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Monday, January 28, 2013

Hopey Changey

So, we went over the Cliff and Republicans raised taxes on the rich without spending cuts. So, Republicans gave up their "serious leverage" of making the debt ceiling a hostage crisis after all. So, serious gun safety regulation is back on the menu. So, not bad bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform has come out of the Senate this morning. So, I hear the Boy Scouts are ending the gay ban. So, what's next? Enough Supremes to endorse gay marriage? Obama's EPA regulating carbon emissions and propping up domestic solar and hybrid industries with executive orders retrofitting government buildings and replacing vehicular fleets? More neo-confederate governors caving on ACA for Medicaid cash? Single payer appearing in Vermont or California? Perp walks for banksters in New York City? An agreement with Iran? Repealing the "emergency decree" authorizing the global war on terror before the end of the second term? Next up, our first madam President?

3 comments:

Black guy from the future past said...

I'm reading a collections of essays by Einsteins called "The World As I See It", and I have to say, Einstein was a fairly radical, liberal, socialist democrat. This gives me great hope and inspires me for hopey changey, knowing that one of the smartest men who ever lived had such sound political views. This also reveals to me a dark undertone in American academia, and media. How Einstein is routinely lauded for his scientific and technical merits, but rarely even approached as a radical political figure. How sad.

jollyspaniard said...

He also had some radical ideas about god. A lot of people thought he was a religous man because a few of his famous quotes mention god. His private letters reveal that he was in fact a closet athiest who didn't want to be associated with athiesm (not sure the reasons) but that he had a very personal and unique idea of god as the sum total of the laws of physics. Bascially he saw the innate properties of the universe as a creative force and he recognised that force as god.

But he wasn't nessarily one of the smartest men who ever lived. He gets all the credit for relativity but much of the mathematical underpinnings of it had already been laid out by mathematicians who had created hyperbolic geometry just prior. Einstein gets all of the credit because of our propensity towards heroic inventor mythology.

Black guy from the future past said...

>"Einstein gets all of the credit BECAUSE OF OUR PROPENSITY TOWARDS HEROIC INVENTOR MYTHOLOGY"

Ah you have brought up a great point. Genius is predicated on the social climate and the sum total inheritance of human knowledge built up over centuries by many diverse people. I still slip into this frame of the heroic inventor celebrity. Old habits and frames of thought pushed by culture, die hard.