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In McCain’s speech, he states that the difference between him and Obama bringing the troops home is that he wants to win first.  I find this statement ridiculous for the following reasons:

1. This war is not a formal war.  There will be no bowed nation signing an unconditional surrender.
2. This is not a sports game.  There is no metric by which to determine victory.  Any victory will be entirely debatable.  Victory in this case is completely undefinable.
3. Hence, McCain can never win first.

Finally, Obama doesn’t want “cut and run”.  As detailed clearly on his website:

Under the Obama plan, a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and to protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel. He will not build permanent bases in Iraq, but will continue efforts to train and support the Iraqi security forces as long as Iraqi leaders move toward political reconciliation and away from sectarianism.

The entire point is to begin to move forward with our foreign policy, not continue with failed and stubborn policies.  Not admitting that you’ve miscalculated doesn’t mean you didn’t miscalculate.  For that matter, Iraq is starting to feel less and less like Vietnam and more and more like Abyssinia.

The honorable senator from Arizona is misleading us with his comments and asking us to support policy detrimental to our best interest and contradictory to our patriotic duties.

I would like to refer you to this fantastic article by the IHT.  It’s eleven pages long and every worth every fraction of a calorie you spend reading it and digesting it.

All it takes is one to lick their fingers and raise it up into the winds to catch the concern we all have about the economy.  It’s everywhere.  It’s in the media.  It’s on our lips.  It’s the cost of gas.  It’s the cost of food.  It’s a lot more.  There’s a growing realization that we have not tended to our own like we should have.  Our public education system is crumbling around us, the rising costs of college keep many of our own out and yet the economy demands greater technical proficiency than before.  Our earning potential has diminished compared to what it was in the 70s while the cost of housing has increased by 80% (from Elizabeth Warren).   Our highways systems are overburdened and incapable of handing the growth our urban centers have undergone.  Our rural economies suffer and go ignored.

McCain wants to go overseas and strong arm foreign markets into artificially strengthening the American dollar.  Barack Obama wants to retool our infrastructure and our workplace.  One yields short term results at the cost of long term stability.  The other one takes time but yields a stronger America.  An America ready to compete with the rising economies of the East.  Not just compete but integrate well with them so that we might prosper.  The global economy needs modern vision.  Vision that accounts for changes in technology.  We’re an information economy with one of the worst internet backbones in the so-called “first world”.  We can’t expect to compete and quite frankly, we could be doing a lot better.  It’s no longer just a modern highway, rail, and air traffic system that our economy depends upon but a strong and flexible national network.

Our economy needs significant tending to and we need to ensure we handle our business.  We need to be involved.  We need to understand how our economy has changed and how we can position ourselves better to continue to remain the premier nation in the world.  Prosperous and free.  Not one without the other.  We need a president who will listen to those that seek to keep us that way and that man is Barack Obama.

There’s a chance that the Obama campaign will bring Barack up to speak in Alaska.  A big determining factor will be figuring out the number of supporters for the senator up here.  To that end, we’re holding a day of canvassing on the senator’s behalf this Saturday, the 16th of August.  There’ll be three sessions.  One from 9 a.m. to noon, one from noon to 3 p.m., and one from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.  We’ll be working in teams and meeting lots of undecideds and Democrats.  Email me if you want additional information or better yet, call the local Obama campaign office and get in touch with an organizing field officer.  Anchorage:  677.1532.  Palmer:  746.3053.  Fairbanks:  328.4078.  Juneau:  586.4170.  Let’s make this happen!

That’s interesting. I hope Pennington lands on his feet.  He wasn’t the right fit for Brian Schottenheimer’s offense anyhow.  Maybe Gruden could use him.  Who knows?

These are some factoids I want to mention:

• I listen to All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone all the way through at least once a day.
• I think bow-ties are pretty awesome and I’d wear one at least once a week if my neck was thinner.
• Fred Meyer has recalled a bunch of their ground beef.  Just in time for the 4th of July weekend.
• Brandon has shown me what an interesting blog looks like.  My thoughts on that?  I’ll stick with what I’ve got going here.  I am who I am and I do what I do.  I definitely like reading his blog though.

Generating a dual on polyhedra or a graph is a relatively simple process and I’ve found a Mathematica demo that walks someone through the process.

Thanks John for introducing me to 65daysofstatic.  Now I have introduced you, the reader.  Winner:  65days.

From the last chapter of The View from Nowhere:

One summer more than ten years ago, when I taught at Princeton, a large spider appeared in the urinal of the men’s room in 1879 Hall, a building that houses the Philosophy Department. When the urinal wasn’t in use, he would perch on the metal drain at its base, and when it was, he would try to scramble out of the way, sometimes managing to climb an inch or two up the porcelain wall at a point that wasn’t too wet. But sometimes he was caught, tumbled and drenched by the flushing torrent. He didn’t seem to like it, and always got out of the way if he could. But it was a floor-length urinal with a sunken base and a smooth overhanging lip: he was below floor level and couldn’t get out.

Somehow he survived, presumably feeding on tiny insects attracted to the site, and was still there when the fall term began. The urinal must have been used more than a hundred times a day, and always it was the same desperate scramble to get out the way. His life seemed miserable and exhausting.

Gradually our encounters began to oppress me. Of course it might be his natural habitat, but because he was trapped by the smooth porcelain overhang, there was no way for him to get out even if he wanted to, and no way to tell whether he wanted to. None of the other regulars did anything to alter the situation, but as the months wore on and fall turned to winter I arrived with much uncertainty and hesitation at the decision to liberate him. I reflected that if he didn’t like it on the outside, or didn’t find enough to eat, he could easily go back. So one day toward the end of the term I took a paper towel from the wall dispenser and extended it to him. His legs grasped the end of the towel and I lifted him out and deposited him on the tile floor.

He just sat there, not moving a muscle. I nudged him slightly with the towel, but nothing happened. I pushed him an inch or two along the tiles, right next to the urinal, but he still didn’t respond. He seemed to be paralyzed. I felt uneasy but thought that if he didn’t want to stay on the tiles when he came to, a few steps would put him back. Meanwhile he was close to the wall and not in danger of being trodden on. I left, but when I came back two hours later he hadn’t moved.

The next day I found him in the same place, his legs shriveled in that way characteristic of dead spiders. His corpse stayed there for a week, until they finally swept the floor.

It illustrates the hazards of combining perspectives that are radically distinct. Those hazards take many forms; in this final chapter I shall describe some that arise in connect with out attitude toward our own lives.

If you have an opportunity to read this book, I would highly suggest it. I’m glad I finally polished it off. It’s funny how the idea of “summer reading” is just a vestige of one’s days in school but is still a habit.

This.

“Moksha” by Caspian:

Fantastic song by a fantastic band. Sometimes I wonder if I’d like living in a city in the lower 48 somewhere so I could have access to such fantastic music. Let’s not forget art either. Living in Alaska is both a blessing and a curse.

One of the ways I like to define an act that’s culpable is if there is no rational reason for executing the act. I think this is probably a pretty standard way of looking at things. We often see the defense of a home as a less culpable act than a murder in cold blood.
We can also define a being by its power and its scope. Power being an abstraction of a being’s general ability to force its will upon the world around it and the scope being its ability to understand the consequences of forcing its will upon the world. Power and scope are probably not independent. One of the properties of scope is that an individual possessing it may be able to think upon its actions and analyze the rationality and consequences of an act.
To use an argument that’s isomorphic to one Nagel uses for something else, it’s possible for me to imagine a less intelligent and less able Peter, one that understands the universe less or one that is weaker or both. When Lesser Peter acts, one might argue that LP is less culpable than Standard Peter. In this way, one can also imagine a Greater Peter, one that is smarter and more able to force his will upon the world. Due to his scope, he can see the consequences of his actions with greater clarity. Or at least, further from the fringe than a LP or SP. This, in turn, would make GP more culpable than his lessers. So, when GP does something like step on a spider, his irrational act makes him more culpable than SP or LP’s. And this, my friends, is why I hate it when people step on spiders.

*NOTE: This was a post made in fun and partly inspired by the books I’ve been reading as of late. One of the things I found was that I had to cut out a lot and ignore other explorations that would have made the post more interesting for brevity and time. So if it seems incomplete and rife with uninvestigated, unargued, and undefended points, well, that’s because it is. Not that I wouldn’t like to do that.