Look deeper, and you'll see that the main difficulty for Obama was also the main difficulty for Bush: increasing entitlement spending as the baby-boomers age.
Are you saying we're dipping into income tax revenues to pay out social security checks? The program is supposedly solvent for about 20 more years.
Maybe you've noticed that your income tax and social security payments are separate items on your paycheck... A lot of people don't understand this whole "entitlement" thing. We've had politicians confusing Social Security with "welfare" for the past couple of months.
It's not like they're taxing you so they can pay me more when I retire. What I get back depends on what I put in. But I guess misrepresenting the whole thing is a whole lot more effective as stirring the more ignorant parts of the population to come vote for you, so certain politicians rant about "entitlement" as if it were a hand-out.
BTW, this will let you identify what the main difficulties for Obama are.
As a non-american I still haven't figured out what Glenn Beck has to do with the tea party.. and yet, everytime I hear about one, someone brings up the other.
Lots of politicos and demagogues are trying to stake an ownership claim on it.
I think originally it was just a diverse collection of people unhappy about one thing or another - misinformed about those things in most cases. But the way the politicos/demagogues are tugging at it and the way the media is covering it is making it more homogeneous. (Read: "Anglo Saxon FOX News addicts.)
Don't know why this is modded 'insightful'. "Defeatist liberals" have never had that much influence. And it certainly wasn't just liberals who soured on the war before it was over.
The problem - then and now - was that the US public will only tolerate so much blood & treasure invested into a foreign war that isn't extremely well motivated. (From what I've read the public was beginning to go sour on WWII before it was over - a well-motivated war if there ever was one.)
Iraq and Afghanistan have been tolerated for so long because 9/11 gave us a faux since of mission. But that has been mostly used up, and it's not just liberals and anti-war types who are no longer supportive.
It's not an accident that the generals and politicians have to keep coming up with new reasons for being there, and coming up with "surge"-style gimmicks to suggest that they really can fix an f*ed up country with guns and bombs.
Oh yes. Unfortunately, the famous liberal dove Robert McNamara doesn't agree with you if you read between the lines of "Fog of War".
One of the main reasons the bombing was less effective that you make out was the C Chi tunnels which IIRC were far more extensive than bomber-command wished to believe.
There is a historical tendency to overrate the effects of air power while a war is in progress. A post-WWII study found that the Allied strategic bombing campaign hadn't been nearly as effective as we counted on it being.
The Germans planned on overrunning only the European portion of the USSR, and naively counted on destroying their trans-Ural warmaking capabilities with air strikes alone.
Every modern US president should understand that when s/he sends troops off to a fighting war a clock starts ticking, and when the time runs out he's got to bring the troops home or the public will elect someone else who will. (AIUI, the public was starting to sour even on WWII before it was over.)
I don't suppose there's a way to know how far you can ride the clock when it starts, but you'd darn sure better be aware of this basic fact.
but how can you justify making the game completely unavailable to them?
I'm going to guess that the GameStop executives had an emergency meeting on the topic "What high-profile action can we take to defuse this controversy real quick", and the geniuses came up with this.
Respect would be acknowledging that our men and women in uniform are adults and can decide for themselves how they want to spend their leisure time.
I wonder how much of the controversy stemmed from military bases to begin with. Playing as the bad guys has a long tradition. (Any military posters here to comment?)
Our media and demagogues thrive on manufactured controversy.
A cell wall was always a hard one to explain since we seem to jump from viruses to one cells organisms.
Actually, the cell wall is just about the easiest thing to explain. Just take a bunch of short-chain molecules that are hydrophobic on one end and hydrophilic on the other and throw them in water, and the self-organize into pockets very like the cell wall.
I'm in the strange position of having reached the realization that essentially, unless I'm willing to devote about 20 years of my life studying the matter on my own I'm going to have to decide to accept it by faith and not by reason. Oh irony, you are so delicious.
Not so ironic, IMO. You (and me) have faith that the evidence is there and we could dig through it ourselves if willing to spend a couple of decades on it. That seems quite different from faith that an omni*ent being exists and did all the stuff attributed to it.
And we can do a bit of digging without investing a full twenty years. I thought cosmic inflation sounded like an egregious epicycle to make the theory fit the observations, until I read about the odd and not obviously related phenomena that it explains.
I've never understood why hardcore atheists believe that scientific explanations preclude God as a valid concept.
Strictly speaking it doesn't. You just don't need God as an explanation when you have real explanations. And for those things you still can't explain, invoking God doesn't help anyway - an unknowable power with unlimited capability and inscrutable will is compatible with any and every observation you make, and therefore has no explanatory value.
Also, people who cling to belief in God tend to cling also to myths that are demonstrably *not* valid concepts, so God tends to get thrown out with the garbage he's sitting in.
If theists had any sense they'd ditch Genesis faster than atheists do.
Moses created "the almight" about 1000 BC. He invented the single god, aka "all-mighty", inspired by the single god of a pharao a few centuries earlier (who btw was Nefertitis husband). Before that the hebrews were polytheistic like most other in Egypt.
More likely, IMO, that the Jews picked up monotheism from the Persians. The prophets' continual whinge was "the people are whoring after false gods! the royalty is whoring after false gods! the prophets of false gods are whoring after false gods". It seems pretty obvious that they had a polytheism problem fairly late in the game.
The big question is how Pharaoh had receieved the idea of a single god. Possibly he in turn was inspired by the zoroastrians, a monotheistic religion which had been created several centuries before him. It is not stranger than that.
The date of Zoroaster is not well established; Akhenaten may have proceeded him.
I'm not sure how strictly monotheistic Akhenaten actually was. He certainly promoted his favorite god above the others, but I think the priesthoods of other gods still existed under his reign.
I suppose you could also argue that Zoroasterism is not monotheistic either, what with the dualism thing.
It's rather ironic that a leading thinker in 3 dimensional space has such a 2 dimensional mind set.
Sigh.... I'm sure this seemed clever when you typed it, but you should really read over it again just to make sure its not a nonsensical collection of words that doesn't really mean anything.
Not a collection, a 1 dimensional sequence of words. (Cf. subject line, eh?)
Still room for the old logical fallacy there. If God created gravity, then who created God? Most theists then state that God was always there, but then it's easier to simply say that gravity was always there.
Cut out the middle man!
Or, don't multiply entities needlessly.
Creationists claim that everything needs a cause, including the universe, then posit a god as the necessary cause and immediately proclaim that that god is immune to the "everything needs a cause" claim.
Also, "God" has no explanatory value. He can do anything, and what he decides to do is completely unpredictable. If a scientist predicted a particle or force that can do anything and is utterly unpredictable, he'd be either ignored or laughed at.
So it is not correct to say that nothing existed a week before then. The question itself is invalid, because there was no "week before then" to begin with.
BTW, every mainstream flavor of Christianity teaches that Satan's fall happened before the Genesis 1 creation did.
Strangely, both the Bible and most cosmological models indicate that time itself, at least as we know it, did not exist before Creation and/or the Big Bang respectively.
Au contraire, the Bible doesn't say diddly about time before creation. You're just reading modern conceptions into it.
Just like, as is proven by history, at least a couple of million Chinese and Egyptians.
Genesis literalists like to "show" that if you started with eight people around the assumed time of the flood, it takes only a modest exponential growth rate to get the world's current population. Too bad they don't pause to consider what their curve predicts for just a few hundred years beyond the starting point.
And therein lies, I think, the big cognitive difference between scientists and traditionalists. Scientists are all over their own hypotheses with "what about this?" questions, but a traditionalist doesn't look beyond the most superficial analysis if it gives the desired result.
but what it *does* do is call into question the very premise that those methods are based on.
Right. It's altogether conceivable that trees grew a dozens of rings per year until just before we started looking!
It seems that the more we study the more we find out that these things humanity has been 'sure of' at points in history are just plain wrong: the earth isn't flat, the earth isn't the center of the solar system, and maybe the earth isn't billions of years old...
The only reliable trend is that every time we find out something is wrong, the universe proves to be even more unlike sacred texts portray it.
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Look deeper, and you'll see that the main difficulty for Obama was also the main difficulty for Bush: increasing entitlement spending as the baby-boomers age.
Are you saying we're dipping into income tax revenues to pay out social security checks? The program is supposedly solvent for about 20 more years.
Maybe you've noticed that your income tax and social security payments are separate items on your paycheck... A lot of people don't understand this whole "entitlement" thing. We've had politicians confusing Social Security with "welfare" for the past couple of months.
It's not like they're taxing you so they can pay me more when I retire. What I get back depends on what I put in. But I guess misrepresenting the whole thing is a whole lot more effective as stirring the more ignorant parts of the population to come vote for you, so certain politicians rant about "entitlement" as if it were a hand-out.
BTW, this will let you identify what the main difficulties for Obama are.
As a non-american I still haven't figured out what Glenn Beck has to do with the tea party.. and yet, everytime I hear about one, someone brings up the other.
Lots of politicos and demagogues are trying to stake an ownership claim on it.
I think originally it was just a diverse collection of people unhappy about one thing or another - misinformed about those things in most cases. But the way the politicos/demagogues are tugging at it and the way the media is covering it is making it more homogeneous. (Read: "Anglo Saxon FOX News addicts.)
"serious" (for lack of a better term) journalists
The better term is "opinion show hosts".
The best term for most of them is "corporate propaganda peddlers".
The National Park Service used to provide formal estimates, but quit doing it not too many years ago.
Probably because they were displeasing various groups by not supporting their fantasies about how many people were there.
But the defeatist liberals would have none of it.
Don't know why this is modded 'insightful'. "Defeatist liberals" have never had that much influence. And it certainly wasn't just liberals who soured on the war before it was over.
The problem - then and now - was that the US public will only tolerate so much blood & treasure invested into a foreign war that isn't extremely well motivated. (From what I've read the public was beginning to go sour on WWII before it was over - a well-motivated war if there ever was one.)
Iraq and Afghanistan have been tolerated for so long because 9/11 gave us a faux since of mission. But that has been mostly used up, and it's not just liberals and anti-war types who are no longer supportive.
It's not an accident that the generals and politicians have to keep coming up with new reasons for being there, and coming up with "surge"-style gimmicks to suggest that they really can fix an f*ed up country with guns and bombs.
Afghanistan, meet Viet Nam; Viet Nam, meet Afghanistan.
Oh yes. Unfortunately, the famous liberal dove Robert McNamara doesn't agree with you if you read between the lines of "Fog of War".
One of the main reasons the bombing was less effective that you make out was the C Chi tunnels which IIRC were far more extensive than bomber-command wished to believe.
There is a historical tendency to overrate the effects of air power while a war is in progress. A post-WWII study found that the Allied strategic bombing campaign hadn't been nearly as effective as we counted on it being.
The Germans planned on overrunning only the European portion of the USSR, and naively counted on destroying their trans-Ural warmaking capabilities with air strikes alone.
Except the political battle.
Every modern US president should understand that when s/he sends troops off to a fighting war a clock starts ticking, and when the time runs out he's got to bring the troops home or the public will elect someone else who will. (AIUI, the public was starting to sour even on WWII before it was over.)
I don't suppose there's a way to know how far you can ride the clock when it starts, but you'd darn sure better be aware of this basic fact.
but how can you justify making the game completely unavailable to them?
I'm going to guess that the GameStop executives had an emergency meeting on the topic "What high-profile action can we take to defuse this controversy real quick", and the geniuses came up with this.
Respect would be acknowledging that our men and women in uniform are adults and can decide for themselves how they want to spend their leisure time.
I wonder how much of the controversy stemmed from military bases to begin with. Playing as the bad guys has a long tradition. (Any military posters here to comment?)
Our media and demagogues thrive on manufactured controversy.
A cell wall was always a hard one to explain since we seem to jump from viruses to one cells organisms.
Actually, the cell wall is just about the easiest thing to explain. Just take a bunch of short-chain molecules that are hydrophobic on one end and hydrophilic on the other and throw them in water, and the self-organize into pockets very like the cell wall.
I'm in the strange position of having reached the realization that essentially, unless I'm willing to devote about 20 years of my life studying the matter on my own I'm going to have to decide to accept it by faith and not by reason. Oh irony, you are so delicious.
Not so ironic, IMO. You (and me) have faith that the evidence is there and we could dig through it ourselves if willing to spend a couple of decades on it. That seems quite different from faith that an omni*ent being exists and did all the stuff attributed to it.
And we can do a bit of digging without investing a full twenty years. I thought cosmic inflation sounded like an egregious epicycle to make the theory fit the observations, until I read about the odd and not obviously related phenomena that it explains.
There's been a concerted effort in academia to pit science against religion.
Are you offereing this as fact or opinion?
I've never understood why hardcore atheists believe that scientific explanations preclude God as a valid concept.
Strictly speaking it doesn't. You just don't need God as an explanation when you have real explanations. And for those things you still can't explain, invoking God doesn't help anyway - an unknowable power with unlimited capability and inscrutable will is compatible with any and every observation you make, and therefore has no explanatory value.
Also, people who cling to belief in God tend to cling also to myths that are demonstrably *not* valid concepts, so God tends to get thrown out with the garbage he's sitting in.
If theists had any sense they'd ditch Genesis faster than atheists do.
Why's this a troll? Occam's razor is not law around here.
But gravity is...
Moses created "the almight" about 1000 BC. He invented the single god, aka "all-mighty", inspired by the single god of a pharao a few centuries earlier (who btw was Nefertitis husband). Before that the hebrews were polytheistic like most other in Egypt.
More likely, IMO, that the Jews picked up monotheism from the Persians. The prophets' continual whinge was "the people are whoring after false gods! the royalty is whoring after false gods! the prophets of false gods are whoring after false gods". It seems pretty obvious that they had a polytheism problem fairly late in the game.
The big question is how Pharaoh had receieved the idea of a single god. Possibly he in turn was inspired by the zoroastrians, a monotheistic religion which had been created several centuries before him. It is not stranger than that.
The date of Zoroaster is not well established; Akhenaten may have proceeded him.
I'm not sure how strictly monotheistic Akhenaten actually was. He certainly promoted his favorite god above the others, but I think the priesthoods of other gods still existed under his reign.
I suppose you could also argue that Zoroasterism is not monotheistic either, what with the dualism thing.
You could have just said "Hawking Picks Rational Thinking Over Superstition"
Yes, but that might have started a flame war.
Ermmm, never mind.
It's rather ironic that a leading thinker in 3 dimensional space has such a 2 dimensional mind set.
Sigh.... I'm sure this seemed clever when you typed it, but you should really read over it again just to make sure its not a nonsensical collection of words that doesn't really mean anything.
Not a collection, a 1 dimensional sequence of words. (Cf. subject line, eh?)
Actually it was Georges Lemaître who proposed the Big Bang Theory.
And for the amusement of the current discussion, he was a catholic priest
Therefore it was God, not gravity?
What is your point?
Still room for the old logical fallacy there. If God created gravity, then who created God? Most theists then state that God was always there, but then it's easier to simply say that gravity was always there.
Cut out the middle man!
Or, don't multiply entities needlessly.
Creationists claim that everything needs a cause, including the universe, then posit a god as the necessary cause and immediately proclaim that that god is immune to the "everything needs a cause" claim.
Also, "God" has no explanatory value. He can do anything, and what he decides to do is completely unpredictable. If a scientist predicted a particle or force that can do anything and is utterly unpredictable, he'd be either ignored or laughed at.
So it is not correct to say that nothing existed a week before then. The question itself is invalid, because there was no "week before then" to begin with.
BTW, every mainstream flavor of Christianity teaches that Satan's fall happened before the Genesis 1 creation did.
Strangely, both the Bible and most cosmological models indicate that time itself, at least as we know it, did not exist before Creation and/or the Big Bang respectively.
Au contraire, the Bible doesn't say diddly about time before creation. You're just reading modern conceptions into it.
Just like, as is proven by history, at least a couple of million Chinese and Egyptians.
Genesis literalists like to "show" that if you started with eight people around the assumed time of the flood, it takes only a modest exponential growth rate to get the world's current population. Too bad they don't pause to consider what their curve predicts for just a few hundred years beyond the starting point.
And therein lies, I think, the big cognitive difference between scientists and traditionalists. Scientists are all over their own hypotheses with "what about this?" questions, but a traditionalist doesn't look beyond the most superficial analysis if it gives the desired result.
I don't think anyone really believes the earth is 6000 years old.
Just that Adam lived 6000 years ago.
I was raised in a church where most would have me believe that *nothing* existed a week before Adam was molded.
But those with a heretical bent did go for the day-age interpretation of Genesis I, to reduce at least some of the glaring conflicts with reality.
Methinks we've got another outbreak of N-Rays or CNF in the works.
Just a hunch...
but what it *does* do is call into question the very premise that those methods are based on.
Right. It's altogether conceivable that trees grew a dozens of rings per year until just before we started looking!
It seems that the more we study the more we find out that these things humanity has been 'sure of' at points in history are just plain wrong: the earth isn't flat, the earth isn't the center of the solar system, and maybe the earth isn't billions of years old...
The only reliable trend is that every time we find out something is wrong, the universe proves to be even more unlike sacred texts portray it.