I randomly ran into my elementary school best friend who I went to high school with and haven’t seen in years at Carl’s Jr. So weird catching up. Man I’m old, I’ve known him since kindergarten, i.e. most of my life.
A girl who I no longer talk to and is for all intents and purposes my ex girlfriend put her birthday on my iPod calendar once and a notification just popped up.
"It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand."
— Madeleine L’Engle (via quotestuff)
"Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment."
— Henry David Thoreau (via blade-maiden)
(Source: crownandbook, via makeitfireproof)
"Wow, it’s midnight already and I accomplished nothing."
— Me, every night.
This is definitely one of the top worst essays I’ve ever written. I don’t even feel like using my remaining 40 minutes until its due to check over it, because I know that I’ll end up hating myself if I look at what I’ve read. I’ll just have to turn it in and hope that I can scrape a B-. Oh gosh, I don’t want to imagine my prof reading this steaming pile of crap and what he’ll think about my abilities (lack thereof) as a student. Oh well, I have grocery shopping to do tonight, a doctor’s appointment in the morning, and an important quiz to spend tomorrow studying for. Blah.
A False Assumption
The underlying premise in the arguments pro-abortionists give against fetal personhood is that non-persons can change into persons. They are saying that a living being can undergo a radical, essential change in its nature during its lifetime.
But there is a logical problem here. If the change was biologically inevitable from conception, given time, then this change is not a change in essential nature.
This is because if the being naturally initiates the change, it must be in its nature from the beginning to do so. If it is in its nature to do so, then despite any changes in such characteristics as independence, place of residence, physical development, or demonstration of mental ability, what the being is in later life is what the being is from the beginning of its life.
This means that if we are persons with the right to be free from aggression later in life, we are persons even at conception.
Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., Libertarians for Life
(Source: l4l.org)
Why.
If Dr. Paul does not win the nomination, I will still be voting for him, or even writing in his name.
Reasons:
Voting in accordance with my conscience and my principles is now more important to me than voting for the party. I don’t agree with any of the other Republican candidates on even half as many things as I agree with Ron Paul on. I’m a libertarian with a socially and economically conservative background, and Paul fits the bill perfectly. The other candidates are not talking about correcting the root causes of our national problems, as Paul is. They’re talking about trying to treat the symptoms by enhancing the very conditions that caused them. On policy issues, I see very little difference between the other Republicans and President Obama. So it does not matter one bit to me if it’s Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum versus Barack Obama in the general election. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Sure, the rhetoric is different, and the beneficiaries of government largesse are different, but free markets and individual liberty are thrown out the window just the same. Just as Obama has continued all of the most objectionable of the Bush administration’s policies: unconstitutional foreign wars and interventionism, massive deficit spending and corporate bailouts, corporatism, expansion of the welfare state, ad nauseam, I hold out no hope at all that the new bunch of Republicans will be any different, except for Ron Paul. I flat-out just don’t trust Romney, Gingrich is a disgusting human being and an opportunist, and Santorum is a warmongering religious authoritarian. I just could not, in good conscience, vote for any of them.
We should be doing everything we possibly can to avoid a war with Iran, because not only can we not afford it, not only would yet another aggressive foray into a land on the other side of the planet be morally and practically insane, not only is Israel not our constitutional responsibility to defend, not only can Israel handle the threat that Iran may or may not pose very well on its own, but Russia and China have major economic and political interests in Iran. An American invasion will almost certainly escalate into a long-expected third world war. Already, the Obama administration is moving troops around the world and cutting forces in Europe, Africa, and South America, in order to focus on China. This strikes me as either insane or evil. I want nothing to do with it. Another, bigger war will complete America’s decent into despotic tyranny and bankruptcy. All of the Republican candidates, save Paul, are just itching for that war, whatever their claims to the contrary. They all support the sanctions that are putting a choke hold on the Persian people, just as FDR’s sanctions against oil exports to Japan before WWII put Japan in a position where they had to either shut down and abandon their empire, or attack the United States in a gamble. Sanctions do not ever prevent wars. They cause them.
I will be voting for the man who represents an about-face along that road. For me, it will never again be about Republicans versus Democrats. It is about life and liberty, against all the tyrants and purveyors of death in the world who would snuff out that light.
Barack Obama is not America’s problem. He is just a symptom of a system that rewards smooth-talking liars who are backed by financial and military corporations that are deeply intertwined with the government, and which is fueled by the Federal Reserve’s powers to inflate the currency to fund corporate bailouts and wars. This has been going on for ninety-nine years. It caused every dead American soldier sent to perish in Eurasia, every American who starved during the Great Depression and every other recession, this past century, and it will keep killing and destroying for the sake of power, until it is stopped.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich are not the solutions to that problem. They are products of it, just as much as Obama is. None of them will reverse the decline of American freedom and prosperity, either because they don’t understand what’s causing it, or because they want to be a part of it.
Ron Paul has the solutions.
(via dillondean)
#27
Recent scientific discoveries have once again demonstrated the glory of God in the heavens. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the discovery of the fine-tuning of the universe. The consequences of this are phenomenal — either one believes that we are incredibly “lucky” or that someone designed our designed universe, or, if you are really desperate to avoid God, you invent the “multiverse theory,” which speculates, without any empirical evidence, that the universe is one of billions of universes that just happens to provide the fine-tuning for life.
Finally, I would point out that it is the philosophy of scientism rather than the practice of science that is the problem. The philosophy of scientism, that only the material exists, is anti-Christian and, ironically, it is also anti-scientific because it is not an empirically provable scientific theory. The Bible is not a scientific textbook and it would be foolish to look for things to prove in the Bible from science (as though the Bible were subject to our current limited understanding). But the presuppositions and teachings of the Bible are, as we would expect them to be, completely compatible with the practice and knowledge of science.
- David Robertson, “Science” vs. Science
