3/12/12

How I Would Up The President's Approval Rating

Obama Approval Rating Down in New York Times/CBS Poll - NYTimes.com: "At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election."

'via Blog this'

Nobody says this will be easy. But here is what I'd suggest:

Float Hillary as a possible VP and if it flies promise Biden the first Supreme Court vacancy.

Get out of Afghanistan ASAP

Start organizing among prominent Republicans who are convinced the GOP nominees are poison to the economy.

Appoint Colin Powell to an important Middle East post

Hit those oil reserves with a pledge to double the effort to get off the sauce.

Dominate the news with daily implementation of good ideas within your power

Consider lightening up on Bradley Manning

Feature every jobs action with local input and hit the GOP on its no-jobs stance





Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Nothing like a little pink slime in your kids' school lunches


If the following received in an email is true, it is not too swift of anyone to distribute it to anyone

QUOTE

Pink slime is gross. It's connective tissues of cow and other beef trimmings, heavily treated with ammonia to kill pathogens like salmonella and E coli.

Experts say it's "a high risk product" that lacks nutritional benefit. Even fast food giants like McDonald's and Taco Bell dropped it years ago.

But the USDA is about to buy 7 million tons of pink slime to put in school lunches.

Bettina Siegel, a lawyer and mother to two school-aged kids, started a petition to get the USDA to cancel its order ASAP, and it's gaining national attention.

If tens of thousands of people sign, the media and lawmakers will take notice and pressure the USDA to cancel the order

END QUOTE

A Real Change Agenda

End the war on drugs
Global nuclear disarmament
Global reduction of military budgets by half
Priority on education in every state budget
Open immigration
Universal identification
Make human settlements car free
Free political prisoners
Dismantle all nuke plants
Cease reliance on fossil fuels
Institute a global gild system and open employment
Require legal circulation of all money
Allow local communities to establish themselves as crime and weapon free


Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

President Obama Should Tell The Vendetta Machine to Cool It

People For the American Way: Tell Judge Cebull to Resign:

'via Blog this'

I am tired of seeing allegedly progressive groups going after Limbaugh and others. We are involved in a tough war now. This kind of chump change solicitation deflects us from a real change agenda and enables the other side to say we are just their flip side. We probably are. But there is no reason we cannot reform and abide by values of tolerance, helpfulness and democracy. There are enough conservatives who despise the antics of the wingnuts. This is no way to help the cause.



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Peirce and Nietzsche Precursors of the Future


As far as I know Peirce and Nietzsche did now know each other
They lived the same time
The achievements of both went unrecognized until they became posthumous authors
Each of them broke the very same ground from different perspectives
Nietszche was a philologist and the greatest writer of a nation he excoriated
Peirce was a multi-disciplinary intellectual renegade rejected by his peers
Both wandered in substantial solitude
 Neitzsche a mite saintly Peirce a mite sinful 
What did they achieve
The marriage of the metaphysical and the scientific

Both vindicated a metaphysical (transcendent) philosophy 
Within the immanent frame of science
Both men arrived at the same conclusion 
Both failed to take the next step

In Pierce's case the next step would have been a vastly more forceful presentation of ethics
than is implicit in his scattered writings
In Nietszche's case it would have meant winning back the decade he lost to madness
and completing the revaluation of values he began with The Antichrist 

Both anticipated a world now coming into being
The narcissistic nominalism that has ruled since Descartes
is giving way to realism of the sort  Peirce developed
The hoary values Nietzsche scourged
are giving way not  so much to values we now attribute to Nietzsche
But to values he would logically have developed 
had madness not intervened one day in Turin

Today I think of wandering around Sils-Maria as I did a few years back
thinking of the solitary inhabitant of that Alpine village
And of days in Cambridge
where my relatives came here with Pierce's forbears and walked on to Watertown
in 1639
Peirce - America's greatest intellectual - was flatly rejected by President Eliot at Harvard

Two of the greatest minds of the 19th century
Merge in my own musings
Waiting for someone to create from their confluence
something past the thin and vacuous theologies and philosophies and scientific understandings of the present
The future lies with that merging of the metaphysical
and the scientific
With the realization that ethics and being belong together
With a universality that realizes the full reality of all
and builds on the acknowledgement of fallibility
as redemptive
a sign of movement forward




Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Fatuous Theorizing - Things Do Get Done and Our System is OK

George Edwards and the Powerless Presidential Bully Pulpit : The New Yorker:

'via Blog this'

Above you can read why our system is broken but when all is said and done our system actually does work because it runs on freedom.

Not perfect freedom. And in many cases not actual freedom. But on the freedom which is indeed the most powerful of all, the capacity to choose the values which guide us. There are only four ontological values - that is to say values which, by your choice of them, puts you in the ranks of those who move history forward, values I attribute to the Jesus who emerges most saliently in the Gospel of Mark.

When you choose non-idolatry, helpfulness, tolerance and democracy, you are part of the solution, even if you are ranged on opposite sides of an issue. When you choose the lesser values of self-aggrandizement and hoarding, you become part of the problem. When you kill remotely or actually you are the problem.

Our government is a huge apparatus of doing that is rarely thought of as government. The government we see deals with a tiny slice, a few minutes on the clock. We get exercised over gnats. We think heaven or hell rides on the shoulders of actors who actually derive such power as they have from their ability to embody dramatic forces in stories whose importance varies immensely. Thus Santorum the Tom Sawyer of nativistic bombast.

We have an enduring governance because we have so little real capacity to alter it in its basics. The basics run on currents too strong to be more than nudged. When we do some nudging, we are exercising our freedom to choose values. Sometimes, when all other things are equal, we get a break in the direction of greater fairness and greater helpfulness and greater democracy and less intolerance. And a brake on greed. That little window is the one through which a better future is sometimes visible.

Even weekly magazines need to become the intellectual flavor of the day. Be prepared to hear why our governance is broken.


Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

I called a values summit and nobody came


I called a values summit and nobody came
I wanted to propose values that Jesus held
Like tolerance democracy and helpfulness
I thought it might be time to call again





Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Much of what I want to watch is not available on Netflix Instant View

Burn After Reading - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

'via Blog this'

Getting DVDs by mail is like trying to drink at a nonexistent oasis - too much hassle.

Nevertheless I want to see this flick. Why can it not be included among those I can watch online? I think it is because someone believes that life is improved by encouraging people who explicitly did NOT want DVD delivery to regret their decision and curse Netflix for being petty and idiotic.

That must be it.



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Philanthropy and capitalism are joined at the hip

Philanthropy and capitalism
Are joined at the hip
Profit and largesse are what they're doing
Except when they slip
We keep wondering if some other system
Might be less unjust
But since the failure of Communism
In profit we trust



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Snapping in Afghanistan

Snapping in Afghanistan is nothing I mean nothing new
Those born there can be dead and gone before their lives are through
      Violence and  fundamentalism they're a mortal brew
Sometimes it seems that all the world will snap before we're through




Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press