Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving All!

I am thankful that the US is not like Iraq, yet.

Yahoo News reports massive bombing attacks in Sadr City. It is a terrible news to mar a day of Thanks giving.

Unfortunately, our politicians and professors seem to be doing everything in their power to make the US look like Iraq. I hope the people can figure a way out of the binding hatred that is oozing from the left and right in this nation.

I am thankful for the US Soldiers who are in Iraq trying their hardest to find a way to stop the violence. The tens of thousands of deaths that we've heard about on the news is horrible. The hundreds of thousands of murders that took place without being reported during the rule of Saddam was worse. The underreported genocide in Sudan breaks my heart.

Since the days that Hegel and Marx spewed their venom in ink, the west has been struggling with the question of how to deal with violence that comes from inherently violent ideologies. It may be that the only way to deal with these ideologies is to let their inherent violence play out in public.

The Leftist revolutions of the 20th century led directly to rule by genocidal thugs. The modern-Jihadist ideology (which is surprisingly similar to the ideologies of the left) leads to the same end ... rule by genocidal thugs.

The ideologies are compelling. We cannot stop them until the people who hold the ideologies see the result of their actions.

Even that doesn't seem to work.

I was mad at Bush of invading Iraq in 2003. I was mad because the current violence that we see was a predictable result of the Jihadist ideology and the Stalinist methods used by Saddam Hussein.

While I am mad at Bush for one bad decision. I am very proud of the Iraqis and US soldiers who are trying to find ways to establish a responsible, representative government in the county. Bush should be scorned for his bad decision. Bush was right that we would have to stand against radical Islam. The timing and choice of location was not perfect.

The fact that we have to deal with the results of our imperfection is called being humans.

Unfortunately, just like la Revolucion, the only way for the Jihad to end is for the people supporting the Jihad to realize that the Jihad simply leads to rule by thugs, just as the revolution leads to rule by thugs.

I am thankful that the Left (and its counterpart the reactionary right) has yet to turn the US into a place like Iraq. They are trying ever so hard. I hope we can get through the next decade with out degenerating.

O No, It's O Day

I just wanted to file this under Dangers of Elevating Science to a Religion: (Drudge Report).

Apparently, a group of progressive activists have declared the Winter Solstice (Dec 22) Orgasm for Peace Day. As with most of the spittle that drools from progressives, the activists claim that Orgasm for Peace Day is more than an hedonistic orgy. It is science!

The group starts with the tired claim that Evolutionary Psychology has proven that war occur because baboons like George Bush are still in a lower evolutionary state than Progressives. We must hate George Bush, We must hate George Bush, We must hate George Bush, We must hate George Bush.

If we all hate George Bush with enough raw emotion; we might cause him to evolve.

The second part of the science is a belief that we can affect the randomness of the universe by all joining in a group action ... a group orgasm. This, apparently is especially important in places where people like George Bush built weapons of mass destruction.

Just on the side: Let's assume that these wanks are right and orgasming releases some sort of cosmic power that reduces randomness. How do we know that the result is something good? The slime buckets who engage in this event are likely to kill any life created from the group orgasm. There will also be a large number of people who will use the event to manipulate other people in a negative. Sounds to me like the cosmic energy produced from the event will be a negative hateful force ... and not a butterfly-loving force.

I don't want to reward these wanks with a link. I suspect that a large number of really disgusting males will use this crap to coerce young women to submit on Dec 22. Icky.

This idea that we can create world peace by orgasming is pure mindless superstition ... yet progressives claim it to be science.

I learned to hate religion in college. I wish people would see that the progressives who are trying to raise science to a religion are systematically creating something that is a thousand times worse than Christianity. The genocides done by the Nazis and Communists (both pseudo-scientific religions) were a thousand times worse than Christianity at its worse.

I still love real science. Historically, real science does better in a Christian environment than anywhere else. I think there is a great deal of merit in what Pope Benedict is saying about faith and reason. When you remove reason from faith, you get extremely oppressive religions, when you remove faith from reason, you get really icky, oppressive systems of systematic manipulation.

Can We Pull it Off?

I watched an interview with Nancy Pelosi on the Newshour. She used the after election press time to call for a more bipartisan Congress and great communication within the Congress. Interestingly, in the interview, Magarite Warner had to restrain Pelosi from flying into a tyraid about the incompetent president and the challenges faced when intellectually superior Democrats have to deign to communicate with intellectually inferior Republicans.

I hope that Congress can break this current trend of nasty partisan bickering. I
even believe that Ms. Pelosi and Howard Dean are currently sincere in this call for an end to the partisanship that has ripped apart the Congress in the last several sessions.

For that matter, I believe that there is reason to hope that we can move beyond the partisan bickering. Many of the Democrats elected in this last cycle are true moderates who are in Washington to get a job done and are eager to engage in discourse. A good example of this new style democrat is the Blue Dog Coalition.

The problem that we face as a nation is that the system of discourse taught in schools is extremely mean, and extremely manipulative. We've been taught to win arguments by changing the definition of terms. We've been taught to divide people into classes, and we have been to place paradoxes and conflicts into the foundations of our system of reasoning.

The way that we've been taught to engage in discourse undermines our ability to engage in discourse.

In universities you often find people engaged in an orgy of group think. A person who does not share the group think will branded as being as the one undermining discourse, when it is, in truth, the group dynamic that is preventing discourse.

This current post election call for open discourse is very fragile. It is unlikely that Bush will give in to Howard Dean's or Nancy Pelosi's call to abandon Iraq. As Commander and Chief, the war is still primarily under the adminstration's domain. He is likely to accept ideas on how to win Iraq and to find ways to keep the country from transforming into a Vietnam style dictatorship (as we saw happen when America took John Kerry's advice and abandonned that country).

On Iraq, Bush is likely to be open to ideas, but is unlikely to engage in the group think shared by Pelosi, Dean and Reid.

I suspect that before we are far into this lame duck session, Pelosi will be heaving accusations at Bush that, because he does not share Pelosi's view of life, that he is undermining discourse. My guess is that if the direction of the Democratic Party is left entirely to Nancy Pelosi, what we would probably see is nothing more than a stab at conciliation, followed by efforts to frame the breakdown of bipartisanship on Bush.

The method works quite well. If you think outside progressive "group think", you get labelled as a contrarian unwilling to engage in discourse.

This method is absurd. Basically, if you do not come to all the same conclusions as the progressives, then you get accused of undermining discourse. This is absurd, because the whole reason for engaging in discourse is so that people can discuss different options.

Quality discourse does not lead to a situation where everyone thinks exactly the same. Quality discourse leads to a dynamic system where people have different ideas but are still engaged in pursuing a common good.

The Blue Dog side of the Democratic Party might be able to bridge the gap. This group will have to stand against the "group think" mantality of its own party leadership. As this group is looking for practical solutions, there is a small chance that they will succeed.

I hope that Congress really concentrates on improving the quality of discourse. My skeptical mind makes me think that we will have a very brief interlude of postering followed by attempts to blame the break down on one's opponents.

Research on Human Embryos

The current political idiocies revolving around stem cell research provide an interesting example of the poor state of modern discourse. I've watched several newsports thst seem to intentionally confusing the definition of terms. For example I've seen "progressive" newscasters show a clip with a doctor talking about how now embryos are killed in adult stem cell research followed by a conservative talking about embryotic stem cell research. A viewer who did not know that the clips were about different things would agree with the smirking progressive newscaster that the conservative was a kook.

Embryotic Stem Cell Research is a very important issue that our society need to address. It is even one of those areas where we may be forced to put legal restrictions on how science proceeds with their research. For that matter, it is an area where I believe you would find the majority of scientists agreeing that we need guidelines and restrictions. I doubt there are many scientists who want their industry engaged in unbridled experimentation and destruction of human beings.

What is really bizarre in this current debate is that progressives (who are generally the first to jump up and down to demand regulations and socialization) are the ones opposed to regulations. Meanwhile the Conservatives, who generally oppose regulations, are the ones arguing that any experiments involved with the creation of people should be watched carefully, regulated, and maybe even prevented.

The fact that progressives are actively working to muddle and suppress debate about the beginnings of life is not that surprising if you are familiar with the dialectic. The technique of the dialectic is usually to use the extremes to regulate the center. For example, a progressive using Marxist Dialectics would use us monopoly laws to regulate the hotdog stand on the corner. To accomplish the goal of regulating the center from arguments about the extremes, you must first do whatever you can to muddle actual debate about what takes place at the extremes. For example, in the Plan B debate, progressives redefined the term conception arguing that conception takes place at implantation. This effort has muddled our ability to talk about the beginning of life.

Anyway, back to the stem cell debate.

The conservative concern is that an out-of-kilter research machine wants to fertilize embryos (make humans) specifically for experimentation. I suspect that there are some scientists who would love to do just this. However, I suspect that most scientists draw an ethical line here. It is likely that we need some sort of legal restrictions here as well. To understand this, we have to look a bit at the reproductive system again.

The way human reproduction works is that a sperm fertilizes an egg. This new cell is called a zygote or embryo. This embryo starts as a single cell. The amazing thing about this cell is that it can develop into any of the complex cells in our body.

A cell that has the ability to develop into other cells is called a “stem cell.” So we have some natural crossover of definition which complicates the debate. There is a type of cell called an adult stem cell. These are cells that we carry through our lives that retain a certain ability to divide into different type of cells.

Most of the cells in this earliest stage of development belong to this class of things called stem cells. Research on these cells is called embryotic stem cell research. In debating the issue, there needs to be a distinction between fertilizing an egg so that you have cells to research, and other methods of researching on embryotic stem cells. For example, I’ve read articles about procedures that extracted embryotic stem cells from the umbilical cord.

A second area of debate is about cloning. Once again, the terms we use are not perfect. Scientists use the term cloning at a cellular level to refer to the division of cells. Science fiction books and popular imagination associate cloning with armies of genetically identical beings. When politicians say the word cloning, they are generally thinking of walking, talking people.

Interestingly, one proposal to allay fears of creating a human cloning industry (walking talking clones) is simply prohibit implanting any stem cells (embryos) created from the stem cell research into female uterus. I find this interesting as it relates to the Plan B debate which tries to define implantation as the time when human life begins.

This system where you try to curb the fertilization of embryos coupled with a prohibition on implanting and taking embryos to term (growing them into people) provides an interesting beginning of an ethical foundation for this stage in the development of stem cell research. This two part methodology is a start to allaying the great fears that an uncontrolled research community will start creating millions of embryos for research purposes, and it is a start in trying to find ways to keep the industry from starting to produce genetically modified people.

This compromise, of course, is far from perfect. It leaves unhappy people on both sides of the debate, which is often a good sign. Some might argue that any form of cloning embryos to get stem cells involves dinking around with human life. In the case of an embryo, each cloned embryo could be brought to term as a unique living human. We actually see a natural form of human cloning with identical twins. Identical twins are identical because the zygote somehow splits after fertilization. The fact that identical twins appear to be two different does put a human face on this cloning issue. Were a research lab to whip up a vat with 100,000 cloned embryos, they would have 100,000 eggs in their brew that could become people.

Whatever laws we pass at this stage of embryotic research is likely to need modification in the near future.

Since it is impossible, at this point, to determine a proper ethical line to limit where experiments on early human life should stop, my Libertarian heart tells me that trying to pass a law in this area is bound to fail.

It would be so much better to live in a world where Doctors could do something like the Hippocratic Oath and work to set and adjust ethical standards on issues like the experimentation on human beings.

Unfortunately in this world where Progressives routinely manipulate the scientific community to achieve their political ends, we will caught in a trap where we cannot depend on a rational scientific community to abide by any scientific guidelines set by the scientific community.

We are really in a bad situation right now. The progressive community has politicized research on embryos to the point that I don’t think we can trust the scientific community to make good ethical decisions. Progressive politicians want to push the scientific community into as many controversial areas as possible to create a deeply divided emotional body politic that they will be able to manipulate as they desire.

Faith and Reason

The blog Conservative Christian has an interesting post on Religion and Reason (I want to record the link for future reference). I used to hold the politically correct view that Christianity is nothing more than vain superstition, and that for society to progress we needed to wipe religion from existence.

I am now of the opinion that things are much more complex. My personal experience has shown that many of the people claiming to be progressive and anti-religion have an apparently irrational view of life. Conversely, I've known many people who were deeply religious, but were extremely rational.

Undoubtedly, there are some extremely manipulative and irrational religions. The statement that religious people are inherently rational is as wrong as the statement that all religious people are inherently irrational.

The more that people stand up and talk about the reasonable aspects of their religion is a good thing.