A Conservative Argument Against the Senate Filibuster Rule

Drew Justice: Rollback by reconciliation -- he's convinced me.

The Parable of the Satellite Dish

Doctor Zero: The Parable of the Satellite Dish

The Parable of the Satellite Dish

Imagine a large condominium complex is meeting to consider a package deal with a cable TV company. Over eighty percent of the condo owners have their own satellite dishes, and are quite happy with the service. Some of them don’t bother to watch television at all, preferring to rent movies from Blockbuster or Netflix for entertainment. However, the condominium Board of Directors says they’re getting a lot of complaints from the residents who don’t have satellite dishes, demanding the condo association purchase a cable TV package, and fold its cost into the monthly homeowner dues.

The homeowners already pay extremely high dues, and they’re not happy with the quality of service they receive. They also notice that most of the people clamoring for cable television aren’t even homeowners – they’re renters, so they don’t pay the association fees directly. The condo owners already host regular movie nights at the clubhouse, which also has a well-stocked library, so no one is truly starved for entertainment. Still, the owners feel guilty that anyone has to make do without TV service in their home, so they invite a cable company to give them a sales pitch.
...

There is more, of course.

Now, the thing is, the very fools in the body politic who are salivating over "health" "care" "reform" would never stand for such a situation with respect to mere entertainment. Apparently, far too many people care about having choice about incidentals ... but not so much about liberty. And, such folk are not only not jealous of their own liberty (see the Founding Fathers if you do not understand that), but are quite resentful of *my* liberty.

Obamandias

Obamandias

Obamandias
I met a traveller from a once free land
Who said: A vast and fathomless ego hath
Scorched the earth. Nearby, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose contempt
And tilted chin, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.
Few survived that parliamentary Armageddon
The rest were run out of town on a rail, or fled.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Obamandias, king of kings:
Look on my legislation, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the ruins
Of that colossal Self, burnt and bare
The lone and lifeless prairie stretches far away.

Reifying Democracy

'El Inglés' on the 'Gates of Vienna' blog: The Death of Democracy [It's a good and thoughtful essay, but do be charitable about the minor factual error of equating the terms 'Congress' and 'House of Representatives']

From the fury of the Northmen

A thousand years ago, our cultural ancestors prayed, "From the fury of the Northmen, Lord, protect us!"

Today, we ought to pray, "From the tender mercies and caring solicitude of the Good Intentioned, Lord, protect us!"


The above thought was sparked by Matteo's post: The Next Move

Zombies!

An Anonymous poster on Edward Feser's blog made an amusing comment which I wish to share with Gentle Reader:

First, the context of the remark is that Mr Feser had linked to this ubiquitous video:

And Anonymous' comment was:

This gave me a great idea for a video game/movie/parody. People in a small town in the mountains of Pennsylvania must use their guns and religion to survive the zombie apocalypse. The zombies mutter slogans like "change" and "hope" and shamble about, but rather than eating a person's brains, they go for their pocketbook. Once deprived of their own money and reduced to living on federal aid, these people become zombies as well.

Convictions

Someone who comments on Bob Parks' 'Black & Right' blog as 'The Machine' posted a comment I wish to share with Gentle Reader:

"A man is only as wrong as his convictions will allow."

For context, the comment was made in response to Nicolas' question of why certain Republicans, such as John McCain or Scott Brown, won't hold the line against "liberalism." Or, to put it another way, why are there RINOs?

Modernism and the Rejection of Reason

John C Wright: Modernism and the Rejection of Reason

...
A reader comments [regarding a review of a story Mr Wright had written when he was an atheist, in which the reviewer had back-read Wright's current Chrisitian belief into the story]: "One thing about Stoic thought is that in many respects it is more like Christian thought than it is like modern thought in general. If the reviewer is unfamiliar with Stoicism then the mistake would not be entirely surprising to me."

Aha! Your thought I fear is true and right. Modern thought is so eager to reject Christ, that it ends up rejecting paganism as well, not to mention logic, philosophy, objectivity, faith, hope, charity, temperance, moderation, fortitude and justice. It rejects everything, and leave us with nothing.

Modern thought is composed, with innumerable minor variations, with two great main streams: the revolt against the Church in the name of Reason, and the revolt against Reason in the name of Nothing. The first revolt we can call, with no violence to the term, Modernism. The second we can call Postmodernism. There may be more accurate uses of these two terms, but for the purposes of this essay, these are correct in denotation and connotation. The sum of these two streams taken together produces an odd, indeed a horrifically ironic, modern movement. Christianity so successfully adopted an explanation of the world and heaven, that the postmoderns find they cannot reject the heaven they loath, the place of mystic revelation, without also rejecting the world, the place of reason. They are left with an abyss, where neither revelation nor reason reach, a place of pure Nietzschean willpower, a void where the meaningless Self is utterly free to shape the meaningless Nothing into whatever form the empty Self desires. This void is fitliest called Hell. As if they cannot burn down the Cathedral without burning down the Academy.

Why should this be? In every bumper sticker slogan pasted to every half-empty brain, in every television show, paperback novel, and quip by Carl Sagan, science is proposed as the enemy of the Church and the victor over her. Why in the world would the pagan idolaters of science smash their own idols in the fury of their iconoclasm to trample our Christian icons?

The short answer is that the scientific worldview is as Christian as the Great Mass of Mozart, as Christian as Michaelangelo’s David, as Christian as Christmas. I submit that the one cannot be degraded and dismissed without degrading and dismissing the other.

...

That's just the start of the article; following this introduction is a well-reasoned argument which may help Gentle Reader understand some importanf things about the strange, anti-rational modern and post-modern world in which we all live.

The only (minor) quibble I have with Wright's essay is that some readers may understand him to be saying that Modernism and Post-Modernism are two different things; whereas, Post-Modernism is the logical culmination of Modernism.

Just wouldn't happen

'The Deuce:' Just wouldn't happen, in which 'The Deuce' analyzes some recent intellectual dishonesty from the Pope-of-Atheism.

Division By Zero

This post is actually a response to someone on a different blog. But, as I've tried to get this point across to others before, I've decided to post it on my blog (now that I have one) so as to have it written up once. The point I indend to get across to Gentle Reader is this --

Division by zero yields the infinite number.

Now, admittedly, due to the word "yields," that phrasing is less than perfect. But I can't think of a better way to succinctly phrase it. If one prefers, one can think of the issue this way: The answer to the question, "What is 'X' divided by zero?" is "the infinite number" (technically, it's the first of the trans-finite numbers, that is, it's the trans-finite number known as "aleph-null").


Following is the recent exchange on Edward Feser's blog which prompts this curent post:

Martin: Any formal system that is interesting enough to formulate its own consistency can prove its own consistency iff it is inconsistent.

[Note: 'iff' is a technical term meaning "if-and-only-if" see here]

Ilíon: Is it not the case that an inconsistent formal axiomatic system can prove *any* statement which can be formulated within the system?

Martin: Yes, if you allow inconsistency then you can prove anything. This is why division by zero is not allowed in arithmetic and there undefined operations. It order to be useful it must be incomplete.

Ilíon: Actually, the reason division by zero is -- by axiom -- not allowed in arithmetic is that division by zero yields "the infinite number." It's not that division by zero makes arithmetic inconsistent (*), it's that arithmetic is not robust enough to deal with "the infinite number."

(*) If division by zero made arithmetic inconsistent, then it is arithmetic itself which is inconsistent.

Martin: Division by zero does not produce an infinite number! It is undefined because it allows for an inconsistent arithmetic and using it you can prove any two numbers equal each other. This point is discussed at length in the book "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife. This is also why the IEEE floating-point standard has the constant NaN (not a number) and integer division by zero throws an exception on most computers.

Now, as for calculators and computers, the reason they are designed to throw an exception when a division by zero is attempted is two part:

• the operation cannot be completed arithmetically in finite time;
• and, even if the operation could be completed arithmetically, the answer cannot be "held" in the computer's or calculator's register -- by the same token, one can encounter the same issue when trying to use these devices to multiply large numbers

Well, that and the fact that arithmetic isn't robust enough to deal with "the infinite number," even could the operation be completed or the result be represented in the physical device.

====
Now, to the proof that The answer to the question, "What is 'X' divided by zero?" is "the infinite number".

First, Gentle Reader must understand that when I say "Now, to the proof ..." I am not using the term 'proof' in the (limited) mathematical sense.

Recall, Martin and I were talking about the concepts of 'consistency' and 'completeness' as applied to "formal axiomatic systems," such as arithmetic. Arithmetic is 'incomplete' (and thus, all of mathematics is incomplete) -- what this means is that there exist true arithmetic statements which cannot be derived from the axioms and rules of arithmetic; or, to put it another way, there exist true arithmetic statements which cannot be proven via arithmetic.

However, these true-yet-unprovable arithmetic (and higher math) statements can be grasped and understood to be true by a human mind -- after which one may treat them as axioms. So, I hope to prove my claim by showing Gentle Reader *how* to go about grasping the truth of the claim. It's up to Gentle Reader whether he will pick it up.

Arithemetic is counting, that's all it is; each of the four arithmetic operations (addition, subraction, multiplication, division) is counting. The first two are simple counting: counting upward (addition) and counting downward (subtraction). The other two are more complex counting, they are the counting of counting: multiplication is the counting of additions; division is the counting of subtractions.

Now, long division, is simply a shortcut technique for doing the series of counting of subtractions to solve a specific division problem. Once we have been taught long division, we habitually use it to solve a division problem -- after all, the long division technique is quicker and far easier than doing division in its basic form. And, I suspect, we tend to forget what division really is.

Consider the multiplication problem: "5 * 4 = x" and let's forget that we have memorized the multiplication table. How can we solve the problem? By multiple additions, of course, same as when you used to do arithmetic on your fingers. The problem "5 * 4 = x" is equivalent to "5 + 5 + 5 + 5 = x" (or, if one *really* wants to get down to basics, it is equivalent to "(1+1+1+1+1) + (1+1+1+1+1) + (1+1+1+1+1) + (1+1+1+1+1) = x" )

Similarly, a division problem can be solved by reiterative subtractions ... because that's what division really is. The division problem "20 / 5 = x" can be solved by counting how many itertions of subtracting 5 from the result of the previous iteration are required to get the result to a number less than 5. Thusly:

• 1] 20 - 5 = 15
• 2] 15 - 5 = 10
• 3] 10 - 5 = 5
• 4] 5 - 5 = 0

As it takes 4 iterations to reduce the dividend to a number less than the divisor (and, in this example, there is no remainder), the quotent/answer to the problem "20 / 5 = x" is 4.

So, let us apply what we have learned -- or, realized that we already know, but have overlooked -- and divide some number by zero. It doesn't matter which number we choose, the correct answer is always "the infinite number." Consider the division problem "20 / 0 = x." We can attempt to arithmetically solve it thusly:

• 1] 20 - 0 = 20
• 2] 20 - 0 = 20
• 3] 20 - 0 = 20
• ...
• 99] 20 - 0 = 20
• ...
• 999] 20 - 0 = 20
• ...
• 5359] 20 - 0 = 20
• ...
• 999...999] 20 - 0 = 20
• ...

As Gentle Reader can clearly see:
1) division by zero does not make the arithmetic we are doing inconsistent;
2) as the result of the subtraction at each iteration continues to be equal to the dividend, the problem can never be completed via arithmetic -- there is always at least one more iteration to be performed
3) thus, the answer to the division problem "20 / 0 = x" is "x = infinity"
3a) however, this answer can never be arrived at via arithmetic (for arithmetic is 'incomplete' )
3b) nevertheless, a human being can see/understand that the result of division by zero is always "the infinite number."

As I said at the first, I can show Gentle Reader *how* to grasp the truth that the correct answer to any division by zero is "the infinite number." But it's up to Gentle Reader to let go the incorrect assertion about division by zero that he was taught so many years ago, and go ahead and grasp the actual truth of the matter.

========
The reasons I have categorized this post under "free will" and "pious myths" and "reason" are as follows:

• Firstly, I'm trying to keep the categories to a manageable minimum, so for this post I didn't create new categories such as "mathematics" or "logic"
• As they are so connected, I'm tending already to use the category "reason" to also include "logic"
• I've categorized this under "pious myths" because it's a myth, a mis-teaching about arithmetic, that I'm intending to help the reader see through
• I've categorized this under "free will" because the reader must *choose* to see through the mis-teaching we were all taught in our schools