Obama To Disband the Marine Corps

You didn't know this, did you?

On a flight home I sat in between two individuals,  a Marine and boxing promoter.  The boxing guy was an older gentleman, and told interesting stories, such as meeting Don King.  Both men were very pleasant and that helped make time pass on the flight.  We were all combat veterans and all Southerners, so we had a lot in common.  Then the discussion, inevitably, turned to politics.

The older guy turned to the Marine and said "You know Obama is getting rid of the Marine Corps, right?"

The Marine was puzzled.  He hadn't heard this news.  Neither had I.  "Yeah, Eric Holder just had a meeting with the Joint Chiefs.  Obama is going to disband them by Executive Order."

Hooooo boy.  We are going to do this now, are we?  Putting aside for the moment why the head of the DOJ would be involved with restructuring a military department in the DoD, I said: "I don't think any president can just disband a branch of service.

                  quoting "SemDem" (Seminole Democrat) at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/01/1355083/-Obama-To-Disband-the-Marine-Corps

Ways of Thinking About History, Take 2 (part 1?)

History and Systematization

I will always be enticed by the dream, of a grand system for discovering, from history, how to make a better world.

At the same time, nearly all experience tells me this is a foolish, often dangerous, chimera.

To systematize, seems to be an irrepressible urge, evident in many people, and a part of the design of human beings. This urge has given rise to religions, cults, literary salons, 'think tanks', universities, philosophical societies and their journals, those arrogant 'master narratives', grand unified field theories, scientific and historical conferences, and paranoid fantasies.

What to Make of Judith Curry?

Or   Watt's Up With Judith Curry?

This article is something of a "spin-off" of Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example.

   A Common refrain of those who call global warming a hoax, is that mainstream climatologists are "calling an opposing scientist a 'denier', ostracizing him/her and ridiculing them".

 So what to make of Judith Curry, who while continuing to publish studies supporting the general trend of global warming, has done more to impugn the integrity of her colleagues, and encourage those who call them liars than most actual climate change deniers

When Someone says Islam *is* based on Tolerance, Charity, ... [the meaning of "is", part II]

If you haven't already, I recommend reading Part 1.

OK, if someone says (as I'm sure some do) that "Islam is based on Tolerance, Charity, ..." -- while on the other hand inciting hatred and violence to Jews, or Americans, or Muslims of another persuasion, then this is something we call lying, and that sort of thing happens a lot, as we all know.

But there is plenty of evidence if you're willing to look, of ordinary Muslims, in America, Britain, Pakistan, or Africa, whose lives are about going to work and raising children who say and sincerely believe such a statement.

It really MIGHT depend on what the meaning of the word "is" is. (Reposted)

Reposted from the Ontological Comedian

If you think every word has a definition, and definitions are how we know what words mean, consider the word "is" -- which is a pivotal part of every definition -- indeed of the very idea of definition. A bear is a large furry mammal that sometimes walks on it hind legs, etc., etc.

The Big Lie again: "Holiday Trees" and Steven Levy "commentary"

 The following is going viral again as it apparently has around every Christmas of the past few years
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/l/Steven-Levy.htm#.VIDWCUrUhLU

The above sources says it is based partly on a screed by Ben Stein, which is easy to believe considering other things he's written.

Apparently the White House referred to Christmas Trees as Holiday Trees for the first time this year which prompted CBS presenter, Steven Levy, to present this piece which I would like to share with you. I think it applies just as much to many countries as it does to America.

I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat...

What is Science and What Can We Learn From it About Keeping Our Heads on Straight Generally.

Here are three posts trying to make some contribution to philosophy of science and to the public's understanding of it.

The first, What is A Machine? Natural Machines and Origins of Science tries to express something possibly original about the occasions when people have gotten a foothold on the path to a major branch of science.  Before the scientific revolution there were, hidden amidst the blooming buzzing confusion of nature, a few "natural machines".  Unlike the typical object in nature, they behave with predictable simplicity, although this may not be obvious for a long time -- until certain concepts and technologies aid in their analysis.  These include a heavy dense projectile in (parabolic, as it turns out) flight, and the system of the Earth, Sun, moon, and planets (and their moons).  Probably, I should say machines and mechanical processes, but I like the idea of a flying rock or cannonball as an ultra-simple machine.

The next essay, Finding Your Invisible Elephant. A Science Requires, and is Shaped by, a Tractable Subject Matter suggests that "scientific method", or other good epistemic processes such as peer review journals and conventions are not enough.  Once a discipline, through a fruitful set of techniques, is able to repeatedly find its way to make contact with a coherent set of fundamental facts of nature, only then do the practices of academia give rise to a ratcheting mechanism that can make the diverse efforts of many autonomous individuals and groups converge on better and better understanding of some set of phenomena.  This does not work for literary criticism, and its working in many fields of social science, such as sociology of scientific knowledge, is highly dubious.

The third essay, Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example focuses on a case study of scientific consensus by a practitioner of the fairly new field of social epistemology, Miriam Solomon in her book Social Empiricism.  It concerns the gelling, over several decades, of recognition of the phenomenon of continental drift, or plate tectonics.  Many very diverse disciplines had to finally agree that they all had data pointing to the same surprising phenomena before it could legitimately be said that there was a scientific consensus.

Now, this falls short of what the title seems to promise, but is part of a project of trying to take small, sometimes painful steps in that direction.