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Chris Matthews on the role of the media in the Obama presidency…

This does not bode well for citizens desperate for transparency in the new administration. First it was Fox News’ Carl Cameron unloading secrets about Sarah Palin after the election, and now this gem? Unacceptable.

Thank you.

Distance: 41.25 miles
Avg. Speed: 14.77 mph
Max Speed: 32.19 mph
Hours Pedaling: 2:47:32
Riding Partner: Demond Mott
Flats: 0
Avg. Temp: 78 degrees (Demond: “With a freaking NW wind. I’d put it at 20 mph, but that’s just me.”
H2O Refills: 2
Destination: Foley, AL
Hotel: nope
Song of the Day: Yea, Alabama (Roll, Tide Roll)

MapMyRide and I are no longer communicating, the pain of our dysfunction has overcome the relationship. For the last few rides I will be using Google. Estimated Mileage: 121
View Larger Map

No messing with MapMyRide tonight, the Super 8 has un-super internet connectivity and I’d rather not have the headache. The plan is shaping up to be the following; Dothan tomorrow, Crestview the day after, then Pensacola, Mobile, Biloxi and Kiln all in a row.

This week I also came to realize that cycling across Lake Pontchartrain and into New Orleans on October 30th, might be an impossibility. Of course I’d like to ride, but one look at the 10-mile span on Googlemaps has forced me to call an audible at the line. If you have a solution, please email me at jointheride@electioncycle.com

Ripping off Andrew Sullivan, but more applicable to my line of work anyways,

The climb will be brutal and the distance could reach 100 miles, but I have this to keep me going.

Last summer my oldest brother John took his daughter Kelsey on a bike ride through the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. The ride was suppose to be about eight miles round-trip. But only three miles into the trip John was feeling the exhaustion from the heat and as he looked back at his 8-year-old daughter, there, on top of Barbie bicycle with pink tassels and white tires he saw a face beet red with eyes staring straight forward.

Concerned his daughter might be overheating, or too exhausted to finish, my brother turned and said “We’ve already gone THREE WHOLE MILES, do you want to turn back?”

Without missing a stroke or taking her eyes off the path she said,

“Kelsey Foley doesn’t quit!”

John’s internal response: “Uh, okay…”

So for today, I remember that “Kelsey Foley doesn’t quit!” even if she’s never climbed the Smokey Mountains.

Kelsey Foley STILL doesn't quit.

Destination: Cherokee, NC
Roads: The Appalachians
Elevation Range: 1991 ft. to 5171 ft.
Total Ascent: 3383 ft.
Total Descent: 3504 ft.

I’d rather have not faced the rain tomorrow, but to make up the lost time I need to get on the bike. I rode around Asheville today in the pouring rain. Not fun. Crossing the Smokey’s should be a blast but I want to make sure to take excellent photos and have a safe descent, both of which are considerably more difficult in the rain.

<a href=”http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/nc/asheville/797178986985″ mce_href=”http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/nc/asheville/797178986985″>Asheville to Cherokee</a><br/><a href=”http://www.mapmyride.com/find-ride/united-states/nc/asheville” mce_href=”http://www.mapmyride.com/find-ride/united-states/nc/asheville”>Find more Bike Rides in Asheville, North Carolina</a>

Columnist and law professor Richard Epstein recently authored this piece for Forbes, in which he presents the late philosopher Robert Nozick’s theory of distributive justice and applies it to the current financial crisis. From the Epstein article (via the Volokh Conspiracy and Instapundit):

Disasters like this latest financial meltdown don’t just happen. Mistakes this huge require an impoverished political philosophy to grease the skids. Fannie and Freddie didn’t design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the “patterned principles” of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully in his 1974 masterpiece, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Believers in patterned principles hold that there is some preordained social order that is more just than others. Accordingly, the function of the state is to use the levers of powers to manipulate behavior to achieve the desired outcomes. These patterned principles stand in opposition to historical principles of justice, which are content to establish the rules of the game and then let the legal moves by individual players determine the social outcomes. For Nozick, the key rules were rules of justice in acquisition (to set up the initial property rights) and justice in transfer, whereby those rights (and others derived from them) could be exchanged or combined through voluntary transactions.

It’s certainly a rarity these days to see a mainstream columnist write about ideas that are prominently discussed among contemporary political philosophers. (Note: I think this reveals as much about the state of journalism as it does about the state of philosophy - many journalists being relatively uninterested in the conceptual bases of our political institutions, or if they are, often unreflectively so; and philosophers being relatively uninterested in the practical application of their ideas). I think Epstein does a fair job introducing his readers to one of the more prominent theories of distributive justice, as it was argued for by Nozick.

Although I disagree with Nozick on many philosophical points, I always find him great to read, as he is very funny and his ideas are engaging. I would certainly recommend the aforementioned Anarchy, State, and Utopia for anyone who might be interested.

What’s more, however, is that I’m currently taking a class in which we’re studying Nozick’s epistemological views.  Like many great philosophers, Nozick didn’t devote himself exclusively to one area of philosophy - in addition to politics, he also took up some of the largest problems in the theory of knowledge.  Take this following skeptical problem, for example:

1.) I don’t know I’m not a bodiless brain in a vat (think the Matrix scenario, but with no body).
2.) If I don’t know I’m not a brain in a vat, then I don’t know that I have hands (or anything about the external world).
3.)Therefore, I don’t know that I have hands (or anything else about the external world).
4.) But (come on!) I know that I have hands.

Nozick’s solution to this problem is to deny 2.), namely, that I although I don’t know I’m not a brain in a vat, this does not entail that I don’t know I have hands. Anyway, just something for you to mull over if you want to distract yourself from the fact that our financial system is failing and that our government is spending 700 billion dollars that we don’t have.