If anything I would say the Supreme Court and its lower branches have shown FAR more fidelity to the constitution than the other 2 branches, or the Member States, which often act as if the Constitution does not exist.
Well, yeah. But that's an extremely low hurdle. Kinda like being the fastest snail, or the best-tasting turd.
Which would mean there is an untapped market for their rejects. Replacing mandatory location-based public schools with publicly funded school vouchers would eliminate the problem of being trapped in a bad school.
Of course, this is no obstacle if you have plenty of money. You just pay for a private school without the vouchers. As a bonus, the absence of vouchers keeps the undesirable types out. As a double bonus, low-quality public schools provide a stream of poorly trained young adults that cannot gain employment above minimum wage. Helpful if you are a wealthy magnate of industry.
In my area there are only a few quality public schools. Most of the private schools cost about the same as public schools spend on a per-pupil basis, yet are widely perceived as providing a superior education. Thanks to No Child Left Behind parents could opt out of the worst public schools and receive an automatic transfer to a better school. Until this year that is. The Obama administration just exempted all of the states that failed to reach their NCLB targets from the law. So now I have to either send my kid to the failing school that we were recently zoned for, pony up for a private school (in addition to the funding I'm providing for the public schools) or move into a better school district. All so we can make sure those union jobs are not threatened. Nice. Oh, and so we can make sure that those crazy fundamentalists don't get to have their kids educated in a Christian school. Gotta make sure we roll out that boogie man to make sure to keep the partisans in line.
Wow, step away from the team red / team blue blinders. He didn't say anything about paranoid warmongering. He's talking about a Federal government freed from the bounds placed on it by its founding documents. This flag was planted firmly with the New Deal and the court-packing threats used to get approval from the Supreme Court for powers which clearly required constitutional amendments before laws could be enacted.
Fast forward to 2001 and you've got Bush pushing through the "Patriot Act", a law that wipes its tush with the constitution. A few years later you've got supposedly "liberal" president Obama doubling down on the "Patriot Act". We've got the Kelo decision saying that local governments can take your home and give it to shopping mall developers because shopping malls raise more tax revenue. Nice! We've got Gonzales v. Raich which says that the federal government can outlaw growing a plant in your own home under the commerce clause, because you theoretically could have bought or sold the plant across state lines. Of course, this decision relied on the WWII Wickard v. Filburn case that said the government can prevent you from growing food for yourself on your own land (under the theory that you would otherwise have to buy the food on the open market, which distorts interstate commerce).
Our current leadership doesn't seem to have much regard for constitutional restrictions in the area of war powers either, having attacked several countries without authorization from congress. Not that congress had enough of a sack to do anything about it. Well, other than Kucinich, who filed suit against the Libya attacks... love him or hate him, at least he stands up for what he believes in regardless of who's in power. Other than a couple of fringe cases like Kucinich and the Paul duo, Team Red and Team Blue are on the same page with regard to the irrelevance of the constitution, regardless of their rhetoric. They also seem to be on the same page with regard to your civil liberties and the war machine, regardless of their rhetoric. Oh sure, one guy over here will make a speech about gun rights, and another guy over there will make a speech about gay marriage, but when it comes down to it they all support the unfettered expansion of the powers of the federal government and only feign fealty to the constitution when it suits their purposes.
One advantage alcohol has is that it is relatively easy to control your dose - relatively easy, not completely easy. Most people binge drink when first learning and there are some dangerous situations created because of that. But if you pace your consumption, alcohol can be self limiting (you tend to pass out before drinking too much - unless you are really slamming the shots).
Heroin and cocaine have the disadvantage of requiring small controlled doses - the more pure they are, the more difficult it is to reliably deliver the correct dose. Of course, absent prohibition this problem would be easily solved. In some South American countries you can get cocaine in ground leaf form at the grocery store - used to make a morning "coffee". Apparently it makes a good wake-up drink, perhaps better than coffee. Presumably pretty much impossible to overdose on that. Heck, I hear that foreign dignitaries visiting Bolivia get a drink of mate de coca as a part of the official state dinner.
Yeah, that's a great step forward. It is extremely rare for the courts to do something like this.
As strong as the police "get out of jail free card" of qualified immunity is, the prosecutor's absolute immunity is even stronger. Last year the Supreme Court held that prosecutor's offices cannot be sued when they repeatedly violate defendant's constitutional rights and put innocent people on death row. Because judges are lawyers, they created the concept of absolute immunity for their brothers in the prosecutor's office. There is no law granting them this protection, the courts just decided that it wasn't fair for prosecutors to be liable for any actions they might take in office - like framing an innocent man and putting him on death row. What did Mel Brooks say? "It's good to be the King!"
I had the same (or similar) poster from National Geographic. It showed the three possible origins of the moon on one side and a highly detailed map of the moon on the other. Nice map.
FWIW- the three possible origins of the moon were: Budding from angular momentum, co-formation in the same location and capture of a rogue planetessimal from elsewhere in the solar system. If I recall correctly, budding and capture were considered long-shot ideas. Interesting that the currently prevailing theory was not one of the 3 possible methods of formation...
That's a great analysis. Except that when the Saudis "dump" oil, they are actually reducing the restrictions they have placed on exports that are designed artificially inflate the price of oil. They are not subsidizing the production of oil at a loss ("dumping"). OPEC exists to act as a cartel and artificially inflate the price of oil. If OPEC were western corporations rather than sovereign nations this would be an illegal price collusion.
The same goes for China's restrictions on rare earth exports. (except perhaps the lax environmental standards which could be counted as a subsidy of sorts)
Recent history is replete with examples of industries that have been wiped out in the west by "dumping" from emerging economy nations. A large chunk of the "asian tiger" boom was associated with accusations of unfair competition and dumping. You mention steel... flat panel displays were definitely shown to have been sold at a loss - with the net result that no flat panel displays are produced in the country that first developed the technology. So nation-level dumping definitely can work to eliminate competition.
But I doubt anyone can successfully argue that the US government's response to these sorts of challenges has been terribly effective. As you point out, it is pretty easy to argue the opposite - that they've been effectively terrible.
I haven't run into a cell phone jammer - as far as I know - but I do have a pirate radio station nearby that is pretty annoying. They are some kind of Hatian radio station that moves around the area. Their transmitter is low power, so it only covers a few square miles - but it is extremely noisy, so it stomps all over 3-4 stations when you are in the area. Missing the end of an interesting story on NPR because I'm driving through their broadcast zone is more annoying than I would have thought.
I can only imagine that getting knocked off of my phone would be even more annoying. Heck, I've considered firing an anti-radiation (HARM) missile at the Hatians, and I only missed out on hearing the end of "This American Life".... Cut off my wife and who knows what might happen?
"I'm no fan of some of the shit Occupy has pulled -- in particular, squatting on public land in such a way that it reduces the value the public can get out of it."
Hate to tell you but Occupy is the public. So they have every right to squat on public land. This is part of the value the public gets out of it.
Yeah! It's our land!!!.... soooo.... why don't I get to set up a Pizza and Beer tent on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? I'm the public too, and we the public would get a great deal of value from having a slice and a frothy pint while touring the mall. Oooh, and one of those lobster-roll carts too. Those things are tasty!
There are those with boots on the ground in these poverty stricken areas that disagree with your conclusion about redistribution. There was PBS documentary a few years ago about an Ethiopian expat. working in the US who returned to her home country to solve the problem of famine. In spite of many decades of billions of dollars of direct aid, there were still massive regional famines in her home country. She saw that access to capital and markets was restricted for poor rural farmers, so they were not getting fair prices for their product nor were they able to get accurate market information about which crops to grow. The issue is very complicated, tied up with government corruption, state control, rent-seeking monopolists, etc., but many international aid organizations including the UN have embraced the concept.
The basic premise is a variation on the "teach a man to fish" argument. In this case it is "give a man access to a market where he can sell the fish for a fair and transparent price" and he'll eat for a lifetime. The agricultural revolution in the west was not simply one of better farm machinery and fertilizers. It also included infrastructure like grain storage, transportation, access to capital and futures markets.
Libertarian principles leave us without roads, police or fire services. If you don't want to be part of a society that considers these and other things necessities for the state to provide then, well, frankly you can suck it because you'll never get your way.
Government is the only way to solve problem X. This is the fallacy of government solipotence - the erroneous belief that only the State can solve society's problems. In fact, every valid service that governments now perform can be done more morally, and usually better, by voluntary means. Virtually every current government service has been done, at some time in history, by voluntary means. Private roads, private courts, police, and legal systems, cheap private health insurance, mail delivery, quality control certification, wildlife preservation, and so on have all been done privately.
I never heard of this ozarkia site before, and he seems to be talking the anarcho-capitalism subvariant of anarchists, but still, it puts the lie to your straw man arguments. (see how I went back to the GP's use of "straw man"? That's the sign of some quality entertainment right there, coming back to the theme... Shakespear did it all the time. James Cameron too... it is only a matter of time before Slashdot gets its due on the big screen.)
Libertarians and monarchists, however, are pretty darn close.
The latter think they should be ruled by a king. The former think they should be the king that rules.
That doesn't even make a damn bit of sense. Libertarians are the last folks who would want a king, even if they were appointed to the post. Let's do a quick google... ah, here's the Libertarian party platform:
As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.
We believe that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud must be banished from human relationships, and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized.
Consequently, we defend each person's right to engage in any activity that is peaceful and honest, and welcome the diversity that freedom brings. The world we seek to build is one where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from government or any authoritarian power.
Hard to reconcile that philosophy with a desire to be authoritarian rulers. In fact, monarchists and libertarians are almost entirely polar opposites, although I suppose that also depends on the nature of the monarch. I guess you could posit a benign monarch that doesn't interfere in anyone's life in any way. Not a great deal of likelihood in that, but if you are going to have a purely theoretical discussion I suppose it is something you could propose...
Actually, the tool is correct - the location is wrong. In this scenario they don't apply the oxy-acetylene torch to the hard drive. They apply it (or some variant) to the "suspect". XKCD covered this fairly succinctly.
Actually, I think they already have this award show. It is called the MTV movie awards. They also have categories for "best kiss", etc. See also: "Teen Choice Awards".
Apparently I am not the most eloquent bloviator on the internet. So I'll refer you to http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ for all the right reasons that both of these alternative medicine fields are based on ideas that indeed fall into the category of "bat-shit insane".
For a shortcut to the answer as to "why" for homeopathy, focus on the centesimal (C) dilution scale. a 6C homeopathic solution has the active ingredients diluted at one part in a thousand billion. Most homeopathic solutions are 10C or even 20C. Random googling turns up this explanation of a homeopathic HGH supplement. Money quote from this site:With a 10C dilution of homeopathic HGH you are over 1 Trillion times more likely to win the lottery than find a molecule of HGH in the solution.
Chiropractic is more complicated - but the core premise of chiropractic is that subluxations of the spine impinge on the flow of "life force" and thereby cause disease - so check their articles on subluxations. The fact that in blinded controlled tests chiropractors reading a slate of identical X-rays failed to identify the same "subluxations" should give pause as to the existence of any such malady in their patients. The fact that studies of similar panels of chiropractic patients by radiologists and spinal surgeons failed to identify any "subluxations" in these patients at all should give further pause. The fact that the only maladies that have been shown to be helped by chiropractic in blinded, controlled studies are those with "soft endpoints" (such as back pain) should give further pause. These are similar to the maladies that are helped by things like acupuncture, sham acupuncture and placebo. The core premise of chiropractic (that subluxations impinge on the flow of "life force" and cause all of the maladies of the body) is certainly bat-shit insane. The best of chiropractic may have arguably moved beyond this notion - but it is far from a slam dunk that even the best are anything more than quacks.
"Like cures like" has absolutely nothing whatever to do with vaccination. "Like cures like" in the context of hoemopathy means that since arsenic poisoning causes diarrhea and vomiting you can use arsenic (when properly diluted) to cure diarrhea and vomiting associated with cholera. A vaccine is not a "like". A vaccine carries a protein epitope that the B cells in the body can recognize and create antibodies against. These specific antibodies will stick to the disease agent that carries the epitope and allow the body to clear it. The body has a specific mechanism for recognizing "self" and "not self" in the Major Histocompatibility Complex and T, B and other immune cells. The "water memory" of homeopathy proposes that placing poison in water and then performing serial dilutions until none of the original substance exists will imbue the water with the memory of the substance, allowing the water to cure you. In fact, homeopathy holds that the more dilute the solution, the more powerful the medicine. Properly prepared homeopathic solutions will not have a single molecule of the putative active agent.
For Chiropractic let's ask the American Chiropractic Association if they think chiropractors are limited to working on back pain and related issues that have been shown to be helped by chiropractic practice (and massage therapy):
Chiropractors have the training to treat a variety of non-neuromusculoskeletal conditions such as: allergies, asthma, digestive disorders, otitis media (non-suppurative) and other disorders as new research is developed. A variety of techniques, treatment and procedure are used to restore healing which will be the topic of future education releases.
Nope. They believe that subluxations can cause all sorts of general health maladies. Therefore, treating subluxations can cure these maladies. The problem with this idea is that subluxations don't exist and don't cause diseases. Therefore treating them doesn't do anything. No amount of x-rays showing that bones move in relation to one another at places called joints are going to change that notion. Now, chiropractic schools and societies have move well away from the more laughable teachings of chiropractic in recent years... but they certainly haven't moved into the realm of "evidence based medicine". Far from it.
This is one of the basic tenants of science. Proper blinding is required to eliminate researcher bias. Rarely is this evident in "hard sciences", but with noisy edge effects, researcher bias can be powerful. Researchers fool themselves this way all the time. "Cherry Picking" data is another way to fool yourself (often called 'data mining'). Many of the "healing foods" claims fall into this category, like the recent acai berry craze. Test 100 samples of different foods and you'll get 5 false positives to a p>.05. This is simple math, but most researchers overlook this on their first tour through. Followup tests will show the effect evaporate.
This set of experiments confirms human fallibility rather than pointing to quantum effects.
You don't seem to know what either homeopathy or chiropractic are.
Chiropractic practice asserts that subluxations of the spine are the root cause of disease. And that manipulating the spine can relieve these subluxations and thereby cure the disease. Diseases like cancer, liver failure, etc. This is demonstrably false. There are some areas where chiropractic can help (back pain). This help has been shown to be similar to massage therapy. Ethical practitioners have moved away from the traditional claims and basis of chiropractic and focus on muscular/skeletal problems that can be helped by massage or massage-like treatments.
Homeopathy asserts that "like cures like". Homeopathic preparations take substances that cause negative symptoms, such as fever or stomach ache, and by serial dilution remove all of that substance from the preparation, leaving just water. This preparation is then deemed to be powerful medicine for curing the symptoms that the substance causes. There is no plausible mechanism for this to work. However, it has been scientifically tested many times. In all cases it has been shown to be no different than placebo. (sometimes studies have shown some effect, but when methodological problems are addressed, the effect disappears).
Homeopathy has nothing whatever to do with immunization. Immunization involves the introduction of a concentrate of live, killed or attenuated disease causing organisms or epitopes from disease causing organisms - often along with an adjuvant cocktail - into the body. The body then recognizes these foreign bodies as "not self" and mounts an immune response. This is well understood and well documented at a cellular and molecular level. It has also been shown to be very effective in clinical trials. It was so effective in the case of smallpox that the virus was completely eradicated in the wild.
Actually,if you define "God" as "that which created all", then by definition the existence of anything is evidence of God. Sure, it may be a tautology, but a tautology is an assertion that is true under all interpretations. So he's not wrong. It may not prove much of anything, but he's not wrong.
Thomas Aquinas tackled this argument a long while ago.
Of course, this version of the ontological argument ignores the possibility that nothing created the universe. Although this possibility defies all experience within the universe, there is no logical flaw in assuming infinite regressions or spontaneous creation.
Still, the basic question of science, particularly cosmology, is "why"? We keep pushing back the unknown and finding new and interesting details about how the universe was started and how it has evolved, but there is still that nagging question of "but what happened just before that?" and "where did the energy come from" and "why does matter exist as it does?"
"I don't know" isn't so satisfying. "that is unknowable" is even less satisfying. Some people choose to call the unknown answer "God". Others think that's silly. Many more refuse to acknowledge the existence of the question. (most, but not all of those folks are in the "believer" category)
Agnosticism is a subset of atheism (theism requires an active belief). Claiming that you have proof that there is no God because in your view there is no evidence of His existence goes beyond the strictly logical. Agnostics acknowledge that there are things that cannot be disproved. Some claim not to care one way or the other. The more rigorously motivated place the null hypothesis squarely in the "there is no god" camp, waiting for evidence to the contrary.
Yeah, I used the 2 metal coat hanger dowsing rods as a kid too. The ideomotor effect is amazingly powerful. They worked with 100% accuracy detecting metal objects and wires hidden under sheets and towels, or finding buried wires. After playing with it for a few hours I figured out that it only worked if I could guess where the object was hidden. Better blinding eliminated their effectiveness. The magic was gone. I was able to debunk dowsing as a 10 year old kid using my family members, a box of wrenches and an assortment of sheets, blankets, towels and cardboard boxes. It was really cool to see James Randi doing the same experiment on TV a few years later.
As others have said, if you can detect any water, running or not, under controlled, blinded conditions using dowsing, you'll be a wealthy dude. Well, small 'w' wealthy, but a million bucks is nothing to sneeze at. Just head on over to JREF and set up the test to pick up your check.
Well, maybe not nobody... But I can't. 'Cause nobody else bought my phone so they didn't make mods for it. Well, Ok, there is one mod for my phone. Ok, 2. But they aren't Cyanogen. So I can't really modify my device...
So it is very likely that the number of smart phone users in China will exceed the entire population of the united states in very short order. When you've got a billion more people than the United States has, these kind of numbers are not all that surprising. The US is a pretty big country. So big that more than a half-million people die from heart attacks each year. This is more than the entire population of nearly 100 countries. China is so populous that they have more than 120 cities with populations exceeding 1 million. They currently have around 700 million people living in cities. That is close to the total population of europe and double the population of the USA. That's a lot of opportunities for selling cell phones.
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If anything I would say the Supreme Court and its lower branches have shown FAR more fidelity to the constitution than the other 2 branches, or the Member States, which often act as if the Constitution does not exist.
Well, yeah. But that's an extremely low hurdle. Kinda like being the fastest snail, or the best-tasting turd.
Which would mean there is an untapped market for their rejects. Replacing mandatory location-based public schools with publicly funded school vouchers would eliminate the problem of being trapped in a bad school.
Of course, this is no obstacle if you have plenty of money. You just pay for a private school without the vouchers. As a bonus, the absence of vouchers keeps the undesirable types out. As a double bonus, low-quality public schools provide a stream of poorly trained young adults that cannot gain employment above minimum wage. Helpful if you are a wealthy magnate of industry.
In my area there are only a few quality public schools. Most of the private schools cost about the same as public schools spend on a per-pupil basis, yet are widely perceived as providing a superior education. Thanks to No Child Left Behind parents could opt out of the worst public schools and receive an automatic transfer to a better school. Until this year that is. The Obama administration just exempted all of the states that failed to reach their NCLB targets from the law. So now I have to either send my kid to the failing school that we were recently zoned for, pony up for a private school (in addition to the funding I'm providing for the public schools) or move into a better school district. All so we can make sure those union jobs are not threatened. Nice. Oh, and so we can make sure that those crazy fundamentalists don't get to have their kids educated in a Christian school. Gotta make sure we roll out that boogie man to make sure to keep the partisans in line.
Wow, step away from the team red / team blue blinders. He didn't say anything about paranoid warmongering. He's talking about a Federal government freed from the bounds placed on it by its founding documents. This flag was planted firmly with the New Deal and the court-packing threats used to get approval from the Supreme Court for powers which clearly required constitutional amendments before laws could be enacted.
Fast forward to 2001 and you've got Bush pushing through the "Patriot Act", a law that wipes its tush with the constitution. A few years later you've got supposedly "liberal" president Obama doubling down on the "Patriot Act". We've got the Kelo decision saying that local governments can take your home and give it to shopping mall developers because shopping malls raise more tax revenue. Nice! We've got Gonzales v. Raich which says that the federal government can outlaw growing a plant in your own home under the commerce clause, because you theoretically could have bought or sold the plant across state lines. Of course, this decision relied on the WWII Wickard v. Filburn case that said the government can prevent you from growing food for yourself on your own land (under the theory that you would otherwise have to buy the food on the open market, which distorts interstate commerce).
Our current leadership doesn't seem to have much regard for constitutional restrictions in the area of war powers either, having attacked several countries without authorization from congress. Not that congress had enough of a sack to do anything about it. Well, other than Kucinich, who filed suit against the Libya attacks... love him or hate him, at least he stands up for what he believes in regardless of who's in power. Other than a couple of fringe cases like Kucinich and the Paul duo, Team Red and Team Blue are on the same page with regard to the irrelevance of the constitution, regardless of their rhetoric. They also seem to be on the same page with regard to your civil liberties and the war machine, regardless of their rhetoric. Oh sure, one guy over here will make a speech about gun rights, and another guy over there will make a speech about gay marriage, but when it comes down to it they all support the unfettered expansion of the powers of the federal government and only feign fealty to the constitution when it suits their purposes.
One advantage alcohol has is that it is relatively easy to control your dose - relatively easy, not completely easy. Most people binge drink when first learning and there are some dangerous situations created because of that. But if you pace your consumption, alcohol can be self limiting (you tend to pass out before drinking too much - unless you are really slamming the shots).
Heroin and cocaine have the disadvantage of requiring small controlled doses - the more pure they are, the more difficult it is to reliably deliver the correct dose. Of course, absent prohibition this problem would be easily solved. In some South American countries you can get cocaine in ground leaf form at the grocery store - used to make a morning "coffee". Apparently it makes a good wake-up drink, perhaps better than coffee. Presumably pretty much impossible to overdose on that. Heck, I hear that foreign dignitaries visiting Bolivia get a drink of mate de coca as a part of the official state dinner.
Yeah, that's a great step forward. It is extremely rare for the courts to do something like this.
As strong as the police "get out of jail free card" of qualified immunity is, the prosecutor's absolute immunity is even stronger. Last year the Supreme Court held that prosecutor's offices cannot be sued when they repeatedly violate defendant's constitutional rights and put innocent people on death row. Because judges are lawyers, they created the concept of absolute immunity for their brothers in the prosecutor's office. There is no law granting them this protection, the courts just decided that it wasn't fair for prosecutors to be liable for any actions they might take in office - like framing an innocent man and putting him on death row. What did Mel Brooks say? "It's good to be the King!"
I had the same (or similar) poster from National Geographic. It showed the three possible origins of the moon on one side and a highly detailed map of the moon on the other. Nice map.
FWIW- the three possible origins of the moon were: Budding from angular momentum, co-formation in the same location and capture of a rogue planetessimal from elsewhere in the solar system. If I recall correctly, budding and capture were considered long-shot ideas. Interesting that the currently prevailing theory was not one of the 3 possible methods of formation...
That's a great analysis. Except that when the Saudis "dump" oil, they are actually reducing the restrictions they have placed on exports that are designed artificially inflate the price of oil. They are not subsidizing the production of oil at a loss ("dumping"). OPEC exists to act as a cartel and artificially inflate the price of oil. If OPEC were western corporations rather than sovereign nations this would be an illegal price collusion.
The same goes for China's restrictions on rare earth exports. (except perhaps the lax environmental standards which could be counted as a subsidy of sorts)
Recent history is replete with examples of industries that have been wiped out in the west by "dumping" from emerging economy nations. A large chunk of the "asian tiger" boom was associated with accusations of unfair competition and dumping. You mention steel... flat panel displays were definitely shown to have been sold at a loss - with the net result that no flat panel displays are produced in the country that first developed the technology. So nation-level dumping definitely can work to eliminate competition.
But I doubt anyone can successfully argue that the US government's response to these sorts of challenges has been terribly effective. As you point out, it is pretty easy to argue the opposite - that they've been effectively terrible.
I haven't run into a cell phone jammer - as far as I know - but I do have a pirate radio station nearby that is pretty annoying. They are some kind of Hatian radio station that moves around the area. Their transmitter is low power, so it only covers a few square miles - but it is extremely noisy, so it stomps all over 3-4 stations when you are in the area. Missing the end of an interesting story on NPR because I'm driving through their broadcast zone is more annoying than I would have thought.
I can only imagine that getting knocked off of my phone would be even more annoying. Heck, I've considered firing an anti-radiation (HARM) missile at the Hatians, and I only missed out on hearing the end of "This American Life".... Cut off my wife and who knows what might happen?
Oh come on! If you leave the city and go straight north for 10 miles, you can still exercise that right in your designated "Free Speech Zone"(tm) :)
Yeah! Freedom is great!!
[this post issued from my designated 5'x5' Free Speech Zone in compliance with all applicable laws. $500 permit fee paid in full.]
"I'm no fan of some of the shit Occupy has pulled -- in particular, squatting on public land in such a way that it reduces the value the public can get out of it."
Hate to tell you but Occupy is the public. So they have every right to squat on public land. This is part of the value the public gets out of it.
Yeah! It's our land!!! .... soooo.... why don't I get to set up a Pizza and Beer tent on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? I'm the public too, and we the public would get a great deal of value from having a slice and a frothy pint while touring the mall. Oooh, and one of those lobster-roll carts too. Those things are tasty!
Or are some people more equal than others?
There are those with boots on the ground in these poverty stricken areas that disagree with your conclusion about redistribution. There was PBS documentary a few years ago about an Ethiopian expat. working in the US who returned to her home country to solve the problem of famine. In spite of many decades of billions of dollars of direct aid, there were still massive regional famines in her home country. She saw that access to capital and markets was restricted for poor rural farmers, so they were not getting fair prices for their product nor were they able to get accurate market information about which crops to grow. The issue is very complicated, tied up with government corruption, state control, rent-seeking monopolists, etc., but many international aid organizations including the UN have embraced the concept.
The basic premise is a variation on the "teach a man to fish" argument. In this case it is "give a man access to a market where he can sell the fish for a fair and transparent price" and he'll eat for a lifetime. The agricultural revolution in the west was not simply one of better farm machinery and fertilizers. It also included infrastructure like grain storage, transportation, access to capital and futures markets.
Do shut up, there's a good chap.
Libertarian principles leave us without roads, police or fire services. If you don't want to be part of a society that considers these and other things necessities for the state to provide then, well, frankly you can suck it because you'll never get your way.
I think you've conflated libertarians with anarchists. And even anarchists have plausible mechanisms for providing those services. Let's ask google... first link that comes up for "anarchist provides roads police"
I never heard of this ozarkia site before, and he seems to be talking the anarcho-capitalism subvariant of anarchists, but still, it puts the lie to your straw man arguments. (see how I went back to the GP's use of "straw man"? That's the sign of some quality entertainment right there, coming back to the theme... Shakespear did it all the time. James Cameron too... it is only a matter of time before Slashdot gets its due on the big screen.)
Libertarians and monarchists, however, are pretty darn close.
The latter think they should be ruled by a king. The former think they should be the king that rules.
That doesn't even make a damn bit of sense. Libertarians are the last folks who would want a king, even if they were appointed to the post. Let's do a quick google... ah, here's the Libertarian party platform:
Hard to reconcile that philosophy with a desire to be authoritarian rulers. In fact, monarchists and libertarians are almost entirely polar opposites, although I suppose that also depends on the nature of the monarch. I guess you could posit a benign monarch that doesn't interfere in anyone's life in any way. Not a great deal of likelihood in that, but if you are going to have a purely theoretical discussion I suppose it is something you could propose...
Libertarian, Anarchist, Minarchist..... not the same thing.
Actually, the tool is correct - the location is wrong. In this scenario they don't apply the oxy-acetylene torch to the hard drive. They apply it (or some variant) to the "suspect". XKCD covered this fairly succinctly.
Actually, I think they already have this award show. It is called the MTV movie awards. They also have categories for "best kiss", etc. See also: "Teen Choice Awards".
Apparently I am not the most eloquent bloviator on the internet. So I'll refer you to http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ for all the right reasons that both of these alternative medicine fields are based on ideas that indeed fall into the category of "bat-shit insane".
For a shortcut to the answer as to "why" for homeopathy, focus on the centesimal (C) dilution scale. a 6C homeopathic solution has the active ingredients diluted at one part in a thousand billion. Most homeopathic solutions are 10C or even 20C. Random googling turns up this explanation of a homeopathic HGH supplement. Money quote from this site:With a 10C dilution of homeopathic HGH you are over 1 Trillion times more likely to win the lottery than find a molecule of HGH in the solution.
Chiropractic is more complicated - but the core premise of chiropractic is that subluxations of the spine impinge on the flow of "life force" and thereby cause disease - so check their articles on subluxations. The fact that in blinded controlled tests chiropractors reading a slate of identical X-rays failed to identify the same "subluxations" should give pause as to the existence of any such malady in their patients. The fact that studies of similar panels of chiropractic patients by radiologists and spinal surgeons failed to identify any "subluxations" in these patients at all should give further pause. The fact that the only maladies that have been shown to be helped by chiropractic in blinded, controlled studies are those with "soft endpoints" (such as back pain) should give further pause. These are similar to the maladies that are helped by things like acupuncture, sham acupuncture and placebo. The core premise of chiropractic (that subluxations impinge on the flow of "life force" and cause all of the maladies of the body) is certainly bat-shit insane. The best of chiropractic may have arguably moved beyond this notion - but it is far from a slam dunk that even the best are anything more than quacks.
"Like cures like" has absolutely nothing whatever to do with vaccination. "Like cures like" in the context of hoemopathy means that since arsenic poisoning causes diarrhea and vomiting you can use arsenic (when properly diluted) to cure diarrhea and vomiting associated with cholera. A vaccine is not a "like". A vaccine carries a protein epitope that the B cells in the body can recognize and create antibodies against. These specific antibodies will stick to the disease agent that carries the epitope and allow the body to clear it. The body has a specific mechanism for recognizing "self" and "not self" in the Major Histocompatibility Complex and T, B and other immune cells. The "water memory" of homeopathy proposes that placing poison in water and then performing serial dilutions until none of the original substance exists will imbue the water with the memory of the substance, allowing the water to cure you. In fact, homeopathy holds that the more dilute the solution, the more powerful the medicine. Properly prepared homeopathic solutions will not have a single molecule of the putative active agent.
For Chiropractic let's ask the American Chiropractic Association if they think chiropractors are limited to working on back pain and related issues that have been shown to be helped by chiropractic practice (and massage therapy):
Nope. They believe that subluxations can cause all sorts of general health maladies. Therefore, treating subluxations can cure these maladies. The problem with this idea is that subluxations don't exist and don't cause diseases. Therefore treating them doesn't do anything. No amount of x-rays showing that bones move in relation to one another at places called joints are going to change that notion. Now, chiropractic schools and societies have move well away from the more laughable teachings of chiropractic in recent years... but they certainly haven't moved into the realm of "evidence based medicine". Far from it.
This is one of the basic tenants of science. Proper blinding is required to eliminate researcher bias. Rarely is this evident in "hard sciences", but with noisy edge effects, researcher bias can be powerful. Researchers fool themselves this way all the time. "Cherry Picking" data is another way to fool yourself (often called 'data mining'). Many of the "healing foods" claims fall into this category, like the recent acai berry craze. Test 100 samples of different foods and you'll get 5 false positives to a p>.05. This is simple math, but most researchers overlook this on their first tour through. Followup tests will show the effect evaporate.
This set of experiments confirms human fallibility rather than pointing to quantum effects.
You don't seem to know what either homeopathy or chiropractic are.
Chiropractic practice asserts that subluxations of the spine are the root cause of disease. And that manipulating the spine can relieve these subluxations and thereby cure the disease. Diseases like cancer, liver failure, etc. This is demonstrably false. There are some areas where chiropractic can help (back pain). This help has been shown to be similar to massage therapy. Ethical practitioners have moved away from the traditional claims and basis of chiropractic and focus on muscular/skeletal problems that can be helped by massage or massage-like treatments.
Homeopathy asserts that "like cures like". Homeopathic preparations take substances that cause negative symptoms, such as fever or stomach ache, and by serial dilution remove all of that substance from the preparation, leaving just water. This preparation is then deemed to be powerful medicine for curing the symptoms that the substance causes. There is no plausible mechanism for this to work. However, it has been scientifically tested many times. In all cases it has been shown to be no different than placebo. (sometimes studies have shown some effect, but when methodological problems are addressed, the effect disappears).
Homeopathy has nothing whatever to do with immunization. Immunization involves the introduction of a concentrate of live, killed or attenuated disease causing organisms or epitopes from disease causing organisms - often along with an adjuvant cocktail - into the body. The body then recognizes these foreign bodies as "not self" and mounts an immune response. This is well understood and well documented at a cellular and molecular level. It has also been shown to be very effective in clinical trials. It was so effective in the case of smallpox that the virus was completely eradicated in the wild.
Actually,if you define "God" as "that which created all", then by definition the existence of anything is evidence of God. Sure, it may be a tautology, but a tautology is an assertion that is true under all interpretations. So he's not wrong. It may not prove much of anything, but he's not wrong.
Thomas Aquinas tackled this argument a long while ago.
Of course, this version of the ontological argument ignores the possibility that nothing created the universe. Although this possibility defies all experience within the universe, there is no logical flaw in assuming infinite regressions or spontaneous creation.
Still, the basic question of science, particularly cosmology, is "why"? We keep pushing back the unknown and finding new and interesting details about how the universe was started and how it has evolved, but there is still that nagging question of "but what happened just before that?" and "where did the energy come from" and "why does matter exist as it does?"
"I don't know" isn't so satisfying. "that is unknowable" is even less satisfying. Some people choose to call the unknown answer "God". Others think that's silly. Many more refuse to acknowledge the existence of the question. (most, but not all of those folks are in the "believer" category)
Agnosticism is a subset of atheism (theism requires an active belief). Claiming that you have proof that there is no God because in your view there is no evidence of His existence goes beyond the strictly logical. Agnostics acknowledge that there are things that cannot be disproved. Some claim not to care one way or the other. The more rigorously motivated place the null hypothesis squarely in the "there is no god" camp, waiting for evidence to the contrary.
Yeah, I used the 2 metal coat hanger dowsing rods as a kid too. The ideomotor effect is amazingly powerful. They worked with 100% accuracy detecting metal objects and wires hidden under sheets and towels, or finding buried wires. After playing with it for a few hours I figured out that it only worked if I could guess where the object was hidden. Better blinding eliminated their effectiveness. The magic was gone. I was able to debunk dowsing as a 10 year old kid using my family members, a box of wrenches and an assortment of sheets, blankets, towels and cardboard boxes. It was really cool to see James Randi doing the same experiment on TV a few years later.
As others have said, if you can detect any water, running or not, under controlled, blinded conditions using dowsing, you'll be a wealthy dude. Well, small 'w' wealthy, but a million bucks is nothing to sneeze at. Just head on over to JREF and set up the test to pick up your check.
Yup... nobody can run the open-sourced Android on their cell phone.
Well, maybe not nobody... But I can't. 'Cause nobody else bought my phone so they didn't make mods for it. Well, Ok, there is one mod for my phone. Ok, 2. But they aren't Cyanogen. So I can't really modify my device...
According to this chart there are nearly 400 million mobile subscribers in China today. C-Net seems to think that number is way too low. They pegged it at over a half million 4 years ago, with 200k new subscribers daily .
So it is very likely that the number of smart phone users in China will exceed the entire population of the united states in very short order. When you've got a billion more people than the United States has, these kind of numbers are not all that surprising. The US is a pretty big country. So big that more than a half-million people die from heart attacks each year. This is more than the entire population of nearly 100 countries. China is so populous that they have more than 120 cities with populations exceeding 1 million. They currently have around 700 million people living in cities. That is close to the total population of europe and double the population of the USA. That's a lot of opportunities for selling cell phones.