The issue is that Amazon is on corporate welfare. They don't pay staff enough to live on, and rely on government hand-outs to keep them alive and healthy enough to keep working in their warehouses.
... and your solution is to keep people on government handouts, entirely, until they get hired for a wage you think is sufficient.
A New York Times article stated that this drug was developed with three other non-viable drugs for a total cost of $388,000,000. Dividing by the stated cost of $143,000 dollars, 2,713 patients have to be treated with this drug for 1 year to recover development costs. This drug treats Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). Approximately 20,000 people are diagnosed with CLL each year, and those people have an average age of 71 years. Approximately 4,500 people die each year from CLL. Your lifetime risk of developing CLL is 1 in 175.
You now have more information to discuss alternative treatments, their costs, and why folks would choose one over the other, as well as a greater ability to evaluate the potential profitability of this drug (Imbruvica) at any price point.
Because thier motto was always "leave people alone."
It never was. It never, ever was. It was always "those people are different from us, let's get 'em!" Or of course, it has also been "those people aren't really people, so it's okay to enslave them".
The Democrats- the left- have always been the slave party. That 'southern strategy' tale about everybody switching sides in the 60's has always been a bunch of rubbish that Democrats tell each other, as they promulgate endlessly racist and racial policies. Your pals on the left have switched from racial malevolence to racial condescension, which I suppose is a small improvement. Maybe in another 60 years you'll actually treat people like people, instead of grievance groups to be pitted against each other for electoral gain.
It's interesting, Mr. Thoughtful, that you admit heterogeneous views, but then still carry on with typical western leftist chauvinism. To wit, your underlying thought seems to be that: "all various cultures really value the same things that westerners want, and any differences are just merely exotic window dressing without any meaningful substance, so we should be able to get along just fine if we can just move past those nasty conservative right-wingers."
In contrast, I maintain that there are real and substantive differences between cultures, and that some societies, if we are to trade with them, must be kept at arms length, and guarded against. Why? Because they don't value what you and I value, and they'll treat you like a chump if you tell yourself they do, and act as if they do. At other times they do things that are quite plainly heinous; the moral relativist like yourself is paralyzed by mindless non-judgementalism. For example, I hold that tossing a man's widow on his funeral pyre is a wicked thing that must be stopped if one has the power. To a relativist like yourself, burning a live widow on a dead man's funeral pyre is a cultural difference as unimportant as what color one chooses to paint a room.
Everyone knew the shooter was a problem. Everyone saw something, everyone said something- to the police, to the FBI, to the school administrators- and nobody did anything. They just let it happen.
It is amazing how the far right really does not understand how important all of those items are. Even now, the military is pointing out how worthless our high school grads are. They are in HORRIBLE shape, and many of them can not pass boot camp or even pass high school.
Oddly, the GOP screams about having a strong defense, while gutting EVERYTHING needed to make it so.
The GOP is SOOOO fucking over America.
The left controls education in this country; the results of that system serve the goals of Democrats. Sure, you can point to some school in the rural south that is trying to teach young earth creationism, but the vast majority of schools are run by graduates of left-wing education schools (inside left-wing colleges) that are more interested in teach neo-marxist doctrine than the three 'R's', history, and physical education. Further, they get their guidance from the United States Department of Education, whose employees gave $74,000 to Clinton last election.... and $220 to Trump. SHRIEK and USE alternating CAPITALIZED letters all you care to, but the left owns education in this country.... so they own the results. It'll take another two generations to undo the damage your fellow ideologues did to American education.
How about I let gay folks sue them along with say, the civil liberty union and let the courts settle these issues on an individual basis? No need to make the fuss you seem to want. Like with any criminal behavior, when the crime is actually commited, the legal system can be brought in and resolves the issue.
That's a bunch of rubbish. The two noteworthy bakery cases out there are plain instances of agitators seeking out Christian bakeries to ruin.
"But now gay people want to force bakers to bake them cakes "
How about another way of seeing it? How about gay people don't want to be denied basic commercial services provided to everyone else? If a baker can tell a gay couple they won't make them a cake they can tell a black couple the same.
This cop turned out later to be a total piece of human waste, involved in numerous thefts and the statutory rape of a fifteen year old. He was a member of the SWAT team.
SWAT team members are completely capable of being complete pieces of human shit.
They should ask for volunteers for the SWAT team.... and then permanently bar anyone who volunteers. At least the first time around it would help weed out psychopaths who want a chance to shoot someone.
Minor Quibble- otherwise I very much appreciate your post- The SL-1 incident in Idaho- When you're standing on top of a reactor that goes prompt critical to 20 Gigawatts, you're going to die whether or not there is a steam explosion. One of the victim's bodies was so contaminated that they were putting off a radiation field of 500R/hr- a certainly lethal dose if you spend any amount of time next to him!
Afterwards a stuck-out rod became part of the design consideration- at no time could a single stuck rod cause the reactor to go critical, or prevent it from being safely shutdown.
Back to your point, this was an electric power production experimental reactor run by the United States Army, intended to make power in Arctic regions.
Actually, the us population picked Hillary. elites of the electoral college pick the orangutan.
....because the only legitimate elections are the ones leftists win....
Your 'champion' had feet of clay and should have known the rules of the game just as well as Trump. She played for a popular vote win, which she got, but a popular vote win doesn't get the presidency. Further, California alone tipped the scales for the popular vote- and they're not too particular about who they let vote.
That's pretty much the reason for the electoral college in the first place- so that California doesn't (or a few large population centers don't) dictate the president of the United States every single election.
They certainly have backup power for critical systems like air traffic but remember that an airport is basically a city. 275,000 people a day pass through that airport. The eleven different four-car trains there carry 200,000 people each day. The terminal is 6.8 million square feet. Just to keep some lights on so people don't panic requires a ton of backup power. Providing power for all the baggage handling, runway lights, and all other systems is a HUGE ask. Powering it during normal times likely takes damn near its own power plant. Running it on backup power would an insane requirement.
And to pile on, if you took out the central switchgear, you're screwed regardless of having generators. Offhand it appears they didn't think too much about redundancy or diversity when designing the airport's electrical system..... 'half the power is gone' would be a much less sensational headline!
It's easy to say that when churches are considered "charities" and the republicans actively court every church goer they can find.
This distortion is clearly evident from your own article, but ignored in your post. 40% of the way down the page is the breakdown, "Religion and Charitable Giving". The church-goers group gives slightly more than the non church goers to secular causes, but they dwarf everything else on the chart with their donations to the church.
Don't get all holier than though about charity when 70% of your "charitable" contributions went to a church.
So, by your own review, the Church-goers still 'win'. And to accept your 'point', you would have to imagine that Church contributions go only to fund church operations. They don't. Church raised funds also go to charity operations both directly (food banks, for example) and indirectly (providing a meeting space- and building heating- for local groups like boys and girl scouts, AA, etc.)
"Non-violent, meaningful action works very well against tyrannical governments. History has two big prominent examples: Gandhi and Martin Luther King. " That's plain wrong. Gandhi and MLK argued against basically moral governments that needed to do certain things better. Try being Gandhi or MLK in Stalin's Russia, North Korea, Iran, or any number of other places, and you get slaughtered before more than 20 people know your name. Trump' s no tyrant. Literally no one is afraid of speaking out against him in any forum.
3) Will someone just go ahead and sign Colin Kapernick? You might not agree with his politics or the whole kneeling thing but he's probably as good as at least half the starting quarterbacks playing right now. The longer this blackballing of Kapernick drags out the worse it looks for the NFL. Sign him. If he can't play then cut him but enough of the blackballing.
Well, one train of thought goes that Kapernick isn't that good of a QB, knew it, was at risk of getting cut, so he started this whole political charade as a self-promotion gambit. Rumor has it he was also on the verge of getting picked up when his girlfriend shot off her mouth with some race-baiting bullshit and his pending offer was shelved. Overall, it looks like teams have decided Kapernick just isn't a good enough player to justify all the drama he comes with. You could call that 'blackballing', I suppose, or you could consider maybe no one really wants to deal with his B.S.
Fukushima's site was dug down to make it easier to build. Just up the coast, closer to the epicenter, Onagawa was built higher above the water line, and they even included a basin to maintain an ocean water supply to the safety related pumps for the duration of a tsunami. They escaped the Earthquake and Tsunami largely undamaged. In fact, Onagawa actually served as shelter after the Tsunami.
It seems clear to me that some things that cause depression will obviously cause excessive screen time. For example, if you break both your legs you might be unhappy and unable to do much besides use electronics.
Similarly, depression could easily cause self-medicating behavior, including watching movies or playing games.
As for the idea that excessive screen time causes depression, that seems like a fairly common example of the 'new media is evil trope' that has existed since the printed word was invented - not just movies, comic books, videogames, D&D, but pretty much every new media gets this stupid trope from the conservatives that are not the intended target of the new media.
As a parent it's been my experience that if I let my kids have too much screen time, or play too late, their behavior goes down the tubes. My (almost 7 year old) daughter frequently visits a friend's house where they quickly settle in front of a screen of some variety, and she comes back acting like a brat pretty much every time. I'll be talking things over with the other parents next time.
My son (8.5 years) less so, but there's certain games- like Roblox- that turn him into an insufferable little jerk if I allow any play time.
So yes, I limit screen time based on my observations of how they behave when I don't limit screen time- and it's not much of a stretch to think this will continue to be true for quite a while, until they learn to self regulate.
So you can blather on about tropes, and eeeevvvillll stupiiiidd conservatives, but the headline summary lines up with my personal experience, and other parents have similar experiences. Coloring, drawing, reading, playing- none of these activities have the same downsides as screen time.
Yes, I allow some screen time. As I write this, my daughter is playing minecraft, and my son is watching people on youtube play minecraft. But it's not going to go on all night.
You have inherited or perhaps decided to embrace one particular solution, where three is one, teenage single moms are venerated, and the rest is based around worshipping a self-doubting homeless dude who brought loads of wine to a wedding party, hung around patronizing his male friends, then ended up getting himself nailed by some guys in togas. Oh, and apparently you should no longer be put to death for wearing wool and cotton together, but it was bad at one point.
Which of these are your meaningful guidelines again?
I'd tell you, but you're not particularly interested. You're just here to attack. Any reader who is actually interested should seek; because they will find.
For you, I offer Matthew 7:6: "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces."
We seem to have lots of independent, confusing, unconnected pieces. All of which appear to be separate and independent. But that could easily because we can't see the "big picture". Once we develop an understanding of all the laws of the physical world, then it could be that there is inevitably only one way they could all be fitted together.There would be no need for an alien intelligence or "higher being" to have created them
The only question that would arise would be: who or what is the picture about?
The pieces are only independent, confusing, and unconnected because you revolt and shuffle around the puzzle when a recognizable image starts to appear.
Romans 1:20- "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
If there's is no creator who made us on purpose, for His own reasons, their our lives are about nothing. You're no more meaningful than a gold fish. I don't believe that, though. Science repeatedly points to special singular events that are best explained by the intervention of an all-knowing, all-powerful entity.
Start with the big bang. Are you telling me in one instant there was nothing, and the next instant there were the makings of everything, and those components exploded away from each other in such a coincidental fashion as to result in our universe today.... and this doesn't plainly point to God engaging in creation?
You could hit back with 'God of the gaps', of course, but be wary of 'science of the gaps' as well- when you make up some absurd, just-so tale to explain away the inexplicable, with absolutely no basis in the observable universe.
We're all seeing that this and saying we live in a simulation, etc., is simply recasting spirituality and the idea of gods in a new form, right?
Which is fine, you can do that. But as someone used to seeing their religion in the crosshairs, it does strike me as a bit weird whenever the people instinctively scathing about religious ideas decide they really want them afterall, just co-opted under different labels.
"In ages of fervent devotion men sometimes abandon their religion, but they only shake one off in order to adopt another. Their faith changes its objects, but suffers no decline." Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America.
As a Christian, I am endlessly amused by these attempts to obtain spirituality without meaningful guidelines, and to explain away the inexplicable by positing an alien whose characteristics must be awfully similar to God's.
...Just when I think we've reached the limits of how crazy fucked-up the Japanese can be, they show me I'm wrong.
On the other hand, they don't seem to be spending any time shooting people at music festivals, churches or schools every other week.
In the US, Democrats shoot people, and then other Democrats demand us decent folk surrender our weapons.... that we need to defend ourselves from Democrats!
LOL Rolling Stone? Joking, right? They're not what you'd call, "credible". We know for a fact they will lie to bias a story to fit with their pre-existing politics.
Attack the messenger.
They're known liars and hucksters with an axe to grind. The story at hand may or may not be accurate, but it's worth noting that Rolling Stone is hardly a paragon of integrity. It's a big flag that you should absolutely double check their work before you take it seriously.
What a load of crap. You brown shirts went after Ben Shapiro in Berkeley. You're violent, nasty thugs who have no place in a civil society. I'm thankful that Berkeley, of all places, had the good sense to realize that law and order must be maintained, and properly secured his second appearance.
You have chosen to live by the sword; push the rest of us too far, you will die by it as well. Fortunately even left-wing mayors and college administrators are starting to realize it's best to prevent you from starting your next riot.
There have been previous instances when a convert had changed his name to, say, 'Abdul Fatah', committed some act of violence, and then the media reported his name as 'Stephen Paddock' knowing full well of his previous legal name change. (I have no reason to believe, at this time, any media outlet is doing this routine for this particular story.)
There is one way to get more gun control in the US.
Hand out assault rifles to Black Lives Matter protesters. Gun control laws would suddenly become very, very important to many of the people who are horrified by gun control today.
It's funny you say that, because the first gun control laws were aimed at disarming black people so they couldn't protect themselves from Klan violence.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is that Amazon is on corporate welfare. They don't pay staff enough to live on, and rely on government hand-outs to keep them alive and healthy enough to keep working in their warehouses.
... and your solution is to keep people on government handouts, entirely, until they get hired for a wage you think is sufficient.
A New York Times article stated that this drug was developed with three other non-viable drugs for a total cost of $388,000,000. Dividing by the stated cost of $143,000 dollars, 2,713 patients have to be treated with this drug for 1 year to recover development costs.
This drug treats Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). Approximately 20,000 people are diagnosed with CLL each year, and those people have an average age of 71 years. Approximately 4,500 people die each year from CLL. Your lifetime risk of developing CLL is 1 in 175.
Cancer.org lists 5 other treatments (Obliersenn, Lumiliximab, HA22, Lenalidomide, 'standard' chemotherapy) for CLL , and mentions dozens of drugs are in testing for CLL treatment.
You now have more information to discuss alternative treatments, their costs, and why folks would choose one over the other, as well as a greater ability to evaluate the potential profitability of this drug (Imbruvica) at any price point.
Because thier motto was always "leave people alone."
It never was. It never, ever was. It was always "those people are different from us, let's get 'em!" Or of course, it has also been "those people aren't really people, so it's okay to enslave them".
The Democrats- the left- have always been the slave party. That 'southern strategy' tale about everybody switching sides in the 60's has always been a bunch of rubbish that Democrats tell each other, as they promulgate endlessly racist and racial policies. Your pals on the left have switched from racial malevolence to racial condescension, which I suppose is a small improvement. Maybe in another 60 years you'll actually treat people like people, instead of grievance groups to be pitted against each other for electoral gain.
It's interesting, Mr. Thoughtful, that you admit heterogeneous views, but then still carry on with typical western leftist chauvinism. To wit, your underlying thought seems to be that: "all various cultures really value the same things that westerners want, and any differences are just merely exotic window dressing without any meaningful substance, so we should be able to get along just fine if we can just move past those nasty conservative right-wingers."
In contrast, I maintain that there are real and substantive differences between cultures, and that some societies, if we are to trade with them, must be kept at arms length, and guarded against. Why? Because they don't value what you and I value, and they'll treat you like a chump if you tell yourself they do, and act as if they do. At other times they do things that are quite plainly heinous; the moral relativist like yourself is paralyzed by mindless non-judgementalism. For example, I hold that tossing a man's widow on his funeral pyre is a wicked thing that must be stopped if one has the power. To a relativist like yourself, burning a live widow on a dead man's funeral pyre is a cultural difference as unimportant as what color one chooses to paint a room.
Everyone knew the shooter was a problem. Everyone saw something, everyone said something- to the police, to the FBI, to the school administrators- and nobody did anything. They just let it happen.
It is amazing how the far right really does not understand how important all of those items are. Even now, the military is pointing out how worthless our high school grads are. They are in HORRIBLE shape, and many of them can not pass boot camp or even pass high school.
Oddly, the GOP screams about having a strong defense, while gutting EVERYTHING needed to make it so.
The GOP is SOOOO fucking over America.
The left controls education in this country; the results of that system serve the goals of Democrats. Sure, you can point to some school in the rural south that is trying to teach young earth creationism, but the vast majority of schools are run by graduates of left-wing education schools (inside left-wing colleges) that are more interested in teach neo-marxist doctrine than the three 'R's', history, and physical education.
Further, they get their guidance from the United States Department of Education, whose employees gave $74,000 to Clinton last election.... and $220 to Trump.
SHRIEK and USE alternating CAPITALIZED letters all you care to, but the left owns education in this country.... so they own the results. It'll take another two generations to undo the damage your fellow ideologues did to American education.
How about I let gay folks sue them along with say, the civil liberty union and let the courts settle these issues on an individual basis? No need to make the fuss you seem to want. Like with any criminal behavior, when the crime is actually commited, the legal system can be brought in and resolves the issue.
That's a bunch of rubbish. The two noteworthy bakery cases out there are plain instances of agitators seeking out Christian bakeries to ruin.
"But now gay people want to force bakers to bake them cakes "
How about another way of seeing it? How about gay people don't want to be denied basic commercial services provided to everyone else? If a baker can tell a gay couple they won't make them a cake they can tell a black couple the same.
A whole bunch of bakeries have been found for you to go and protest and wage lawfare on! I'll be waiting with baited breath while you stir up the left wing mobs to run these folks out of business.
This cop turned out later to be a total piece of human waste, involved in numerous thefts and the statutory rape of a fifteen year old. He was a member of the SWAT team.
SWAT team members are completely capable of being complete pieces of human shit.
They should ask for volunteers for the SWAT team.... and then permanently bar anyone who volunteers. At least the first time around it would help weed out psychopaths who want a chance to shoot someone.
Minor Quibble- otherwise I very much appreciate your post-
The SL-1 incident in Idaho- When you're standing on top of a reactor that goes prompt critical to 20 Gigawatts, you're going to die whether or not there is a steam explosion. One of the victim's bodies was so contaminated that they were putting off a radiation field of 500R/hr- a certainly lethal dose if you spend any amount of time next to him!
Afterwards a stuck-out rod became part of the design consideration- at no time could a single stuck rod cause the reactor to go critical, or prevent it from being safely shutdown.
Back to your point, this was an electric power production experimental reactor run by the United States Army, intended to make power in Arctic regions.
Actually, the us population picked Hillary. elites of the electoral college pick the orangutan.
....because the only legitimate elections are the ones leftists win....
Your 'champion' had feet of clay and should have known the rules of the game just as well as Trump. She played for a popular vote win, which she got, but a popular vote win doesn't get the presidency. Further, California alone tipped the scales for the popular vote- and they're not too particular about who they let vote.
That's pretty much the reason for the electoral college in the first place- so that California doesn't (or a few large population centers don't) dictate the president of the United States every single election.
They certainly have backup power for critical systems like air traffic but remember that an airport is basically a city. 275,000 people a day pass through that airport. The eleven different four-car trains there carry 200,000 people each day. The terminal is 6.8 million square feet. Just to keep some lights on so people don't panic requires a ton of backup power. Providing power for all the baggage handling, runway lights, and all other systems is a HUGE ask. Powering it during normal times likely takes damn near its own power plant. Running it on backup power would an insane requirement.
And to pile on, if you took out the central switchgear, you're screwed regardless of having generators. Offhand it appears they didn't think too much about redundancy or diversity when designing the airport's electrical system..... 'half the power is gone' would be a much less sensational headline!
It's easy to say that when churches are considered "charities" and the republicans actively court every church goer they can find.
This distortion is clearly evident from your own article, but ignored in your post. 40% of the way down the page is the breakdown, "Religion and Charitable Giving". The church-goers group gives slightly more than the non church goers to secular causes, but they dwarf everything else on the chart with their donations to the church.
Don't get all holier than though about charity when 70% of your "charitable" contributions went to a church.
So, by your own review, the Church-goers still 'win'. And to accept your 'point', you would have to imagine that Church contributions go only to fund church operations. They don't. Church raised funds also go to charity operations both directly (food banks, for example) and indirectly (providing a meeting space- and building heating- for local groups like boys and girl scouts, AA, etc.)
"Non-violent, meaningful action works very well against tyrannical governments. History has two big prominent examples: Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "
That's plain wrong. Gandhi and MLK argued against basically moral governments that needed to do certain things better.
Try being Gandhi or MLK in Stalin's Russia, North Korea, Iran, or any number of other places, and you get slaughtered before more than 20 people know your name.
Trump' s no tyrant. Literally no one is afraid of speaking out against him in any forum.
3) Will someone just go ahead and sign Colin Kapernick? You might not agree with his politics or the whole kneeling thing but he's probably as good as at least half the starting quarterbacks playing right now. The longer this blackballing of Kapernick drags out the worse it looks for the NFL. Sign him. If he can't play then cut him but enough of the blackballing.
Well, one train of thought goes that Kapernick isn't that good of a QB, knew it, was at risk of getting cut, so he started this whole political charade as a self-promotion gambit. Rumor has it he was also on the verge of getting picked up when his girlfriend shot off her mouth with some race-baiting bullshit and his pending offer was shelved. Overall, it looks like teams have decided Kapernick just isn't a good enough player to justify all the drama he comes with. You could call that 'blackballing', I suppose, or you could consider maybe no one really wants to deal with his B.S.
Fukushima's site was dug down to make it easier to build. Just up the coast, closer to the epicenter, Onagawa was built higher above the water line, and they even included a basin to maintain an ocean water supply to the safety related pumps for the duration of a tsunami. They escaped the Earthquake and Tsunami largely undamaged. In fact, Onagawa actually served as shelter after the Tsunami.
It seems clear to me that some things that cause depression will obviously cause excessive screen time. For example, if you break both your legs you might be unhappy and unable to do much besides use electronics.
Similarly, depression could easily cause self-medicating behavior, including watching movies or playing games.
As for the idea that excessive screen time causes depression, that seems like a fairly common example of the 'new media is evil trope' that has existed since the printed word was invented - not just movies, comic books, videogames, D&D, but pretty much every new media gets this stupid trope from the conservatives that are not the intended target of the new media.
As a parent it's been my experience that if I let my kids have too much screen time, or play too late, their behavior goes down the tubes. My (almost 7 year old) daughter frequently visits a friend's house where they quickly settle in front of a screen of some variety, and she comes back acting like a brat pretty much every time. I'll be talking things over with the other parents next time.
My son (8.5 years) less so, but there's certain games- like Roblox- that turn him into an insufferable little jerk if I allow any play time.
So yes, I limit screen time based on my observations of how they behave when I don't limit screen time- and it's not much of a stretch to think this will continue to be true for quite a while, until they learn to self regulate.
So you can blather on about tropes, and eeeevvvillll stupiiiidd conservatives, but the headline summary lines up with my personal experience, and other parents have similar experiences. Coloring, drawing, reading, playing- none of these activities have the same downsides as screen time.
Yes, I allow some screen time. As I write this, my daughter is playing minecraft, and my son is watching people on youtube play minecraft. But it's not going to go on all night.
I have no idea why you might be amused by that.
You have inherited or perhaps decided to embrace one particular solution, where three is one, teenage single moms are venerated, and the rest is based around worshipping a self-doubting homeless dude who brought loads of wine to a wedding party, hung around patronizing his male friends, then ended up getting himself nailed by some guys in togas. Oh, and apparently you should no longer be put to death for wearing wool and cotton together, but it was bad at one point.
Which of these are your meaningful guidelines again?
I'd tell you, but you're not particularly interested. You're just here to attack. Any reader who is actually interested should seek; because they will find.
For you, I offer Matthew 7:6:
"Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces."
We seem to have lots of independent, confusing, unconnected pieces. All of which appear to be separate and independent.
But that could easily because we can't see the "big picture". Once we develop an understanding of all the laws of the physical world, then it could be that there is inevitably only one way they could all be fitted together.There would be no need for an alien intelligence or "higher being" to have created them
The only question that would arise would be: who or what is the picture about?
The pieces are only independent, confusing, and unconnected because you revolt and shuffle around the puzzle when a recognizable image starts to appear.
Romans 1:20- "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
If there's is no creator who made us on purpose, for His own reasons, their our lives are about nothing. You're no more meaningful than a gold fish.
I don't believe that, though. Science repeatedly points to special singular events that are best explained by the intervention of an all-knowing, all-powerful entity.
Start with the big bang. Are you telling me in one instant there was nothing, and the next instant there were the makings of everything, and those components exploded away from each other in such a coincidental fashion as to result in our universe today.... and this doesn't plainly point to God engaging in creation?
You could hit back with 'God of the gaps', of course, but be wary of 'science of the gaps' as well- when you make up some absurd, just-so tale to explain away the inexplicable, with absolutely no basis in the observable universe.
We're all seeing that this and saying we live in a simulation, etc., is simply recasting spirituality and the idea of gods in a new form, right?
Which is fine, you can do that. But as someone used to seeing their religion in the crosshairs, it does strike me as a bit weird whenever the people instinctively scathing about religious ideas decide they really want them afterall, just co-opted under different labels.
"In ages of fervent devotion men sometimes abandon their religion, but they only shake one off in order to adopt another. Their faith changes its objects, but suffers no decline." Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America.
As a Christian, I am endlessly amused by these attempts to obtain spirituality without meaningful guidelines, and to explain away the inexplicable by positing an alien whose characteristics must be awfully similar to God's.
...Just when I think we've reached the limits of how crazy fucked-up the Japanese can be, they show me I'm wrong.
On the other hand, they don't seem to be spending any time shooting people at music festivals, churches or schools every other week.
In the US, Democrats shoot people, and then other Democrats demand us decent folk surrender our weapons.... that we need to defend ourselves from Democrats!
LOL Rolling Stone? Joking, right? They're not what you'd call, "credible". We know for a fact they will lie to bias a story to fit with their pre-existing politics.
Attack the messenger.
They're known liars and hucksters with an axe to grind. The story at hand may or may not be accurate, but it's worth noting that Rolling Stone is hardly a paragon of integrity. It's a big flag that you should absolutely double check their work before you take it seriously.
What a load of crap. You brown shirts went after Ben Shapiro in Berkeley. You're violent, nasty thugs who have no place in a civil society. I'm thankful that Berkeley, of all places, had the good sense to realize that law and order must be maintained, and properly secured his second appearance.
You have chosen to live by the sword; push the rest of us too far, you will die by it as well. Fortunately even left-wing mayors and college administrators are starting to realize it's best to prevent you from starting your next riot.
There have been previous instances when a convert had changed his name to, say, 'Abdul Fatah', committed some act of violence, and then the media reported his name as 'Stephen Paddock' knowing full well of his previous legal name change. (I have no reason to believe, at this time, any media outlet is doing this routine for this particular story.)
There is one way to get more gun control in the US.
Hand out assault rifles to Black Lives Matter protesters. Gun control laws would suddenly become very, very important to many of the people who are horrified by gun control today.
It's funny you say that, because the first gun control laws were aimed at disarming black people so they couldn't protect themselves from Klan violence.