The Information Paradox: Ron Paul does not accept evolution

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The Information Paradox: Ron Paul does not accept evolution

George W Bush — Campaign Contributions

Oooooh this site’s a doozy! Goes right back to my previous post about figuring out where the $$$ comes from for presidential candidates’ campaigns. I’ll have to see what sort of credibility it has—it could be legit, but I always have my BS detector set on High, so I’m not sure yet.

Anyhoo, check out the love fest for this gem of a president: George W Bush – Money, Politics, George W Bush, Campaign Contributions

I see excited, loyal GDub “fans” and their posts, and I can’t help but play a soundtrack of derogatory banjo music in my head, interspersed with the sound of NASCARs flying by. ALL CAPS, screaming at the top of their lungs about Jesus and how God put Bush in office.

It really scares the shit out of me. Really.

I mean, I realize a lot of the world believes in the Judeo-Christian god—I was raised Catholic—but these fricken creation monkeys really kill me. Sure, I totally understand believing in God. It seems to be a big part of the human make-up. I personally am not so sold on organized religion, but there are plenty of people I respect that do. So OK, believe what you believe and do your thing. What does bother me, however, are the craz, dogma-spouting idiots that seem to lack even the tiniest sliver of ability to state arguments logically, persuade with arguments, and convey cohesive believable ideas. They all seem to be reading from the same script! As an educated person, it really blows my mind.

It’s sooooo frustrating to think that there really are people like this—people that seem to only understand and accept the narrowest regurgitated view of the world. I don’t understand, but I want to understand. I want to see what they see, think how they think and fully grasp why they can move through this world living as they do. So far, I just haven’t been able to get it.

A friend of mine feels there are basically a huge percentage of idiots out there. And that’s just how it is. The Sherri Shepherds of the world, if you will. Whatever they do professionally, wherever they live, whatever family they’re from, some people are just stupid. And, in his view, these folks are much more numerous than smart people.

Me, I’ve always tested high. I’ve gone to good schools, I’ve gotten good grades. I’ve scored in the top 5% in intelligence and academics tests.

But I just feel normal. I feel like I establish the “C” average. I generally assume that everyone else is as smart as me, and the difference is in what we know. Academically, some folks are math people, some folks are science people; some people are great with languages, some people are amazing artists. We’re all smart—just in different ways.

So…can I reconcile my worldview with what I see? Can I say these lunatics that are dyed-in-the-wool loyal to Bush’s regime in the face of all we’ve learned—SIMPLY DUE TO their belief that their god put this man there—can I say that these people are as smart as I am? That they just know something different than I do?

Mabe my main gripe is that I believe these people are out of their element. Say some redneck dumbfnck loves the shit out of Bush, loves God with all his heart, loves NASCAR. God bless him. He can sing Travis Tritt songs and mean it. This guy is an equal of mine. Let’s say his intelligence—his area expertise—is selling Toro lawnmowers. He can sell more Toro lawnmowers than anybody. He knows their parts, their tolerances, their horsepower—everything.

So far so good with my theory. He is a smart, capable equal.

HOWEVER, the problem arises when this lawnmower salesman starts asserting himself in neighborhoods he does not belong. Namely, logic. Political discourse. “Bush is the best president ever and was put there by God!!!”. To this, all I can say to the lawnmower salesman is “boy, you’re out of your element”.

He may be smart. At selling lawnmowers. But just as I know nothing about mulching features, he knows nothing about logic. He cannot make a rational, educated proposal and back it up with facts. All he can do is come in all passionate, guns blazing, and start yelling and screaming because someone on a comment board doesn’t echo what his preacher says on Sunday mornings.

I think that’s it. He’s not stupid. He’s not worthless. He’s just out of his element. And, painfully, he doesn’t seem to know it.

A problem with all of this is that guy’s vote counts (just about) as much as mine does. Sure, we have the electoral college jacking up the whole system, but in a nutshell my vote and his vote is equal.

Admittedly, I’m not studious poli-sci student; I’m no socioeconomics Ph.D. I’m just your average guy, making an effort at being a decent, responsible citizen. I want to read about candidates, weigh my options and make my decision. I realize that—more than any other choice we make in life—choosing a candidate is going to be a compromise. No one out there is going to represent my beliefs to a T. And frankly, given my limited knowledge, that’s probably a good thing in the long run. To some extent, we have to find someone that appears to be legit, appears to represent what we believe, and appears to be a credible leader. Once we do that, we have to trust that we’ve made a good decision.

It ain’t easy.

FEC Candidate Summary Reports

The current wisdom seems to be “figure out where they get their money from and you’ll know what they’ll do as president”.

I think there’s some logic in that. In some preliminary digging around I found some resources; here’s a link for Ron Paul:  FEC Candidate Summary Reports – Candidate ID P80000748

I would like to dig up a reasonably comprehensive list of corporate contributors. Also, I suspect that individuals within corporations will be doing some contributing as well, so I’ll probably have to figure out who’s who and what their agenda is. This site shows individual contributors, so it would probably be easy enough to start with the big $$$ contributors and then track down who they work for or what their deal is.

This’ll take some doing I reckon.

In the meantime, I happily welcome comments. Yeah, with my current traffic, that’s essentially yelling into the wind, but hey maybe people will comment if I ask ‘em to.

So: leave your comments, monkey!

Preliminary Investigation: Ron Paul

Homeboy’ll be the first person I check out. Why? Is it because it’s almost Christmas and he sorta looks like one of Santa’s elves?

Simply put: no. He seems very interesting at a glance, but I have no quantitative (or qualitative) information just yet to justify that view. Let’s get crackalackin’, shall we?

Ron Paul 2008 › Issues

Foreign Policy:  Interesting stance. On the surface, I like what the site has to say. But it is, after all, just his web site. What’s his voting record? What are the details of how he would go about interacting with the rest of the world to bring his vision to life? Dunno yet. But for now, he gets a preliminary <check />

A Purpose

Working from a hotel room with CNN playing the Republican debates in the background, I think I’ve finally found a purpose for this blog: to figure out who *my* 2008 presidential candidate will be.

Over the course of the next however-many months, I hope to define and then outline what my beliefs are, then weed through the candidates and figure out who my candidate is. I realize my values are somewhat off the beaten path (something I gladly announce), so I will bet that whoever I find matches my values and beliefs will not be a front-runner, and will likely in the long run lose.

So be it. At least this time out I will have a clear idea on what my options are. I can’t say that I’ve used my vote as wisely in the past.

In broad strokes, here’s how I see my values at present:

• in a diverse country like the USA, we must regain the separation of church and state; this belief–probably more than any others–will insure that my candidate will not make it to the end of the race.
• the era of American “Policing The World” as my mother would say is over; in many regards we have over-extended ourselves and shuttled our military off to various points on earth. We’ve done this for myriad and complex reasons, and it is far too simplistic to say that we should bring all our soldiers home and shutter the windows. While many of our military moves have been (I suspect) purely economic, destructively self-serving machinations to secure oil for ourselves, some of what we do internationally probably has positive moral/ethical impact. How the hell do you figure out what’s what through the tiny distorted lens of the news media? Man, I don’t know. But I’ll try. We have to pull in the reigns and not spread ourselves out so thin that we are promoting military actions with questionable motives we can’t support.
• promotion of the rights documented in our constitution, and reversal of (what I perceive as) the bullshit the Bush regime has established. I have more reading to do to figure out exactly what that is.
• vastly improved foreign relations and policies; we cannot be a nation of one in a world of many, arrogantly pushing our agenda on absolutely everyone.

Writing this out really makes me realize that I really hate Bush. At least what my perception of Bush has always been. What the fuck has this guy and his crew been up to? Is it really as bad as I perceive? Worse? WTF?!??!?

Having said all that, god help me, I think I’m Republican. My parents were very much Democrats, but I don’t really know that they did any real research or had any strong grounding for their votes cast. I suspect they knee-jerk voted, and I truly suspect they were of the first generation to vote based on personality politics. How the candidate looked, spoke, etc. Bullshit, in other words.

Let’s see what I come up with in the coming months.