Whenever I encounter someone saying that Texas should secede, I counter that the US should give Texas back to Mexico.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Whenever I encounter someone saying that Texas should secede, I counter that the US should give Texas back to Mexico.
In my previous entry I described the process of front-loading and political engineering in DoD procurements. As I was writing it, I happened to look over at PZ’s blog and saw there was discussion of Ray Kurtzweil… So I thought I’d maybe Kurtzweil a bit about the DoD.
Conservatives will tell you they favor small government, reduced taxes, and traditional social values. Oddly, in the US today, that somehow translates into “there is no amount of money that is too large to spend on the military.” We’re treated to a constant barrage of pleas for financial assistance from the pentagon, particularly, and its bootlickers, in general, in spite of the pentagon’s claiming it doesn’t have any way to tell where the money is going. Basically, the taxpayers are pouring money into a bucket that has the bottom knocked out, and the crooks holding the bucket keep shouting “It’s EMPTY! Pour FASTER!”
Baudelaire by Manet
Baudelaire’s poetry was fuelled by opium and alcohol (what, did you think they were just dissolving sugar in their absinthe?) and he led an appropriately decadent life for an artist. [Read more…]
Because he was a Hugo Award nominee, I decided to get a few books by some of the authors on the list that I hadn’t seen before. So I went over to amazon.com and found a book by Chuck Tingle.
(Not Safe For Work below the line)
Jean Meslier
From the most remote period theology alone regulated the march of philosophy. What aid has it lent it?
Someone run and warn Iris: the enemy has stepped up their game.
This is going to be a couple of parts, but I’m going to try to tie them all together, in time. I’ve chosen a “selection plus commentary” approach for these sermons, which means I’m almost certainly going to be dropping spoilers about the future pieces of text. Since it’s philosophy, not thriller fiction, I think that’s OK. On with the sermon:
– Robert Paul Wolff
Politics is the exercise of the power of the state, or the attempt to influence that exercise. Political philosophy is therefore, strictly speaking, the philosophy of the state. If we are to determine the context of political philosophy, and whether indeed it exists, we must begin with the concept of the state.
This clinic is going to be a bit less prescriptive and more theoretical.
Is this the right room for an argument?
We are going to look at a powerful technique for pulling your opponent into a discussion-ending quagmire; it’s the rhetorical equivalent of sneaking off the battlefield under cover of darkness.
This staggers my brain and leaves me flailing around for words. 1% of the population of the planet are refugees.