To me, our president’s main job is as a symbol of the American populace. He has a bunch of advisors to tell him or her what to do regarding policy. So basically, I’d just like to have a president who represents the American people well. I’d like him or her to be charismatic and sound intelligent. And I’d like it if he or she didn’t piss a lot of people off when they said things.

We have a lot of work to do to repair our image in the eyes of the rest of the world. It seems like they regard us as lazy, fat, and stupid by comparison. Well never fear, because today I was squeezing into a pair of jeans, and I thought of the easiest, simplest way to fix this problem.

See, the problem isn’t me, and the fact that I’ve gotten fatter. The problem is the pants. I could totally still fit in the same size pants I wore in high school if those size pants were just a little bigger!

Let me be a little more specific. The problem lies at the Bureau of Standards, where we need to think about updating our units to the 21st century. The trouble isn’t that Americans are fat, it’s that our inch is too short. We take inflation into account when it comes to things like the economy, why shouldn’t this principle apply also to our measurements?

And here’s the beauty part: nobody has to know! We’ve been refusing to adopt the metric system for a reason, people. We can make our inch just a little bit longer, our pound a little heavier, but keep all the conversions the same. This way, by our English System units, we will slim down, while the rest of the world stays exactly the same. This means an immediate boost to our national reputation! And without any extra effort on the part of our people.

Well hopefully our next president and his or her advisors will take this idea into consideration. Because really there are very few drawbacks that I can think of. Just guys, when you’re measuring your “length” use the centimeter side.

One such logical fallacy that I found interesting is the “slippery slope” argument. A classic and recent example of just such an argument has been applied to the concept of gay marriage. “If we allow people of the same sex to get married,” the reasoning goes, “then we are relaxing our moral standards and our definitions of marriage. Before long, our standards will continue to lapse to the point where people will be marrying the duck from the pond down the street, or their shiny new plasma TV, or the abstract concept of whimsy.”

When I first heard this concept, I must say I was rather convinced. I mean, it is only natural that, if everyone knew that gay people were being allowed to marry, they would want to marry their favorite dog or tree or chair. I know I would marry all kinds of stuff if it were legal and would earn me a tax break. Provided of course that there was love.

However, today I am wiser for having read about the holes in this logic. The explanation was pretty technical, but here is the way I understand it.

Say, for the sake of argument, that you allow yourself to be convinced by this “slippery” argument that same-sex marriage is bad for our society, and you go ahead and allow them to ban it. That’s fine; it doesn’t really affect you, whatever. A few months pass. Now they come out with a new, similar argument, for why they should also ban man-woman marriages. This seems a little weird, and it means that you can’t get married, but the logic seems sound, so ok. Let’s ban it. Next they go after sex. And then what? Hugs? Handshakes? Friendship? Pretty soon you can’t talk to people on the street! A little while after that, you’re not allowed to even look at another person! Can you imagine trying to buy groceries without looking at anybody? I sure can’t!

So when you think about it in these terms, slippery slope arguments are a pretty severe problem. In fact, if you’re allowing yourself to be persuaded by this sort of reasoning, you’re actually contributing to the extinction of the American populace. We need sex in order to procreate and sustain our citizenry! Do you want that on your conscience? I know I don’t! And that’s only one example of what you’re contributing to.

Hopefully I’ve impressed upon you the importance of being able to identify these problematic arguments, and that next time you hear such an argument, you’ll be able to identify it and further, understand how it is trying to destroy the fabric of our society by snowballing out of control. Thank you for reading.

Oh yes, and for those who are wondering what tautology means, well, every single statement is tautological, unless it’s not.

Well, I tend to rant a lot about the internet and how amazing it is and how great it is that everyone can have a voice yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah. Etc. Sometimes though I wonder if it really is a good thing.

For instance, the other day I was really bored and I ran a search on Google for “who likes taco salad.” In quotes, because naturally I only wanted exact matches. And much to my bewilderment, it turned up a hit. Incidentally, the page it turned up was a message board for Atkins dieters, some thread about how to eat breakfast while still adhering to the diet (“This morning I had some leftover lard dumplings and a jar of mayonnaise”). I mean, I’ve read about the science behind it, and I grant you that it makes a certain degree of sense. But I still believe that it can be taken too far. Way, way too far. Like, lard dumplings far.

In any case, you have to admit that it’s pretty crazy that we live in an age where i can find out something as ridiculously insignificant as “who likes taco salad” with a simple Google query. What it has brought me to realize is that every second that the internet is in existence, we come nearer and nearer to recreating that once hypothetical “monkeys on typewriters” representation of infinity. Except we’re not just recreating all the great literary works (in fact, those probably already exist online somewhere), but we’re recreating every insipid string of random words that could conceivably be strung together in any semi-sensical fashion. In fact, it likely goes down to letter level as well. I bet you’d be hard pressed to find a 4-letter string that doesn’t exist on the web in some page of computer-generated bargle or other. I haven’t checked recently, but we might be running short on 5-letter strings too. And that number will only continue to increase.

Anyway, I survived my first day of classes, and I even lived through president Bush’s State of the Union address without muting it too many times. Just once I want to hear one of those speeches start with, “The state of our nation is weak. Very very weak. And feeble.” That would be great.

So what lessons did we learn today? Freedom of expression is nice but also kinda depressing. Also, I am tired and I am going to bed. So remember these things when someday you don’t know how you are going to finish a sentence and so you just ramble on for a while until eventually the sentence comes to a natural conclusion.

In my World Civs class we had to choose a country that we’re following throughout the semester, learning about its history and current affairs and such. I chose Norway, because I’ve been feeling a little guilty that my Granny is of 100% Norwegian descent, and all I know about that part of my heritage is what I learned on that stupid ride at Disney World. We all know what a touchtone of cultural and historical accuracy Disney has been..

Now that I finally have internet in my apartment (YAY), it’s become much easier to follow the news. I found an English-language Norwegian newspaper online, and my first little read through it yielded some interesting tidbits of information.

On article I found particularly interesting was this one. I can’t help by be a little bit bothered by the fact that we Americans think we can just impose our will on other countries and expect them to cooperate. In this particular case, the motives and methods of our current administration are definitely questionable, and I’m inclined not to agree with them. I’m sure they have their reasons for doing what they are doing, but real reasons are just a subset of those things which are not divulged to the public. It’s pretty staggering once you suddenly realize how little you know about the inner workings of your own government, and how much is hidden from the average person.

In conclusion, ugh, I can’t stand politics. Which is kind of a shame, because they are so deeply entrenched in our society that we all are going to have to learn how to play that game in some capacity at some point in order to sustain ourselves.

A couple of other articles from the same paper revealed the following juicy morsels: Norway is both the least religious and the fattest country in Europe. I’m so proud *sniff*