Rather than spending so much energy blasting the PUMA people and their sympathisizers, try spending some thinking time about WHY such a movement even exists. Then think about that and Obama's electability.

Kerry and Gore had great credentials but were lousy candidates, although Gore did win the popular vote. That and a couple of bucks will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!

Obama is electable.

puma pushing mccain is wrong.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden 08

http://barackobama.com

PUMAs pushing McCain is wrong. 

Is that what you believe? Who knew?

Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!

that is part of what I believe. Still, yes... it is wrong.

No more rove/bush years, no more neo-cons, no more road to facism.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden 08

http://barackobama.com

Thanks for making me laugh!

Barack Obama and Joe Biden 08

http://barackobama.com

when I was in High School.

Commercial with the two pot smoking hippies.. "Hey is that Freedom Rock?! Turn it up maaan!!!"

haha. :D

hahaha!

Ah... thanks.

Now I just got home from work. Going to sit, have a beer, eat some bad store bought chicken and watch the convention on replay.

Thanks "dude". :)

Barack Obama and Joe Biden 08

http://barackobama.com

..as first Secretary of State for the rumored island of Clarktopia

Well, I can be fairly diplomatic unless I'm angry. Then it's not pretty.

I'm such a Francophile that I'd have to choose a French-speaking country. I may have to check out Martinique. It's like Hawaii -- a full part of France itself, not just a territory.

Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!

At some point, one does have to stop unifying behind a terrible candidate and put one's foot down. As long as we're willing to keep fighting for someone who's just a little bit better than the other guy, we'll keep getting people who are just a little bit better than the other guy. Of course, that leaves you open to winding up with the other guy in the short term, leaving you screwed in the short term, but hopefully better off in the long term.

Is this the time to stand up against mediocre candidates? I don't know. Some people clearly think it is. Others don't. Personally, I haven't decided yet. For everything there is a season.

We learn. We change. That's progress. If we don't do that, well, we're GWB.

"We burned down the village to save it."

A lot needs changed...but you can't change what's not there any longer.

If we stop fighting for the better...even if only a little bit better...we will not just suffer in the short term IMHO.

The lesser of two evils may still be evil, I'll not argue with that, but the greater of two evils will never lead to good.

The 2 terms of GW Bush is a perfect example.

If people don't start thinking, we can't "win" no matter who is in the White House. They'll do what they did to Clinton over Lewinsky and nothing will get done. At some point, you have to stop sticking your finger in the dike and go after the root cause. I think the root cause is that people don't think. They want easy answers. The media spin last night (so I've been told) was that Biden's speech was weak. That's because it had substance. And that's not what the "people" want. So it was deemed "weak" by the MSM. It's time to make the people want substance.

We learn. We change. That's progress. If we don't do that, well, we're GWB.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to get people to think more? The first requirement is to make sure they have enough information to think, but I don't think you can force-feed information if they're not willing to assimilate the information. Furthermore, the digital age has reduced people's attention spans to almost nothing. I'm guilty of that, myself.

Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!

I think it's going to take a lot of work. I think Kos was on the right track, but he lost his focus before he'd even gotten part way there. It would have to be something like that backed up by a "Thinking" think tank. LOL! You'd have to merge the brains from a few leading think tanks on both sides (not idiots, but people with whom we've got intellectual disagreements) and front that up with discussion groups in multiple forums--website, townhall meetings, TV, books, etc. You could have "facilitators" making the rounds to Starbucks or Borders for discussion groups. The facilitators could be "trained" by experts in the topic, like Wes. Like maybe you train 100 of these facilitators, 10 on each major topic, and give them access to people like Wes (not just Wes but people who disagree with Wes) and then turn them loose to tour the country, write blogs and guest editorials, appear on talk shows, or even have a cable program that talks about these things once a week. I think it's a huge effort. But it could be done.

We learn. We change. That's progress. If we don't do that, well, we're GWB.

"Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop. It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious [tsunami-like] bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it."
~CG Jung

::

DIAGNOSIS: PSYCHIC EPIDEMIC
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/061905Levy.html

EXCERPT

All we have to do to see the madness of our species is to open our eyes and look at what we are doing to each other, to the environment which we depend on for our survival, and to ourselves. What more evidence of a collective psychosis do we possibly need?

The prescription for this disease is simply for enough of us who see it to connect with each other in lucid awareness so that it can be contained, metabolized, and healed. We can put our collective realization together and dream a much more grace-filled universe into incarnation. This is an evolutionary impulse from the universe in which we are invited to participate.

The fundamental process underlying what is collectively playing out on the world stage is psychic in nature. What is getting acted out politically, socially and economically is a manifestation or expression of what is going on deep within the collective unconscious of humanity. It is because of this that Jung says, “We can no longer afford to underestimate the importance of the psychic factor in world affairs.”

It is very dangerous when millions of people fall into their unconscious together and act it out en masse. Mass psychology, which is a herd phenomenon based on fear, then becomes the order of the day. When speaking about Germany in the 1930’s, Jung sounded eerily prophetic when he said that it “...fell prey to mass psychology, though she is by no means the only nation threatened by this dangerous germ.”

"Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious," wrote C. G. Jung.

Because of our inherent suggestibility, we can easily reinforce the unconscious parts of each other, as if we are mutually hypnotizing each other in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. For example, Bush and his supporters are co-dependently feeding into and supporting each other’s unconscious delusions. At a certain point we can’t separate the phenomenon of George W. Bush from his followers, as they are interconnected expressions of a deeper process. In their interplay, Bush, his followers and everyone who reacts against them are the manifestation of a deeper, unconscious field which is expressing and revealing itself as it incarnates through them.

By not seeing Bush’s madness and thereby falling under its spell, Bush supporters unwittingly become agents through which the collective psychosis non-locally propagates itself. Like a higher-dimensional virus that reproduces itself through our unconscious blind spots, a psychic epidemic is spreading itself through Bush, his supporters and everyone who reacts against them.

When we fall prey to conforming to mass psychology, our unconsciousness makes us prone to potentially ignore and deny our individual perceptions and give away our power to others, which is the ‘group-think’ characteristic of cults. We then become dis-associated from our ability to discern between our inner fantasy-image of what we believe to be true, and the reality of what is actually happening, which is a sign of madness.

When we collectively fall into fear, we become easily manipulated and controlled by leaders who themselves have fallen prey to the power-drive of the shadow, as we mutually feed into and off of each other’s unconsciousness. Once emotions such as fear reach a certain pitch, to quote Jung, “...the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. This is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”

A collective psychosis is a closed system, which is to say that it is insular and not open to feedback from the ‘real’ world. Reflection from others, instead of being looked at and integrated, is perversely mis-interpreted to support the agreed-upon delusion that binds the collective psychosis together. Anyone who challenges this shared reality is seen as a threat and demonized. An impenetrable field gets conjured up around the collective psychosis that literally resists consciousness. There is no point in talking rationally with a Bush supporter, for example, as their ability to reason has been dis-armed.

h/t early-bird

It's not just mass psychosis, but individual bias that must be recognized and subjected to reason.

For example, as a scientist and skeptic, I find it necessary to be consistently on guard against becoming too fond of ideas, especially my own. After every result or when reading other's work, it is necessary to re-evaluate. In science, at least, experience is not always a good teacher, because sometimes we can miss the truth that is hidden by our point of view.

I have a good rule of thumb to help. Whenever I find myself agreeing too much with current thought, I step back and try to convince myself that it is wrong.

Now, politics is far from science and elections are as often as much about personal likes and dislikes as much as policy. The "data" that is out there (information about candidates and their character) is so blanketed by the efforts of writers to influence opinion that one can support almost any viewpoint one is pre-disposed to. So for me it is even more important to stop back away from what I've seen and heard and determine what is what and who is who.

For me, it always starts with issues. When it comes to elections I first decide my own positions on the issues I care about: biomedical research funding, stem cells, education, health care, minimum wage, small business vs big business, war (and how will we get our troops home ASAP in a way that preserves peace), etc. I then look at the candidates. I then choose whichever candidates have positions that come closest to what I believe will be the best policies. I also factor in their ability to actually implement their positions.

Fortunately, I am also a cynic (I think many of General Clark's supporters are more idealistic than I). As a cynic, I have low expectations for the character and ethics of candidates for both parties. That way I can be happily surprised if they exceed my very low expectations.

They have to be critical of someone and they won't dare say anything negative about the chosen one. Likewise with B.C. who sucked it up for the chosen one. That left poor Joe Biden.

That is the crux of it all. I don't think this Presidential election is the right point to abandon backing the Democratic Candidate. And I won't even go so far as to say that Obama is a terrible candidate.

Obama is a relatively weak candidate, which is one of the reasons why I don't think he should be our nominee, so he risks turning a likely Democratic victory into a very possible Democratic defeat. But that point is moot now since he is the nominee and fearing that Obama will lose is not a good reason to not try to help him win. He is by no means a shoo in and maybe he isn't even the favorite, but an Obama victory in November is certainly plausible.

Beyond being a weak candidate I am not confident, for several reasons, that Obama is a good candidate, but he is not a terrible one. He is highly intelligent, he lines up with core Democratic positions on most issues most of the time, and he has the ability to inspire many Americans, in particular younger ones, to become active in politics and society. Obama will inherit a lot of International good will if he wins, mostly because he isn't Bush, but also because Obama does not physically look sound or act like the image of the Ugly American abroad. That will give him a heqlthy head start as President.

It will be a social good for America to for all time forward know that a Black American, not just White Americans, has reached the height of political leadership in our nation. That will be a real force in inspiring millions of minority youth to ramp up their own dreams for what it is possible for them to achieve in their own lives. Conversely, racism must be denied a victory in this head on test of it's power in America, not that the battle has been joined.

As I wrote in my blog earlier, it is easier for me to back Obama/Biden then a ticket like Obama/Kaine. Biden is seasoned and an independent thinker. I'm relieved that Obama chose to have him close at hand.

But mostly I think the stakes are too high right now, with tensions with the Islamic world at the breaking point and another possible war on the near horizan, and with Global warming, and with a Supreme Court that is about to fall over the cliff in a right wing plunge, to think THIS is the Season to step away.