Religion or lack of it is irrelevant

Mithridates

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Sunday January 02, 2011 · 3:38 AM PST

2011/01/02 · 03:38

Sorry for the quick diary entry but what's up with all the diaries on the rec list about religion?

* Why I am an Atheist

* I was a Christian Once

* Why I am still a Christian (paraphrasing as it's off the list now)

Just below I see two more:

* "Invisible Sky Fairies and "Flying Spaghetti Monsters"

* Dead Letter, Why Christianity As We Know it is Toast

Daily Kos is for electing Democrats. Democrats can be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, Taoist, whatever. It's 2011 and there's a severe lack of attention being paid to some of the elections that will be happening this year:

http://www.dailykos.com/...

Mithridates

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Saturday November 20, 2010 · 10:36 AM PST

2010/11/20 · 10:36

It's past 3 am here where I live but I had to write a diary entry before I went to bed as I don't think our side truly appreciates the gravity of the situation regarding the START (New Start) treaty. There is a little talk about it, but not enough. We need to be going all in on it too.

The reason is simple: the White House didn't ask for ratification of the treaty to be a battle. They were looking for a few months of hearings and discussions, and then ratification with the same large majority all other nuclear reduction treaties have been given until now. However, it seems that the GOP is interested in trying to stall it, for no reason other than to deny President Obama a legislative victory.

What they want, of course, is to delay the ratification, deny the president a legislative victory, and...

Mithridates

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Friday November 05, 2010 · 5:01 AM PDT

2010/11/05 · 05:01

First, a quick note on the midterms: 17 out of the last 20 midterms have resulted in a loss for the President's party, and this midterm makes it 18 out of 21. Though losses in the House were huge, I still see it as vastly preferable to 1994 where House losses were not so great but the GOP took the majority in the Senate, leaving the President at the whim of both houses. So it could be worse, and since presidential elections garner a lot more attention (which means a larger turnout among younger voters), 2012 will certainly be different. But now to the subject of this diary entry:

You never feel so fired up about an election as the week after a loss. The result of an election brings with it the 20/20 hindsight about which candidates should have been given the most support, and where one's resources should have been allocated. The time after an election loss brings with it a lot of enthusiasm, but lacks an outlet where it can be channeled. But wait a second, maybe there is a good place for it to be channeled. And a good example of this is found in the Canadian city where I'm from, Calgary. Because last month in Calgary...

Mithridates

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Friday September 03, 2010 · 6:42 AM PDT

2010/09/03 · 06:42

Hi Daily Kos, Canadian living in Korea here. I think it might be a good time to pen my thoughts on the US and President Obama, as I might be able to offer a bit more objective and unbiased view from over here.

Let's see...where to begin. First of all, the way Obama views government and the presidency. I think if I had to characterize Obama's governance in a single sentence it would be this: "Begin with an ideal, analyze the situation, and then move as close as possible to that ideal as the current situation will allow".

Mithridates

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Wednesday December 16, 2009 · 5:57 AM PST

2009/12/16 · 05:57

I don't want to pronounce judgment on the health care bill because a removal of Lieberman's support for an expansion of Medicare is a pretty big deal. I do have a really good example of the above quote though, not from the world of politics but rather from TV. I wrote about it here when it happened but I'll sum it up in this post as well.

It has to do with Terminator.

Mithridates

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Saturday December 05, 2009 · 9:00 AM PST

2009/12/05 · 09:00

This diary is one that I've thought about writing for about a year now (since Barack Obama was elected) but have never been able to condense into a single cohesive idea. So maybe I'll just write without one and see what happens. It's a half personal diary entry, but probably also applies to a lot of other people as well and expands into a more general theme near the end.

I'll start with myself: the main obsession in my life since 1998 has been languages, since I one day decided while working in a boring office in Calgary that I was going to learn Japanese to fluency and leave office work and Canada behind. To make a very long story short, skip ahead a decade later and the interest in Japanese (I did become fluent by the way - JLPT lv. 1 and Kanji kentei pre-lv. 1) has turned into an interest in languages as a whole, and with that came about an interest in geopolitics. In 2007 I spent a lot of time on Turkish and have become quite good, and now I am working on Persian. I currently live in Korea.

Now to explain what this has to do with the price of tea in China..

Mithridates

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Sunday November 29, 2009 · 3:13 PM PST

2009/11/29 · 15:13

This will be a bit of a short diary, but it highlights a point that may be fairly important in the next few days ahead.

Remember "grab a mop"? Three words that perfectly summed up the situation President Obama was talking about at the time, the fact that when the country is digging itself out of its current mess there's no honor in sitting on the sidelines and whining about how the other side is trying to clean up the mess. Well, I found another short three-word term that might be a good one to hammer away with.

Mithridates

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Tuesday November 10, 2009 · 4:15 AM PST

2009/11/10 · 04:15

I just took a look over the Rec list right now and here's what it looks like. The diaries dealing with the Stupak amendment are outlined in red, those dealing with upcoming strategy in the Senate are outlined in...well, any colour you want to imagine because there isn't a single one. One of the diaries on the list has a tiny mention of the Senate, but that's it.

Mithridates

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Saturday October 10, 2009 · 11:23 AM PDT

2009/10/10 · 11:23

I decided to carry out a search of some of the former Nobel Peace Prize controversies of days past, and the one from 1936 (actually the 1935 prize but awarded in November 1936) to be particularly interesting as someone else considered the awarding of the prize to be blatant partisanship. The images are here, but the two articles I found are short and the text of the second one is below.

Mithridates

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Thursday September 24, 2009 · 11:09 PM PDT

2009/09/24 · 23:09

I wrote a fairly lengthy post on this subject on Page F30 this morning, but since much of this has to do with the direction of the American space program we should probably be having the discussion here as well. Yesterday afternoon NASA held a press conference to announce the definitive presence of water on the Moon, and it was simply fascinating. It seems that this water is most present every morning and evening (note that morning - evening = 14 days on the Moon) on the Moon, and though it exists everywhere it is in larger quantities in higher latitudes, so away from the equator.

Mithridates

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Thursday September 17, 2009 · 8:18 PM PDT

2009/09/17 · 20:18

Not an American conservative leader, mind you, but Brian Mulroney, the former Prime Minister of Canada. He's a political figure that certainly knows what it means to spend political capital, as he instated a tax called the GST (goods & services tax) that made his administration extremely unpopular, and after his resignation his party was reduced from 200+ seats to only 2 seats in Parliament. But thanks to the GST (the next government promised they would get rid of it, and thankfully broke that promise) Canada was able to run successive surpluses through the 1990s and up until last year.

The GST was lowered from 7% to 5% recently, and now we have no surpluses anymore. Coincidence? No, because it was always a risk to do so, as lowering it meant that Canada had a much lower margin of safety for economic downturns.

Mithridates

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Sunday September 06, 2009 · 10:19 PM PDT

2009/09/06 · 22:19

My last diary was about cats too but this one ties into health care too. Here's the story:

Yesterday I received a call from my girlfriend saying that her sister had seen a kitten near the place where she works out, and upon receiving the directions I spent the next hour and a bit looking for it as it was fairly far away. Eventually I found it - go to the hotel...go behind hotel, find street with restaurants and steakhouses...find health centre...find coffee shop on the left...see stairs leading down...go down to the basement and lo and behold, there was a kitten hiding underneath a sign! Found you! This kitten seems to have lost her mother as she (or he, but we'll go with she for the time being) kept on just walking back and forth and every once in a while would mew at the sky a bit.

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Religion or lack of it is irrelevant

The White House is going all in on the START treaty - are you?

Feeling fired up now that the election is over?

Let me explain something to you about Obama.

The perfect is the enemy of the good

How can one make more of a difference?

Pay "less for more" is the new keyword to hammer away with

Daily Kos, stop losing focus

Hitler: Nobel Peace Prize "a misuse of a humanitarian institution for partisan political purposes"

Now that water has been confirmed on the Moon it's time to focus on there instead of Mars

Major conservative leader defends universal health care

Kittens and the moral and practical imperative for universal health care