Andre's Executive Order

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...

Alright, I didn't really want to go here because it's being hammered to death, but I'm getting a lot of questions about the debt ceiling, and most of the explanations I'm seeing from the media suck. So here's my take. Why do we have a debt ceiling? A government the size of the United States has an amazingly large financial gray area lurking in predicting the funding necessary to do its job. This gray area is the necessary costs to running the government that we can't predict in advance of a regular budget. By way of example, a single day of operations in Iraq or Afghanistan costs roughly 720 million dollars. Generally speaking, nobody can predict the outbreak, start, or end of war. Similar expenses include natural disasters such as Katrina or man made disasters such as the Wall Street scandals. Not all such gray expenses are negative either. Unexpected opportunities can arise that defy the planned budget or were dependent on unlikely legislation for infrastru...

Taxation. It's one of the big talk-points and battle lines between the two moderate parties we have. Republicans love to slam Democrats for raising taxes and hurting business while Democrats love to slam Republicans for using tax cuts to benefit corporate deals made to further corporate greed at the expense of Americans. The Tea Party has recently brought taxation to the forefront of the news by raging in a nearly incoherent way against the increases in tax funded programs, taking a nearly libertarian stance on the potential tax impacts. Again, the #1 cited reason for this rage? The interference with business that such costs would have. What the hell do politicans mean when they say 'Business'? It's convenient to lump every kind of economic effort into a single word like 'business' and then use broad generalizations to talk about how a tax or legislation is for or against it. But pay attention folks. Doing business in the US has changed enormously in the last fi...