A Mission Statement for the Dose of Reality.

Now that I've got the central idea out there, I'll describe what I hope to do with this blog.

As you can see from the first post, this blog is meant to be and will be exclusively political. The manifesto I just put up describes, in short, the basis of my political outlook and the point of view from which all other postings will be made. In a world dominated by the Democrat-Republican dichotomy and their attendant political machines, it's sometimes hard to tease the truth out of what's going on around us. Each side has entire media networks and research organizations dedicated to making them seem right and correct to the American people. The unfortunate victim of this race to political power is clarity. It becomes trivially easy to simply talk past each other rather than discuss things based on their merits when the two sides of a debate are exposed to two entirely different sets of information.

This needs to be corrected.

I will admit that I'm not free of bias. Some would call me a libertarian (although I'll maintain to my death bed that the right term is republican liberal) but I do go out of my way to try and get the facts and data behind me, most of the time. It helps that I don't particularly like most of my 'fellow' libertarians and don't share their extremism or dogmatism. Finally, I've got just enough of a hold on my own ego that I do second guess myself quite often. Using these imperfect tools, I hope to be able to take the happenings in our increasingly complex and distorted political world and present them in a way that is both truthful and open. My sources are not perfect, nor unlimited, so a realistic aim for this blog is only a marginal improvement over the mainstream media, but if I can succeed in removing even a fraction of the bullshit from the things people hear every day I'll consider the whole project accomplished.

Now, I want to be clear that that doesn't mean I'll be using kiddy gloves. There are some things which, due to the data I've been exposed to, I feel are rather definitely right. I'm not going to skirt around touchy issues in an attempt to seem unbiased or moderate. I will not hold back just because something may be controversial.

So, to finish, I hope anyone who stumbles across this blog enjoys it and shares it with their friends and family.