Four years later....

Four years ago today the Iraq war began. There are many lessons to be learned from the past 4(plus) years. One stunning lesson is the need for an educated populace, being educated and informed on politics is a never ending process. Like science it is a group effort, you take from experts in different specialties, you challenge ideas, you demand examples and proof. You build up, things fall apart, and you go back to the drawing board. You build a consensus over time. In the process one must be hyper vigilant to not allow ones own principles and bias to go unchallenged. Political assertions, beliefs, philosophy, are intellectual engineering feats of first measure. But they have stunning consequences, life and death consequences, which I feel are too often kept out of the equation. Its quaint for you to believe what you want to believe and I believe what I want to believe. In theory that works out great. But reality isn’t so neat and nice, people live, die, and are permanently maimed and devitalized as a repercussion of the way one votes, or the money one sends to this or that cause. If one can learn anything from four years is that we not only need systemic levels of interpretation but application of such analysis. We need intellectual algorithms to process information and then act on such information.