Andre's Executive Order

At the heart of this election lies a subtle truth. The world has been changing quickly in the last twenty years and with the advent of social media and portable electronics, the scope and nature of those changes has become unavoidable.   The sudden deluge of information showing us all the differences in what makes up the American fabric has been terrifying to a large portion of our country that still, today, lives in mostly white, traditional communities across the rural US. We watched white rural American struggle with a black president. We watched parts of it squirm and coil against Obama no matter what he said or did because he represented something. He represented all those changes that had been hitting rural America again and again at faster and faster rates. While liberals wanted to make it purely about race, it was deeper than that. Yes, it was about a black president with a strange name, but Obama had also become a visible, daily symbol on TV and the news of all the c...

David Harsayni is a senior editor at The Federalist, a conservative blog that gets a great deal of attention nationally. I regularly keep tabs on Real Clear Politics for articles about the election and current events. This shoddy piece of pseudo politics caught my attention and immediately hit a land mine with me. At the risk of making him more popular, a few things need to be said. The article itself: The Fedralist: 10 Abortion Questions Hillary Clinton Won't Answer A good political thinker starts by getting fired up about something. They let their emotions flow about an issue and let those emotions fuel investigation and debate. They explore the ideas with the choir of voices like them then pit those ideas against their opponents and fight it out. But the good political thinker is debating and battling to test the limits and contours of the issue. Like a old grave rubbing, you run the crayon back and forth over the whole area and the outline of the message on the stone gets ...

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." -Genesis, 1:28 This single verse has had a powerful impact on western culture. While fairly simple and straight forward, it forms the religious foundation upon which consumerism, and manifest destiny are justified and things like climate change are denied. The state of humanity is understood to be an ongoing project to subdue and control the natural world, and the conquest of nature and the planet is seen as God's will and therefore just in all actions and most methods. This, itself, has had some terrible consequences for our country. But for some, like Ted and Raphael Cruz it doesn't stop at conquest of the natural world. ' Dominionism ' is a theological approach that reads more into Genesis 1:28 than most ...

What's the structural difference between religion and science? Religion is a matter of belief. It's stories and ideas that encapsulate an emotional state, values, traditions, and cultural outlook of believers. When a group of people share the same beliefs about how to live life and what is sacred, their celebration of those things is what we call 'religion'. So with religion, the expression may change and the methods of understanding will almost certainly change, but the underlying conclusions and fundamental ideas never do. Your religion can't be wrong, you can just deviate from it's rightness. With religion, your method may be wrong, but your desired outcome never is. Science is about the process, itself. With science there is no conclusion that is above challenge or question. Science requires consistency above all else - the ability to repeat discovered results. It requires consistent application of discovered rule sets and methods between various trial...

Bernie Sanders takes Wisconsin! This makes seven wins out of the last eight contests and reinforces the populist message and its resonance with Americans across the country.  The delegate count, 1279 for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders' 1027 makes the race appear to be a dead heat. I've spoken with numerous young voters, but Bernie supporters are particularly  excited, enthusiastic, and motivated by the prospect of real populism and the focus of morality and social justice in politics again as a front running concern of a candidate with a proven record of consistency in his approach and priorities. But there's a problem. Bernie Sanders supporters are falling in love with the moment more than the message . Bolstered by the fatigue with political complexity and manipulation by corporation and dark money, Bernie voters are doing what has sabotaged American voters again and again throughout our history. They are loading all their hopes and fears and dreams and fr...

What does it mean to be facing a Bernie Sanders revolution among Democrats and a Trump revolution among Republicans? American culture has always stood on what amounts to an illusion. It's a child's view of who we are as a country and a people. But like a child's self understanding, what we believed to be American doesn't exactly comport to reality. We're the land of the free and home of the brave who committed systematic genocide to get that land and built an economy on the backs of slaves so we could claim that freedom. We're the country of laws without nobility or king that has structured financial influence into politics that creates defacto kingmakers and an acknowledged nobility of wealth and power who are all but required allies to get elected. We are a land of market opportunity for the aspiring individual with self determination and ambition, but that opportunity is not only upwards: It's downwards too. Unlike other first world countries, the downw...