Enhanced interogation

The typical argument for the use of so called "enhanced interrogation" which I will call by the non euphemistic name torture.  is lives are on the line and the CIA and military need to get information from terrorists as quick as possible- so why should we be concerned about their rights and humanity - with enough torture they will talk and give you the information you need to hear to diffuse a ticking bomb.
The fundamental flaw in this argument is that it is based on the notion that a terrorist would not lie in order to have the torture end- which is what history show happens.
In order to believe the ticking bomb argument- you should believe the following as well.
1. people in the late medieval period and Renaissance routinely made potions which allowed them to fly on brooms to attend orgies with Satan - these confessions were obtained after torture.
If you even suggest that people may have lied because they were looking for an escape is to invalidate the ticking bomb argument.
3. there was a massive infiltration of German saboteurs in the USSR in the Stalinist era.
2. The U.S. sent pilots into combat in Vietnam who were fresh out of ground school with only enough fuel for a one way flight- and the many other  lies American pilots told the guards at the Hanoi Hilton.
If there was a ticking bomb you want to get accurate information as quickly as possible not to allow yourself to follow a wild goose chase where the bomb explodes killing people because the leads were lies.

All lives matter

There are some articles I'm hoping originated from the onion-
http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/10/a-college-president-had-to-apologize-for#commentaddingblock
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-craven/please-stop-telling-me-th_b_6223072.html
In this case it is people getting upset over Kathleen McCartney of Smith college tweeting all lives matter and saying such a tweet is culturally insensitive.

Such tweets strike me as racist-  as they sound like they want us to ignore other police shootings.

The people complaining will ask questions like 

the question that stands and begs the answer is, do black lives matter?

The answer is yes- as the category of all people does include black people. Any statement with the word all- means if there is one exception then it is false-so accept the fact we mean what we say.

Then they ask if we would have felt the same if the skin color was reversed- and my answer here is simple yes I would- and that is death is tragic and when police shoot people we must be willing to look at the evidence and be willing to hold the police accountable when they cross over the line.

I ask these people how do they feel about the Dillon Taylor case?  

Dillon Taylor was a 20 year old white man who had been shot by the police in Salt Lake City, Utah

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58472404-78/taylor-cruz-hands-gill.html.csp

If they are upset over his death after reading about it- then they have proven all lives do matter however if they want to give any excuse that states that these three case should not be viewed with the same lens that is built on a notion that their is a difference in any of these due to skin color - then the complaint is racist.  

The usual line is that the relationship between the black community and the police is problematic at best. This might be true but it does not change the fact the cases should be looked at individually and the verdicts should be based completely on the evidence at hand. People might bring up issues like race relations- or the historically bad relationship between the police and black community these are important issues that need to be honestly discussed with people recognizing the fact the dream of the civil rights movement where people are judged by their character and not skin.

I refuse to make an exception/

GMO

At times it feels like I am one of the few people who believe in the free market when it comes to genetically modified organism.
There are plenty of post on the internet demanding GMO either get labled or flat out banned often times promoting the alleged superiority of organic foods. When discussing our food supply it is important to remmeber the following fact yield per acre and the amount of farm land needed to support the population has steadily increased as people switched from purely organic methods to modern methods.
At the grocery store- organicly grown food costs about twice as much non organic food. There are two possible reasons for this- either it costs twice as much to farm organically and a higher percent is tossed out or the market is rather small but filled with wealthy yuppies who allow themselves to be gouged.
I'm more inclined to believe the first- because unless there are laws that limit organic farming and make it essentially impossible to start an organic farm agricultural companies would be starting organic farms- to rake in the higher profits.
Some of the arguments for organically grown food are the following.
1.) they are healthier- there have been some studies that have brought this into question claiming there is not that much of a difference. Then there is the question about how healthy is a plant grown in manure ?
2. They are better for the environment- they will state pesticide use but ecosystem is affected by more than just pesticides and there is a possibility that the right GMO could result in in a plant that uses fewer chemicals.
As I am not an agricutluralist I can't say what is possible or what people are working on.
Nor do I know the full pros and cons of any given GMO.  The public needs real information- and not simple fear mongering by people who fear the advent of a new technology. The last thing would be a ban on all current and future GMO technology or laws that would ban alternatives.

Blow back

there is an old saying - no good deed goes unpunished. This expression is about the law of unintended consequences and what is often called blow back in political circles.
When ever you hear some one advocate a policy you must ask the simple question-
what is the worst thing that can happen if it is implemented?
For example when you hear a politician advocate that we get into the middle of some war- either by supporting one side or even sending in troops- you need to ask the following questions.
1.) What is the cause of the conflict and what is happening on the ground. This means looking at articles from outside the mainstream media and and taking everything with an ocean of salt.
The first casualty in war is the truth. Nothing is worse than a false narrative that is used to bring about war.
( so look at antiwar pages like
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/
http://antiwar.com/
and others
)
2.) What are possible peaceful solutions being suggested- there are some politicians and pundits like Paul Wolferiz , William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, John McCain and others who want to paint every conflict as the Munich accord in 1938- and view themselves as Churchill and who ever wants a peaceful answer as Chamberlain. The problem with this analogy is that it ignores what is happening now.  In my view the only thing worse than a major war that happens because a pacifists made the wrong call would be to have a major call because someone supporting a bellicose interventionist foreign policy made the wrong call. Since in the first- a lot of people died but you tried to prevent it. While the second the deaths could have been prevented- but a peaceful solution was not sought.
We take a look at Ukraine - what started the Ukrainian civil war was the EU and Russia's Eurasian customs union getting into a bidding war over Ukraine. The EU offered an association agreement and future membership provided they underwent some austerity measures in order to get their economic house in order the Russians promised them a major aid package and membership with out any strings.
the people in eastern Ukraine favor ties with Russia and and the west they favor ties with the EU and internal extremest combined with outside influences turned a trade dispute into a civil war.
If I had been in the EU when the Ukrainian government started accepting the Russian offer I would have been taking the approach of lowering trade and travel barriers against the Russian trade union so that both halves of Ukraine would have been able to get what they wanted.
3. ) what is the worse thing that can happen if things go wrong.- for example during the lead up to the Iraq war - I was opposed to it as Saddam Hussein had more or less a secular government and during the first gulf war he had plenty of opportunity to hit coalition troops and Israel with chemical weapons before January 17, 1991 but he did not do so. The simplest explanation in my view was Saddam Hussein believed doing so would possibly result in nuclear retaliation or at least the dismantling of his regime. In short- Saddam may have been simply evil or even crazy but he was not stupid.  Then more recently we have ISIS.  The US has been siding against asaad in the Syrian civil war. This has helped build up ISIS. There are one of two reason this happened- either the Syrian civil war has been a fight between Asaad and ISIS all a long with the US ignoring realities on the ground or ISIS rose to power because they are the most ruthless and well organized group in Syria and have exterminated all third options which are better.  Either way if we had stayed out- Asaad may have crushed ISIS years ago. The lesson here is some times the devil you know is better than the one you don't know.
4.) remember that there will never be utopia as long as the world is governed by fallible humans and there is only so much that anyone can do to combat evil with out being a source of evil oneself or grinding yourself to the ground. Empires tend to fall because they get overstretched and can't afford to defend the frontier. So if you feel you have the duty to intervene everyplace you will fall either from 10,000 paper cuts or one strong blow that you failed to react to as you were tied up with 10,000 pieces of paper.

Classical Education

Classical education is what existed in America and the western World in General, prior to the system that was established in the post WWII Era. It really began in Ancient Greece and Rome, was lost in the Dark Ages, then resurrected with the advent of the renaissance.

Classical education has a very, very high view of humanity and human potential. This makes perfect sense, considering that what we now call classical education was first developed by the Greeks who believed “Man is the Measure of All Things” and later adopted by Jewish and Christian Communities who believe as a foundational part of their world view that humankind is created in the divine image of God.

To the Classical Humanist, the world makes sense and the job of the educator is to equip the student with the skills and the knowledge foundation to discover that sense for themselves.

For that reason, Classical education emphasizes learning for learning’s sake, unlike modern public education, which focuses on assessment.

Classical Education places large emphasis on the liberal arts, language, literature, history, art, music, rhetoric, and philosophy, are key areas of study in any classical education curriculum, BUT math and science are also considered very, very important.

Another key hallmark of Classical education is that all subjects are taught with the connections between them acknowledged. Unlike in public schools, where beyond the most basic skills taught in the first few years, subjects are, for the most part, treated as wholly separate and having little or nothing to do with each other. This of course is simply not the reality. For this reason, classical students are not permitted to simply ignore one or more “non-essential” areas of study, but must gain a strong and stable foundation from all subjects on which they can build the rest of their educational lives beyond secondary school.

Classical students start learning foreign languages, often Latin and Greek, as early as first grade, not in high school.

The essential methodology of a classical education hinges on the Trivium

The Trivium was the foundation of classical education. The Latin word “trivium” refers to “the three paths,” which are grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Grammar teaches us how to read and how to understand what we are reading, and it teaches us the rules for writing intelligibly, according to the rules of a particular language. The grammar stage, is applied to all subjects. This is when the bare necessities are taught, for reading, the grammar stage is when they are taught phonics and learning how to use context clues and other skills the students will need throughout the road ahead,

Logic teaches us how to think, how to reason analytically, so that we are not misled by fallacious arguments. As Aristotle said, “Some reasoning is genuine, while some seems to be so but is not” despite that there is “a certain likeness between the genuine and the sham.” The study of logic enables us to distinguish between the two. Logic, is the stage at which not only, do classical students continue to expand upon the facts and skills they acquired during the grammar stage, but this is the stage at which they begin to see connections and cause and effect relationships between facts and between subjects.

Rhetoric teaches us how to express ourselves, to convey information accurately and, most especially, to be persuasive in discussions. Aristotle put it in the following words: “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” And so, the Trivium arms the student with a thoroughgoing understanding of his language, the ability to reason critically, and the ability to express thoughts convincingly. Rhetoric is essentially the art of writing and speaking eloquently, of forming, presenting, understanding, and responding to arguments.

Net neutrality

The concept of Net Neutrality has been brought up by Obama and the FCC.
I am a techie- I am a webpage developer and a software development student at ITT.
These are my concerns with FCC mandated net neutrality
The idea behind Net Neutrality is that all internet traffic should be treated the same.
First with net neutrality- an ISP can not filter out content.
The problem here is the fact that some customers might want to have adult content filtered out and will net neutrality laws prevent this?
I know there are products like net Nanny that offer filtering on the client side but server side solutions can give users benifits like filtering out viri and possibly a faster internet connection sine you could be down loading a page from a proxy server located in your town instead of some web server located farther away that needs more hops.
Next an ISP can not give a specific sight a speed boost under net neutrality.
If a site like accounts for a large percent of internet traffic with out net neutrality an ISP could sell them a dedicated line could benefit consumers by speeding up the network over all as a netflix movie won't have to compete with cat photos on Icanhazcheezeburger.com
Then there is the fear that an ISP might try to throttle Netflix down so they can offer their own competing media service.
There are only two ways this scheme could work- first the ISP would have to be the only one in town in order to prevent people from seeing their friends get a faster Netflix connection and second Netflix would have to be kept in the dark.
There a few ways Netflix could counter- they could start their own ISP, change their business model and provide content and not a server.Also unless the company was clear on their network policies they could be sued since the average customer was expecting unfiltered internet.
If a neutral internet is what the public desires- then we should be asking- what are the hurdles to starting an ISP and will rules prevent people from getting a filtered internet if they wanted?
Is it simply it will cost tons of money- or are there any regulations that are hurdles. There is indication from Google Fiber that in some cities regulations are still a major issue-
http://www.broadbandforamerica.com/blog/regulatory-concessions-paved-way-google-fiber
Google isn't their name but also the size of their bank account so it only shows problems when you have the cash not how much cash is needed.
If some one wanted a filtered internet- and one that is clearly not neutral the issue that matters is how well the ISP communicates how they manage their network the option should not be removed.

Comparative Religious Education

First as an Orthodox Christian convert I have encountered quite a few people ignorant of my faith.
First there are the people who hear the word Orthodox even if it is followed by Christian who will think I am Jewish, next there is the occasional Catholic who seems to have no idea about the events of 1054 and call me an ignorant dunce when I call the Catholic church the second oldest in Christianity- because they only understood Christian history in the light of Catholics and Protestants and with out knowledge or consideration that their might be a third option.
Even though I have countered idiocy aimed at myself I support comparative religion classes out of concern for general knowledge and not specific incidents.
When I was in middle and high school- our school did cover a little bit of Islam and other religions when we covered different parts of the world.
This is important-as religion is important in shaping the philosophy, history and even art of the world.
The beliefs of Islam or any given religion is important for those who follow it.
Not covering these things turns school into an institution for propaganda and not education.
There are multiple ways to see the world- and an educated person will understand that fact and they would also understand that means learning that perspective is good in helping you learn empathy for others.