But I have a problem when people start trying to take down Christmas lights on the town square, because someone was offended. I have a problem when Halloween and Christmas are canceled because someone was offended. I have a problem when a local judge is forced to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda, even though the VAST majority of the local population wants it there because someone from out of town was offended.
I think that the flip side is that there are people who "have a problem" with the government spending their resources for what essentially amounts to a pointless hat tip toward somebody else's religion. Seriously. We understand that Christians run the government. Every branch of it. There's no need to spend tax dollars and public space point it out, especially in places like courthouses where important decisions are supposed to be made completely independently of religious tradition.
Little girls in the second grade have been taken to the principal's office because they said grace before lunch.
I'm going to have to challenge this one. When did this happen, and was it an official policy or just some idiotic administrator with no clue about the rules?
No, by definition, secularism is the separation of Church and State. That is the central tenant of that ideology. Communism not only separated Church and State, but made it a capital offense in many situations to practice a religion, thus the ultimate separation. If you look at the philosophical tree you will see that democracy, is actually on the same branch as communism, and that branch is called secularism.
I think that you need to brush up on your set theory a bit. You're right about what secularism is, but you jump completely off the rails in equating it with communism. Communists implemented secularism. Communism is not secularism and secularism is not communism. Secularism doesn't lead to communism. They don't form a "tree" of any sort. Each can exist independently of the other, although communist regimes have opted to go the brutally secular route. If I had to make a guess, I would guess that communist regimes insisted on strict secularism mainly because it's hard to have more than one unquestionable dogma running the show and that established churches were a threat to their power. It's tough to make people act against their own interests by asserting that you have Absolute Truth when the people you're talking to already have another Absolute Truth that doesn't totally jibe with yours.
All secular ideologies suffer from the same fundamental flaw, human nature. I don't think democracy is bad, and I despise the thing communists have done, but democracy without a defining moral system, will always fail, and fail miserably. Thus while democracy strives for separation from the Church, it cannot do without it.
I think that the issue is that you're working on the assumption that it's not possible to have a meaningful moral system without some sort of religion attached to it. I, and many philosophers, strongly disagree.
I think the question is less that they're being questioned and more how it's being done. When I was in college and a professor said something that didn't make sense to me, I'd ask about it and explain how it didn't match with my understanding of things. Almost invariably, we worked it out (usually with the prof explaining what I was missing--a consequence of not knowing everything that was necessary to fully understand the topic). The typical MO for creationism isn't to open that discussion with the scientific establishment, but rather open a "discussion" in the court of public opinion by finding uninformed people and saying, "Those scientists are full of crap. Change your curriculum and textbooks to reflect my nonsense." They totally skip the part where they challenge the science in the scientific literature and go straight for the PR victory. That's not only rude, but it smears the hard work of good scientists in the public eye.
I work in engineering. If somebody in my group puts out a design that I think is flawed, I debate it with them before it goes into production. I don't go to management and say, "Bob is totally incompetent, and you should use my design instead" without talking it through with Bob first, and I certainly don't go to the presses and smear him in front of the general public.
What I meant by the USG creating money via the Fed was they can at any time declare debt and it is constructed in the form of a bond by the Fed.
That's simply not true. It confuses the job of the Fed and the Treasury. They're very different organizations with very different jobs. When the government issues debt, it does so through the Treasury department. The bonds are auctioned off on the open market. The Fed does transact open market operations by buying and selling bonds, but that's a different matter, and it clearly confuses people on a massive scale. People assume that the Fed just has to buy whatever debt Congress is selling. It doesn't. This assumption leads to the invalid conclusion that Congress essentially "prints money" whenever it issues debt. It doesn't.
This bond is then sold to someone which creates the money the government needs. This money is then loaned out (10% of it so is kept in reserve) to a bank, which in turn loans out that money (of which 10% is kept in reserve) and so on and so fourth. It gets to the point where all this imaginary money is lent out due to the creation and selling of a bond that for every $1.00 the government creates in debt/bond, there is $10.00 now in the system, e.g. inflation.
I think you're misunderstanding the money multiplier effect. You're close, but not right in this case. If the government issues a $1 bond, there's no increase in the money supply. The $1 was already out in the system and already multiplied out to its maximum value if it came out of private hands. UNLESS... the Fed buys it. The Fed's bank account has a little "infinity" next to the balance, and when the Fed buys and sells bonds, it really does change the amount of money in the system--and that effect is multiplied out using the money multiplier as you pointed out. Under those circumstances, the debt is in fact "monetized" and is financed in the form of inflation. The key thing to remember is that it's the Fed's decision to do that, not Congress or the President. It's done with an eye toward stable inflation rather than budgetary convenience.
It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is for people to convince themselves that the people who disagree with them are just evil for evil's sake. Selflessly evil. Hint: If you're trying to figure out the motivations of somebody you disagree with and you come up with something like, "They want everybody in the world, including them, to die of ebola," odds are pretty good that you're missing something in your assessment. There are rare exceptions, but it's not a bad rule of thumb.
Seriously. Does the claim, "Environmentalists aren't actually interested in the environment. They just want everybody (including themselves) to be poor!" really pass the smell test?
Economists are always wrong. The only thing they have going for them is that they are able to explain afterwards WHY they were wrong.
Yowza. I was doing my BS in economics just at the tail end of the tech bubble, and everybody in the economics department was counting the days until the inevitable burst. The conversation immediately after that was the property bubble. I don't know which economists you're listening to, but the ones I spent my time with did just fine during both. I think maybe you're mistaking the people who work for the investment companies and make money whenever they paint a rosy picture on the evening news with actual economists.
economists didn't see the sub prime morgage bust coming either, so excuse me for taking anything such experts say with a grain of salt.
Take this from somebody with a background in computers and economics: The economic analysts on TV are to actual economists what the technology experts on TV are to actual technology experts. Perhaps that's a bit harsh, but as far as I can tell, it's true.
That guy uses the word "product" more times in a minute than most people do all month. God, I hate that guy! Now I have one more reason.
What's even creepier is watching any documentary that shows food manufacturing (snack foods, etc.). The manufacturing people are conditioned to refer to whatever they're creating as "the product" which is a little upsetting when you consider it's something for people to eat.
And of course, there was our recent company meeting when one of the senior executives from corporate came down to give us a pep talk and tell us what a great job we were doing and kept referring to us as "resources." Nothing says "we value you" like being referred to the same way people refer to office supplies.
As an independent voter, I might have considered voting for McCain in the Republican primary (assuming my Democrat pick was projected to win), but his vote against this bill dampens my interest in that plan.
What little interest I had in McCain turned mainly to disgust when he took his "stroll" through the "safe" markets of Baghdad to show Americans how well things were going and neglected to mention that he had Blackhawk and Apache helicopters and about 100 soldiers. Our leaders should say what they want in support of their positions, but as soon as they start blatantly lying about how well a war is going, they're failing us. I expected better from a veteran.
I see this claimed all over the place by people who have some problem with Guantanamo, but I haven't seen where the evidence for this comes from. These people are given hearings to determine their status, and tribunals to determine their guilt or innocence, and without evidence, they are not found guilty. The charges against them are specific, and I read many of them online a while back. None of the charges read "some guy said he belonged to Al Qaeda." Yes, some were brought there without sufficient evidence... and were subsequently released. Doesn't that mean that the tribunals are working properly?
You might want to try the studies published by Steton Hall's law school. Specifically, here and, more generally, here. Many of the charges are very much just "some guy said he belonged to al Qaeda." Among the results of these studies: Only 5% were actually scooped up off of a battlefield. 86% were turned in by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance when we were offering rewards for tips. The bottom line is that regardless of the merits of the detainment (which appear very weak in many cases), we are being lied to by our leaders when they claim that the detainees are uniformly high value targets or that they were picked up off of a battlefield. We basically bought a bunch of them with little or no evidence beyond hearsay. I strongly recommend that anybody with an interest in these cases listen to (or read the transcript of) the This American Life program on the topic and then chase down references as they see fit. It's stunning how close we're coming to simply disappearing people on little or no evidence the way a tin pot dictatorship would. Regardless of whether it's constitutional, it looks to me like we're we're going to be answerable for some very serious mistakes.
And no, if you're stuck in an isolated prison for years with minimal contact with the outside world before the people holding you admit that they have no reason to hold you beyond fear of embarrassment, the system is not working properly. I don't know about you, but I have a limited lifespan, and I would consider years of my life disappearing into a hole more than a minor bump in the road. There's a good reason why habeas corpus is recognized as a fundamental right by modern democracies. Without it, people disappear. The only distinction I see between myself and a farmer from Afghanistan on that issue is a legal one, not an ethical one.
The nice thing about arbitrary products from the ground: You can't print more if you are irresponsible with what you have. You can't just spend today and worry about the consequences in 20 years.
All of these things are true, but there's a flip side as well: Your money supply is stuck at whatever quantity you happen to be able to pull out of the ground. It doesn't reflect the growth of your economy as a properly managed pool of fiat money does. The net result is the potential for unexpected deflation that burns a lot of people--usually people who have invested in infrastructure--when one segment of your economy grows quickly. In an ideal world, the money supply would scale closely with the growth of the economy to keep currency values stable. In the real world, that will either be enforced by twiddling the fiat money supply or by deflation slamming on the brakes whenever your economy gets uppity and tries to grow too quickly.
The simple question is whether one wants to trust the ratio of currency economy size to elected officials, economists, or blind ass luck. Elected officials are right out because, as you point out, they print money like fiends to buy votes and temporarily bypass the need for fiscal responsibility. Blind luck hasn't worked out all that well in the past as there are a number of cases when gold-related deflation has screwed large populations (e.g. the dollar in the late 19th century). Independent economists don't really have an incentive to inflate like crazy, and they tend to make better decisiosn about our money supply than mining companies. Going to gold simply trades one problem for another and abdicates control over the system.
Banks routinely lend 10 times the amount they have on hand in total assets. They create money out of thin air in order to siphon off enormous amounts of capital in interest on debt.
You say that as though banks are doing something nefarious rather than behaving exactly the way they're expected to behave. The creation of money out of "thin air" is accounted for in the regulation of the money supply. You won't find Ben Bernanke indignantly exclaiming, "We set the money supply to the right level and then the banks went and inflated it! I'm shocked! How did they do that?"
The process itself spawns inflation, robbing savers and producers.
No, not necessarily. It can cause inflation, depending on how the Fed regulates the underlying supply of money. The multiplier effect caused by fractional reserve banking is simply a multiplicative factor (not exactly a constant, but close enough for this discussion) on a variable that's completely under the Fed's control. The Fed could spawn inflation or deflation or the coveted zero inflation, depending on its policies. The fact that it opts for slow, well-controlled inflation is not a coincidence: For all the problems of inflation, you get the mirror image set of problems with deflation and slowed growth and investment to boot. It is not a tasty pie.
It also tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of very few, making it more difficult for the many to live debt free.
That's true of any monetary system. The reality is that in a capitalist society, once you have a certain amount of money, you can stop working and let your money work for you. Whether you open a bank or invest directly in securities or small businesses, you're going to be the winner and the working stiff is going to play your game. As for it being difficult to live debt-free, the simple question is: Would you want to? Certainly, being in ever-increasing debt for the entirety of your life is a bad thing. But at the same time, the easy availability of credit allows one to start capital-intensive businesses, buy a home earlier in life, and generally offers a sizable set of benefits in smoothing out one's quality of life over time. Look at countries where credit is unavailable and see what people are doing to lift themselves out of poverty. It's not as easy as it seems.
He's much more knowledgeable about the American monetary system than most. He's the only person who cared when the Fed stopped reporting the M3. He's obviously not fond of inflation, fiat currencies, or fractional reserve lending. As a result, Ron Paul is in my five;) He's right between Feingold and Boucher.
Personally, I think that while we're tying our economic growth to arbitrary products dug from the ground, an aluminum-based economy would be far more interesting. Or mercury. That stuff is awesome.
You know, I hate to be anal, but continental drift is NOT a fact. It's a theory.
I'm almost sure you're trolling here, but come on. Continental drift is a measurable phenomenon. That's about as close to "fact" as one can meaningfully be.
And there are quite a few people who disagree with it.
Yes, and we call those people crazy. Fortunately, I don't think any of them are working as professional geologists, so I guess we're OK. Alternately, I suppose you could be posting this from the 1970s.
What I'm curious about is the certified mail
It doesn't prove anything about the sender, merely that it got received.
One possible reason is to prevent people from claiming that they froze their records after something goes wrong and then trying to blame TransUnion. TransUnion can simply say, "If you sent it, you must have done it via certified mail, so you have the records to prove that it was our mistake, right? No? Then go away." Of course, one would think that a canceled check or record of a credit card payment would be enough to prove that the transaction took place.
QUICK: DNA for organisms residing in a gene pool where part of the population is eliminated. Ceratin traits that exist in some do not exist in others and thus a loss. Same thing happens in natural selection, loss of genetic information or a larger gene pool. Same thing occurs with extinction, of which we are reminded that 90% of all life forms in existence at one time or another are extinct.
That fact alone disagrees with the entire imaginary engine that is supposed to push evolution. Being that loss and entropy are proven through observation and beneficial mutation is so rare it is a wonder that anyone got the idea it could even go up.
So I'm getting from this that you don't so much have an objective, measurable definition for "genetic information" like I asked for, yes?
You do not have to assume linear shrinkage, it could could be geometric or exponential, but it is doing so at a pretty good clip at this time. To think that somehow it was roughly the same size or close enough BILLIONS of years ago defies all of physical science.
If it were happening (and there are good reasons to doubt that it's happening the way you claim), I'd expect it to be geometric--meaning that if we play the decay backward in time, the inflation of the sun would slow down roughly proportionally to the cube of the increase in radius. Have you run the numbers on that? More to the point, it's pretty clear that the sun is not such a simple system. You have the tendency toward gravitational collapse being held in check by the phenomenal amount of energy being released by nuclear fusion. I'm not sure of the implications this would have for it, but I'm fairly sure that the rate of collapse you're appealing to is even greater than the one posited in the Helmholtz mechanism, so I think that you're pretty much discarding the whole process of nuclear fusion here. Then again, even Answers in Genesis, which is about as nutty as they come, doesn't take the shrinking sun claims as gospel. Perhaps there's a reason for that.
No, I will leave linear assumptions to people who try to use carbon 14 to date ancient artifacts or organic specimens they assume had a nearly identical atmosphere in the prehistoric past. Take one reading and get 5,000 years. Take another of the same specimen and get 68,000,000!
Given the numbers you just produced and the fact that you referenced C14 dating in conjunction with them, I'm forced to assume that like your assertions about the sun, you're full of crap when it comes to radiometric dating as well. It might be time for you to try to understand the underlying principles. Hint: C14 dating simply cannot produce meaningful values like 68,000,000.
The source I last saw on the sun was the Harvard -Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder.
I haven't been able to find any similar source (although, like the old fairy tale "we only use 10% of our brains" there are several similar but incompatible versions floating around the Internet), but I haven't looked very hard. Against my better judgment, I'll assume that your memory is correct on this one.
There are many sources, but surely you understand the sun (like any other star) does stay the same size, don't you?
There are many sources giving many different results. Surely you understand that taking a single instantaneous measurement of the rate of change of a complex dynamic system and then extrapolating it linearly is not a smart thing to do, don't you?
Your question is nothing more than an attempt to turn this into an ad-hominem mud-slinging match. Sorry, but I am not playing.
WTF? You're claiming that the literature is littered with examples of Dawkins acting abusive, and you can't be bothered to come up with a single quote? And now that's somehow a way for me to turn this into an "ad-hominem mud-slinging match"? What the hell are you talking about? You have to remember that there's a difference between somebody attacking you and somebody writing something that you find upsetting.
If Dawkins does behave as I say, a simple lookup online of a few articles of his would be enough to prove or disprove my point, so how much I have actually read is irrelevant to his behaviour.
That's what I was trying to get you to do. Hint: I've read a lot of Dawkins and I disagree with you so I was thinking that maybe we could delve into why we disagree. Apparently we disagree because I'm wrong and I'm an asshole like Dawkins. I'm glad we could clarify that.
What's with this passive-aggressive bollocks of yours?
Passive aggressive? I'm not even entirely sure that we're speaking the same language here. I'm getting the impression that you think that a lot of people are attacking you when they're really just disagreeing with you. Another hint: If everybody is a jerk except you, you might want to reconsider how you're assessing people.
You made a rather rude assertion and I asked you to back it up. You backed it up essentially by repeating your assertion. Forgive me if that leads me to believing that you're simply parroting the views of people who dislike Richard Dawkins or that you're just hyper sensitive and see anything contrary to your views as an attack.
I've read quite a bit of Richard Dawkins' work, thank you very much.
Such as?
Dawkins does not debate. He attacks.
For example?
And if you don't see what is wrong with Dawkins behaviour in the piece quoted by prof. Dutch, I suggest that you go back and take a closer look, this time without your rose-coloured glasses.
I'm going to take every Dawkins quote that I can find out of the Dutch piece. Maybe you or somebody else here can point out what I'm missing:
The scientific principle that I wish everyone understood is Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of 'design'.
The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. The diagnostic feature of things that look designed is that they are statistically improbable in the functional direction. They do something useful - for instance, they fly. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.
Then
Not only can natural selection mimic design; it is the only known natural process that can mimic design. And now, here is the most difficult thing that I wish people understood. True design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything, because the designer himself is left unexplained. Designers are statistically improbable things, and trying to explain them as made by prior designers is ultimately futile, because it leads to an infinite regress.
And finally
Natural selection escapes the infinite regress, because it starts simple, and works up gradually - step by step - to statistical improbability, and the illusion of design. Engineers and other designers are ultimately made, like all living things, by natural selection.
So distant are many people from understanding this, they seriously believe that the existence of functional improbability is evidence in favour of intelligent design - the greater the improbability, the stronger the evidence. Truly, the precise opposite is the case. I wish that more people understood this.
Seriously, what an ass, huh?
So I guess my question is, are you referring to something else Dawkins wrote, or are you really that sensitive?
I also don't mean something LOSING genetic information.
Quick: Define "genetic information" in a quantifiable way. Please.
Also, speaking of the sun, did you know the sun burns off about 5 feet of nuclear material a day? That means if you step back in time the sun is much larger than it is now. Its a problem for evolutionists who think the earth HAD to be here for BILLIONS of years. You see, when you go back a few thousand years the sun is much larger, but not so big as to cause problems for life. But when you go back hundreds of thousands, much less millions of years, you get a sun so big that the earth's surface would be thousands of degrees hotter than currently. Temperatures that would liquefy iron are not conducive to life.
Where are you getting your data? And even if it was the case, why in the world would you assume linear shrinkage for a sphere? What mechanism would create such a trend?
It's Richard Dawkins that is complaining. I have no problems accepting your scenario as true, as this is exactly the way Dawkins behaves.
Dawkins and his followers do more damage to scientific rationality than the Creationism/ID crowd, IMO. Their petulance tends to scare people off, and their total unwillingness to engage in debate with even rational believers is a sure sign of a fundamentalist mindset that is just as bad as the one they accuse their opponents of.
I can only wonder if the people who write things like this have ever heard Dawkins speak or read any of his work. He's constantly painted as some sort of a fire-breathing monster when in reality he appears very much as your standard mild mannered university professor. I've rarely seen him really lose his temper or snap at people. I think that this perception stems from the fact that he has the gall to take religious ideas as ideas to be evaluated rather than simply something to be treated with total reverence. Statements like "There's no evidence for claim X" are all good and fine unless claim X happens to be a fundamental tenant of your religion. Then, Dawkins suddenly goes from just your regular guy to a horrible demon with no regard for rational discourse.
Professor Dutch, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin, and definitely not a lover of pseudoscience, puts it much better than I can.
I just read the section titled "The Dawkins Wing" and for the life of me, I can't figure out what you're talking about. Dutch appears to be attacking what he sees is the logic Dawkins uses, but I can't see how any of it supports your claim of petulance or otherwise inappropriate behavior.
And you have not met me...Hello.... a person who spent years raising strains of germs in a lab, fully aware of evolution, fully believing Darwin. Yet, I am a Christian. Again, I say Hello. I am that corundum, a scientist that believes. We are few, but we do exist.
As far as I can tell, most surveys indicate that you're still in the majority. Where do you get the idea that a religious scientist is the exception and not the rule?
Mmmm hmmm, sure. It's "Confirmation Bias" now but what was it 100 years ago when no one knew what it meant?
If they had used it to predict what modern theory would be, then no it wouldn't. As it stands, with people rationalizing it after the fact and shoehorning it into modern theory, then yes it is.
That's a red herring. If you are prepared to accept the "memory" in the first place, then perhaps the 10:1 dilutions will deal with that - at any stage, there is never going to be _that_ big an impurity. I did a bit of reading about this many years ago, and it's actually internally pretty self consistent.
Dilutions? Dilutions from the same water source? The whole issue is that the water you're diluting it with will, by homeopathic principles, have "memories" of other things. It's not something that you can escape. Water all over the world has touched just about everything you can imagine. If it actually "remembered" the things it had been, there'd be no meaningful way to get "clean" water to do the dilutions with. Nobody seems to have a proposal for how to get water to "forget" but then again, the idea that water has a memory is basically something that was made up from hole cloth by an 18th century physician with no real support to begin with.
No, I'd simply ask you to demonstrate it, and let your failure to do so speak for itself. Something like that should be easy to demonstrate if it was true.
Well I've seen myself fly, and I don't see a reason to demonstrate it for you. My flight is impossible to test in an empirical way for reasons I'll never bother to explain, and I take your assertion that I should prove myself as an example of the Establishment trying to Keep Me Down. Why are you so full of Hate for those of us who have The Truth about buoyancy and gravity?
This is actually my biggest problem with homeopathy. It's worth pointing out however that those fundamental rewrites do sometimes happen - 105 years ago we didn't have relativity or quantum physics (and some of the results of quantum physics are mind-bendingly counter-intuitive, which is why I don't regard counter-intuitivity as being particularly damning). Another example - the relatively recent discovery of prions overturned the "Central dogma of molecular biology".
There's a key difference here: Actual results. The arguments against homeopathy are many. Sure, you can overcome any or all of them with a simple demonstration that it works. The problem is that it hasn't been demonstrated. In fact, it falls flat on its face whenever proper controls are in. No, having a counter-intuitive idea doesn't mean you're completely wrong, but it is an indicator. Having an idea that's both counter-intuitive and cannot be demonstrated in reality usually means you're completely wrong. At that point, if people keep selling it (for money) as truth to the gullible, it's more than just harmless nonsense.
None of Randi's arguments stands on its own and you seem to think that makes them bad. The problem is that while being counter-intuitive doesn't make you wrong and not having results doesn't necessarily make you wrong, the combination of the two is extraordinarily damning.
First you conflate several different groups (kind of like Randi does too):
I conflate them simply because they have one thing in common: Rather than address the empirical results of investigations into their claims, they give in to their strong preference for their own version of reality. The "alternative medicine" crowd gets some slack because it's often meaningful treatment (although I frown strongly on pushing "treatments" until after they've been properly tested, even if "ancient wisdom" indicates that they're right--more often than not they fall on their faces as well). As a whole, these people have one main thing in common: Spectacular claims that don't jibe with reality combined with a total inability to demonstrate them and a total inability to accept the fact that it casts severe doubt upon their claims.
Then you say "They're essentially telling ignorant third parties, "Don't listen to the experts. They're frauds!". The boot seems rather to be on the other foot with that
What do you say to the extremely intelligent scientists who DO believe in ID and have plenty of evidence to point to for the substantiation of their claims?
I'd say that I'm unaware of any evidence that could argue meaningfully for or against ID, given that ID is so completely unspecified as to be indistinguishable from arbitrary magic.
I tolerate your atheism; why won't you tolerate my beliefs as well?
I'm not the OP, but your beliefs are fine by me as long as they're not being taught in science classes and as long as you're not touchy about it when people point out where they conflict with objective reality (which is exactly the issue with Hovind and company).
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the issue is that you're working on the assumption that it's not possible to have a meaningful moral system without some sort of religion attached to it. I, and many philosophers, strongly disagree.
I think the question is less that they're being questioned and more how it's being done. When I was in college and a professor said something that didn't make sense to me, I'd ask about it and explain how it didn't match with my understanding of things. Almost invariably, we worked it out (usually with the prof explaining what I was missing--a consequence of not knowing everything that was necessary to fully understand the topic). The typical MO for creationism isn't to open that discussion with the scientific establishment, but rather open a "discussion" in the court of public opinion by finding uninformed people and saying, "Those scientists are full of crap. Change your curriculum and textbooks to reflect my nonsense." They totally skip the part where they challenge the science in the scientific literature and go straight for the PR victory. That's not only rude, but it smears the hard work of good scientists in the public eye.
I work in engineering. If somebody in my group puts out a design that I think is flawed, I debate it with them before it goes into production. I don't go to management and say, "Bob is totally incompetent, and you should use my design instead" without talking it through with Bob first, and I certainly don't go to the presses and smear him in front of the general public.
I think you're misunderstanding the money multiplier effect. You're close, but not right in this case. If the government issues a $1 bond, there's no increase in the money supply. The $1 was already out in the system and already multiplied out to its maximum value if it came out of private hands. UNLESS... the Fed buys it. The Fed's bank account has a little "infinity" next to the balance, and when the Fed buys and sells bonds, it really does change the amount of money in the system--and that effect is multiplied out using the money multiplier as you pointed out. Under those circumstances, the debt is in fact "monetized" and is financed in the form of inflation. The key thing to remember is that it's the Fed's decision to do that, not Congress or the President. It's done with an eye toward stable inflation rather than budgetary convenience.
It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is for people to convince themselves that the people who disagree with them are just evil for evil's sake. Selflessly evil. Hint: If you're trying to figure out the motivations of somebody you disagree with and you come up with something like, "They want everybody in the world, including them, to die of ebola," odds are pretty good that you're missing something in your assessment. There are rare exceptions, but it's not a bad rule of thumb.
Seriously. Does the claim, "Environmentalists aren't actually interested in the environment. They just want everybody (including themselves) to be poor!" really pass the smell test?
And of course, there was our recent company meeting when one of the senior executives from corporate came down to give us a pep talk and tell us what a great job we were doing and kept referring to us as "resources." Nothing says "we value you" like being referred to the same way people refer to office supplies.
And no, if you're stuck in an isolated prison for years with minimal contact with the outside world before the people holding you admit that they have no reason to hold you beyond fear of embarrassment, the system is not working properly. I don't know about you, but I have a limited lifespan, and I would consider years of my life disappearing into a hole more than a minor bump in the road. There's a good reason why habeas corpus is recognized as a fundamental right by modern democracies. Without it, people disappear. The only distinction I see between myself and a farmer from Afghanistan on that issue is a legal one, not an ethical one.
The simple question is whether one wants to trust the ratio of currency economy size to elected officials, economists, or blind ass luck. Elected officials are right out because, as you point out, they print money like fiends to buy votes and temporarily bypass the need for fiscal responsibility. Blind luck hasn't worked out all that well in the past as there are a number of cases when gold-related deflation has screwed large populations (e.g. the dollar in the late 19th century). Independent economists don't really have an incentive to inflate like crazy, and they tend to make better decisiosn about our money supply than mining companies. Going to gold simply trades one problem for another and abdicates control over the system.
You say that as though banks are doing something nefarious rather than behaving exactly the way they're expected to behave. The creation of money out of "thin air" is accounted for in the regulation of the money supply. You won't find Ben Bernanke indignantly exclaiming, "We set the money supply to the right level and then the banks went and inflated it! I'm shocked! How did they do that?"
No, not necessarily. It can cause inflation, depending on how the Fed regulates the underlying supply of money. The multiplier effect caused by fractional reserve banking is simply a multiplicative factor (not exactly a constant, but close enough for this discussion) on a variable that's completely under the Fed's control. The Fed could spawn inflation or deflation or the coveted zero inflation, depending on its policies. The fact that it opts for slow, well-controlled inflation is not a coincidence: For all the problems of inflation, you get the mirror image set of problems with deflation and slowed growth and investment to boot. It is not a tasty pie.
That's true of any monetary system. The reality is that in a capitalist society, once you have a certain amount of money, you can stop working and let your money work for you. Whether you open a bank or invest directly in securities or small businesses, you're going to be the winner and the working stiff is going to play your game. As for it being difficult to live debt-free, the simple question is: Would you want to? Certainly, being in ever-increasing debt for the entirety of your life is a bad thing. But at the same time, the easy availability of credit allows one to start capital-intensive businesses, buy a home earlier in life, and generally offers a sizable set of benefits in smoothing out one's quality of life over time. Look at countries where credit is unavailable and see what people are doing to lift themselves out of poverty. It's not as easy as it seems.
Yes, and we call those people crazy. Fortunately, I don't think any of them are working as professional geologists, so I guess we're OK. Alternately, I suppose you could be posting this from the 1970s.
Or are you referring to the mechanism behind it?
If it were happening (and there are good reasons to doubt that it's happening the way you claim), I'd expect it to be geometric--meaning that if we play the decay backward in time, the inflation of the sun would slow down roughly proportionally to the cube of the increase in radius. Have you run the numbers on that? More to the point, it's pretty clear that the sun is not such a simple system. You have the tendency toward gravitational collapse being held in check by the phenomenal amount of energy being released by nuclear fusion. I'm not sure of the implications this would have for it, but I'm fairly sure that the rate of collapse you're appealing to is even greater than the one posited in the Helmholtz mechanism, so I think that you're pretty much discarding the whole process of nuclear fusion here. Then again, even Answers in Genesis, which is about as nutty as they come, doesn't take the shrinking sun claims as gospel. Perhaps there's a reason for that.
Given the numbers you just produced and the fact that you referenced C14 dating in conjunction with them, I'm forced to assume that like your assertions about the sun, you're full of crap when it comes to radiometric dating as well. It might be time for you to try to understand the underlying principles. Hint: C14 dating simply cannot produce meaningful values like 68,000,000.
I haven't been able to find any similar source (although, like the old fairy tale "we only use 10% of our brains" there are several similar but incompatible versions floating around the Internet), but I haven't looked very hard. Against my better judgment, I'll assume that your memory is correct on this one.
There are many sources giving many different results. Surely you understand that taking a single instantaneous measurement of the rate of change of a complex dynamic system and then extrapolating it linearly is not a smart thing to do, don't you?
That's what I was trying to get you to do. Hint: I've read a lot of Dawkins and I disagree with you so I was thinking that maybe we could delve into why we disagree. Apparently we disagree because I'm wrong and I'm an asshole like Dawkins. I'm glad we could clarify that.
Passive aggressive? I'm not even entirely sure that we're speaking the same language here. I'm getting the impression that you think that a lot of people are attacking you when they're really just disagreeing with you. Another hint: If everybody is a jerk except you, you might want to reconsider how you're assessing people.
You made a rather rude assertion and I asked you to back it up. You backed it up essentially by repeating your assertion. Forgive me if that leads me to believing that you're simply parroting the views of people who dislike Richard Dawkins or that you're just hyper sensitive and see anything contrary to your views as an attack.
For example?
I'm going to take every Dawkins quote that I can find out of the Dutch piece. Maybe you or somebody else here can point out what I'm missing:
Then
And finally
Seriously, what an ass, huh?
So I guess my question is, are you referring to something else Dawkins wrote, or are you really that sensitive?
Where are you getting your data? And even if it was the case, why in the world would you assume linear shrinkage for a sphere? What mechanism would create such a trend?
I just read the section titled "The Dawkins Wing" and for the life of me, I can't figure out what you're talking about. Dutch appears to be attacking what he sees is the logic Dawkins uses, but I can't see how any of it supports your claim of petulance or otherwise inappropriate behavior.
Dilutions? Dilutions from the same water source? The whole issue is that the water you're diluting it with will, by homeopathic principles, have "memories" of other things. It's not something that you can escape. Water all over the world has touched just about everything you can imagine. If it actually "remembered" the things it had been, there'd be no meaningful way to get "clean" water to do the dilutions with. Nobody seems to have a proposal for how to get water to "forget" but then again, the idea that water has a memory is basically something that was made up from hole cloth by an 18th century physician with no real support to begin with.
Well I've seen myself fly, and I don't see a reason to demonstrate it for you. My flight is impossible to test in an empirical way for reasons I'll never bother to explain, and I take your assertion that I should prove myself as an example of the Establishment trying to Keep Me Down. Why are you so full of Hate for those of us who have The Truth about buoyancy and gravity?
There's a key difference here: Actual results. The arguments against homeopathy are many. Sure, you can overcome any or all of them with a simple demonstration that it works. The problem is that it hasn't been demonstrated. In fact, it falls flat on its face whenever proper controls are in. No, having a counter-intuitive idea doesn't mean you're completely wrong, but it is an indicator. Having an idea that's both counter-intuitive and cannot be demonstrated in reality usually means you're completely wrong. At that point, if people keep selling it (for money) as truth to the gullible, it's more than just harmless nonsense.
None of Randi's arguments stands on its own and you seem to think that makes them bad. The problem is that while being counter-intuitive doesn't make you wrong and not having results doesn't necessarily make you wrong, the combination of the two is extraordinarily damning.
I conflate them simply because they have one thing in common: Rather than address the empirical results of investigations into their claims, they give in to their strong preference for their own version of reality. The "alternative medicine" crowd gets some slack because it's often meaningful treatment (although I frown strongly on pushing "treatments" until after they've been properly tested, even if "ancient wisdom" indicates that they're right--more often than not they fall on their faces as well). As a whole, these people have one main thing in common: Spectacular claims that don't jibe with reality combined with a total inability to demonstrate them and a total inability to accept the fact that it casts severe doubt upon their claims.
I'm not the OP, but your beliefs are fine by me as long as they're not being taught in science classes and as long as you're not touchy about it when people point out where they conflict with objective reality (which is exactly the issue with Hovind and company).