larger say in the determination of who is and who is not better qualified and secrecy inherent within the classification process hides mistakes being made.
Government conspiracies does not exist, they are made up by the mentally ill. We forget that the Government can be defined in terms of an intentional public conspiracy. We like to think that this conspiracy is all for the good, but as Oliver North, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and even Robert E. Lee have shown us, there are all kinds of ideas about what good conspiracies mean. You might even say... "Politics is conspiracy." Governments can be justifiably be defined a large and powerful organization with political tentacles reaching into every sector of life throughout the planet. Finally, the definition of mental illness does not preclude intelligence, perception or rationality. Human beings can have a depression which is defined as a mental illness because of what is true and because of what they actually witnessed. Combat and tragedies justifiably induces this kind of mental illness. There is no doubt that some forms of mental illness cause some individuals to create conspiracies but we must not directly link the notion of conspiracy to mental illness.
People who call themselves conservatives are the true conservative thinkers. First there is the definition of the word "conservative" to consider. To actually be conservative is not necessarily the same as being titled as a conservative any more than an individual with the last name of King is actually the king of anything. In politics, the term conservative is a tool for confusion, it is a self appointed title signifying nothing about the nature of what is or is not conservative about what they think or do.
Drivers are safer when they go the speed limit when driving on interstate highways. The posted speed limit may be the law, but it is also not a statement of safety. Fog and ice changes the expectations of what is and is not a safe speed. The notion of safely of driving too fast or too slow also depends on the traffic which surrounds you. Highway patrolmen trying to regulate traffic should make an effort to recognize this fact.
HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes are effective ways to reduce traffic loads on freeways. This all depends on what you think a reduction of traffic loads means. What HOV actually does is shift the freeway loads to side streets at different times of the day. HOV is actually an incentive program that is intended to change the loading and driving patterns of car owners. Those who might drive with just the right amount of passengers anyway feel privileged. But it doesn't take very much calculation to realize that fewer people are actually being transported through HOV lanes. The fact is that HOV had to be sold as something that it is not and then justified as being worth it after the fact.
Morphine is a good drug for Doctors to prescribe and marijuana is not. Drugs are simply complex arrangements of chemicals, not morals. They do good when they serve a beneficial propose. This means that when drugs are allowed to be used for good reasons, Doctors do good things for people. If we are to assume that Doctors do good, then it follows that if morphine or marijuana are beneficial to the care of patients they should be proscribed.
People suffering from the pain of terminal cancer should not smoke marijuana because it is harmful to them. Marijuana might hurt a terminally ill patient if he or she is driving a vehicle but there is by definition no risk. People who are terminally ill deserve the dignity of being able to use medicines that minimize their pain to an acceptable level and/or gives them a reasonable quality of life. Legal punishments aside, the true harm to terminal patients exists in the denial not the use.
Human beings don't have the right to decide their existence, God does. First of all, to believe this you must first believe that there is a God. Some people don't. In fact, many people don't. Does this mean then that the majority determine the personal existence of the individual? We certainly see this happen when Americans execute criminals. If a criminal decides to commit a crime for which his will be executed, who has made the choice? God did not but if he did he did it through individual choice. The dilemma exists in the fact that personal existence is not just an aspect of reality that can be judged, it is reality.
Stem cells and embryos are human beings too. This is the 'ethical' concerns underlying both the issues of cloning and abortion. Aspects of stem cells and embryos represent potential humanity. But the fallacy of this position lies in the fact that a potential existence is not the same as the existence of something. The definition of human life is not a probability.
The President of North Korea is crazy if he believes that the George W. Bush administration is out to get him. North Korea certainly has been called the nexus of evil enough times by George. And while George might not agree, the majority of sane people would probably agree with the President of North Korea on this point. The fact is that the North Korean President would be crazy if he didn't believe it.
America can sell our largest corporations to China without consequences. Like America, China is a complex and diverse country and like us it culturally has a fundamentally fatalistic bent of manifest destiny. China is the primary competitor of all world economies. From the perspective of the centralized Communist Chinese Government, the United States of America is in a competitive economic war with China and the direction of the planet. China is in a rapid period of technological growth that requires intellectual fuel. When America sells corporations to China, they are deliberately establishing investments within our geopolitical territory. There are tremendous consequences to our turning over control of our largest corporations to other countries and this is particularly true for China, even if we don't now know what the consequence are now.
High gasoline prices do not really change anything. Gasoline is currently the essential physical fuel of the American economy. As the availability of gasoline becomes short, the ability to transform ideas into physical action is jeopardized. High gasoline prices affect availability and by doing so affects United States economic capability. Higher gasoline prices draws income from the working class and delivers far more wealth into the hands of the already wealthy multinational companies and this wealth results in the means for funding the political objectives of their agendas. This ultimately affects the political stability of our nation. But high gasoline prices also changes the requirement of gasoline to remain essential to economic America's capability and that changes everything.
Labor unions no longer serve useful purposes within our competitive notion of America. The mechanics of the machine that we call a democratic marketplace economy protect the ownership of the wealthy while treating those who work to earn a living as a commodity. Labor is merely a statistical pool of budgetary overhead to the legions of competitive minded business accountants. Labor Unions represent the part of the vast industrial machine in America that was specifically designed to serve the employed as though they are a commodity. Unfortunately, businessmen decided that labor unions are also a means of becoming wealthy and of course have valued people more when they provided the most income. In our modern age the lack of broad support for labor unions arise from the the fact that while they support the wages of the working class they also discriminate between the employed and the unemployed. The base of welfare for the working class is the unemployed. But just because the labor unions are broken does not mean that they should not be fixed. There is also the political aspect to consider. A voice and an identity needs to exist for the public and not just at the wage bargaining tables. Political elections also serve the welfare of the general public but without the support of labor unions the solidarity of the general public tends to fragment. As long as the labor unions remain weak the causes of liberalism can not be adequately represented and will not be properly addressed.
Manufacturing jobs are not important to Americans. The nations of the world should not be divided between those countries who manufacture and those who do not. Nations should maintain that balance that exists between their independence and their interdependence on foreign products. This protects nations from the effects of a global recession. In this respect America is too porous and we do not have laws that protect us from our own poor decisions. The United States desperately needs the ability to produce products that are not only made in the U.S.A. by companies that are owned by the U.S.A.. Manufacturing is the creation of value. Domestic ownership means that manufactured value can be locally recalculated and this can dramatically increases the opportunities that local communities have. When local manufacturing is lost, the only thing that is left is store front merchandising and catalog sales.
The inflated housing market is not a form of inflation. Don't believe it! The most expensive thing that most people ever purchase in their lives is their home. The rate of inflation in homes has come about because of the cost of materials, the cost of labor and the shear fact that lenders have been allowed to get away with jacking up the prices of homes. For some reason the economic watchdogs have not seen fit to include housing costs into the inflation equation even though there are an awful lot of people with huge balloon payments that will never see equity. America is deluding itself if it thinks that ownership is not a part of the American dream and as long as the economics of the housing market continues to go unchecked, housing inflation will be the greatest determining risk to the economic welfare of the United States.
Even without a technological purpose, we have the war so our American economy is continuing to do just fine, thank you. The technological engine that that is at the heart of our nation has no purpose. There are profiteers and there are politicians, but there is no real mind behind its growth. Without direction, the technological growth of the United States is self destructive. One can see the power that a technological sense of direction can divert to the American economy by looking at the 1990's. War is a form of technological growth but it is growth controlled by bureaucracies. When war inevitably ends, so too does the technological growth. What the military industrial complex has essentially established is a sense that this war will be unending. This is precisely the same concept that was presented in George Orwell's classic story "1984." The problem is that when people identify the truth, i.e. the fact that a war is contrived, there is little recourse for the bureaucrats but to preserve the purpose of the state at the expense of the the individual rights and entitlements. To give technologies purpose, and allow it to continue to expand, a productive goal must come into existence that that is outside of the existing economy.
Every American troop who is killed in combat, has deliberately sacrificed his or her life for freedom. Every time an American dead soldier is wrapped up in an American flag, we are asked to assume that he or she was a hero who made a conscience decision to make a sacrifice. Only fanatics go into the military with the expressed purpose to die for a cause. Americans go into the service to serve, not to sacrifice. Simply being in the military is not a sacrifice. The vast majority of American soldiers go into the services to earn a living and to challenge and advance themselves. They choose the advantages and disadvantages of their bargain. Many are in the military because they enjoy the power that they have over other people. Americans are not currently forced to join and do this line of work and the vast majority do in fact greatly benefit from their work. Freedom and sacrifice is an abstract notion to most Americans and when you scratch the surface you find that these concepts are a thin veneer. We posthumously assign sacrifices after the fact. The truth is that the so called 'sacrifices' in combat are largely due to the true battle between the competence of our enemies and our own organized stupidity and carelessness. Darwinian law prevails, even on the battlefield. If this is not a sacrifice for freedom, then what is it? When you get past the noise of our combat technologies; when we actually begin to think about what combat deaths mean from larger perspective, the situation is more than just sad. The main reason why we Americans die in war is because all in all we are a pretty stupid lot, the majority of whom for better or worse believes in the American myth that we are smarter and more advanced than everyone else. Nationalism makes it easy to forget that the so called 'sacrifice' of war solves absolutely nothing. Every time we slaughter a determined enemy they are simply paying the price for our teaching them to better at their jobs. Every time one of our troops die in combat, a part of America dies for nothing. The American public are not willing to come to terms with the utter waste perpetrated in name of pride so we make symbolic heroes out of their bodies. Death as a symbolic gesture eventually wears thin and eventually wars do end, only to be reincarnated in a decade or two by another generation.
Our American military has always been the best because we don't indiscriminately kill innocent women and children. The reality is that our military is a system that simply damned good at killing to achieve mission objectives. But whatever we think we are or are trying to achieve, war ultimately comes down to the slaughter of the innocent. Make no mistake, our military goes into combat intending to destroy the enemies will, not simply those who fight against us in combat. The innocents are the infrastructure of our enemies will. Our sense of war is not that surgical project intended for the greater good that we are being told. The simple fact is that in all wars, it is always the innocent who suffer most. They not only are slaughtered and die of disease and starvation in greater numbers, they also must endure the deaths of their family members when they do survive. America has committed its military to the wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of entire cities of men, women and children. We deliberately bomb apartment buildings when we think that doing so achieves 'mission objectives," and it is well known that we are known to support and supply other nations who are quite willing to do our 'missions' for us. Each year we ignore the plight of starving children because doing something about it does not serve our economic and political objectives. For all of our other wonderful traits, and we do have many, we Americans define our public notions of war the way that we do because we believe that we have the divine authority and just cause to do it, though the reality is that we do it because we believe we have the power to suppress the truth.
Women should not have the right to serve in combat even though they train men who must die combat.
American women don't have the right to determine what grows inside them but men do.
It is correct to teach children that creationism is a valid scientific substitute for evolution because the Bible said so.
Of course Social Security can be cutback without harming senior citizens.
Psychotic tree hugging hippies are trying to keep people from earning a decent living.
We Americans prize freedom more than conformity.
There is no evidence that people have caused global warming because global warming does not exist.
Communists governments are now good partners with the United States.
America has not ignored AIDS in Africa for political and economic advantages.
The United States does not need the United Nations because we are far too powerful.
True democracy and freedom can be effectively forced on other cultures through economic and military coercion.
The Afghanistan has fundamentally changed because we now liberated it and made it a democratic nation.
It made no difference if Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, because Iraq needed to be invaded anyway.
Even if our President ordered invasions, torture, imprisonment, executions and assassinations, he should not be compared to Hitler.
An American military prison where prisoners are detained forever without a trial should cannot be compared to a Soviet gulag.
The fingernail clippers of passengers aircraft have a higher security priority than nuclear bombs in harbors.
America is winning the war on terror when we spend ten billion dollars by stopping hijackers from using fifty cent box cutters.
The perfect way to discourage aircraft hijacking is to make all of the normal passengers perfectly miserable.
When terrorists attack us, it is the President's job to make up reasons to attack countries that have nothing to do with those terrorists attacking us, particularly those countries he wanted to attack anyway.
Since an enemy combatant is not a prisoner of war, the Geneva Convention and international law does not count. We live in an age of a lame American Presidents. First there was the definition of Sex and next there is the definition of enemy combatants. Maybe one day we will get a President with enough sense to understand just how stupid this kind of defense really is. Just because the President of the United States attempts to change the words does not mean that he changes meaning of laws and international treaties.
The President of the United States can do anything it wants to people as long as what they do is not in the United States. There is a reason why the President of the United States is not the President of Planet Earth.
Our American flag does not stand for freedom of speech because our symbol is more important than freedom of speech. The flag is first and foremost symbolic of freedom of speech. Without freedom of speech there is no right to show the flag.
It is easier to make a hero out of a soldier who has been killed by friendly fire than to admit that our military screwed up. Armies go to war with what they are and what they have so of course they believe this is true! In the military the mission comes first. The practical problem arises when the military leaders find that they also must convince the public that the welfare of their soldiers are more important than the mission and that the war is going as planned.
Being a "compassionate conservative" means returning prisoners to countries that torture for the intelligence information we want.
Our military policies on winning our wars should have absolutely nothing to do with their expectations of peace.
It is conservative thinking to wage an endless war on a concept, but it is liberal thinking to ask for accountability.
It should be an honor to have a President in office to whom God spoke and told him to be President.
Starting wars based on false pretenses is just sometimes the patriotic American thing to do.
Unilaterally invading sovereign countries for just about any reason is the really great thing about our American foreign policy.
Torture of prisoners of war and so called 'detainees' may not be very nice but it is OK, as long as Americans do it to others; but it is evil if anyone else does it to us.

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