Sunday, May 13, 2012

Happy Mother's Day

As far as mothers go, I won the lottery.

My mother was born in Denver and raised in Wyoming where learned a deep love for the open skies of the west. She developed a keen interest in the wildflowers of the Mountain West. She was a conservationist before radicalized environmentalism.

In college she had classes on classical logic taught by Sister Marium Joseph. The Trivium is a great book on classical logic.

After college, my parents lived in the deep south before the Civil Rights movement. Yep, they were carpetbagging Republicans back when it was entirely Democratic.

Fortunately, my parents moved back to Denver before I was born. So, I have the distinction of being a third generation Coloradan.

In the 1960s, my parents campaigned for Barry Goldwater. In  that experience she discovered that the Rockefeller Republicans were as bad as the Democrats.

Having learned some classical logic she launched in on a multi-decade study of the differences between classical and modern logic. The primary focus of her studies was the logical education of the founders.

The founders of the United States received a refined version of classical logic distilled by the likes of Arnauld and Watts. They adored Addison.

Logic took and extremely ugly turn in the early 1800s when Kant and Hegel became the rage. It was through my parents that I learned that its the underlying system of discourse and not the Democrats that is destroying our freedom.

We moved to Utah in the 1970s. Utah is the absolutely most beautiful place on the planet.

Sadly, Utah is people challenged.

So, my poor mother has four decades of research on the education of the US founders in a state that has no interest in the subject.

I've published some of my mom's writings on the sites: The Roots of Sound Rational Thinking and Affirmative Rationality. It is hard to work on a project when there is absolutely no interest in it.
Anyway, the projects I work on, like the Medical Savings and Loan, etc., are attempts to apply sound rational thinking to health care. The goal of this program was to challenge the underlying thinking behind socialized health care and show that a rational system that held individuals in high esteme would achieve better results.

If there was one present I could give my mother it would be a weekend at a mountain retreat with people who loved the Founders and wanted to discuss classical logic while taking a few breaks to look at wildflowers.

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