John McCain on the other hand, could have done something but instead accepted the claims of martian corporate lobbyists that evidence for martian climate change was inconclusive.
Ah, I had tried to post a reply to myself but it looks like it didn't get recorded.
Aeroskipping involves using a non uniform body to compress the atmosphere in a precise way, converting forward momentum into a directional pressure front that creates lift. If you come down again after that first skip then you already don't have escape velocity for the gravitational gradient you are in and will just get slowed down further, leading to collision. You seem to accept this and are trying to come up with an alternative scenario.
However, the boundary to space is really a mutual diffusion of the atmosphere into the solar wind. The equations for diffusion and the second law of thermodynamics indicate that, in the absence of a source of turbulence in the two gases, any irregularities in that boundary would naturally dampen out and flatten to a smooth surface. You only get variations in that boundary through the application of energy, usually through gusts in the solar wind caused by "storms" or heightened activity on the solar surface.
To use your analogy, it's more like the merging of a river outflow into the sea. The pressure on the boundary is equalized between the two bodies. You can see where muddy river water mixes with the salt ocean water but you don't see ships bouncing of the boundary. Behind that solar wind/atmosphere interface you just have a gradually increasing pressure gradient due to the increasing mass of atmosphere pressing down from above because of the gravitational attraction. There's no other "surface" of any kind, just increasing density. The 100Km space "boundary" is, for the most part, an approximate, convenient, and arbitrary definition.
So, if you need solar activity to cause ripples in the solar wind/atmospheric boundary, your asteroid is more likely to hit a couple of local density maximums in the solar wind since those are spread over a 3D volume, rather than skip or pass through spikes a 2D "surface" that doesn't clearly exist.
While Deadstick's post on double or triple atmospheric skips does match what I was saying about gravitational capture and aero braking, Captain Nitpick's post on the size of the asteroid required to cover the visual arc described in the original post explains why it couldn't have just crashed over the horizon (unless B5_Geek's observation happened in Siberia in 1908 or in the Yucatan millions of years ago).
The physics and geometry really don't work the way you think they do, and they can't be made match a scenario with the result described in B5's original post. Which isn't to say something didn't happen but, as Capt. Nitpick says, B5_Geek's memory is probably faulty on some points. Just for starters, there's perception issues such as what produces the moon illusion.
There's a fair bit of evidence that many experiences of UFOs, alien abductions, etc. can be explained by various sleep disorder variants. Look up web sites and articles on sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming.
What leads me to the idea is that even solid smooth surfaces aren't really smooth The atmosphere is not a solid, it's a gas (or a liquid depend on your point of view and terminology). 'Nuff said.
It's simple physics. Gases don't support large pressure/density gradients without strong energy gradients to force that to happen. There are very few natural events that would cause two of them to happen side by side. Try filling a bowl and tipping it to see how long you manage to keep dicontinuities in the boundary without putting in a lot of energy. The sun has prominences in its atmosphere during periods of high activity, but it's also a bloody nuclear furnace!
I don't care how many particles you're breathing in what you're smoking, what you're breathing in is still mostly a gas and not solid!
That would seem more likely to me too. It might just have been in a skimming near-orbit so that atmosphere skipping would have taken it over the horizon where it could break up unseen by the poster. Still, at 100 kilometers altitude and object large enough to appear as large as the original author describes ("It was the size of a grapefruit or softball held out at arms length") would seem to make it big enough to be unlikely to break up unless it was a soft agglomeration of fairly small particles, and you would expect tidal stresses to break that up earlier. So the report doesn't make much sense if taken at face value.
Well... I bet the edge of the atmosphere isn't a solid smooth shell, that if an object were passing at a particular angle, it might hit more than one jagged edge Presumably your "particular angle" is a grazing tangent.
But what would lead you to make that bet? The atmosphere's a fairly layered mixture of uniformly mixed gases. Surface gradients would tend to even out pretty quickly. You might get some light density waves but I doubt their height differential would be that great. The atmosphere does expand and contract locally and globally depending on a number of factors: things that affect temperature and therefore density, like seasons or solar activity. But generally, most weather is going to happen in the first few kilometers above ground, way below the upper reaches (circa 100 kilometers) where a skimming asteroid would "bounce". By the time you get that high, the temperature and pressure gradients from surface features should have evened out through the different atmospheric layers.
You really need a lot of energy (in the form of heat or pressure gradients) to create significant boundary variations in a fluid. Hadley cell boundaries should be way too far apart, and I doubt they would cause significant boundary fluctuations in the upper layers of the atmosphere even if they were more closely separated. Unless you have a bunch of active volcanos, or some very nasty weather systems that would preclude the observations this guy claims to have made, I don't see your scenario of "jagged edges" being likely.
So unless the solar cycle was in a period of high activity and the sun was having a solar eruption with streams of ionized gases causing strong localized heating of the upper reaches of the atmosphere, I wouldn't recommend taking that bet because it sounds like a long shot to me.
well, it does seem like the orbital mechanics would be against that happening yes, particularly bouncing twice. If it was rapidly moving in a solar-elliptical orbit and skimmed the Earth, then I could see a single slight bounce at the fringes of the atmosphere. But two bounces would indicate that it was moving slowly enough for significant gravitational interaction with the Earth, which should lead to aerobraking, capture, and collision.
So ask yourself, Is "Maverick" really THAT bad? He wants to continue getting blank cheques to continue a war that has a true cost for the current 5-year span estimated (once you count extra long-term healthcare costs for injured soldiers and replacement costs for equipment worn-out due to heavier war use) at 3 trillion dollars. And he's willing to continue it for up to 100 years if that's what it takes. That money's got to come from somewhere, and right now it's mainly being borrowed from the Chinese instead of being paid for by USA citizens. Even the Democrats can't waste money at anything close to that rate if they stop the war.
Seriously, most of the federal deficits of the last 30 years have been under/due to spending under Republican administrations. How long do you think your $9 trillion debt can continue to increase before the world starts treating dollars as toilet paper? You think oil is expensive now?
Yeah, he's that bad. He's less in touch with reality than Tom "Scientology" Cruise (that other "Maverick" pilot).
I remember in the 80's seeing a TV show on directions in space-based weapons research for the SDI/Star Wars program. While both lasers and particle beam weapons were considered, each had their drawbacks. Lasers were subject to attenuation from clouds and atmospheric dust, whereas particle beam weapons were subject to bending from the Earth's magnetic field, as well as dispersion from electrostatic repulsion of the ions. One suggested possible approach was to use a (relatively) lower-power laser to ionize a plasma channel as a conduit for the ionized particle beam (although I expect that would only be effective in atmosphere and therefore would require a lot of LEO satellites). So laser-seeded lightning isn't a huge stretch in that direction - a bigger question would be why hasn't anybody tried it before?
But this article got me thinking about politicians and religious fundamentalists who lie through their teeth while exclaiming "If I'm lying, may God strike me down with lightning/where I stand". A set of geosync laser platforms powerful enough to create an ionized channel between storm clouds and people who have uttered that phrase just seems long overdue.
Or perhaps, to make the argument more concise, because the invididual as a self is capable of subjectivity, our morals, which are to the best of our ability to prove through scientific inquiry, a property of the system known as the self, are therefore subjective. I'm not sure I buy your argument. Your approach only indicates that any human's perception of a moral system is necessarily subjective. It does not necessarily indicate that there cannot be an underlying objective moral system which we can only perceive subjectively. So while we might never understand the underlying moral system, we might asymptotically get closer to it through refinement of our subjective models.
The body of science that deals with consciousness and perception unconditionally show this. Thus in order to assert the reality objective morals, one must discredit the scientific method of experimentation and validation--in which case, nothing is or can be proven. Yeah I'm still not convinced by your approach. I think you'd have a better approach using Godel's incompleteness theorem. I would expect that an objective moral system should be reducible to a consistent arithmetical theory, but in that case then Godel's theorem would apply to show that it can't be complete.
I fail to see how our worldviews significantly differ or why you "had to comment on my post", apart from the fact that you deliberately use emotionally loaded and antagonistic language. I don't see how that approach does anything to help theists see the fallacy in their worldview, and I think the antagonism does rather the opposite.
Please give us your solid (i.e. testable) scientific theory for the origin of that "something". There is none currently, but assuming that will always be the case is not logical. Heck, we've only really started getting a handle on the physical laws that govern this universe in the last hundred years and we're still quite a ways from completely understanding that. Who is to say what we could figure out in another few thousand years?
There is also no scientific theory for the origin of the universe prior to the big bang. Where does all matter and energy come from? Saying "It just is" is one possibility, but not a provable one, or even a provably best possibility.
No one says they're an agnostic with respect to unicorns. They just say "Unicorns aren't real." Well, we haven't found any "unicorn bones" that didn't involve the horn of a narwhal. So there's a complete lack of evidence or reason for the belief in the existence of a unicorn.
On the other hand there is a universe that we live in, and so far no solid (i.e. testable) scientific theory for its origin. The root cause of existence is certainly questionable. It's unlikely to have been an Abrahamic God, Greek Titans, Vishnu, Raven, Aslan, Eru or any other creator and creation process described in human creation myths. But it's certainly possible that something existing outside of our concept of space and time created the universe. While it may seem that only shifts the question to how did that something originate, the whole idea of origin is based on a directional time dimension that may not apply to such a creator. So the idea that a creator may exist can't be completely logically dismissed even if it's well beyond current scientific understanding.
However, an understanding of the scale of humans with respect to the structures of the universe makes the idea that such an creating entity would be interested in meddling in the evolution of life on planet Earth, let alone the affairs of the human race or even individual humans, to be of such an incalculably low probability that you may as well be talking about unicorns.
Now there's a completely different question of whether competitive evolutionary pressure could have made us evolve to need to hold belief systems with creation myths and concepts of afterlife. The ability to hold and share such beliefs could have encouraged the development of societal systems beyond the small tribal groups prevalent in primates so that we could develop civilization. Those beliefs sometimes also appear to help relieve the mental stress of existential angst and knowledge of one's mortality. However the latter might also be a side effect of evolutionary selection if those least emotionally invested and most capable of challenging the belief system would be the most likely to leave the protection of the greater group against the dangers of a primitive world. It really sucks to be an agnostic and realize that we may have evolved to live longer and happier if we hold religious beliefs in an afterlife even if there is no such thing. But that's another story.
However, the beauty of English over many other languages is that it is still possible to massacre grammar and spelling and still be perfectly understandable. True, but unless you're deliberately massacring the grammar and spelling for poetic or satirical reasons, what you say will come across weakly and reflect intellectual sloppiness. You and CRCulver may not like it but one of the insights from the 20th Century is Marshall McLuhan's observation that "The medium is the message". A sloppily written post doesn't carry as much weight as a gramatically correct one.
If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that they are throttling all encrypted traffic, because otherwise P2P traffic could just become encrypted (already happening) to masquerade as other encrypted traffic on port 22 or GRE/IPSec tunnels. Which means that your ssh connection, as well as that VPN to your workplace stand a pretty good chance of getting traffic-shaped. Still cool with that?
You mean the gaming market that has basically been completely taken over by consoles, to the extent that there are Slashdot articles about the possible demise of the PC gaming market? That gaming market?
Hey, we all know that it's now legal in the USA to apply torture such as electrical shocks to the gonads. But nobody seems as brazen in bragging about it as you are, sir.
Should Ted Kennedy or other Catholic congressmen be expected to support child molestation, abstinence-only STD prevention, and other stupidity because the head of the Catholic church has, either explicitly or tacitly, condoned the same?
When Kennedy goes to church, it does imply some kind of support for the things being openly preached there. However, I have never heard of a Catholic priest preaching in favor of child molestation. Do you have some evidence otherwise?
Priests who were known child molesters were shuffled to posts in new parishes and congregations not just once but multiple times. The church could have created a role for those priests where they wouldn't have been in a position of responsibility over children, but still been useful to the church but that's not what happened. While it's OK to hate the sin but forgive it and love the sinner, the church's actions show that it was more important to avoid the scandal that defrocking priests or removing them from a position of responsibility would have entailed. The church hierarchy - and the abuse was widespread enough that it must have been known at the highest levels - placed the church's and their own reputations ahead of the protection of their flock. Whether they meant to or not, that gave tacit approval to the priests to continue their activities in their new posts because those priests knew that the penalties were effectively a slap on the wrist compared to what they would get in a civil court. The church counted on fear of the continued public stigma of homosexual activity to keep the victims quiet.
My gut feel is that it was open knowledge in some parts of the church hierarchy that a number of the priests were homosexual, and that the pressure of their vows of celibacy and fear of discovery could make them turn to abusing those who were least likely to speak out against them. I also suspect that the church's public stance against homosexuality has been useful as a recruiting pressure tactic to encourage homosexuals to join the priesthood and holy orders where their apparent lack of interest in women would be less suspicious to a homophobic society.
Which isn't to say that all those who take vows in the Catholic church have homosexual tendencies (or that they hold wild homosexual orgies in seminaries:-)); a deep faith and desire to serve are surely a major factor for most religious candidates, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the proportion of priests who are homosexual has historically been higher than for the general population and that that knowledge also affected the way the church dealt with this issue. It's kind of hard to prove though since it's doubtful you could get a sufficiently honest response to a survey.
It's also interesting that as the stigma of homosexuality has decreased in Western countries, the Catholic church has found it harder to get candidates for the priesthood. There's many other factors that happened in the same time frame as well: smaller family sizes, less emphasis on following the advice of elders (who may have recommended to later sons who wouldn't inherit that they join the priesthood). But when it comes to smaller family sizes, it's interesting to note that the probability of homosexuality increases with subsequent births due to changes in the hormonal environment of the womb. So smaller families should also lead to a lower proportion of homosexuals in the population.
For the last few years I've been tending to see it as a hypocritical house of cards that's slowly falling down. I don't think it's going to get better until the generation that has entered the priesthood in the last ten years, and theoretically is less involved in that mess, winds its way into the top rungs of the church hierarchy. That means I don't see a change in the church for another 40+ years because the hierarchy and promotion rules are set up to resist change. Normally that's a good thing because it pro
You mean like all the Catholics who are uncomfortable or downright unhappy with the Catholic church's stance on contraception (including condoms in AIDS-ridden Africa), homosexuality, and protecting child-molesting priests through many decades of the 20th Century? While I've known some who left the church, I have also known some who stayed despite their personal disagreements with church policy because they didn't want to leave the community of the church. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a high proportion of people who were molested as children by Catholic priests who are still members of the church in spite of being molested, and yet who don't feel that doing so supports child molestation. Should Ted Kennedy or other Catholic congressmen be expected to support child molestation, abstinence-only STD prevention, and other stupidity because the head of the Catholic church has, either explicitly or tacitly, condoned the same?
The last two Popes' actions and words have been responsible for numerous deaths and broken lives, something that I doubt can be said for the Reverend Wright. Both have also been responsible for some good works.
I might be cognitive dissonance: you wind up ignoring the bad things about someone because they don't match up with the world view promoted by the good things, and you prefer to trust in the good things. Or it might be the crazy old uncle who becomes more intolerant over time who you vehemently disagree with but choose not to upset too much because he was good to you when you were younger. In the end you have to judge Obama by what he does and says rather than what one or two individuals around him say. Should Jesus be judged by Judas' actions?
In any case, the UCC is Christian in name only. They're one of the many "Bible a la carte" type churches that sort of picks and chooses just how Christian they feel like being based on current opinion polls.
That's OK. Since the bible is the result of the winning side of an inter-"church" conflict between Peter and Paul that (among other things) threw out the Gnostic Gospels, you can make valid claims that the same applies to all the mainstream "Christian" faiths. It's kind of like the Sunnis and Shias each claiming the other sect are not "real muslims". The mainstream Christian sects are just more popular combos on the menu than the UCC.
"St. Peter was giving some Protestants who had just arrived in heaven a tour. St. Peter pointed out the chapels where the Lutherans, the Baptists, and the Unitarians worship. Then as the group spied a huge stone cathedral, St. Peter cautioned the Protestants, "sshhh. That's where the Catholics pray. They think they're the only ones up here."
Hopefully, those of Hagee's worshippers who somehow manage to avoid winding up in hell for the sin of pride (among others) get treated with the same segregation so that they can be safely ignored by the rational people.
See this preliminary analysis of Hillary's appointment schedule during the Clinton White House years. Note the bit about Hillary's "private appointments" on Dec. 22, 2000 vs. the pictures of her with Bill and a Rabbi that lobbied for controversial pardons. Hillary appears to have some history and involvement on the subject of Presidential pardons which McCain and Obama just don't have.
That said, I agree with you on the higher risk of abuse of the pardon powers for a Republican president than for a Democratic one. I just think that this particular Democratic candidate is more vulnerable on the issue because of her past involvement. But yeah, McCain's not too far behind her and I like your suggested line of questioning for him.
Sure, but since that's a de-facto devaluation of both the dollar and Chinese currency, all other imports will increase. Like oil - why do you think crude is at $110? Partly because of low supply compared to the high international demand, but also because the dollar isn't worth as much compared to other currencies and other countries can afford to pay more for the same amount of oil on open markets.
That will eventually cause even those cheap chinese goods to rise in price as energy and plastic feedstock makes the cost of production increases, and more locally don't forget gas, food, and everything else. Inflation sucks for anybody on a fixed income. But hey, enjoy those lead-tainted, lowest bidder chinese products since soon it's the only thing you'll be able to afford!
The answer is easily predictable: No-one on that list will be pardoned without an open & exhaustive investigation by normal procedures in the justice dept.
And the response to that is "Like the type of investigation your husband had done for Marc Rich, Susan McDougal, Roger Clinton and others? How thorough was that?"
Slashdot Mirror
Silly. Al Gore wasn't born yet.
John McCain on the other hand, could have done something but instead accepted the claims of martian corporate lobbyists that evidence for martian climate change was inconclusive.
Ah, I had tried to post a reply to myself but it looks like it didn't get recorded.
Aeroskipping involves using a non uniform body to compress the atmosphere in a precise way, converting forward momentum into a directional pressure front that creates lift. If you come down again after that first skip then you already don't have escape velocity for the gravitational gradient you are in and will just get slowed down further, leading to collision. You seem to accept this and are trying to come up with an alternative scenario.
However, the boundary to space is really a mutual diffusion of the atmosphere into the solar wind. The equations for diffusion and the second law of thermodynamics indicate that, in the absence of a source of turbulence in the two gases, any irregularities in that boundary would naturally dampen out and flatten to a smooth surface. You only get variations in that boundary through the application of energy, usually through gusts in the solar wind caused by "storms" or heightened activity on the solar surface.
To use your analogy, it's more like the merging of a river outflow into the sea. The pressure on the boundary is equalized between the two bodies. You can see where muddy river water mixes with the salt ocean water but you don't see ships bouncing of the boundary. Behind that solar wind/atmosphere interface you just have a gradually increasing pressure gradient due to the increasing mass of atmosphere pressing down from above because of the gravitational attraction. There's no other "surface" of any kind, just increasing density. The 100Km space "boundary" is, for the most part, an approximate, convenient, and arbitrary definition.
So, if you need solar activity to cause ripples in the solar wind/atmospheric boundary, your asteroid is more likely to hit a couple of local density maximums in the solar wind since those are spread over a 3D volume, rather than skip or pass through spikes a 2D "surface" that doesn't clearly exist.
While Deadstick's post on double or triple atmospheric skips does match what I was saying about gravitational capture and aero braking, Captain Nitpick's post on the size of the asteroid required to cover the visual arc described in the original post explains why it couldn't have just crashed over the horizon (unless B5_Geek's observation happened in Siberia in 1908 or in the Yucatan millions of years ago).
The physics and geometry really don't work the way you think they do, and they can't be made match a scenario with the result described in B5's original post. Which isn't to say something didn't happen but, as Capt. Nitpick says, B5_Geek's memory is probably faulty on some points. Just for starters, there's perception issues such as what produces the moon illusion.
There's a fair bit of evidence that many experiences of UFOs, alien abductions, etc. can be explained by various sleep disorder variants. Look up web sites and articles on sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming.
It's simple physics. Gases don't support large pressure/density gradients without strong energy gradients to force that to happen. There are very few natural events that would cause two of them to happen side by side. Try filling a bowl and tipping it to see how long you manage to keep dicontinuities in the boundary without putting in a lot of energy. The sun has prominences in its atmosphere during periods of high activity, but it's also a bloody nuclear furnace!
I don't care how many particles you're breathing in what you're smoking, what you're breathing in is still mostly a gas and not solid!
That would seem more likely to me too. It might just have been in a skimming near-orbit so that atmosphere skipping would have taken it over the horizon where it could break up unseen by the poster. Still, at 100 kilometers altitude and object large enough to appear as large as the original author describes ("It was the size of a grapefruit or softball held out at arms length") would seem to make it big enough to be unlikely to break up unless it was a soft agglomeration of fairly small particles, and you would expect tidal stresses to break that up earlier. So the report doesn't make much sense if taken at face value.
But what would lead you to make that bet? The atmosphere's a fairly layered mixture of uniformly mixed gases. Surface gradients would tend to even out pretty quickly. You might get some light density waves but I doubt their height differential would be that great. The atmosphere does expand and contract locally and globally depending on a number of factors: things that affect temperature and therefore density, like seasons or solar activity. But generally, most weather is going to happen in the first few kilometers above ground, way below the upper reaches (circa 100 kilometers) where a skimming asteroid would "bounce". By the time you get that high, the temperature and pressure gradients from surface features should have evened out through the different atmospheric layers.
You really need a lot of energy (in the form of heat or pressure gradients) to create significant boundary variations in a fluid. Hadley cell boundaries should be way too far apart, and I doubt they would cause significant boundary fluctuations in the upper layers of the atmosphere even if they were more closely separated. Unless you have a bunch of active volcanos, or some very nasty weather systems that would preclude the observations this guy claims to have made, I don't see your scenario of "jagged edges" being likely.
So unless the solar cycle was in a period of high activity and the sun was having a solar eruption with streams of ionized gases causing strong localized heating of the upper reaches of the atmosphere, I wouldn't recommend taking that bet because it sounds like a long shot to me.
well, it does seem like the orbital mechanics would be against that happening yes, particularly bouncing twice. If it was rapidly moving in a solar-elliptical orbit and skimmed the Earth, then I could see a single slight bounce at the fringes of the atmosphere. But two bounces would indicate that it was moving slowly enough for significant gravitational interaction with the Earth, which should lead to aerobraking, capture, and collision.
So... drunk pilot?
Seriously, most of the federal deficits of the last 30 years have been under/due to spending under Republican administrations. How long do you think your $9 trillion debt can continue to increase before the world starts treating dollars as toilet paper? You think oil is expensive now?
Yeah, he's that bad. He's less in touch with reality than Tom "Scientology" Cruise (that other "Maverick" pilot).
I remember in the 80's seeing a TV show on directions in space-based weapons research for the SDI/Star Wars program. While both lasers and particle beam weapons were considered, each had their drawbacks. Lasers were subject to attenuation from clouds and atmospheric dust, whereas particle beam weapons were subject to bending from the Earth's magnetic field, as well as dispersion from electrostatic repulsion of the ions. One suggested possible approach was to use a (relatively) lower-power laser to ionize a plasma channel as a conduit for the ionized particle beam (although I expect that would only be effective in atmosphere and therefore would require a lot of LEO satellites). So laser-seeded lightning isn't a huge stretch in that direction - a bigger question would be why hasn't anybody tried it before?
But this article got me thinking about politicians and religious fundamentalists who lie through their teeth while exclaiming "If I'm lying, may God strike me down with lightning/where I stand". A set of geosync laser platforms powerful enough to create an ionized channel between storm clouds and people who have uttered that phrase just seems long overdue.
I fail to see how our worldviews significantly differ or why you "had to comment on my post", apart from the fact that you deliberately use emotionally loaded and antagonistic language. I don't see how that approach does anything to help theists see the fallacy in their worldview, and I think the antagonism does rather the opposite.
There is also no scientific theory for the origin of the universe prior to the big bang. Where does all matter and energy come from? Saying "It just is" is one possibility, but not a provable one, or even a provably best possibility.
On the other hand there is a universe that we live in, and so far no solid (i.e. testable) scientific theory for its origin. The root cause of existence is certainly questionable. It's unlikely to have been an Abrahamic God, Greek Titans, Vishnu, Raven, Aslan, Eru or any other creator and creation process described in human creation myths. But it's certainly possible that something existing outside of our concept of space and time created the universe. While it may seem that only shifts the question to how did that something originate, the whole idea of origin is based on a directional time dimension that may not apply to such a creator. So the idea that a creator may exist can't be completely logically dismissed even if it's well beyond current scientific understanding.
However, an understanding of the scale of humans with respect to the structures of the universe makes the idea that such an creating entity would be interested in meddling in the evolution of life on planet Earth, let alone the affairs of the human race or even individual humans, to be of such an incalculably low probability that you may as well be talking about unicorns.
Now there's a completely different question of whether competitive evolutionary pressure could have made us evolve to need to hold belief systems with creation myths and concepts of afterlife. The ability to hold and share such beliefs could have encouraged the development of societal systems beyond the small tribal groups prevalent in primates so that we could develop civilization. Those beliefs sometimes also appear to help relieve the mental stress of existential angst and knowledge of one's mortality. However the latter might also be a side effect of evolutionary selection if those least emotionally invested and most capable of challenging the belief system would be the most likely to leave the protection of the greater group against the dangers of a primitive world. It really sucks to be an agnostic and realize that we may have evolved to live longer and happier if we hold religious beliefs in an afterlife even if there is no such thing. But that's another story.
do u get it? lolz
If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that they are throttling all encrypted traffic, because otherwise P2P traffic could just become encrypted (already happening) to masquerade as other encrypted traffic on port 22 or GRE/IPSec tunnels.
Which means that your ssh connection, as well as that VPN to your workplace stand a pretty good chance of getting traffic-shaped. Still cool with that?
First they came for the P2Ps...
You mean the gaming market that has basically been completely taken over by consoles, to the extent that there are Slashdot articles about the possible demise of the PC gaming market? That gaming market?
Hey, we all know that it's now legal in the USA to apply torture such as electrical shocks to the gonads. But nobody seems as brazen in bragging about it as you are, sir.
Priests who were known child molesters were shuffled to posts in new parishes and congregations not just once but multiple times. The church could have created a role for those priests where they wouldn't have been in a position of responsibility over children, but still been useful to the church but that's not what happened. While it's OK to hate the sin but forgive it and love the sinner, the church's actions show that it was more important to avoid the scandal that defrocking priests or removing them from a position of responsibility would have entailed. The church hierarchy - and the abuse was widespread enough that it must have been known at the highest levels - placed the church's and their own reputations ahead of the protection of their flock. Whether they meant to or not, that gave tacit approval to the priests to continue their activities in their new posts because those priests knew that the penalties were effectively a slap on the wrist compared to what they would get in a civil court. The church counted on fear of the continued public stigma of homosexual activity to keep the victims quiet.
:-)); a deep faith and desire to serve are surely a major factor for most religious candidates, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the proportion of priests who are homosexual has historically been higher than for the general population and that that knowledge also affected the way the church dealt with this issue. It's kind of hard to prove though since it's doubtful you could get a sufficiently honest response to a survey.
My gut feel is that it was open knowledge in some parts of the church hierarchy that a number of the priests were homosexual, and that the pressure of their vows of celibacy and fear of discovery could make them turn to abusing those who were least likely to speak out against them. I also suspect that the church's public stance against homosexuality has been useful as a recruiting pressure tactic to encourage homosexuals to join the priesthood and holy orders where their apparent lack of interest in women would be less suspicious to a homophobic society.
Which isn't to say that all those who take vows in the Catholic church have homosexual tendencies (or that they hold wild homosexual orgies in seminaries
It's also interesting that as the stigma of homosexuality has decreased in Western countries, the Catholic church has found it harder to get candidates for the priesthood. There's many other factors that happened in the same time frame as well: smaller family sizes, less emphasis on following the advice of elders (who may have recommended to later sons who wouldn't inherit that they join the priesthood). But when it comes to smaller family sizes, it's interesting to note that the probability of homosexuality increases with subsequent births due to changes in the hormonal environment of the womb. So smaller families should also lead to a lower proportion of homosexuals in the population.
For the last few years I've been tending to see it as a hypocritical house of cards that's slowly falling down. I don't think it's going to get better until the generation that has entered the priesthood in the last ten years, and theoretically is less involved in that mess, winds its way into the top rungs of the church hierarchy. That means I don't see a change in the church for another 40+ years because the hierarchy and promotion rules are set up to resist change. Normally that's a good thing because it pro
You mean like all the Catholics who are uncomfortable or downright unhappy with the Catholic church's stance on contraception (including condoms in AIDS-ridden Africa), homosexuality, and protecting child-molesting priests through many decades of the 20th Century? While I've known some who left the church, I have also known some who stayed despite their personal disagreements with church policy because they didn't want to leave the community of the church. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a high proportion of people who were molested as children by Catholic priests who are still members of the church in spite of being molested, and yet who don't feel that doing so supports child molestation. Should Ted Kennedy or other Catholic congressmen be expected to support child molestation, abstinence-only STD prevention, and other stupidity because the head of the Catholic church has, either explicitly or tacitly, condoned the same?
The last two Popes' actions and words have been responsible for numerous deaths and broken lives, something that I doubt can be said for the Reverend Wright. Both have also been responsible for some good works.
I might be cognitive dissonance: you wind up ignoring the bad things about someone because they don't match up with the world view promoted by the good things, and you prefer to trust in the good things. Or it might be the crazy old uncle who becomes more intolerant over time who you vehemently disagree with but choose not to upset too much because he was good to you when you were younger. In the end you have to judge Obama by what he does and says rather than what one or two individuals around him say. Should Jesus be judged by Judas' actions?
That's OK. Since the bible is the result of the winning side of an inter-"church" conflict between Peter and Paul that (among other things) threw out the Gnostic Gospels, you can make valid claims that the same applies to all the mainstream "Christian" faiths. It's kind of like the Sunnis and Shias each claiming the other sect are not "real muslims". The mainstream Christian sects are just more popular combos on the menu than the UCC.
There's the old joke:
"St. Peter was giving some Protestants who had just arrived in heaven a tour. St. Peter pointed out the chapels where the Lutherans, the Baptists, and the Unitarians worship. Then as the group spied a huge stone cathedral, St. Peter cautioned the Protestants, "sshhh. That's where the Catholics pray. They think they're the only ones up here."
Hopefully, those of Hagee's worshippers who somehow manage to avoid winding up in hell for the sin of pride (among others) get treated with the same segregation so that they can be safely ignored by the rational people.
See this preliminary analysis of Hillary's appointment schedule during the Clinton White House years. Note the bit about Hillary's "private appointments" on Dec. 22, 2000 vs. the pictures of her with Bill and a Rabbi that lobbied for controversial pardons. Hillary appears to have some history and involvement on the subject of Presidential pardons which McCain and Obama just don't have.
That said, I agree with you on the higher risk of abuse of the pardon powers for a Republican president than for a Democratic one. I just think that this particular Democratic candidate is more vulnerable on the issue because of her past involvement. But yeah, McCain's not too far behind her and I like your suggested line of questioning for him.
Sure, but since that's a de-facto devaluation of both the dollar and Chinese currency, all other imports will increase. Like oil - why do you think crude is at $110? Partly because of low supply compared to the high international demand, but also because the dollar isn't worth as much compared to other currencies and other countries can afford to pay more for the same amount of oil on open markets.
That will eventually cause even those cheap chinese goods to rise in price as energy and plastic feedstock makes the cost of production increases, and more locally don't forget gas, food, and everything else. Inflation sucks for anybody on a fixed income. But hey, enjoy those lead-tainted, lowest bidder chinese products since soon it's the only thing you'll be able to afford!
And the response to that is "Like the type of investigation your husband had done for Marc Rich, Susan McDougal, Roger Clinton and others? How thorough was that?"