The New Democrats: Strengthening the center left

Bill Clinton's administration ran a fairly successful New Democrat ideology. Obama's tax plan, economic policies, and proclaimed approaches to domestic and foreign policy best embody where America should be heading and thus, I've been a supporter of his since the beginning. If anyone says Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama's had virtually the same Senate records and similiar political objectives, they are overlooking some apparently subtle, yet stark differences (e.g., a potential gas tax holiday and what universal healthcare really means).

Two things I wish Obama, and the Democratic party would sink their teeth into (read: embrace) are more competitive education and social security reform. School vouchers in some form, No Child Left Behind, and the privitization of social security are fundamentally steps in a better direction. The first two are often attacked by teachers' unions, the latter by groups such as the AARP. Yet, incorporating incentives and personal choice into both public education and social security would do wonders for both institutions.

Free Will versus Determinism? Or something else?

For many years now, I've pondered over the free will v. determinism debate. I tended to lean toward determinism as being more probabilistic, but as I was playing devil's advocate about six months ago with a close friend and philosophy guru in favor of free will, I came to the conclusion that strong determinism is probably false due to the uncertainty that prevades quantum mechanics. For example, you can predict that in general particles will act a specific way approximately X percent of the time but because the percentage is less than 100, that uncertainty could potentially manifest itself into an infinite number of extremely divergent types of universes in the long run. And as we know of the the cosmic scale of time, that's an extremely long run.

I would say that there is probablistic determinism or constrained determinism such that event A happening is likely to influence event B, event C...event n; that said I think it's impossible to calculate a future event even if all known information in the universe could be calculated using a quantum computer given the randomness involved. That said, I think we can safely rule out free will.