searching for the truth

You've never heard of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers' Pac?  It is all over the news, and living in a purple state you have heard from them plenty.  Well all these Pacs just slide their name in at the end of the commercial very quietly, and their names all sound the same because they don't want to be identified with their slurs, they want you to think you have the idea that you thunk it up yourself.

The part where they have picked five candidates is something they have announced themselves.  The part about establishing their own get out the vote thing they have not.  Well we'll find out soon enough if that is true, it's not the sort of thing you can hide.  It sort of falls into line with what I know and what I have been thinking.

Aye and there's the rub, it sort of falls into line with the way I see things.  See maybe that is the kernel from which all those conspiracy theories grow, and by conspiracy theories I mean the far out stuff like the truthers (9/11 was an American plot) and the birthers (Obama was born in Kenya).  If you hear that your next door neighbor, who you know be a drunk, crashed his car at Deadman's Curve, you nod your head.  If you hear that he was singing soprano in the church choir, you think maybe the guy who told you is a liar, or a guy who doesn't  check out his stories very well.

It is a problem, you know we all start out looking for the truth, and everytime we come across a fork in the road it behooves us to submit it to the crucible and come out with the most likely truth.  But in fact we all have a bias and tend to favor the right or the left and this can lead us astray.  The thing to do is question ourselves, maybe give more weight to the other side.  When I am outraged by something the reps do, I make myself turn it around and think what if the dems did the same thing.  And not surprisingly, it often wouldn't piss me off so much if the dems did it, so then I am not so hard on the reps doing it.

So I guess maybe I was unsteady ground with bringing up the article that was based on mysterious memo, but I was bringing it up in order to show how the tea party is manipulated by rich donors, and I did have a source, it wasn't just something I read in a book only a can't remember which one.

I was a little apprehensive about using the Kochs as an example, I should have added, 'and their ilk,' because there are a lot of guys like them.  On the fringes of the left they have become like legendary ogres, the Koch Brothers this, and the Koch Brothers that.  I don't approve.

I too wondered how did Cortez, with that handful of clanking conquistadors conquer the great civilization, and read a book and it was as you said, everybody around them hated the Aztecs, so it was no big deal to get that wagon rolling.  What did you want me to look up about Japan?

My assertion about Europe having a less well-defined poverty class, I am embarrassed to admit comes from an article I read some time ago, and I am embarrassed to admit that I don't remember (I will look it up, but not right now).  Anyway back when we were lads it was common knowledge that Americans were taller than Europeans, because basically we were Europeans who had moved and were eating better.  Maybe it was twenty five years ago, this guy was doing a study on that and discovered to his amazement that at the current time Europeans were taller than Americans.  How could that be?  Well one thing was that the Europeans were eating a lot better, and the second thing was that most Americans were as tall as Europeans, but poor Americans were considerably shorter and that took the American average down.

And of course the poor Americans were black, and from that I drew my assertion that if white people were poor we would be more concerned with helping them out than if they were black. 

Anymore though Europeans have accumulated big minorities of muslims, and I have read that they haven't done as good a job of assimilating them (different religion, different language) as we (white guys) have done for our blacks.

Well one well wonders what kind of Beagle you would have been today had you attended the military academy or that U of Chicago school.  I would guess, given your penchant for contrariness the former would have made you more left wing and the latter more right wing, but I don't think either one of them would have changed you all that much because it seems like from birth you have been headed for The Freehold.  What do you think of that analysis?