Republican Think Tank

Now that's an interesting idea. What in the world do they think about? How their heroes, the Bushes and Reagan, have quadrupled the budget deficit in a mere 20 years of governance?

When Reagan came to power in 1980 the deficit wasn't even a trillion dollars. "W" has done that in a year.

By 1992, when Clinton came unto office, it had ballooned to over $4 trillion. Under "W" it grew another $4 trillion to $10 trillion.

The unpaid obligations run up by Bush will add at least another trillion. And that doesn't count the unfunded programs like Social Security and Medicare which continue to balloon out of control. The Medicare Part D disaster which came in under Bush will add billions.

Oh yeah, what about tax reform and regulatory relief for small business?

Of course, the $10 trillion figure often used for the debt is as phony as Groucho Marx's glasses. The true debt under reasonable accounting standards is probably at least five times as high. Much of the difference is in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations resulting from benefit increases which were not offset by revenue increases.

Welcome to our world children. You must fund the programs we enjoyed in a global economy which will enjoy increasing population and declining resources.

Of course our "anti-government" Republicans are not content to take away our economic freedoms.They want government mandates to replace individual freedon in decisions about healthcare, religion, and speech.

What about the Democrats? Well they are complicit in out of control spending, but they don't preach about limited government and lower taxes, much less moral superiority (Can you say Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Ted Stevens, Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay...?)

At least Republicans know the difference between Shiites's and Suni's. Woops. Hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to replace one with the other in Iraq. Welcome President Al Sadr.

What about healthcare, science, the economy, the environment, foreign relations...?

Nice stewardship "W".

Well, we elected a President who seems to have intellect and compassion. He seems to want to return government to the people. He seems to appreciate the role of science, the arts, and education in Americaan life. He has a plan to transform the economy and put us back on the path of world leadership.

Yes we can.

Lee

Art and the Science of Zen

In Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, Rabkin shows how Shakespeare poses reality as , "...pairs of polar opposites...". He goes on to develop the notion of complementarity as a core world vision. "...there are phenomena which physicists can understand only by treating light as waves and others which they can interpret only by treating it as quanta...". Shakepeare's vision is portrayed in a discussion of Richard II, "...the complementarity of it protagonists virtues..."

In The Surrealist Revolution...Gershman says, "...The vital element in a myth...They express ...the feeling that there is a duality in nature...In a true surrealist work there is no message, only an invitation...to acknowledge the only true values in a fraudulent world, liberty, love and the poetry which expresses them...".

In the Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin says, "...The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition...striving for an integration between the subject-matter and the form in which it is expressed that separates the Theatre of the Absurd from the Existentialist Theatre".

The history of art, like that of science and philosophy is about a search for core values, truth, beauty, justice, love, harmony...Now, modern science has uncovered truths that transcend all historical thought. The twists and turns and dilemmas which surfaced in the historical search for truth are now seen in a new context.

As we are able to penetrate deeper and deeper into the nucleus of the atom what we find are mathematical structures and relationships which point to a multi-dimensional, interconnected universe. The fields, waves, quarks, photons, electrons and other fuzzy metaphors extracted from the mathematical and scientific data are just signs of a reality not to be understood by our senses or intellect.

What does this say about the nature of god...man...woman...being...? How do we now answer the age old questions...what is real...what is just...what is beautiful?

The answers are at least partially buried in the mathematical structures which continue to evolve and emerge at all levels of study.

Lee

Zen and the Art of Particle Physics.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says, "...ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants...the laws of physics and science ..these are ghosts..."

What he wants to do is develop an all-encompassing notion which allows for the transcendence of the dualities which have split humanity and being. Art and Science, Romantic and Classic, Induction and Deduction, Subjective and Objective, all ways of dividing the world analytically and breaking syntheses.

The Big Bang may have been an event from which perfect symmetry exploded leading to our reality through a series of symmetry breaks. The original connections of the primordial elements may still exist in the elements which make up ourselves and our world.

There may be a unity underlying the apparant diversity we face. Notions from mathematics and science like Non Locality, Entanglement, Fields, Probability Waves, Uncertainty, Complementarity, Exclusion, Fractals, Emergence, Quarks, Topologies, Groups and Spaces all point to the reality of an interconnected, holistic universe.

Philosophical structures like Platonic Forms, Baconian Idols, Kantian Categories, Sartrean Existence, Rousseauean General Will, Hegelean Spirit, and Smith's Invisible Hand, like Pirsig's Quality/Value speak of a transcendence pointing to a similar unity of being.

Lee