Comments Posted By mannning
Displaying 171 To 180 Of 475 Comments
BIRTHERS vs. TRUTHERS: WAR OF THE LOONS
Suspicions of serious problems implanted in the minds of mentally weak or biased voters can have serious consequences for politicians. To gauge this effect you have to go out into the counties and listen to the guys at the local gathering spots, visit a tea party, or a political meeting. Rightly or wrongly, there is a large discontent in the land focused on Obama, and such poison as berthers ladel out gets heard and absorbed. I suggest that the birther meme has hurt Obama in the unsophisticated camps of the Right.
Comment Posted By mannning On 3.08.2009 @ 20:07
There is undoubtedly a small fringe that truly believes in the birther argument, but, I think that the majority of citizens that do not want Obama in the office of president are simply willing to go along with the scam to discomfort the opposition. They really believe that Obama's citizenship is not in question.
They see the furious yelling of pundits defending Obama and slamming anyone that seems to believe in the birthers, and then draw the conclusion that giving life to the idea is very troubling to the Democrats, which, in their mind, is a very good thing. So long as the focus is on this scam, it isn't on selling Obama's program.
Further, since they know that they themselves don't really believe the birthers, the Democrat's reverse slam on Republicans for signing up to such fantasy simply rolls off their backs.
In their opinion, Obama is in lots of trouble anyway, and if the birther argument helps his negatives along, so be it. The only way out of the current mess, in their opinion, is to put the Republicans back in office, never mind the silly and eminently forgettable accusation that ALL Republicans think like birthers. After all, in years past, Bush was voted into office twice, even if narrowly once, so the Republican votes are out there still to be had.
The shriller the invective, especially from the Left, the more effective the scam appears to be!
Most good Republicans/conservatives, however, do not play this game.
Comment Posted By mannning On 3.08.2009 @ 13:08
#12 Andersen is right.
If you look up the Socialist Party platform of 1928, you will find about 7 of 12 Socialist goals then to be exactly the same as being proposed by Obama today, but the difference is a far greater magnitude now in spending for these goals.
That these ideas have been "floating around" for a while is certainly true, especially in Socialist/Progressive circles! Irving Kristol made that point rather well when recounting his early excursions into socialism/progressivism (to avoid their real title of communism) in his book "Neoconservatism". The idea was to incrementally nudge the US towards a planned economy and central control through accretion of power and the purse strings by government.
To declare Obama either way--Socialist or non-Socialist--one must look at the historical record of the Socialists. He appears to match their thinking very well indeed, so far.
But, then, no one can declare him a socialist for certain, not yet anyway. You can't look into his mind. So, I suppose you can't declare him a simple Leftist either...unless you are clarivoyant.
Comment Posted By mannning On 30.07.2009 @ 21:29
IT'S PAST TIME TO INOCULATE CONSERVATISM AGAINST THE BIRTHERS
Enormous energy seems to be being expended on this issue of Obama's birth. That energy would better be spent on defeating him and his congressional spend,spend,spend,and tax partners in 2010 and 2012.
A solid fiscal and social conservative message needs to be created and propagated real soon now instead of pouring words and thoughts at tweedy and specious issues such as where Obama was born.
Comment Posted By mannning On 23.07.2009 @ 22:46
WHY CONSERVATISM SUCKS RIGHT NOW
One expects a strong reaction from the public to any hint of change in the wrong direction for our constitutional republic. It is most likely far easier to head it off early, than it is to let it become ensconced in our way of life, and then try to extract it. It is far easier to seize the knife and heal the first hundred cuts than to wait until the thousand cuts Obama plans drain us dry.
To rid us of Obama, the main thing to do, besides objecting vehemently to his socialistic tendencies and policies every time they appear, is to vote him out of office in 2012, along with his marxist-oriented minions in the congress in 2010 and 2012.
The voters put them in; they must take them out.
Comment Posted By mannning On 19.07.2009 @ 14:02
The Anthropic Principle as a concept has been around since Biblical times: the account in Genesis being a prime example of it in non-scientific terms. Of late, there has been an enormous expansion of scientific facts that tend to support the idea of a man-centered universe. Over 39 physical laws and 26 physical constants have been cited as having a very narrow range of values; if any one of them was outside of the range, life as we know it would not be viable.
This has led to the more general idea of Intelligent Design and an Intelligent Designer as the origin and basis for the construction and evolution of the universe, life and man from the Big Bang till now. This concept is easily assimilated by many religions that believe in a God as the creator, but is anathema to the scientific community that is principally atheistic in outlook.
The scientific community has gone so far as to propose a Multiverse in order to avoid the possibility of an Intelligent Designer, thus immensely complicating cosmology. Instead of “God did it” we have a Multiverse within which somehow our particular universe was “selected” by a “mysterious selector” because of its life supporting properties over the infinite number of universes or pocket universes that would not support life. So it appears that we have traded off a Mysterious Designer for a Mysterious Selector, plus enormous difficulties, if not impossibilities, in establishing the bone fides of the Multiverse. Ockham would be aghast.
The many objections to God as the Prime Mover or Architect of the Universe include the memes: “who designed the designer”; and “how can something be created out of nothing (ex nihilo).”
Then, too, the old accusations of “how can a perfect entity create such an imperfect world; and “how can an omnipotent and omniscient entity exist logically?” are brought out of the kit bag to confound the situation once more.
The answer may well be simply: “we do not know how or why God has done what He has done and is doing, and we most likely do not have the mental capacity to understand Him fully.” This, despite the fact as we know it that even God must conform to certain physical rules (or so we believe).
We come then to the questions of how and why man developed consciousness. Is consciousness a logical outgrowth of man’s existence, or was it put there originally by God very early on? Why, then, is man the only species that exhibits a rather full blown consciousness, insofar as we know (can it become even greater in some sense?)?
In the recorded history of man, which covers perhaps 100 centuries, there is no evidence that his capacity to think cogently has grown measurably, while, of course, his knowledge of the world has expanded tremendously. Is consciousness a fluke, or an accident of cosmic proportions? Can we create consciousness in the laboratory? Some powerful thinkers believe it is possible, and are working to that end right now.
Several scientists believe that the mere aggregation of a massive number of software constructs will eventually result in conscious thought. It would seem, however, that piling layer upon layer of logic onto a program or programs would merely result in a tortuous trail of logical steps leading to some end or another, and no spark of consciousness.
In fact, it is quite acceptable indeed for scientists to explore the true makeup of the universe, and to postulate all the universes they want, all the Branes they need and all the brains they can fabricate. They will likely wander in those sets of constructs essentially forever, however. The morass of String Theory/Superstring Theory/M-Theory is one example. Even indirect proofs of the existence of multiple universes have been and will likely continue to be found wanting in the end. Consciousness in the lab will be a Holy Grail, too, for a long, long time. One must question the testability of these ideas.
It appears, then, that we will have to believe either in a God who architected the universe and conscious man or in a Mysterious Selector, multiple universes, and some fluke of nature resulting in consciousness that can never be fully understood.
Put your faith as and where you like it!
Comment Posted By mannning On 15.07.2009 @ 14:11
It must be like the five blind men and the elephant!
Comment Posted By mannning On 11.07.2009 @ 21:17
Ok, there is a reality but your senses can only grasp a little reflection of that reality.
How do you know that there is a reality, and that you can perceive only a little of it?
Comment Posted By mannning On 11.07.2009 @ 21:17
Consciousness...Reality...Truth...ye Gods!
Comment Posted By mannning On 11.07.2009 @ 16:12
Sorting out reality from hallucinations or simply noise seems to be the gist of early mental training of the baby, but I am sure most of us do not remember much of the process whereby we now easily apply ever more sophisticated observational and interpretational rules to what we are seeing.
At this point, I must stop. The morass looming around me is full of words with multiple definitions and connotations. "To observe" is one! "To interpret" is another!
Comment Posted By mannning On 11.07.2009 @ 16:09
