Cogent or Fallacious #4 - Eat What You Want (If you're active)

Looking for something a little less serious for the final assignment, on NPR I found this light hearted article about a Texas duo who ate whatever they wanted as they cycled across Texas.  They stated with the best intentions on eating healthy and balanced meals for their trek but quickly just started eating whatever they wanted due to lack of options and necessity of energy as they were burning over 4,000 calories a day.  I looked at his reasoning and found it to be cogent.  It's realistic for most people to be able to eat "poorly" as long as they are active.  While this article is extreme, it's premise that for active reasonably healthy people, calorie counting is less important as their bodies burn the fuel that is needed.  In my own life I regularly see skinny as a rail people getting giant 64oz Cokes from the convenience store but from their dress and/or vehicles it's obvious that they have active jobs were they for sure work hard physically.  Whereas I choose diet drinks because I choose not to go to the gym and have a sedentary job in an office

Cogent and Fallacious Reasoning #3 - No More Columbus Day?

I was perusing Aljazeera today to find something for this assignment and came across this story about the Seattle City Council voting to celebrate indigenous peoples day on the same day as the Federal holiday Columbus Day.  Columbus Day is not a recognized State holiday in Washington and the people's representatives of Seattle have decided to celebrate native heritage right along with all the furniture and car sale extravaganza's.  Their reasoning is that "Nobody discovered Seattle, Washington".

They also discuss the importance of native peoples in that area and the importance of recognizing their impact on the region.  Additionally it is reasoned that the by enacting a simultaneous observance that they are not taking away from the Columbus Day, just adding to it.

I believe this reasoning to be cogent. It is important to celebrate people who have been in the area for hundreds of years.  Columbus didn't discover Washington for the even the Europeans.

Cogent and Fallacious Reasoning #2 - No More Great Presidents Please

While listening to NPR I heard a segment with author Aaron David Miller who suggests that we have had only 3 great Presidents in the history of our country; Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.  He reasons that in order to be a truly great President that you must meet 3 criteria; a crisis, the capacity to handle the crisis, and character.  It can't be any old crisis however, it must be a big one.  He argues that without a truly nation paralyzing crisis that one cannot be truly great and because he does not want to go through any earth shattering crisis he never wants to have a truly great president again.  I find this reasoning fallacious, both the fact that one cannot be great without a great crisis and also that we should never have great president again because that means we would be in crisis.

I believe that any president has the potential to be a great president regardless if they have to whether a great national crisis.  How a president handles crisis helps define that presidency but there is more to greatness than triumphing over national crisis.  A lot goes into successfully running a country and I think that like any CEO who guides his company to record profits and sustained growth can be considered a great CEO, a President who runs the nation great but never experiences a great crisis can still be a great President.  Maybe because he/she has handled many small crisis exceptionally well, they never have to trudge up the mountain of great crisis.