Among his many philosophical interests and concerns, Leibniz took on this question of theodicy: If God is omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient, how do we account for the suffering and injustice that exist in the world? Historically, attempts to answer the question have been made using various arguments, for example, by explaining away evil or reconciling evil with good.

For Leibniz, an additional central concern is the matter of reconciling human freedom (indeed, God's own freedom) with the determinism inherent in his own theory of the universe. Leibniz' solution casts God as a kind of "optimizer" of the collection of all original possibilities: Since He is good and omnipotent, and since He chose this world out of all possibilities, this world must be good—in fact, this world is the best of all possible worlds.

On the one hand, this view might help us rationalize some of what we experience: Imagine that all the world is made of good and evil. The best possible world would have the most good and the least evil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds

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We've got a long way to go ... The answer to this conundrum is that the universe is an accident of nature, in which there are forces — not of good and evil — but of continuation and annihilation, at various level of energy, density and stability. At the life-bracket, level, these energies developed through evolution into various gamut of self-creating enzymes and molecules. 

At the human level, we understand much of these processes but we have not accepted the reality of them. We still muddle with our own little mudcakes trying to make fit simplistic ideologies to a very complex accidental interaction between elementary bits.

We have to distil the complexity of course... It's a bit like having to work photos with JPEGs. Should we work with Tiff format, the computing process is longer and most programs won't compute. Should we work in RAW original files, no commercial retouching program will be able to work with that. And you might need to wait two days for the result. Thus we simplify. 

We can simplify to a point at which the picture becomes so pixilated that it is not recognisable. This is what we've done in reverse. We never understood the original construct of the universe, thus we imagine a picture to fit. It does not fit.

On this picture we have grafted moral interactions that help stabilise the image, but they end up hiding the reality, like retouching does. 

It is time to revalue our destiny, by looking at reality: there is no evil nor god, just our own stupidity in trying to be gods and blaming other for being evil... It's time to take an existential pathway, especially in politics where hypocrisy is killing the goose.

General Zinni’s primary argument in Before the First Shots are Fired is that while America’s soldiers are the best in the world, the nation’s political leaders who are responsible for providing and elucidating the casus belli upon entering wars, and negotiating the treaties to end them, are sadly inept. Politicians, he writes, choose to enter wars for political reasons, often based on politicized intelligence. Once boots are on the ground, these same politicians look for “measures of success,” such as enemy combatants killed and/or elections held, in order to justify the wisdom of their policies. But more often than not these decisions are made in Washington, far from the battlefield, and are based on domestic “political realities” instead of military ones: e.g. the 2009 “surge” in Afghanistan, the precipitous retreat from Iraq, and the ill-conceived “Arab Spring” season of support for overturning the political order from Libya to Egypt to Syria, just to name a few.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/anthony-zinnis-hard-truths/

Bush’s Underwhelming European Tour

By DANIEL LARISON

....

 "And then there was the content of the speech. “The U.S. has to lead, and we have to do it in partnership with our allies,” Bush said. That’s different from Obama’s message of “building bridges,” and it’s hard to find people in today’s Germany, even among the safely conservative audience that Bush chose, who would publicly agree that America should lead and Germany should follow."

As I said yesterday, Bush’s main goal wasn’t to impress the German audience he was addressing, but it doesn’t help his cause if his performance came across as dull and grating. Bush was speaking at a CDU conference, which was probably the safest and friendliest audience he could have had in Germany, and he managed to underwhelm even them. At the same time, Bush’s Europe trip may also end up leaving many of his party’s hawkish voters cold because he is not being as alarmist and confrontational as his competitors. Dan Drezner reviewed the substance of recent Bush statements and reached this conclusion:

"Compared to the rhetoric coming from the rest of the GOP field, Bush’s perfectly sober and reasonable-sounding foreign policy language will not fire up the GOP base at all. Which means that in any war of foreign policy outbidding, Jeb Bush will lose and lose big."

Bush’s predicament is that he can’t engage in a hawkish bidding war with his competitors without sounding like a copy of his brother (and on foreign policy he largely is in agreement with his brother’s views), but he has already painted himself into the corner as a hard-liner on so many issues that no one will believe him when he uses less inflammatory and combative rhetoric than the other candidates. There was once a time when his brother made semi-reasonable-sounding foreign policy statements as a candidate, but we soon discovered that this wasn’t the way he would actually handle these issues. That’s why Jeb Bush isn’t going to get the same benefit of the doubt his brother did, and it’s probably why he’ll end up satisfying very few people.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/bushs-underwhelming-european-tour/

Why Fast Track Isn’t Free Trade

Today's agreements aren't focused on lowering barriers, but harmonizing global regulations at the cost of sovereignty.

As early as the end of this week, the House of Representatives could vote to approve “fast track” authority for President Obama’s massive new trade deals. The Senate narrowly passed “fast track”—now known as “Trade Promotion Authority”—last month, and its full passage now awaits only the House’s decision.

Fast track commits Congress to an up-or-down vote on whatever the president’s trade negotiators deliver, without the possibility of filibuster in the Senate or further amendments. It thus streamlines and expedites the process of Congressional approval: under fast track, trade deals get special treatment unavailable to other kinds of legislation. And without fast track, it is unlikely that President Obama will be able to pass two controversial trade agreements with our Asian and European allies and competitors.

Fast track approval in the House now hinges crucially on Republican votes because most Democrats are bucking their president to vote against his trade agenda. But why are so many conservatives willing to trust the Obama administration on this issue, while otherwise trying to thwart it at every turn?

Conservatives are caught between their general support for “free trade” and a concern to uphold American national sovereignty. The support for free trade doesn’t just come from a general pro-business orientation; it reflects an older idea that trade unencumbered by government regulation is not only good for business, but good for individuals and for society as a whole, continuous with rights of property and liberty generally.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-fast-track-isnt-free-trade/

If the mindset of 19th-century diplomacy was to blame for the war, then a durable peace could not be built on the basis of “such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna.” Wilson envisioned a new international system that transcended the cynical power politics of the old European one, a new system rooted in the universal “principles of peace and justice.”

In order to moralize diplomacy, greed and avarice needed to be punished: Germany had to be penalized in the war’s aftermath. The universal right of national self-determination meant that Austria’s polyglot empire must be broken up into a series of new states—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. And Wilson’s commitment to the principle of self-government led him to call for regime change in Germany and Austria. Their old monarchical governments needed to be replaced with new republican ones. These measures, he believed, would banish the vices of the old European diplomacy from modern international relations, paving the way for a new system of nations bound together by their shared cosmopolitan values.

Two decades later, the world was back at war.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/europes-enlightened-order/

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United States President Barack Obama has taken a short spin with comedian Jerry Seinfeld for his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee web series, telling him "a pretty sizable percentage" of world leaders may be crazy.

In his latest pop culture venture, Mr Obama filmed a special guest spot for the series, streamed on Crackle.

Each 20 minute episode features Mr Seinfeld chatting informally with a different comedian.

Mr Obama has "gotten off just enough funny lines to get on this show", Mr Seinfeld said in the episode.

The former star of hit TV comedy series Seinfeld chose a silver blue 1963 Corvette Stingray for the ride with Obama, although for security reasons, the pair had to be content with a few slow turns around the White House grounds and the coffee was drunk in a staff dining room.

Amid the small talk, viewers learned Mr Obama blows off steam by cursing, that his underwear is all one brand and one colour, that he shaves before he works out and that his guilty food pleasure is nachos.

"How many world leaders, you think, are just completely out of their mind?" Mr Seinfeld asked Mr Obama at one point.

"A pretty sizable percentage," Mr Obama replied.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-01/sizable-percentage-of-world-leaders-crazy-obama-tells-seinfeld/7063196

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