Call your Senators and Representatives and tell them to denounce Reactionary Weekly

General David Howell Petraeus has kind of a funny last name and I find it rather hard to believe that MoveOn.org are the first to ever poke a bit of fun at it. I also doubt that Mr. Petraeus got to be a full blown General by being thin skinned. If you were looking for anything but tacky tasteless gags from MoveOn, then you are obviously intellectually challenged or…well I guess there is no "or". However, you might expect, or at least hope, they’d try something at least less obvious.
Fox News seems to think they should be denounced. Perhaps they should.
Perhaps they should be denounced for being lazy and hackish and filling the public discourse with meaningless tripe. There are plenty of good arguments to be made about the US deployment in Iraq, MoveOn's ad made none of them. General Petraeus is soldier who takes orders, and to that existent, he is a good soldier. President Bush is a head of state, who cannot possibly tell us everything he knows.
TNYT and MoveOn on the other hand are privet institutions, they could have actually said something meaningful and they chose to make a silly joke instead.
So who exactly has betrayed us?

Moral Quandary

The other day on Chris Matthews' television program, there was a brief discussion about whether homosexuality is immoral. This discourse, though brief demonstrated a severe flaw in western morality. It is not whether homosexuality or any other act is moral or immoral, it is the means by which morality is defined. The general idea being that if one is biologically inclined to certain action that makes it moral. The only problem with this is that if it were consistently applied, it would make pretty much everything moral. Since almost every act is to some existent motivated by our biology. But the problem with this sort of ethical principle is not that it is to broad of vague, it is that its proponents do not consistently apply it. Those who want everything with a biological motivation to ethical at one point will want some other ethical standard at another. The result of course is something wholly arbitrary, and morality as morality is lost.

The Rise and Fall of the Universe, or Who Put the Cause in Cosmos?

The last episode of The Universe premiered on the History Channel last Tuesday and after two hours of following the thread of thought through human history we find that despite some new discoveries and CGI graphics, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is still by far the best film series on the subject.
Sagan’s series is much more dynamic, delving deeper into the subject matter than the simplistic; “this guy discovered this so that guy could discover that” of The Universe. Although Sagan is always trying to shove his materialistic worldview down our throats, at least he gives you enough nice pictures and pretty music to make it go down easer.
The Universe does not seem to have a particular worldview. It does pause to give homage to the fact that the universe having a beginning indicates some sort of creation,* but then wisely observes that science is not equipped to handle metaphysical matters. The real problem with The Universe is that it spends precious little time on real science.
Take relativity for example. Without getting too technical or going into unnecessary details Sagan demonstrates the fundamental principles and why they must be the case. While The Universe on the other hand, literally turns it into a circus, a fairly incoherent circus.
The last episode of Cosmos ironically begins with a quote from Deuteronomy. Of course Sagan would have accepted any source that agreed with his basic premise that we should avoid wiping ourselves out. He apparently thought that it was much better to let our local star or some other natural phenomena do it instead. Perhaps in the meantime we could putter around some tiny percentage of our galaxy, and maybe even feel so much less lonely by discovering bacteria on Europa or perhaps even Alpha Centauri!
But The Universe has no cold war to worry about, and with general stagnation in space exploration on most fronts, there is not much room for propaganda there either. So The Universe takes a more sublime approach. It leaves us with the thought that no matter what we do all humans and human endeavor, all terrestrial life, even the microbes on Europa and untold alien civilizations scattered across the galaxies, even all the constituent particles will ultimately come to naught and be dissolved.
There. Wasn’t that worth waiting for generations of geniuses to build relentlessly on each other’s knowledge to find out?


*Carl Sagan, in his effort to avoid the implications of the cosmos having a definite beginning, dabbled in some rather strange and exotic hypotheses, particularly the “oscillating universe”. The oscillating universe requires an infinite chain of Omega over one universes. Now pretty much all observable data points to our universe not being an Omega over one universe. So either we are the last link in an infinite chain, which is a philosophically difficult position to maintain or there is some other explanation for our universe’s beginning.