No, so I looked it up in the Online Etymology Dictionary
Among the several possible meanings and etymologies of bull is this:
bull (n.3)
"false talk, fraud," Middle English, apparently from Old French bole "deception, trick, scheming, intrigue," and perhaps connected to modern Icelandic bull "nonsense."
There also was a verb bull meaning "to mock, cheat," which dates from 1530s.
And among other things,
shit (v.)
Extensive slang usage; verb meaning "to lie, to tease" is from 1934; that of "to disrespect" is from 1903
Fox News would be especially intrigued by the etymological link between shit and science.
shit (v.)
Old English scitan, from Proto-Germanic *skit-, from PIE *skheid- "split, divide, separate." Related to shed (v.) on the notion of "separation" from the body (cf. Latin excrementum, from excernere "to separate"). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.
Put them both together and:
bullshit (n.)
"eloquent and insincere rhetoric," 1915, American English slang; see bull (n.1) + shit (n.), probably because it smells. But bull in the sense of "trivial or false statements" (1914), which usually is associated with this, might be a continuation of Middle English bull "false talk, fraud" (see bull (n.3)).
So all this time you thought it was just excrement, and it turns out to be a rather clever double entendre.
Good question, and I don't know what the best answer is. But a software developer named Mike Rowe was not allowed to have the domain mikerowesoft.com because microsoft thought it was too close to their name. It seems like Ron Paul has a much stronger case for ronpaul.com.
As to letting the free market solve it, good point. But he's not asking for more regulation, he's asking for enforcement of current regulations in the current system.
Get whistleblowers throughout society and the world to send you confidential information at risk of their employment if not liberty.
Make sure that as you collect and publicize this highly sensitive information, your execution is unquestionable, you publicize every word you and your staff ever hear or say, and that you don't come across as an asshole to fraudulent execs, overreaching governments, armchair patriots, or anonymous cowards.
If offended governments level criminal charges at you, trumped up or valid, you should turn yourself in immediately and just continue your work from Guantanamo or whatever enhanced interrogation facility you are delivered to.
Do all that, and a few of us will, in appreciation, donate 5 to 50 bucks to your organization. But most of us will just Godwin you from the comfort of our sofa.
"Would you consider it reasonable and scientific for them to believe everything in those books is real...?"
I consider it reasonable for children to believe what parents, teachers, and books tell them.
"You don't start with beliefs based upon here say with no scientific backing until it can somehow be disproved."
That's exactly where I started. That's where all babies start. Some of us acquire a measure of scientific discipline along the way. Some of us don't. Some of us scrap the hearsay and bias when it's incompatible with observed fact. Some of us don't.
"You don't start with... no scientific backing until it can somehow be disproved...That is, well, just the opposite of science."
Au contraire. We start wherever we are. Science is a process for us to peel back the layers of the onion and correct our misunderstandings. There's no prerequisite of being born in agreement with the latest textbook, nor is there a requirement we accept the latest textbook as true. It's only "the opposite of science" to reject the textbook if we haven't read it, understood it, or repeated the calculations and experiments.
Disproving/improving the textbook is the essence of science.
"Faith is the opposite - belief regardless of supporting, absent, or contradicting evidence."
I don't think that's a fair description. Speaking from my own religious past, some practitioners feel they are observing, theorizing, and testing. When things don't make go as expected, they may adjust their beliefs. When things just don't make sense at all they'll try to see what went wrong with their experiment - missing variables, [missing dimensions, anyone?].
When all else fails, they are obliged to assume that in some way the outcome was allowed for a reason, by a God whose ways are far higher than man's.
The religious can live with that. The non-believers.can live with the idea that things don't follow a plan. Perhaps that's the main difference between the secular and religious - what we mentally do with that which we can't comprehend.
The original design was sovereign States who delegated a small, well-defined subset of their powers to a common body
That common body was structured so as to make it somewhat self-limiting, somewhat difficult to expand its reach..
It was also structured with layers of increasing responsibility that theoretically would help elevate the finest people to higher offices, even as it filtered out to a degree some of the more extremist voices.
I don't think you'll find many libertarians who believe they live in a free country.
You can probably find many who believe this was originally intended to be a free country, and that it could become one by following the original design.
Not bailing them out is the right answer in any sane world.
Preventing individual companies from becoming so important that their demise would threaten the global economy is probably a good idea, too.
"many large corporations stay in business because they don't take unnecessary risk. "
That's great, I applaud them. But that doesn't put them in a special category. A new board, a new CEO, a disrupted market could make them real risky real quick.
The only measure that matters is the collateral damage of their failure, which is not the same as their annual revenue. It's more about how deep they are in the infrastructure of interstate/global commerce and what their market share there is.
A real easy thing to start with would be to stop approving mega-mergers that would result in a new company with #1 market share.
Enforcing current laws is a good idea, too.
To really address the problem, industries should protect themselves by diversifying and decentralizing their own infrastructure.
But they don't. For example, no retailer wants to piss off WalMart, no elected representative does either. Instead government creates/allows conditions that favor the entrenchment of a particular company, and here we are.
Privatized profits, socialized losses, is what passes for free-market capitalism today.
Little known fact: Utahraptors preferred English over Western style riders.
Some experts artue their physiology was better at digesting riding crops than spurs. But their penchant for renewable fuel makes me think they were just a bunch of socialist treehuggers who hated all things American.
It is opt-in. First you have to book a room at a Disney hotel. Then you have to check in.
After shelling out all that money and travelling all the way there and retrieving your access card and hauling your luggage in, you can still opt-out of your VIP skip-the-line perks if you've got a covert appointment with Tinkerbell.
"We need stories, but we also need to be able to differentiate them from the actual truth."
Why?
Forget history, just reading posts here about current events reveals that we've figuratively got people living on completely different planets.
If there is one "actual truth",encapsulating a historical time and place, I don't know who is qualified to say what it is. If you've got a deterministic algorithm and accompanying proof for discerning "actual truth", do share.
Until then, we tell stories with our biases, and we hear them with our biases, and we recollect them with our biases. We merge the evidence to our prejudices, and sometimes our prejudices to the evidence, and muddle along trying to make the best of a complex world no single human can accurately understand.
"No one really wants to do hard work for a shitty living, stop romanticizing it"
Hopefully you recognize that absolute terms like never, always, and nobody are rarely strictly accurate.
There are 7 billion people on this planet, and I can assure you that among them are many who sincerely enjoy doing hard work for a living, find their work deeply satisfying, and often its own reward.
Maybe that's not your thing. Maybe it's not what most laborers would choose if there were lower hanging fruit. But I fail to see the harm in romanticizing it. In the world there is evil greater than blacksmithing.
Fantasize about whatever you want, and allow others to do the same.
Rights don't come from the law or government, they come from the notion that all men are equal; that all are free to pursue their own course, that none is the master of another.
Just because big men with guns can take away liberty and property doesn't mean they have the "right" to do so, nor that they can define what "rights" others have.
The reality is that America is not a free country, and perhaps no country ever has been. But this was designed to be a country where the people tell the government what to do. If the reality doesn't match the design, it's because people like swallow the government's self-serving narrative, then turn around and tell other people what rights they do and don't have.
I have the right to do whatever the hell I want that doesn't take others' rights or properties. What you, or the law, or an army or king see fit to allow me does not define what my rights are, they define only what kind of men are behind the guns.
"What gives citizens rights is the constitution" Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The constitution describes what government must and mustn't do, not what The People can and can't do. The People are free; the government is not.
"The constitution..is defined... by the fucking government."
Wrong again, so very wrong.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Slashdot Mirror
That's one approach. Or you could put down the tabloid and pick up Scientific American.
No, so I looked it up in the Online Etymology Dictionary
Among the several possible meanings and etymologies of bull is this:
bull (n.3) "false talk, fraud," Middle English, apparently from Old French bole "deception, trick, scheming, intrigue," and perhaps connected to modern Icelandic bull "nonsense." There also was a verb bull meaning "to mock, cheat," which dates from 1530s.
And among other things,
shit (v.) Extensive slang usage; verb meaning "to lie, to tease" is from 1934; that of "to disrespect" is from 1903
Fox News would be especially intrigued by the etymological link between shit and science.
shit (v.) Old English scitan, from Proto-Germanic *skit-, from PIE *skheid- "split, divide, separate." Related to shed (v.) on the notion of "separation" from the body (cf. Latin excrementum, from excernere "to separate"). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.
Put them both together and:
bullshit (n.) "eloquent and insincere rhetoric," 1915, American English slang; see bull (n.1) + shit (n.), probably because it smells. But bull in the sense of "trivial or false statements" (1914), which usually is associated with this, might be a continuation of Middle English bull "false talk, fraud" (see bull (n.3)).
So all this time you thought it was just excrement, and it turns out to be a rather clever double entendre.
And now we all know what bullshit means.
So, as an alternative to all this UN mess, Ron Paul could offer these guys membership in the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an XBox. It's a win-win.
Good question, and I don't know what the best answer is. But a software developer named Mike Rowe was not allowed to have the domain mikerowesoft.com because microsoft thought it was too close to their name. It seems like Ron Paul has a much stronger case for ronpaul.com.
As to letting the free market solve it, good point. But he's not asking for more regulation, he's asking for enforcement of current regulations in the current system.
" I'd like somebody else to take their place"
Well, go for it.
Get whistleblowers throughout society and the world to send you confidential information at risk of their employment if not liberty.
Make sure that as you collect and publicize this highly sensitive information, your execution is unquestionable, you publicize every word you and your staff ever hear or say, and that you don't come across as an asshole to fraudulent execs, overreaching governments, armchair patriots, or anonymous cowards.
If offended governments level criminal charges at you, trumped up or valid, you should turn yourself in immediately and just continue your work from Guantanamo or whatever enhanced interrogation facility you are delivered to.
Do all that, and a few of us will, in appreciation, donate 5 to 50 bucks to your organization. But most of us will just Godwin you from the comfort of our sofa.
"Would you consider it reasonable and scientific for them to believe everything in those books is real ...?"
I consider it reasonable for children to believe what parents, teachers, and books tell them.
"You don't start with beliefs based upon here say with no scientific backing until it can somehow be disproved."
That's exactly where I started. That's where all babies start. Some of us acquire a measure of scientific discipline along the way. Some of us don't. Some of us scrap the hearsay and bias when it's incompatible with observed fact. Some of us don't.
"You don't start with... no scientific backing until it can somehow be disproved...That is, well, just the opposite of science."
Au contraire. We start wherever we are. Science is a process for us to peel back the layers of the onion and correct our misunderstandings. There's no prerequisite of being born in agreement with the latest textbook, nor is there a requirement we accept the latest textbook as true. It's only "the opposite of science" to reject the textbook if we haven't read it, understood it, or repeated the calculations and experiments.
Disproving/improving the textbook is the essence of science.
"Faith is the opposite - belief regardless of supporting, absent, or contradicting evidence."
I don't think that's a fair description. Speaking from my own religious past, some practitioners feel they are observing, theorizing, and testing. When things don't make go as expected, they may adjust their beliefs. When things just don't make sense at all they'll try to see what went wrong with their experiment - missing variables, [missing dimensions, anyone?].
When all else fails, they are obliged to assume that in some way the outcome was allowed for a reason, by a God whose ways are far higher than man's.
The religious can live with that. The non-believers.can live with the idea that things don't follow a plan. Perhaps that's the main difference between the secular and religious - what we mentally do with that which we can't comprehend.
The original design was sovereign States who delegated a small, well-defined subset of their powers to a common body
That common body was structured so as to make it somewhat self-limiting, somewhat difficult to expand its reach..
It was also structured with layers of increasing responsibility that theoretically would help elevate the finest people to higher offices, even as it filtered out to a degree some of the more extremist voices.
I don't think you'll find many libertarians who believe they live in a free country.
You can probably find many who believe this was originally intended to be a free country, and that it could become one by following the original design.
"You're better off not getting the job " says the guy that has a job.
"How about we just don't bail them out?"
Not bailing them out is the right answer in any sane world.
Preventing individual companies from becoming so important that their demise would threaten the global economy is probably a good idea, too.
"many large corporations stay in business because they don't take unnecessary risk. "
That's great, I applaud them. But that doesn't put them in a special category. A new board, a new CEO, a disrupted market could make them real risky real quick.
The only measure that matters is the collateral damage of their failure, which is not the same as their annual revenue. It's more about how deep they are in the infrastructure of interstate/global commerce and what their market share there is.
A real easy thing to start with would be to stop approving mega-mergers that would result in a new company with #1 market share.
Enforcing current laws is a good idea, too.
To really address the problem, industries should protect themselves by diversifying and decentralizing their own infrastructure.
But they don't. For example, no retailer wants to piss off WalMart, no elected representative does either. Instead government creates/allows conditions that favor the entrenchment of a particular company, and here we are.
Privatized profits, socialized losses, is what passes for free-market capitalism today.
"Perhaps you guys are conveniently forgetting how you keep one of the nations biggest crimes intact: armed robberies."
Just like you're keeping carjacking alive by driving a car? I'm not robbing anybody, so don't blame me.
Especially while you are conveniently forgetting about credit card fraud and so-called "identity theft."
The other retailer is not discouraging the use of the card, he's just no longer subsidizing your costs by adding it to everyone's price.
If I, a cash customer, can stop paying your fees, I'll happily shop at the retailer you boycott.
"Jobs, you get the feeling he always wore a fresh black turtleneck each day."
Perhaps you get that from recent trade show videos. Back in the day he was a barefoot hobo whose pungent aroma revolted many a suit.
You should see his troll account.
Little known fact: Utahraptors preferred English over Western style riders.
Some experts artue their physiology was better at digesting riding crops than spurs. But their penchant for renewable fuel makes me think they were just a bunch of socialist treehuggers who hated all things American.
Or do you prefer digging through rock, with just blasting caps and dynamite?
"We got a stinking big profit out of it."
That's great news! Can I see your numbers? And could you also correct these guys?
It is opt-in. First you have to book a room at a Disney hotel. Then you have to check in.
After shelling out all that money and travelling all the way there and retrieving your access card and hauling your luggage in, you can still opt-out of your VIP skip-the-line perks if you've got a covert appointment with Tinkerbell.
"I don't get the reflexive "defend my privacy" stance on slashdot"
I love that about slashdot. It's a great reflex. But after the reflex should come a little thought / analysis.
I have lots of reflexes, and one is to distrust Disney. But like you, in this case I'm really not seeing the problem.
"We need stories, but we also need to be able to differentiate them from the actual truth."
Why?
Forget history, just reading posts here about current events reveals that we've figuratively got people living on completely different planets.
If there is one "actual truth",encapsulating a historical time and place, I don't know who is qualified to say what it is. If you've got a deterministic algorithm and accompanying proof for discerning "actual truth", do share.
Until then, we tell stories with our biases, and we hear them with our biases, and we recollect them with our biases. We merge the evidence to our prejudices, and sometimes our prejudices to the evidence, and muddle along trying to make the best of a complex world no single human can accurately understand.
" folks love to romantize that period and many other shitty periods"
And to "romantize" that is bad because ... what?
What period in human history wasn't shitty?
"No one really wants to do hard work for a shitty living, stop romanticizing it"
Hopefully you recognize that absolute terms like never, always, and nobody are rarely strictly accurate.
There are 7 billion people on this planet, and I can assure you that among them are many who sincerely enjoy doing hard work for a living, find their work deeply satisfying, and often its own reward.
Maybe that's not your thing. Maybe it's not what most laborers would choose if there were lower hanging fruit. But I fail to see the harm in romanticizing it. In the world there is evil greater than blacksmithing.
Fantasize about whatever you want, and allow others to do the same.
Rights don't come from the law or government, they come from the notion that all men are equal; that all are free to pursue their own course, that none is the master of another.
Just because big men with guns can take away liberty and property doesn't mean they have the "right" to do so, nor that they can define what "rights" others have.
The reality is that America is not a free country, and perhaps no country ever has been. But this was designed to be a country where the people tell the government what to do. If the reality doesn't match the design, it's because people like swallow the government's self-serving narrative, then turn around and tell other people what rights they do and don't have.
I have the right to do whatever the hell I want that doesn't take others' rights or properties. What you, or the law, or an army or king see fit to allow me does not define what my rights are, they define only what kind of men are behind the guns.
"What gives citizens rights is the constitution"
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The constitution describes what government must and mustn't do, not what The People can and can't do. The People are free; the government is not.
"The constitution ..is defined ... by the fucking government."
Wrong again, so very wrong.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."