calzonie

Self-contradictory nonsense. The two essays are based on an asserted unpredictability that leads them (inexplicably) to predict, among other things, a reduction in minimum wage to $5, the shooting of an innocent in broad daylight, a war waged with Russia because of a perceived slight, and a devolution of the nation into Peronism. Predictable evil is preferred to the unpredictable? Would Hillary strive less for power than the Donald? Would she be less likely to drag us into a war or destabilize the world? See Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt for examples of Hillary's stabilizing political savvy. Would she be less likely to wield the bureaucracies of the federal government against her political enemies? And predictability? Yes, I knew what Obama was, and not one thing he's done has surprised me at all. Is that a selling point? Would anyone, in their wildest paranoias, have predicted that the small-government, no-nation-building Bush who ran in 2000 would start a multi-decade war attempting to build democracies in the heart of Islam, or consolidate previously unimaginable power and incompetence in the hands of an Orwellian behemoth the likes of the Department of Homeland Security? One thing is clear in this election:. Hillary would be an unmitigated disaster.. She will push the Court into an unchecked Leftist tool of her self-serving statism.. She will disarm law-abiding citizens and repeal the government's acknowledgement of the right to self-defense.. She will open the borders to the worst scum of the Earth in order to secure votes for the Party. She will put an even greater stranglehold on banks, investments, energy, healthcare, manufacturing and more and more of our economy than even the current prince has accomplished. Trump, on the oher hand - yes, they call it correctly: who the hell knows? But from a rational point of view, does Binswanger really advocate a swig from the bottle of cyanide over one from the unmarked bottle, because, what? Better to make the conscious choice for certain suicide than put your fate up to random chance? Out of principle?

Think of this first in terms of your fire truck and grass. A firetruck, stop sign, drop of blood, evening sky, cherry, and hot piece of steel (but not too hot) can be isolated from other objects according to a specific characteristic and united by a specific definition. I.e., "red." Likewise, grass, a lime, a "go" light, a flame from burning copper and a piece of jade are isolated and united by the definition "green." Given enough examples of things that have a similar, but different characteristic, we can abstract the abstractions "green" and "red" (and blue, orange, magenta, gray, etc.) isolate them from other characteristics, and unite them with the specific definition "color." Why do objects have colors? Given scientific insight and experiments, the colors can be explained by light theory, absorption and reflection, and wavelength, all valid concepts, even though every object absorbs and reflects electromagnetic waves "in precisely the same way." Gravity is similar. Go to your concretes: a brick, a feather, a helium balloon. Group bricks with stones, sacks of potatoes, your Uncle Mike, a bar of gold - all of them "heavy." Feathers, with balsa wood, whipped cream, a pumice stone and your Aunt Helen, all of them "light." Now you have two characteristics that are similar but different, and you isolate them and unite them with the definition "weight." Now observe that things with weight fall. (The helium balloon will have to wait till later in your abstraction process...) Now, why do things have weight, and why do they fall? Isaac and Albert, over to you...

Uncle Sam sez: Dollars are not a commodity, everything else is. His logic is simple and unassailable: the barrel of a gun. You will count all your transactions in dollar values, whether you use actual greenbacks or not. Sorry.

I just tried this experiment, only in a more controlled environment. Instead of a donkey, which is an organism subject to changes which might affect the perfectly set up equi-attractiveness of two hay piles, I used a steel ball, set up to drop exactly on the center of another steel ball mounted perfectly securely on a concrete slab anchored to bedrock. The "choice" I tried to establish is the angle at which the ball bounced after striking the mounted ball. I dropped the ball and, as planned, it struck the other ball dead center and bounced directly up towards its starting point. Fell again, bounced again. Each successive bounce transferred kinetic energy into heat energy in the two balls, so each bounce went a little lower than the last one. I accounted for the minute vibrations in each of the balls, as well as all other forces imparted on the balls, all ahead of time. Sure enough, the dropped ball kept bouncing, making a clacking noise that turned into a buzz which increased in pitch until it finally came to rest on the exact top center of the mounted ball. It's still sitting in the same spot, perfectly balanced, after almost six days. Proving once and for all that steel balls don't possess volition.