To say I was exasperated with the world over the summer is putting it pretty mildly.  In these posts it should have been obvious I usually vote Republican, but I am a Republican of convenience.  That is to say the GOP is my party only so long as they stand with me and the values I recognize as a valid means of putting a society together and keeping it that way.  Most of those who vote with me feel the same way.  That means that, apparently unbeknownst to the so-called "leaders" of the party, Republicans are a fundamentally different kind of constituency than Democrats are.

The difference means that what, in the hands of Democratic candidates, is simple and nominal disrespect for a constituency they can reasonably expect to allow them to do their thinking for them is, in the hands of Republican candidates, fraud.  I and my Republican bretheren are tired of fraud.

You may recall I stated that marriage should not be considered a social environment for sexual relationships.  Well, this is news to a lot of people.

This is the very essence of why we have culture.  The dirty secret of culture is that it is not about what we are being told it is about.  We are being sold a culture that is about entertaining adults and empowering elites.  That is, by definition, an unsustainable development.

That's the ticket.  Let the rating points show the way.  Info-tainment as not even the Romans could do it.

Predictably this was both hailed and derided as an attack on Roe v. Wade.  Should it turn out to be so so much the better but, in point of fact, it simply accepts human revulsion at the torture killing of any animal, human or not. 

Albert Einstein was famous for his use of mind experiments, little mental models and scenarios set up to explore ideas.  Let's try one here.

Imagine that you are a benign sentient microbe.  You and a social network of your friends live in a human brain, each of you able to observe the actions of at most fifteen or twenty neurons.  As individuals you would be able to observe the firing of these neurons.  As a group you might be able to ascertain that there is an order to the "universe" of the vast organism comprised of your, and their, neurons.  Would you, or all of you together, be able to detect the intelligence of the larger organism?

No.  Undoubtedly you would not.

To say I'm mad at the Republican party is like saying I may find a use for air today.  Recently I sent them an e-mail in response to one of their shill-o-grams telling the party as much. 

Suprise!, Suprise!, I got a response. 

It's not much, but I share it with you below, along with the e-mail that prompted it.

Upon some reflection there is good reason why we should not want philosophers deciding how judges umpire the game of life.

Freedom.  What does that word mean to you?  Is it just doing what you please, or is there something deeper to it?  I think it means having a grasp of both what I must respect in others and what others must respect in me.  One can't be free if one has no regard for the needs and concerns of others.  Why?  Because that disregard will lead to the harm of others.  Then their self defense will close off even one's otherwise harmless options.  One also can't be free if the larger society, particularly the government, can disregard one's own needs and concerns.  The need side of that equation is obvious.  Fail to fill true needs and a person sickens and/or dies.  But governments do not exist over needs. Tribes fill those just fine.  Governments exist because of concerns, the reduction of anxiety, the desire to know one's place in the world, to be assured that there will be order in society, and the sense that one's efforts will be to one's own credit.  In large societies failure to meet the challenge of these concerns results in a cultural paralysis.  That is, by definition, a loss of freedom.

It is popular for politicians running for national office to run against Washington.  Remember Jimmy Carter?  Yeah, like that.

We prove over and over that the American people, at best, dislike Washington.  At worst we would push it into the Atlantic and start over.  Well, while you ponder how someone like Barak Obama can run against the power structure on which he stands, why not think seriously about how to reduce the influence of a city the inhabitants of which have a serious claim to owning the country.

Go to: http://aimath.org/E8/

Here is described in the sort of unrevealing lay terms we can at least begin to grasp difficult ideas in the results of a pioneering study of very abstract multidimensional spaces in mathematics. 
This is important because one must have an idea what one is looking at before one can really SEE it.

Do these people have a leg to stand on?

No.