thomas friedman should run for president

i really like thomas friedman. a lot. i might even love him, but frankly i don't know him well enough to make that outrageous of a statement. i like him.
(and by the way, of no relevance.. i am really annoyed of john mccain and the endless commercials he is subjecting me to listen to by broadcasting it on cnn.)

friedman posted this recently on his column on nytimes.com.

in the article he pretty much bashes bush very eloquently, and very passionately for his lack of deliverance on his own energy promises 2 years ago, when he promised we would do something about our addiction to oil. why is it. in the face of crisis, then.. in the face of angry rumblings beneath the social fabric of american lives.. is it SO damn easy for him to nullify his earlier promises to end dependence, or at least work on dependence of oil?

here's the important question. is mr bush a liar or a coward. (okay he might be both) but is he a liar and the words he spoke years ago at his national address are merely words for pacification, or is he a coward that can't stand up against emotion and pursue reason? emotion being that our economy is so stressed about oil prices, that he would forsake the rational of earth preservation.

it takes a lot for someone to pursue reason in the face of overwhelming passion. passion can easily distort logical thinking. (see earlier post.) pursuing a sound energy plan (like the one that friedman proposes in his article) would require our nation to set a floor board for oil prices, force consumers to swallow down the ludicrous cost of transporation, and seriously commit to finding renewable dependable sources of energy.

in my development economics class last semester we studied the cost of companies that try to enter an already established market. if the cost is high, even if it is a more efficient producer of a certain product, if the said efficient company cannot overcome the initial cost of entry, they simply won't. for example (and this IS a true story). back ages ago, the US type writers came up with the QWERTY keyboard. they had rigged all the type writers with this keyboard, and everyone got trained on this keyboard. years later, they came up with a more efficient layout (so named DVORAK) that was proven to cause less typing errors than the current model, and due to market entry complications, the DVORAK was soon forgotten, and the QWERTY remains.

unless there is HUGE incentives for people to enter the market of renewable energy (after all capitalism is what works), a real plan to lesson our dependence on oil isn't feasible.

hopefully the next president will be someone who can stand his ground, complications, washington, politics, blahblahblah aside. am i hoping for too much?

my objective

alright. if you don't consider me a little delusional already.. what with my endless rambling, and some what senseless arguments, and circular reasoning.. get ready. so i've been reading ayn rand lately. i've been trying to get through atlas shrugged before the beginning of law school, and i'm almost done. the end is so near that i'm just gleeful in anticipation of page 1070. i only have about 170 pages left. not bad. close.

so ayn rand is a genius. agree with me, disagree with me. that is your prerogative. ayn rand is a convincing, strong minded, compelling philosopher. that you cannot disagree with me on.

and of course, me being as easily influenced as i am, rand has caused me quite a headache the past few weeks. i feel as if i'm embarking on a crisis of belief. a crisis of ... fundamentals.

-----------

i used to think that i might single handedly save the poor children of africa. and should it happen that i couldn't (there was a 99.99% chance of this happening) i would be happy the rest of my life just fighting for them, and their right to live. then i started reading atlas shrugged, and in this novel rand propositions a world where you live by the bread you earn, and by nothing else. according to ms. rand (as i'm sure she would want to be nobody's mrs.) the children in africa be damned.

i'm torn.

i came to a place where i couldn't rationalize the compassion in my heart, and the rational thought in my mind that maybe she was right.

-----------

i've always wondered why her philosophy was called objectivism. i mean. what does that have anything to do with her tenants of philosophy, which are, in short.. to strive for your own happiness, and to be as productive as possible. thankfully my short sightedness and inability to connect the dots were unveiled to me by my friend jeff as we conversed tonight while watching the bachelorette.

as deanna was mulling over the hardest decision of her LIFE. (apparently she should also add that the aforementioned statement is contingent upon that she means it's the hardest decision of her life up to that point.).. i was mulling over ayn rand. i pointed out that as much as i agreed with her, i couldn't separate myself from my heart, and the fact that i hate seeing people suffer. if i don't see it, i suppose i could ignore it, and think that sure.. all poor people deserve to die anyways because they aren't making anything worthwhile, but i can't put myself in my own world where ideologial theories reign. as much as i do see valid points in rand's theories (points you should read yourself, because i could never give them adequate explanation), i cared too much about the plight of poor people, most of the time they don't deserve the lot they get in life.

and that's when jeff said to me: "rodan why do you think it's called objectivism"

lightbulb goes off.

sure. it's called objectivism because you have to be objective in the face of emotion. i would imagine you would have to be some degree of inhumane to look at the face of a starving child and say they didn't deserve a free loaf of bread.. well either inhumane or have a unique capacity for detachment. to remain objective.

so as for me. i can't do it. therefore, i'm solidly back in middle ground. not a radical conservative, but neither am i a free-handout giving liberal. but i guess that's okay. we after are all are the great country of individual thought and middle of the road action.

socio..what?

i guest wrote a blurb for my friend daniel's blog on hilary clinton and why i would not vote for her. i suppose now i will never get the chance. (at least not for the next 4 years). btw. daniel's blog is http://leadingassociates.wordpress.com. i haven't figured out how to use my mac yet so therefore i can't insert hyper-links. that useless fact was not so much a useless plug for my new mac. (i am indeed so happy).

moving on.

so i've been doing this online sociology course on gender studies. i don't know why i dislike sociology so much, when i'm so in love with behavioral economics. when you think about it economics is really a study of the behavior of people dealing with their resources, and behavioral economics is the sub-field that deems people cannot be rational creatures, but are most uniquely irrational, and unique. this almost inevitably creates an justification for the field of sociology.

but this justification annoys the hell out of me sometimes. sociologists in my eyes are trouble makers. or more often they seem to me the kinds of people who have an tiresome desire to be heard. sometimes i feel like the thought process of sociologists are to create some kind of assumption on human kind, and then look for studies and rational evidence to support their assumptions. but that is just me, and my anti-sociologist attitude. i apologize for any sociologists out there that are deeply offended and think me uneducated.

anyways. much to my despair, the book that i have to read for this class, and write essay upon essay on, is comprised of loud mouthed, opinionated feminists. and to be frank, they don't even hid their bias against men and their unilateral disgust of sexism. they think women have been objectified and demoralized by men from the earliest signs of civilization, and this continues to happen today, at home.. and at work.

so honestly. i can't really relate, but then i started thinking that perhaps it was because i haven't actually reached the workplace. anyone knows that the theories of academia are not necessarily practiced in the work environment, so perhaps the popular ideals that men and women are equal, are not necessarily acted out in the work field, when study upon study, and testimony after testimony point that women are unfairly treated in the work place.

please read

(i guess i figured out the hyper link thing after all).

so. okay. was clinton denied a chance at the presidency because she is a woman? maybe. who really knows.

but i stand by the fact that unless someone can present to me something beyond opinion. something that is both concrete and truly unbiased, this question will merely remain something of debate.

simply hilarious

i'm not a feminist.... but. well this is f*ing hilarious and totally worth reading/quoting/sharing.

if men could menstrate.
written by gloria steinem
edited by moi

male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis envy is "natural" to women -- though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb envy at least as logical.

in shortthe characteristic of the powerful, whatever they may be, are thought to be better than the characteristics of the powerless -- and logic has nothing to do with it.

what would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? the answer is clear -- menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:

men would brag about how long, and how much.
boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag parties.
sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. -- of course some men would still pay for the prestige of commercial brands such as john wayne tampons, muhammad ali's jock shields, etc).

military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ("menstruation") as proof that only men
..could serve in the army. "you have to give blood to take blood"
..hold public office
..be priests and ministers. "how could a woman give blood for our sins"
..be rabbis. "without the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean"

male radicals, left-wing politicians, and mystics, however would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any women could enter the ranks if only she were willing to self-inflict a major wound every month.
.."you must give blood for the revolution"

street guys would brag: "i'm a three-pad man!"

tv shows would treat the subject at length.
.."happy days": richie and potsie try to convince fonzie that he still is 'the fon' although he has missed 2 periods in a row.
newspapers would say: "judge cites monthly stress in pardoning rapist"
men would convince women that intercourse was more pleasurable at "that time of the month"

of course, male intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguments. how could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics, or measurement, for instance, without that built-in gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and the planets, and thus for measuring anything at all.
in the fields of philosophy and religion, could women compensate for missin the rhythm of the universe? or for their lack of symbolic death and resurrection every month?

in fact, if men could menstrate, the power justifications could probably go on forever.

if we let them.

a quote worth quoting.

woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached, whereas man is a human being furnished with a hair of testes.

-rudolf virchow, md

save the feminists anger at my quote, i just thought it was quite preposterously funny.

spiders for environmentalism!

in what sense is lying okay?

when you lie to protect the weak, when you abuse power to stand for justice, when you break rules or create your own outlandish ones to preserve peace.. is that okay? does the end justify the means?

my mom gets two magazines. newsweek and instyle. and newsweek offered an interesting article on what kinds of species make it on the 'endangered species list' and what kinds don't.. and perhaps the political reasons that activists secretly harbor to push their 'animal' on the list. for example, the article mentions environmental lawyer Kassie Siegel, and her attempts at pushing the polar bear on the endangered species list. she went through a few other more critically endangered species first (such as a spider that resided in the ice caves of Alaska's Glacier Bay) but found that the spider probably wasn't enough of a poster-animal for stressing the dangers of global warming, so decided to push for the historically impressive beast: the polar bear. he once championed for coca-cola, and now he will be the one who sells t-shirts for global warming.

when does ethics stop mattering? when are corners okay to cut if the end result is achieved. is lying that polar bear populations are decreasing rapidly (when they really aren't, and remain quite stable within the past few years) okay to make people more aware and more responsive to the negative impacts of global warming.

sure if the poles really do melt off, 2/3 of the polar bears could die, and sure we can't predict when that could happen, but does that call for stretching the truth as well?

don't get me wrong. i'm as wanna-be green as they come. i fully believe that it's better to think global warming is happening than to sit in ignorance and wishful thinking that it's not.

but i also firmly believe that you don't achieve justice by bending the rules.

i'm reading atlas shrugged. which is a hell of a novel. it's fantastic. i've earmarked all these pages in the book that i will go back and spend time mulling over rand's ideology, but not quite yet because my goal right now is just to get through the damn thing. (it's 1070 pages!)

anyways, rand does quite a job in this book to paint a ridiculous picture of the men in this book who are collectivists, and think with the 'collective' good in mind. these are the men that oppose industry and individual success, deeming that it is individuality and thinking and creating for yourself that is the cause of all the evil in this world. the men she creates are like modern day robin hoods (a character rand despises), who steal from the rich and give to the poor. sure that idea maybe nice, but the way they go about creating this utopia of equality, is nothing short of evil. the way these men go about tryin to achieve this end is not only utterly unhelpful, but destroying the country as they continue upon this path of justice for the poor.

what am i getting at here? the idea that you can't fight fire with fire. i think the side issue here is that people who want to champion the causes of the environment and the needy and the 3rd world poor feel as if they need to cut corners and to compromise themselves to get action done. but this is hardly the right path. when lies are discovered by the public, they won't rationalize why you lied, or for what good purpose you perpetrated the lie, all they will know is that you lied.
it's funny how when you come across an idea, you find it everywhere. last night i was watching law and order, and there was a case of this one police captain havin raped and killed this mexican girl. the female prosecutor named casey, wanted so bad to catch the bastard that she contaminated evidence, and stretched the boundaries of appropriate questioning to try to nab the guy. in the end. it didn't work. on top of her failing to prosecute the guy, she ended up getting her license evoked for malpractice.

often times doin the right thing is hard, not only because you are doing the right thing, but because doin the right thing forces you to make a lot of little decisions that test your character and your true commitment to truth, and justice. sometimes it's easier to fight for justice with unjust actions.