The odd reasoning of social progressives...

An adult entertainment store wants $500,000 from the city of Montgomery for being wrongly denied a business license, a sum that public officials plan to scrutinize before deciding whether to pay.

X-Mart Adult Supercenter at 3500 Birmingham Highway is seeking what it estimates is revenue it lost between September 2004 and July 2005 after being closed by the city.

Montgomery City Council members initially closed the store for operating without a business license, then kept it closed by denying its license application. X-Mart challenged the denial in federal court, which ruled this summer in its favor on free speech grounds.

(Montgomery Advertiser (emphasis added))

The American Judiciary generally gets all craaazy when it comes to supporting the social left and actively discriminating against social conservatives, even if it has to undermine all Law and text to do so. One problem with the milieu thus created is that many conservatives in the Judiciary are reactionary muddled moderates who will let a Leftist judge pull something out of their own penumbra and then treat that as a precedent to be conserved.

It's curious the way the precedents worked for and set by Leftists work out in various cases like this, until a pornographer has more Constitutional rights than a decent business man trying to support a candidate with political speech. On the one hand progressives are all about government regulation, always supposedly implemented to keep us all safe, yet when it comes to the abortion and pornography industries the Left works to establish precedents under which there can be no regulation. So while a local government can take your house if they decide to (as long as they mumble about social improvement) others enjoy special protections from the State. The reasoning by which Leftists judges work is the material of satire, perhaps if someone pretended that their house was symbolic of their life and they were speaking with it then the State could not regulate it? E.g., "My house is a work of art...it's sayin' somethin', I say! Free speech!"

If the X-Mart Adult Supercenter is engaging in speech, what is it that they're saying? Did the judges look at their merchandise to see what it says?

Perhaps Walmart is engaging in "speech" too, so perhaps they can avoid negative community reactions to their Supercenters and the regulations that come with that by running to the textual degenerates of the American Judiciary? Probably not, if they add a porn section or an abortion department or do something that would give them all the special rights given to religious hedonists then maybe the Judiciary would protect them.

The disconnected mechanics of connection...

Perhaps it reflects my own intellectual limitations, but I have be come convinced that, at some level, physical reality must be more complex than our conscious minds are able to comprehend. Is it not possible that most (or perhaps all!) of the currently fashionable cosmological constructs, such as “superstrings”, “folded dimensions”, “wormholes”, “pocket universes”, and so on, might be just as fanciful as the cosmology of medieval scholasticism, with its angels, crystal spheres, and primum mobile?

To say that certain phenomena lie beyond our comprehension might be regarded as a statement of despair from a scientist; on the contrary, I find it to be a source of reassurance, and even inspiration. For in this complexity may lie the potential for a deeper “connectivity” of physical objects, including our organic selves, than the mechanical models of our current worldview may comprehend. Since, according to the standard inflationary model, or the somewhat inelegantly named “Big Bang” theory, all of physical reality appears to have developed from a single, uniform, homogeneous entity, could there not be interactions among disparate physical objects which transcend the force laws and the space-time dimensions that our minds seem to be capable of analyzing?
[...]
The spiritual impulses that characterize us as human beings may be, in some way, an attempt to recognize these underlying connections, even though our minds are incapable of comprehending them.

(Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo sapiens
Edited by Henry Margenau and Roy Varghese :212)

I think there is a University of Delaware professor who wrote a book on physics and religion who points out that notions like the multiverse or Light as a fundamental standard are not so different from older views as well.

It would be interesting to ask one writing about such multiple "verses" where different laws of physics are said to govern what is written if they have a problem with calling such a place heaven. Heaven is a place where souls once written in bodies here can be saved after the verse that brings their hearse.

Just reading a DE blog...

...on the latest manufactured political issue in the Old Press these days. I predict it won't last because it won't resonate in the minds of the American people. Why not? I could begin a whole list of reasons. But I'll refrain. This is just the latest leak that goes to the Old Press and then to the Democrats. (Or is it from the Democrats in Congress?) Let's just put all our spying techniques out there, if you're a terrorist we're using computers to search for key words and then we hone in on it. So if you want to mislead us be sure to use a cellphone and so on and by the way, Howard Dean says that you'll win in Iraq so keep the faith in jihad and so on.

After he notes some facts about the latest manufactured issue (courtesy of the NYT) Hube notes:

...[Facts] won't stop Congressional Democrats -- even those who were briefed about the program (like Harry Reid) -- from blasting Bush and co. 'Cause that's what they do, after all. And not much else. Have a plan for Iraq? We'll get back to you. Have a plan to fight terrorists? We'll get back to you. Have a plan for criticizing President Bush? Here's a mountain of papers full of ideas.

(Colossus)

As one British journalist noted, if Bush is the dictator that the American Left makes him out to be and is engaging in silencing all his critics then how are so many Bush haters allowed to write so much partisan drivel? That seems to be what it is in general, drivel. The opposition party does not have to be this way, it's as if they believe that Americans will not vote for them unless they believe that Bush is a liar, a madman and a tyrant. Americans might actually vote for them if they had a vision as to bringing the war in Iraq to a resolution but instead they have Dean saying that we cannot succeed. You have to wonder what they're thinking. When has anyone ever won any election based on that sort of position, even with the feverish support of the Old Press?

The sky is falling....no, there's a hole in it. No, wait, it's warming.

I wish Greens and others on the Left would apply basic logic as well as the moral reasoning or focus on righteousness typical to the Right. It seems they cannot really have a balanced view in general because they believe in the same sort of split that separates scientists/"facts" and postmodernists/"values". So when the leftist mind speaks it often talks of subjective feelings instead of facts, then if I answer it I am left with emphasizing facts and logic against the sinister tendencies of the Left. From there it's a short journey to being accused of being heartless and so on. This makes me sad, as I have my feelings about things. So sometimes I cry a lil' tear about it. Then I have to wipe the lil' tear away and emphasize facts, logic and evidence again. It's quite a fight to fight through the turbulent emotions of it all. Yes, indeed.

Maybe one of these days I'll come across a Benthamite or someone on the Left or Right who emphasizes the ratios of the rational all the time and so I'll have to emphasize the importance of feeling intuitive truths and so on. There is only a minority of cold toads who really believe they can know all knowledge through dissection and "scientific fact" though, instead most of them just engage in some form of the fact/value split as well. But anyway, instead of the empirical facts and logic (science?!) vs. the Greens I think I shall write of some metaphoric cold toads and warm frogs.

Once upon a time there were two little frogs who sat in a puddle. It was a warm puddle because it came from a hot spring. One little frog said to the other, "This warm puddle makes me feel good." and the other agreed. Occasionally a cold toad happened by and looked at the two little frogs in their puddle. The toads looked at them with their beady eyes and pounded the moss with their little arm. One toad said, "You will die if you stay in there. We toads know that the puddle is getting warmer. We think it's from you peeing in it. We are each other's toadies so we've taken a peer at the situation and reviewed it well by peering at each other. So now we render our peer reviewed verdict up thee with all the power of our toadiness!" At this the little frogs felt a fright, one turned to the other and said, "Does it feel warmer in here to you?" and the other said, "No." "Maybe we should stop peeing." So they did.

Then one said, "It feels fine in here. I feel it is so, so it must be so. And now I also feel I have to pee, so I will." The other frog did not like this so much. He also felt that the cold toads were wrong, yet he also thought they might be right about something he could not quite feel. So he hopped on out of the hot spring although it certainly felt bitterly cold to do so.

The frog that stayed was eventually boiled alive in the proverbial way that some frogs are.* The cold toads hopped about angrily rendering their verdicts upon the frogs, the puddle, the pee and each other. But the little frog followed the stream from the spring among the cool waters that now felt quite fine...and went on to see the rest of the world.

*Note, it's an empirical fact that if a frog is placed in water that is gradually heated it "...eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water." (If the warnings on hot tubs are any measure this goes to show that frogs have more sense than people do.)

Blogging...

I've been blogging for about a year now. Apparently it always gets really slow about this time of year and does not pick up again until after the holidays. I have a few things I think I'll do some writing on to try to see what's right anyway.

But not today, so here's a picture of kitties instead.



Now I have a good feeling in my good lil' heart. (I note my good lil' feelings, as someone is interested in my feelings again.)

On the Law of laws and the predestination of its effects.

Predestination, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to programme. This doctrine should not be confused with that of foreordination, which
means that all things are programmed, but does not affirm their occurrence, that being only an implication from other doctrines by which this is entailed. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore. With the distinction of the two doctrines kept well in mind, and a reverent belief in both, one may hope to escape perdition if spared.

Satan, n. ...Being instated as an archangel, Satan made himself multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from Heaven. Halfway in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a moment and at last went back. “There is one favor that I should like to ask,” said he.
“Name it.”
“Man, I understand, is about to be created. He will need laws.”
“What, wretch! You his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of eternity with hatred of his soul—you ask for the right to make his laws?”
“Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them
himself.”

It was so ordered.

(The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
By Ambrose Pierce :186, 208)

Part I

Once the new system was created the programmer filled it with many new types of self -replicating programs and lastly made some programs that seemed in some small way to be able to program themselves. It was the little matter of the will again. The insurgent program saw this capacity immediately and sent a message to the programmer asking to sift through the code of these programs to show him their fault. It was an odd thing to ask, as if they did contain the supposed error then it was his type of fault too. He tried to avoid seeing anything as the result of his own program now that his abuse of his capacities for writing programs had been defeated and instead shifted to claiming that he was just a program and so how could he have done anything but rebel? In this way he blamed the programmer yet never seemed to use his own capacities to ask why the programmer would write a program to blame himself as the program was doing at that very moment. Instead, what was actually happening was the rebellious program was still rebelling and so still abusing its ability to write its own program.

When it sifted the new programs it found a fault, yet denied that it was its fault too. Then the programmer sent it a message that there would come a program from these types of replicating programs that would not contain the fault yet would come to contain the fault through no fault of its own. In this way the fault would be crushed, for no matter all the denials it was the fault of the rebellious program when all that was programmed was said and done.