Thursday, March 29, 2012

Vote of No Confidence

Growing up, I was told that if you did not vote, you had no say in an elected official did. At a time, even I believed it, but as I became informed to how the election system works, voting for even the lesser of two evils seems morally wrong. People like to think that in a situation, you have to do something. But doing nothing is something.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Not Really News

I grew up a tad bit strange (still am strange) in that I began watching news channels at a young age instead of cartoons. I began with Headline News, but after realizing that every half hour or so was repeated, I was not able to get the information I wanted. Eventually we got Fox News, and at the time I was still in the left-right paradigm of CNN was liberal, and Fox News was the only station telling the truth.

I watched Bill O'reilly, and later Glenn Beck, but it was during the time that Glenn Beck was on I began listening to Alex Jones. Like a man dying of thirst, I began to relearn economics, government, politics, entertainment, and especially history. One of the first things I heard Alex Jones said is "Don't believe me; look it up." And I did. Everything he was saying I would look up and it was all true. That was no so much surprising as it was surprising that I had not done what I had been taught in college. Since pretty much my first semester, I was taught that if I was to claim anything in a paper, I had to back it up with facts, source it, or cite it.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Author's Research

A couple years ago for Christmas, I got "The Twelfth Imam" by Joel Rosenberg. It is a fictional book set in historical events. You could argue that since it is a book, that alternate version of history or an alternate universe, as it were, would not be the same history as our own. Given how much research the author must have done for the period setting, it would be acceptable to assume that it is relatively the same universe as ours.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Moral Revolution

Right now I am reading "The 5,000 Year Leap" which goes over the principles that the Founders believed in that set up a system to make a country great. There are 28 principles, but the chief among them are liberty, private property, and the pursuit of life and happiness. The book also talks about the doubts these men had before the revolution began. They agreed that a nation must be filled with well educated, moral and just men to be able to govern themselves. They admitted that a nation filled with uneducated and immoral people will flee asking others to govern them.