All Along the Watchtower

"There is no freedom without religion." This is the message coming from the likes of Romney and Huckabee. What an absolutely ignorant and myopic viewpoint. These guys stand for everything I am against (which means on the slim chance one of these geniuses win, I will have to move to Europe - eight years of one talking monkey is enough for me). While Romney promotes religious tolerance, he labels secularism as a religion and than advocates intolerance to it. An amazing example of hypocrisy, both for a government official, and for the religion he represents. If tolerance is a virtue, then he shows that religious "ethics" are not necessarily ethical. Many people are concerned about the moral decay of today's culture, and rightfully so. But their targets are usually 180 degrees off. The problem isn't the new culture that has pushed the limits of acceptable language on TV shows such as "South Park" and "Californication." The problem is the moral decay in Corporate and Government officials and policies which are trying to de-educate the public and starve the middle class out of existence. Religion isn't the solution. Nietzsche predicted in the Nineteenth century that traditional religion would come into conflict with the modern scientific age and that would lead to the destruction of values, resulting in "God is dead." Rather than having some base-less fantasy world as a foundation for ethics, what we need is a solid secular-based ethics. The first problem is politicians and people with low IQs (the kind that can only get jobs as political talk show hosts) claiming that ethics can only exist as a part of religion, and doing a good job of convincing the American public of such nonsense. The second problem is the senselessness of the public education system. High school students are required to take math classes every year, but there may be only one Humanties class, which a select few take. The idea of philosophy seems to be banished from these halls. Now, math is important for one to learn and apply daily in our consumer culture, and it should be taught better. But, really, who the fuck has ever needed the quadratic equation in real life? What education needs is to concentrate on the practical (consumer mathematics, reading) as well as higher level concepts (philosophy, critical thinking, and ethics) that students can use to form better decision making skills and develop better patterns of individual thinking. Combined with more creative freedom, students would be able to apply learning in a more satisfying and productive way. What needs to be eliminated are useless methods that are only necessary for specialized occupations, ones that the students would learn eventually and far more efficiently in their technical training anyway. Only when we teach people to think in sophisticated way, can we expect to live in a sophisticated society.

In other news, the economy seems to be in bad shape. Those of us that live in the real world knew this a long time ago, particularly those of us trying to sell a house. The general media seems to have finally caught on. Of course, there are still a lot of idiots in the media. Every time I hear republi-tard Hannity talk, he goes on endlessly about how strong the economy is under the Bush administration. If he can't grasp basic facts about whats going on in the American public, how can we trust what he has to say about anything (answer: we can't). So, we have the biggest drop in consumer spending in over 25 years and the economy has been given the lowest approval since 1992. I wonder what was similar in 92? Question: what's worse: an evil monkey or a retarded monkey? Its beginning to come out that the housing catastrophe had a corporate Enron-style cover-up. But I'm beginning to wonder about the media as well. Maybe the so-called "left wing" media mentioned it, but other "balanced" outlets have found it convenient to ignore. Now it seems that economy is going to have an effect on the election, particularly the republicans. Bush is going to SW Asia to beg for a drop in prices, probably the smartest thing he can do for his party. Maybe he should have thought about having a domestic policy seven years ago, rather than wasting his time on a foreign policy that has been a complete failure.