After hearing a couple of stories on Worldfocus tonight, I felt compelled to write them this letter:

Martin Savidge needs to be careful of his use of the word despite.

The definition that I have for the word is “In classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical inversions of each other. …”

When Pakistan says that the war in the Swat valley turns in their favor you cannot say “despite this the curfew continues.”  When a war turns in your favor it is not the same as winning it or the war is over.  So there is no contradiction in continuing a curfew.

When President Obama tells the Israeli government some painful truths that they need to hear, you cannot say that despite this he is trying to restart peace talks.  When your allies won’t talk peace because they don’t understand the truth, you might want to tell them the truth in order to get talks started again.

On June 8,2009, I got an email response.

Thanks for the lesson Steven… We’ll try not to be so verbally cavalier…

Regards,

Martin Savidge

Having Alzheimer’s disease is the only explanation that I can think of for Cheney’s behavior shown in this Daily Show segment. Surely we aren’t stupid enough to blame the man who was shouting about the imminent threat and went unheeded because Cheney refused to listen.

Cheney was there, but he doesn’t know until he reads the book? It’s all Clarke’s fault because Clarke didn’t waterboard Cheney until Cheney agreed to listen.