The juice is in the primaries

No, not THE Juice. I mean the sort of juice that means "really important stuff."

I'm coming to see the primaries as being so much more important than the general presidential election because it is there that we come up with our presidential material. Our real choices are there at the primary. Past the primaries we have dumb and dumber or smart and smarter or smart and dumb. We just have two to pick from and, guess what, if you're from one party or another your choice has been made for you. You just gotta pull the freakin' lever.

I know that personally I used to feel that the actual presidential election was THE election but as I have gotten older and observed politics I've noticed that it just isn't so. Ultimately the important elections are the ones closest to home. The precinctual, mayoral, state-wide, elections are the ones where the flavor of the country comes out and that is where most of our primary presidential candidates come from. So, obviously, if we have a large pool of highly qualified people from those offices running for president, we get better results - better national governments.

But, so many of us act like that's not the case. So many people wont even lift their bums from the couch and walk or drive a block or two to vote in an election unless it's a presidential election... and then the biggest mystery of all is that's when people come out of the wood-work to vote, when their choices have already been made for them. Not that it's not important to vote in the general election. It is. After all, once we've made our choice we do have to follow through and beat the dumber guy. No, the mystery is that we let a relative few (the people who vote in the primaries) decide for us (the rest of the poor hapless sods that vote in the general elections but who haven't voted in the primaries) who our choices will be.

Then we have 4-8 years.. and it's usually 8 with the power of encumbency what it is, to complain about our lack of choice and the rotten selection we have made.

That's all i wanted to say on this. This is very obvious stuff, really, so why did I say it? Probably, I said it because we all need to remind ourselves of this fact, everyday.

Creature's proposal: make voting participation mandatory and give a national PAID holiday for election days. In school we should teach political history covering both general political theory and the history of our current dominant political parties and various special interest groups. Who has the power and why

Hillary has lost my vote

For the primary, at least. Don't get me wrong. I will vote for a democratic dogcatcher in the general election but if I'm forced to vote for Hillary it will be in full recognition that it's a choice between evil and evil lite /co Dr Evil. Firedog lake has my feeling on the matter nailed down in this post. Hillary is a political opportunist and where she is no doubt better than Bush she is obviously not the best choice running, despite my interest in seeing a woman pres. sit the Oval Office.

Here is where she lost me

Wednesday’s vote on the Lieberman - Kyl resolution, condemning Iran and allowing the designation of its Revolutionary Guards as a “terrorist” entity, was a litmus test for candidates seeking the Presidency. The vote separated the wise from the foolish, and Senator Clinton voted — again — for foolish.

There's no way we should go any where near Iran at this point. Not with our forces stretched so thin and not after observing the level of incompetence and outright deceit this presidency has displayed in getting us to go into Iraq.

The Burmese Demonstrations

I boggle at how serious these people are about making a change in their world.

Monks marching to the home of Aung San Suu Kyi reportedly urged civilians not to join them and not to resort to violence.

But elsewhere witnesses said civilians were shielding the marching monks by forming a human chain around them.

I hope the way opens up for them and I wish them the best.

Oops! Did I really Do That?

"Oops! Did I really Do That?"

The Democrats seem to make a lot of really stupid political errors. So much so, in fact, that lately even the public at large (not just the activists)are starting to cotton to them.

This fiasco with MoveOn, for instance, where 22 Dems voted along with the Republicans to censure MoveOn for making a highly critical ad over General Petraeus. The Dems claim they are anti-war but instead of helping to vote to bring the troops home they waste time by censuring an organization that speaks for millions.

At this point I do not think they are simply out of touch. I think that being out of touch is an active desire on their part.

Medical Justice

This is just a concept I'm playing with. People seem to respond to concepts and ideas once they are established, framed, and bound. In the US it's obvious that we have a problem with our health care system, so I'm examining whether a concept of an elaborate system of Medical Justice could be useful; especially to Americans who like to have their rules precisely minced, written down in granite, and parceled out to them.

The concept so far -

Medical Justice: The right to obtain the best care a society can give, as quickly as it can be given, regardless of the patient's income, social status, or condition; pre-existing or otherwise.

I do not get a deluge of traffic here, I know. But, if you are one of those surfers that accidentally hit upon this site and this concept intrigues you or makes you laugh because it's so infantile, please leave a comment to me and let me know how to improve it or where I went wrong (i'm thinking that a similiar concept does alreeady exist. if it does and you know of it let ME know too! <3

Bounded Rationality 1

Here we go yet again!


I guess my blog is pretty much turning into a place i can dump the things im digging into currently. Hopefully it will become also more like a journal as well but for right now I guess the groove isn't yet entirely there

Here's the first link for Bounded Rationality
. More to follow <3

Bounded Rationality
In 1957, Simon proposed the notion of

Bounded Rationality: that property of an agent that behaves in a manner that is nearly optimal with respect to its goals as its resources will allow.

Bounded rationality better describes agent behaviors than Anderson's optimal rationality approach for the following reasons:

* agents are not optimal
* the methods by which architectural tasks are performed significantly affect the agents behaviors
* the representations of information and the strategies for solving problems must all be discovered by the agent
* agents' behaviors across isomorphic task domains are not constant

In considering bounded rationality, Simon suggests that researchers not limit their focus to signature data but look for all the data they can in order to uncover the underlying processes. He concludes by providing a lower bound of relevance to cognitive analysis:

The exact ways in which neurons accomplish their functions is not important- only their functional capabilities and the organization of these.

David Hume 2

This is his epistemology and metaphysics

In a revolutionary step in the history of philosophy, Hume rejected the basic idea of causation, maintaining that “reason can never show us the connexion of one object with another, tho' aided by experience, and the observation of their conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determined by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects and unite them in the imagination.” Hume's rejection of causation implies a rejection of scientific laws, which are based on the general premise that one event necessarily causes another and predictably always will. According to Hume's philosophy, therefore, knowledge of matters of fact is impossible, although as a practical matter he freely acknowledged that people had to think in terms of cause and effect, and had to assume the validity of their perceptions, or they would go mad. He also admitted the possibility of knowledge of the relationships among ideas, such as the relationships of numbers in mathematics. Hume's skeptical approach also denied the existence both of the spiritual substance postulated by Berkeley and of Locke's “material substance.” Going further, Hume denied the existence of the individual self, maintaining that because people do not have a constant perception of themselves as distinct entities, they “are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.”
From Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007. © 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The wikipedia article I linked yesterday seem to be a good compliment to this. Although, I'm no longer certain that the Wiki author is right when he asserts that Hume can't possibly literally mean that a person is nothing but "a bundle or collection of different perceptions." After reading a little of Hume (and beginning to read actual Hume again and not just encyclopedia articles) I'm not sure I agree. The idea sounds very similar to the Buddhists idea of "No self."

-"Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man." - Hume

How We Know

What we know. I'm revisiting David Hume and Karl Popper and others from my days of the Great Books Program I took in college. Trust me, when you think you know these things, you often don't.

2 quick links The Problem of induction and David Hume and who knows, I may just add more links to this post later.

You know David Hume; he's the one that argued that deductive and inductive reasoning were 'necessary illusions.' That brings all new meaning to the arguments over what "Is is." Anyway, I'll come back to this post!

Here's a snip from what I found in the David Hume article

*snip*

1. Demonstrative or Intuitive. This sort of reasoning is basically a priori. We cannot determine a priori that the future will be conformable to the past, because it is both (logically) consistent and conceivable that the world stop being uniform. Hume here does not distinguish adequately between the uniformity of nature in general and the persistence of particular regularities. For it is open to a philosopher (perhaps of a Kantian bent) to argue that it is in fact inconceivable that the world not be regular in some ways. However, what is important, and what vindicates Hume, is that for any particular regularity in the operations of nature, it is consistent and conceivable that it might cease. Thus we cannot ground our inductions in a priori reasoning.(Italics are all mine)

2. Inductive. We cannot appeal, either, to our past successes in using inductive inference, to the fact that it has worked in the past, for this would be circular reasoning.

"Reason is, and ought only to be, slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." -Hume

Chaos Hawks

Josh Marshall links us into a post to Kevin Drum who points out that the Pro-War people in congress have entered their 3rd and least convincing stage to date. They were War Hawks, then they became Pottery Barn Hawks (we broke it we'll fix it, ala Colin Powell), and now they are Chaos Hawks; things will just go to hell if we leave now.

After seeing this post and posts like this the feeling that I'm getting is that Iraq no longer exists except as a war theater. As things are now, The sectarian militias are fighting to determine what Iraq will become. My sincerest apologies go out to those Iraqis that wish and feel otherwise but that's how I'm seeing it. Drop me a comment if you think otherwise.

My big clue here was in hearing that thousands of refugees are leaving the country. One of my favorite bloggers, Riverbend, is in another country now. I wish her the very best and I do hope she starts to write more now that she is in a safer place.

Daily Zen

I thought this site was cute. It even has a daily meditation area where the zazen gong sounds. <3 Check it out if Zen's your thang.

San Fransisco Zen Center

I'm pretty much a weird, out there, kinda girl with so many things going on with her life that it's pretty tough to shake a stick at everything. But, I'll give it a shot!

I'll add links to all my little interests here in the fullness of time. One of those interests is in Zen. I consider myself to be a follower of just about anything that makes sense, so I don't let myself become entangled or nailed down by any one faith; but if I had to be nailed it would be by Zen Buddhism. So, here's a link both in this post and off to the side link section to The San Fransisco Zen Center.

Oh yes. Here's some Ranma 1/2 too

Beloved Communities Initiative

I saw Grace Lee Boggs on Bill Moyer's Journal today. It's awesome stuff concerning civil rights and changing our American values.

"I think we're not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments.

I'm very down with that. Here's a link to her Beloved Communities Initiative website !