However, the fact that so many people were neither surprised nor outraged that the original story might have happened in the US... just indifferent... was rather depressing.
Another way of looking at it is that all the people who did get outraged completely totally swallowed the lie without much critical thought. There was no "How could this be?" reaction. That is, in and of itself, depressing in multiple ways -- the lack of critical thinking from Bush opponents and the utter lack of credibility about respecting the Constitution that this administration has built for itself. While the apathy of those who believed and didn't care was worse in my opinion, the knee-jerk ranting of others who believed was also pretty shameful.
I think this hoax showed both how divided the country is on values of freedom of thought and expression and how much damage this administration has done to its own reputation.
If atheism is a faith then teetotalism is a drug addiction, pacifism is an act of aggression, and quite frankly up is down.
I think you're confusing atheism with agnosticism. There's a difference between an absence of belief and a belief in absence. For one thing, people with an absence of belief don't passionately defend it to the point of denigrating others. You only get passionate arguments about their superiority from believers. People don't get that defense / offensive on issues that they don't have a firm stake in.
You're not expected to keep quiet about your beliefs, but in a civilized society, you're expected to treat people who believe differently from you in a civil fashion. Call it "tolerance" or "manners." There's a difference between respectful and disrespectful disagreement, and you put yourself firmly in the latter category by labeling all people who differ from you on this belief as evil. That's bigotry and elitism. Putting yourself (and people like you) above others is the root of all injustice.
It's hard to see the positives when there are so, so many well documented negatives. I would argue that religion has been a force for evil more so than good in this world, and I could make a convincing argument for that.
I'm sure you could -- mostly by focusing completely on the negatives and by ignoring all other contributing social factors to those negative events. The Crusades? Completely Catholicism's fault (ignoring that it was largely money hungry nobles that pushed it with the aid of their corrupt kinsmen in the church despite the fact that Jesus is very clear in his opposition to war and killing). Terrorism? Completely Islam's fault (ignoring that it is largely funded by discontent at the influx of foreign values and of foreign support for freedom-crushing, secularist dictators and that there are plenty of secular terrorist movements like the ETA and IRA). In the process, I'm sure you'd ignore the Red Cross and other charities that had religious origins, the fact that the people who built the welfare system in America ran on Christian moralist platforms against poverty, and the defining role of faith in the lives of Gandhi, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and a great many others who have made positive changes on the world because their faith demanded it of them.
Religion gets scapegoated a lot because religion is historically the most common social glue for defining a community. I'd recommend you read "The Lucifer Principle." You might like it since it would trod a little less on your sensibilities than mine. It's an interesting book that takes a broad overview of evolutionary sociobiology to get at the roots of mankind's pack animal mentality and its effects on society. It may open your eyes to why religion is historically commonly found at the root of conflict and persecution, but why replacing religion with any other ideology won't really solve the problem. There have been plenty of atrocities committed in the name of secular ideologies (like Stalinism, Maoism, and Fascism) without religious justification for the same exact reasons that they are committed in the name of religion -- blind love of one's community, hunger for power and status, and hatred of outsiders as evil and inferior.
If I, a secular person, said any of these things to anyone, especially a child, I would be thrown in jail. There's is clearly a line somewhere that is being crossed daily, using religion as a legal and constitutional loophole.
You're clearly high on drugs if you think a parent would be thrown in jail for teaching their child "crazy" thing just because they don't have a religion "as a loophole." For better or for worse, you can teach your child practically any nonsense you feel like. There's no special super-duper "get out of jail" free card for doing it for religious purposes. Tell them the Earth is flat. Tell them Jews are behind all of the world's ills. Hell, you can even tell them that morality is a fictional construct that has no purpose but to chain the strong to the collective will of the weak. We don't really have any sort of standards (fortunately and unfortunately) about what sort of nonsense parents can teach their children, and I can't think of any non-totalitarian society that ever has.
Prove something that is by definition unprovable? That's a derisible statement. It's even lower down on the scale than people who believe in UFO's, vampires and ghosts. At least they make attempts to subject their beliefs to science and experiment. I might not be right, but you're certainly standing on shaky ground.
*fwissssssshhhBOOOOM!!* (That's the sound of the point breaking the sound barrier over your head.)
He can't prove that God exists. You can't prove that no god exists. You're both on shaky ground, but at least he's a lot less insulting and arrogant about it.
Atheism is a faith. It can't be proven. It can't be tested. It makes claims about man's place in the universe, about existence after death, and about whether there is an inherent morality to the universe. It is a minimalist religion with no formalized moral code.
I am intolerant of injustice, and I see many people perpetuating injustice in the name of religion.
And yet, you don't seem as bothered by people perpetuating injustice who aren't doing it in the name of religion. Do you focus soley on the negative and strike out at nationalism that breeds hate against other nations, at greedy men who hurt their customers by cutting corners, or at amoral researchers that develop biological weapons? Perhaps, instead you are tempered by seeing the volunteerism that patriotism breeds, the bounty that our dollars can buy thanks to industrious capitalists, and the life saving medicines. I don't know about you, but at least I don't tar all of patriotism, capitalism, and science by the actions of their bad actors.
If you are not so strongly set against pride in one's country, entrepreneurship, and research, why must you only focus on the negatives of religion? Why do you not see the charity, the inherent motive to strive against injustice and poverty, and the drive for peace and harmony at the hearts of most religions? Why have you made up your mind that religions are evil without listening to what they have to say?
To me, the essence of bigotry is to hate something so much that you build a two-dimensional characature of it built solely on negatives, and you blindly disregard the positives as irrelevant. It is the same whether it is racism, elitism, sexism, or religious intolerance.
If you actually care about your health, stop drinking soda. Period. There's absolutely nothing good for you about it. From the phosphoric and carbonic acides to the caffeine to the overload of sugars, sodas are simply the worst thing in most American's diets.
Drink water or maybe unsweetened tea if you must have caffeine. You'll find that fast food starts tasting unbearably sweet after a while once you stop being desensitised to sugars. (Seriously, McDonalds hamburger buns and Pizza Hut pizza sauce are just nasty after a while.) Once you get used to it, you'll find that water cleanses the palate just as well as sodas used to. You'll also start dropping weight and you'll be less hungry.
Trust me. Just kick the habit. It's better for you in the long run. Also, if you do decide to drop added sugar entirely from your diet, not having sweet diets drinks makes you less tempted to eat other sweet foods.
You're far better of following the South Beach Diet or just a simple Mediterranean diet. Atkins is way too heavy on saturated fats and tells people to shun healthy carbohydrates like fruits and whole grains. He's right about reducing sugar, but all my low-carb cookbooks I bought when on the South Beach Diet contain way too many unhealthy recipes that are just loaded in saturated fat and calories. I couldn't use 90% of them.
Just use common sense and listen to what's been said by scientists for the past few years. Avoid saturated & trans fats but don't worry too much about unsaturated fats. Avoid sugars and refined starches. Eat more vegetables. Everything else is just marketing hype.
The GI measures glucose levels in the blood since insulin used by cells to stuff glucose through their cell membranes. The problems from diabetes come when glucose gets stuck in cell memberanes and becomes sorbitol. Fructose, however, is metabolized differently and has different effects on the body. Most fructose isn't converted to glucose, which is why fructose has a very low GI.
You can read more about how fructose is metabolized in the body and its potential negative effects here and here.
I wish I could buy bread at Whole Foods, but anything I buy from there just doesn't last for me. Even if I make two sandwiches every day, the loaf goes bad before I finish. I also don't like the way they freeze bread. I end up buying Nature's Own 100% Whole Wheat bread. It uses brown sugar for the sweetener (which I don't see the use of) and no corn syrup.
Truly natural, organic bread just doesn't last long enough for me. You really do lose weight cooking everything for yourself with all-natural ingredients, though I'm not sure whether it's avoiding restraunt recipes & huge portions and avoiding pre-packaged foods or whether using all-natural ingredients that has the larger effect.
I'm not sure if there's stats here about how fructose intake (and sugar intake in general) have increased, but the CDC has a site about obesity trends that has a PowerPoint presentation you can download to see how obesity has sharply risen in the past twenty years.
The site Ban Trans Fats also has the data for 1985-2001 on the web page I just linked so that you can see the maps without PowerPoint. It's insane. In 1985, the fattest states had overweight people making up 10-14% of their population. About half the states had map of incidents of type 2 diabetes from the CDC also corresponds nicely to the fattest areas of the nation.
This is a public health crisis regardless of the cause. I've read several books on diet and health, and I'm just staying away from what's generally agreed to be crap nowdays -- foods with added sugars, refined starches, and trans fats. I don't eat fast food and junk food anymore, and neither should you or anyone else you love. Avoiding sugars (outside of fruits) and starches is key to keeping hunger under control and trans fats are just bad, bad, bad for you.
Considering numerous studies voicing concerns about microwave radiation and alternating magnetic fields leading to DNA damage in rats, I'd really rather not consider pumping enough ambient energy into the surrounding environment to power a home.
Re:Your dogma's running over your karma.
on
Season's Givings?
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· Score: 1
If you're only being charitable because you believe an invisible man in the sky is watching everything you do, I must question your true motives. Are you doing what's right for right's sake, or because you think it will impress the man upstairs?
You have a very thin and superficial understanding of religion, if you believe that Christians only act good because they're "tying to impress the invisible man in the sky." What makes you think that only people who are atheists can do what is right because they believe it's right?
There are three broad categories of Christian: 1) Christians who have never thought about being anything else. 2) Christians who were raised Christian and decided to choose to stay Christian. 3) Christians who were not raised Christians but saw something in Christianity that moved them to believe.
(Note that you can unplug Christian and put in any other religion in the above categories that allows conversion. Religions that don't allow conversion drop the third type.)
The first kind of Christian is often a shallow believer who are conform to the stereotype that atheists tend to have about people who practice religions. In this modern very secular age, they're a minority (but a large one). Most Christians fall into the other two categories, and not that many people do it because they've been rattled by the old fire & brimstone speeches that used to be common in the Puritan era but because there's something there that completes them and that conforms well to their personal sense of right and wrong.
In other words, most Christians choose to be Christians (instead of other religions) because it was what they found that best matched their internal sense of right and wrong, whether that was because they were raised to think that way or because they found it later. A great many may have some sort of transformative moment that shakes them from complacency into belief, but for most real faith comes later.
Now, I'm not going to try to convert you to Christianity, but I do hope to convert you to the principles of tolerance in others. You can't go insulting the kindness of others because they are driven by different inspirations than you. That's just hateful and self-defeating. You cut off your nose to spite your face.
What motives do you have for charity? Why do you practice altruism. For Christians it's very much the same. Sure, feelings of duty or a desire to show the value of Christianity by its good deeds alone may motivate people at the start, but those who stick with it will do it because of the same feelings that come from making the world a better place that drives secular volunteers. We just like to hope that God inspired us to do it, not that God'll sure be impressed with it. Guilt or brown-nosing can't sustain the self-sacrifice needed for long-term altruism.
Also, the Salvation Army does not minister to people directly. The point of the Salvation Army is to do good deeds because they need to be done (in the eyes of Christian morality about alleviating poverty). They don't preach because it might alienate the people they're trying to help. It's not about converting people (unlike Alcoholics Anonymous). It's about doing what the Bible says is a good thing for other people even if you're not doing it because the Bible says you should. The Salvation Army frequently takes on atheists and members of other religions. They don't ask. It's just assumed that you're there to help because you want to and anything else is just a distraction to the work. There is no reason to spite them just because they're largely made up of Christians. To do so is just plain bigotry.
Your dogma's running over your karma.
on
Season's Givings?
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· Score: 1
...Or, you know, if you're not a bitter and hateful ideologue, you could just go ahead and donate to the Salvation Army anyway. They do actually do good work, ya know? It's not like charity for the Lord is any less a heartfelt act of kindness.
You should go see Brokeback Mountain instead. It's a cowboy movie, so there's none of this muscled men running around in tights nonsense. Just some tough guys on the plains.
The problem with the Three Lies is that they're too blantantly self-contradictory since the first two are defining opposites as equals, and they conteract Minitruth's goal of eliminating words from the language that allow dissidents to voice their complaints.
A more accurately chilling version of the Three Lies for today would be: War is Just Security is Freedom Convinction is Strength
I think that that more accurately captures the thrust of what the Party would want to say as well as the attitudes that are damaging America right now. War is a good thing that brings us Peace through the pursuit of Justice world-wide. There is no freedom more important than freedom from criminals, foreigners, etc. that wish to do us harm, and all other freedoms may be sacrificed for this safety. Strength of purpose comes from unquestioning conviction in your beliefs, and those who would challenge them are enemies who are trying to weaken you.
Well, if it's from China, it might be an attempt to get sensitive government info. If that's the case, then you could start by filtering down to only keystrokes from.gov &.mil domains. Then it's a matter of looking for short, 6-12 letter words separated by mouseclicks or presses of the enter of tab keys. For the good stuff, look for words that contain a non-alphabetical characters.
This won't get you into systems with multi-factor identification (like a Secure ID-based password), but it can get you the financial and personal data for government workers who might be subvertible as spies through blackmail, extorsion, or just through a simple offer to help them through a financially difficult time. (This is one reason why your credit history is an important part of getting security clearance.)
Of course, if you're just looking for financial data to rob people indiscriminately instead of something far more sinister, you can look for sections of text starting with people entering URLs for banks and so on. It's not that hard to write scripts to troll through this sort of data using simple shell scripting or Perl. As someone who works at a telecom company, let me just say that grep'ing through gigs of text data for particular strings (like a phone number in a transaction record) only takes a matter of a few minutes. It's something for which you open up Slashdot to read a single article and then come back.
No, sifting through this kind of data wouldn't be a technical or resource challenge in the slightest. Receiving and storing it would be the hardest part of the whole operation after actually writing the code to take advantage of the exploit. Extracting data from text files is monkey work.
No, not really. I still consider myself as having effectively rebutted all of your points. You were not the one to raise the issue that many reality TV contestants are actors. In fact, the only thing you said about actors was that they couldn't possibly keep up the ruse -- under the assumption that they were being filmed without retakes and that the editors of the show are too stupid to not use scenes where they shatter the illusion in the show. Heck, even if the show were 100% real it completely depends on other actors being capable of keeping up the ruse to the supposed dupes! Did you miss the bit about the guy playing a crazy Russian pilot?
Sorry to sound mean and all, but I stand by my statement that your arguments are all invalid with the possible exception of the statement about there being no evidence to the contrary since the other person I replied to muddied the evidence I responded with.
First I've heard of it. That is the game, not its mind-numbing popularity.
I'm perhaps assuming too much, but I'd guess that you're neither Japanese nor a fan of RPGs? Then, I guess you're not in the target market anymore than I am for "mind-numingly popular" FPS or sports games.
According to Condoleezza and Scott McClellan he "Acted within the law."
According to Scott McClellan and Condolezza Rice:
The White House does not condone torture (but fights for the CIA to be allowed to do it).
The White House does not comment on ongoing investigations (but the President said in a recent rare interview that he thinks Tom Delay is innocent).
Congress had access to the same intelligence that the White House had when it voted to authorize the war in Iraq (even though the CRS report proves solidly that they did not).
In short, I don't put much stock in what The Mouth of the Administration says anymore.
That is in the noise, folks. Now while I understand your ideological concerns with it, much more real concerns to me right now are getting over this damn virus, I've been sick for a week and a half, and getting home to my family for Christmas. Then I'll worry about my 1 in 590,000 chance of having been spied upon. Thanks.
It is when the people are complacent about the loss of rights for others that they trade away rights for themselves. If you don't care about our rights disappearing now, then I don't want to hear anything out of you when a party you aren't in love with is in office. Personal privacy matters, and conservatives used to be the loudest advocates for it before 9/11 punched them into submission. I miss the pre-Bush conservatives. At least they stood for something more than just hating gays and cutting taxes.
(OT: I hope whoever modded you Troll gets M2'ed Unfair. I don't agree with you, but I think you're being sincere and unoffensive.)
We all do it as humans. It's what religion is. Do this because I(tm) said so.
That's how it starts with us as kids, and unfortunately that's often how it stays with the less introspecitve among us, but one must move beyond that to have real faith. One must experience one's living faith to truly possess it. It is a deeply personal thing, but ultimately one must choose to believe in something rather than simply accept what they were raised in in my opinion. Otherwise, you're just going through the motions of faith.
Well, that's a pretty plausible rebuttal. Now I'm not sure if the show's pure sadism or a joke on the viewer. Either way, I hope I remember to look this up a couple of months from now when it's over to find out. I really do hope it's a joke on the viewer because the kind of people who would enjoy the show for its sadism NEED to be humbled.
I hate point-by-point rebuttals, but there's really no other format to address your "proof."
no professional actor could possibly act as the contestants have for that length of time and with that level (or rather lack) of intelligence.
"Cut! Take two!" What? Do you think a fake reality TV show is bound by the "one take" rule of normal reality TV shows?
a lack of financial incentive for endemol the producers.
They've gotten their ad-revenue either way once the show's over and the joke's public. It doesn't matter to them.
the viewing public backlash and effect on future reality shows
Maybe they don't particularly care for reality shows (since they're the type of production company who uses scripts and actors to go about their business). Maybe they're actually contemptuous of their audience like many of suspect the creators of most reality TV shows that came after Survivor are. Maybe they're sick of reality TV as well and would like to see it die. Who knows?
While Endemol UK has a few companies that have done a lot of reality TV, the company doing Space Cadets is Zeppotron, a comedy producer. Many of their programs have a sort of in-your-face Dadaism about them. I wouldn't put it past a company like this to pull an Andy Kauffman on the British public.
and the absolute impossibility of keeping it a secret from the most voraciously carniverous press in the world.
You only have to keep it secret from the majority of your audience for six weeks or so since it's a short-run program. Even so, it's not the tabloids that have picked up on the issue so much as the nit-picky bloggers that big media still haven't got a good grip on yet. Besides, if you muddy the rumors enough, people may watch just to find out if it's a hoax or not. I admit that my only interest in the show is related to this, and I'd be watching it right now if I could just to see which way it goes based purely on the assumption that it is a hoax on the viewers. Otherwise, I'd have no interest.
oh, and a [i]complete lack of any realistic evidence to the contrary[/i].
Other than this? Come on, two of the contestants are actors, and that's nowhere in their bios! Do you think that's just coincidence?
Or the dumb blokes who watch reality TV show actually thinking those are real people?
There's someone earlier in the comments section who linked to a blog where somebody points out that 2 of the 3 contestants are ACTORS! He even has a picture of one of them from a commercial.
Have you read the bios of the contestants on the website? They're insane!
I love the idea. This has touches of Andy Kauffman-level genius at messing with the audience for entertainment. If I had cable, I'd be watching right now to see how they let the audience know they'd been had, 'cause THAT'S going to be fun.
Well the number one through three issues I can think of is whether or not it increases tendon and ligament strength. I'm pretty sure if all it does is block myostatin that it doesn't do either. If not, then you run the risk of having muscles way too strong for your joints.
Of course you run this same risk if you leap right into weight lifting with low-rep, heavy-weight work without spending the time to strengthen these joints with high-rep, low-weight work first.
On the other hand, since this almost certainly does nothing for neuromuscular response, you'll also end up with a lot of large but mostly useless muscle mass that's untappable for you.
In other words, don't expect this to substitute for working out for anyone who's not trying to stave off the decay of their existing muscles.
Well, they don't have that "Thou shalt not kill" commandment now do they?
You think you're being clever, but pretty much every culture that ever existed for more than a handful of years (both religious and secular) has had a prohibition against killing people that are members of your group and tacit encouragement for killing people outside of it. That's pack animal behavior, and we've all got some of it in us. Even if a culture admires the values of men who turn their back on baser instincts, a culture will still be shaped by them.
Every religious practice has invented a justification for killing people even if that religion's theory (i.e. scripture) prohibits it because religions are practiced by people, and people are never perfect. Human societies seek an excuse to kill outsiders because of mankind's natural xenophobia. This is not religion's fault because most religions embody a set of ideals that shun this sort of behavior. It is the flaws of the leaders who will kill to defeat "evil" in whatever form a culture sees evil as taking.
Hypocrisy here is not limited to the religious. How many secular societies could survive without telling their members that killing others was wrong and yet how many would still endorse the persecution of people with different values? If you think you're particular philosophy is so high and mighty, you need to concentrate harder on imaging what it would be like if it was popular enough for people to only pay lip-service to.
The only solution to this is the spread of a world-view that spreads tolerance of differing views. This does not have to be an irreligious or atheist world. It should instead be a world focused more on seeking commonality than difference. It should be a world about building a bigger and more inclusive "us" rather than seeking homogeny through excluding people into "them." People will be hated for being different for only so long as we embrace ideologies that emphasize the differences and inevitably condemn them.
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However, the fact that so many people were neither surprised nor outraged that the original story might have happened in the US... just indifferent... was rather depressing.
Another way of looking at it is that all the people who did get outraged completely totally swallowed the lie without much critical thought. There was no "How could this be?" reaction. That is, in and of itself, depressing in multiple ways -- the lack of critical thinking from Bush opponents and the utter lack of credibility about respecting the Constitution that this administration has built for itself. While the apathy of those who believed and didn't care was worse in my opinion, the knee-jerk ranting of others who believed was also pretty shameful.
I think this hoax showed both how divided the country is on values of freedom of thought and expression and how much damage this administration has done to its own reputation.
If atheism is a faith then teetotalism is a drug addiction, pacifism is an act of aggression, and quite frankly up is down.
I think you're confusing atheism with agnosticism. There's a difference between an absence of belief and a belief in absence. For one thing, people with an absence of belief don't passionately defend it to the point of denigrating others. You only get passionate arguments about their superiority from believers. People don't get that defense / offensive on issues that they don't have a firm stake in.
You're not expected to keep quiet about your beliefs, but in a civilized society, you're expected to treat people who believe differently from you in a civil fashion. Call it "tolerance" or "manners." There's a difference between respectful and disrespectful disagreement, and you put yourself firmly in the latter category by labeling all people who differ from you on this belief as evil. That's bigotry and elitism. Putting yourself (and people like you) above others is the root of all injustice.
It's hard to see the positives when there are so, so many well documented negatives. I would argue that religion has been a force for evil more so than good in this world, and I could make a convincing argument for that.
I'm sure you could -- mostly by focusing completely on the negatives and by ignoring all other contributing social factors to those negative events. The Crusades? Completely Catholicism's fault (ignoring that it was largely money hungry nobles that pushed it with the aid of their corrupt kinsmen in the church despite the fact that Jesus is very clear in his opposition to war and killing). Terrorism? Completely Islam's fault (ignoring that it is largely funded by discontent at the influx of foreign values and of foreign support for freedom-crushing, secularist dictators and that there are plenty of secular terrorist movements like the ETA and IRA). In the process, I'm sure you'd ignore the Red Cross and other charities that had religious origins, the fact that the people who built the welfare system in America ran on Christian moralist platforms against poverty, and the defining role of faith in the lives of Gandhi, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and a great many others who have made positive changes on the world because their faith demanded it of them.
Religion gets scapegoated a lot because religion is historically the most common social glue for defining a community. I'd recommend you read "The Lucifer Principle." You might like it since it would trod a little less on your sensibilities than mine. It's an interesting book that takes a broad overview of evolutionary sociobiology to get at the roots of mankind's pack animal mentality and its effects on society. It may open your eyes to why religion is historically commonly found at the root of conflict and persecution, but why replacing religion with any other ideology won't really solve the problem. There have been plenty of atrocities committed in the name of secular ideologies (like Stalinism, Maoism, and Fascism) without religious justification for the same exact reasons that they are committed in the name of religion -- blind love of one's community, hunger for power and status, and hatred of outsiders as evil and inferior.
If I, a secular person, said any of these things to anyone, especially a child, I would be thrown in jail. There's is clearly a line somewhere that is being crossed daily, using religion as a legal and constitutional loophole.
You're clearly high on drugs if you think a parent would be thrown in jail for teaching their child "crazy" thing just because they don't have a religion "as a loophole." For better or for worse, you can teach your child practically any nonsense you feel like. There's no special super-duper "get out of jail" free card for doing it for religious purposes. Tell them the Earth is flat. Tell them Jews are behind all of the world's ills. Hell, you can even tell them that morality is a fictional construct that has no purpose but to chain the strong to the collective will of the weak. We don't really have any sort of standards (fortunately and unfortunately) about what sort of nonsense parents can teach their children, and I can't think of any non-totalitarian society that ever has.
Prove something that is by definition unprovable? That's a derisible statement. It's even lower down on the scale than people who believe in UFO's, vampires and ghosts. At least they make attempts to subject their beliefs to science and experiment. I might not be right, but you're certainly standing on shaky ground.
*fwissssssshhhBOOOOM!!*
(That's the sound of the point breaking the sound barrier over your head.)
He can't prove that God exists. You can't prove that no god exists. You're both on shaky ground, but at least he's a lot less insulting and arrogant about it.
Atheism is a faith. It can't be proven. It can't be tested. It makes claims about man's place in the universe, about existence after death, and about whether there is an inherent morality to the universe. It is a minimalist religion with no formalized moral code.
I am intolerant of injustice, and I see many people perpetuating injustice in the name of religion.
And yet, you don't seem as bothered by people perpetuating injustice who aren't doing it in the name of religion. Do you focus soley on the negative and strike out at nationalism that breeds hate against other nations, at greedy men who hurt their customers by cutting corners, or at amoral researchers that develop biological weapons? Perhaps, instead you are tempered by seeing the volunteerism that patriotism breeds, the bounty that our dollars can buy thanks to industrious capitalists, and the life saving medicines. I don't know about you, but at least I don't tar all of patriotism, capitalism, and science by the actions of their bad actors.
If you are not so strongly set against pride in one's country, entrepreneurship, and research, why must you only focus on the negatives of religion? Why do you not see the charity, the inherent motive to strive against injustice and poverty, and the drive for peace and harmony at the hearts of most religions? Why have you made up your mind that religions are evil without listening to what they have to say?
To me, the essence of bigotry is to hate something so much that you build a two-dimensional characature of it built solely on negatives, and you blindly disregard the positives as irrelevant. It is the same whether it is racism, elitism, sexism, or religious intolerance.
If you actually care about your health, stop drinking soda. Period. There's absolutely nothing good for you about it. From the phosphoric and carbonic acides to the caffeine to the overload of sugars, sodas are simply the worst thing in most American's diets.
Drink water or maybe unsweetened tea if you must have caffeine. You'll find that fast food starts tasting unbearably sweet after a while once you stop being desensitised to sugars. (Seriously, McDonalds hamburger buns and Pizza Hut pizza sauce are just nasty after a while.) Once you get used to it, you'll find that water cleanses the palate just as well as sodas used to. You'll also start dropping weight and you'll be less hungry.
Trust me. Just kick the habit. It's better for you in the long run. Also, if you do decide to drop added sugar entirely from your diet, not having sweet diets drinks makes you less tempted to eat other sweet foods.
You're far better of following the South Beach Diet or just a simple Mediterranean diet. Atkins is way too heavy on saturated fats and tells people to shun healthy carbohydrates like fruits and whole grains. He's right about reducing sugar, but all my low-carb cookbooks I bought when on the South Beach Diet contain way too many unhealthy recipes that are just loaded in saturated fat and calories. I couldn't use 90% of them.
Just use common sense and listen to what's been said by scientists for the past few years. Avoid saturated & trans fats but don't worry too much about unsaturated fats. Avoid sugars and refined starches. Eat more vegetables. Everything else is just marketing hype.
As per the subject, fruits have a lot less sugar than you think.
The problem is that the average American eats a lot more sugar than they used to. Americans eat an estimated 20-34 teaspoons of added sugar in the food and drink every day. While you probably shouldn't be chugging apple juice all day, it would be a far sight better for you than chugging Coke all day. However, there's no need to avoid whole fruits whatsoever. Go wild.
The GI measures glucose levels in the blood since insulin used by cells to stuff glucose through their cell membranes. The problems from diabetes come when glucose gets stuck in cell memberanes and becomes sorbitol. Fructose, however, is metabolized differently and has different effects on the body. Most fructose isn't converted to glucose, which is why fructose has a very low GI.
You can read more about how fructose is metabolized in the body and its potential negative effects here and here.
I wish I could buy bread at Whole Foods, but anything I buy from there just doesn't last for me. Even if I make two sandwiches every day, the loaf goes bad before I finish. I also don't like the way they freeze bread. I end up buying Nature's Own 100% Whole Wheat bread. It uses brown sugar for the sweetener (which I don't see the use of) and no corn syrup.
Truly natural, organic bread just doesn't last long enough for me. You really do lose weight cooking everything for yourself with all-natural ingredients, though I'm not sure whether it's avoiding restraunt recipes & huge portions and avoiding pre-packaged foods or whether using all-natural ingredients that has the larger effect.
I'm not sure if there's stats here about how fructose intake (and sugar intake in general) have increased, but the CDC has a site about obesity trends that has a PowerPoint presentation you can download to see how obesity has sharply risen in the past twenty years.
The site Ban Trans Fats also has the data for 1985-2001 on the web page I just linked so that you can see the maps without PowerPoint. It's insane. In 1985, the fattest states had overweight people making up 10-14% of their population. About half the states had map of incidents of type 2 diabetes from the CDC also corresponds nicely to the fattest areas of the nation.
This is a public health crisis regardless of the cause. I've read several books on diet and health, and I'm just staying away from what's generally agreed to be crap nowdays -- foods with added sugars, refined starches, and trans fats. I don't eat fast food and junk food anymore, and neither should you or anyone else you love. Avoiding sugars (outside of fruits) and starches is key to keeping hunger under control and trans fats are just bad, bad, bad for you.
Considering numerous studies voicing concerns about microwave radiation and alternating magnetic fields leading to DNA damage in rats, I'd really rather not consider pumping enough ambient energy into the surrounding environment to power a home.
If you're only being charitable because you believe an invisible man in the sky is watching everything you do, I must question your true motives. Are you doing what's right for right's sake, or because you think it will impress the man upstairs?
You have a very thin and superficial understanding of religion, if you believe that Christians only act good because they're "tying to impress the invisible man in the sky." What makes you think that only people who are atheists can do what is right because they believe it's right?
There are three broad categories of Christian:
1) Christians who have never thought about being anything else.
2) Christians who were raised Christian and decided to choose to stay Christian.
3) Christians who were not raised Christians but saw something in Christianity that moved them to believe.
(Note that you can unplug Christian and put in any other religion in the above categories that allows conversion. Religions that don't allow conversion drop the third type.)
The first kind of Christian is often a shallow believer who are conform to the stereotype that atheists tend to have about people who practice religions. In this modern very secular age, they're a minority (but a large one). Most Christians fall into the other two categories, and not that many people do it because they've been rattled by the old fire & brimstone speeches that used to be common in the Puritan era but because there's something there that completes them and that conforms well to their personal sense of right and wrong.
In other words, most Christians choose to be Christians (instead of other religions) because it was what they found that best matched their internal sense of right and wrong, whether that was because they were raised to think that way or because they found it later. A great many may have some sort of transformative moment that shakes them from complacency into belief, but for most real faith comes later.
Now, I'm not going to try to convert you to Christianity, but I do hope to convert you to the principles of tolerance in others. You can't go insulting the kindness of others because they are driven by different inspirations than you. That's just hateful and self-defeating. You cut off your nose to spite your face.
What motives do you have for charity? Why do you practice altruism. For Christians it's very much the same. Sure, feelings of duty or a desire to show the value of Christianity by its good deeds alone may motivate people at the start, but those who stick with it will do it because of the same feelings that come from making the world a better place that drives secular volunteers. We just like to hope that God inspired us to do it, not that God'll sure be impressed with it. Guilt or brown-nosing can't sustain the self-sacrifice needed for long-term altruism.
Also, the Salvation Army does not minister to people directly. The point of the Salvation Army is to do good deeds because they need to be done (in the eyes of Christian morality about alleviating poverty). They don't preach because it might alienate the people they're trying to help. It's not about converting people (unlike Alcoholics Anonymous). It's about doing what the Bible says is a good thing for other people even if you're not doing it because the Bible says you should. The Salvation Army frequently takes on atheists and members of other religions. They don't ask. It's just assumed that you're there to help because you want to and anything else is just a distraction to the work. There is no reason to spite them just because they're largely made up of Christians. To do so is just plain bigotry.
...Or, you know, if you're not a bitter and hateful ideologue, you could just go ahead and donate to the Salvation Army anyway. They do actually do good work, ya know? It's not like charity for the Lord is any less a heartfelt act of kindness.
You should go see Brokeback Mountain instead. It's a cowboy movie, so there's none of this muscled men running around in tights nonsense. Just some tough guys on the plains.
I've heard it's very manly.
I meant, "Conviction is Strength."
(Remember, kids: always preview before submitting.)
The problem with the Three Lies is that they're too blantantly self-contradictory since the first two are defining opposites as equals, and they conteract Minitruth's goal of eliminating words from the language that allow dissidents to voice their complaints.
A more accurately chilling version of the Three Lies for today would be:
War is Just
Security is Freedom
Convinction is Strength
I think that that more accurately captures the thrust of what the Party would want to say as well as the attitudes that are damaging America right now. War is a good thing that brings us Peace through the pursuit of Justice world-wide. There is no freedom more important than freedom from criminals, foreigners, etc. that wish to do us harm, and all other freedoms may be sacrificed for this safety. Strength of purpose comes from unquestioning conviction in your beliefs, and those who would challenge them are enemies who are trying to weaken you.
Well, if it's from China, it might be an attempt to get sensitive government info. If that's the case, then you could start by filtering down to only keystrokes from .gov & .mil domains. Then it's a matter of looking for short, 6-12 letter words separated by mouseclicks or presses of the enter of tab keys. For the good stuff, look for words that contain a non-alphabetical characters.
This won't get you into systems with multi-factor identification (like a Secure ID-based password), but it can get you the financial and personal data for government workers who might be subvertible as spies through blackmail, extorsion, or just through a simple offer to help them through a financially difficult time. (This is one reason why your credit history is an important part of getting security clearance.)
Of course, if you're just looking for financial data to rob people indiscriminately instead of something far more sinister, you can look for sections of text starting with people entering URLs for banks and so on. It's not that hard to write scripts to troll through this sort of data using simple shell scripting or Perl. As someone who works at a telecom company, let me just say that grep'ing through gigs of text data for particular strings (like a phone number in a transaction record) only takes a matter of a few minutes. It's something for which you open up Slashdot to read a single article and then come back.
No, sifting through this kind of data wouldn't be a technical or resource challenge in the slightest. Receiving and storing it would be the hardest part of the whole operation after actually writing the code to take advantage of the exploit. Extracting data from text files is monkey work.
No, not really. I still consider myself as having effectively rebutted all of your points. You were not the one to raise the issue that many reality TV contestants are actors. In fact, the only thing you said about actors was that they couldn't possibly keep up the ruse -- under the assumption that they were being filmed without retakes and that the editors of the show are too stupid to not use scenes where they shatter the illusion in the show. Heck, even if the show were 100% real it completely depends on other actors being capable of keeping up the ruse to the supposed dupes! Did you miss the bit about the guy playing a crazy Russian pilot?
Sorry to sound mean and all, but I stand by my statement that your arguments are all invalid with the possible exception of the statement about there being no evidence to the contrary since the other person I replied to muddied the evidence I responded with.
First I've heard of it. That is the game, not its mind-numbing popularity.
I'm perhaps assuming too much, but I'd guess that you're neither Japanese nor a fan of RPGs? Then, I guess you're not in the target market anymore than I am for "mind-numingly popular" FPS or sports games.
According to Scott McClellan and Condolezza Rice:
In short, I don't put much stock in what The Mouth of the Administration says anymore.
That is in the noise, folks. Now while I understand your ideological concerns with it, much more real concerns to me right now are getting over this damn virus, I've been sick for a week and a half, and getting home to my family for Christmas. Then I'll worry about my 1 in 590,000 chance of having been spied upon. Thanks.
It is when the people are complacent about the loss of rights for others that they trade away rights for themselves. If you don't care about our rights disappearing now, then I don't want to hear anything out of you when a party you aren't in love with is in office. Personal privacy matters, and conservatives used to be the loudest advocates for it before 9/11 punched them into submission. I miss the pre-Bush conservatives. At least they stood for something more than just hating gays and cutting taxes.
(OT: I hope whoever modded you Troll gets M2'ed Unfair. I don't agree with you, but I think you're being sincere and unoffensive.)
We all do it as humans. It's what religion is. Do this because I(tm) said so.
That's how it starts with us as kids, and unfortunately that's often how it stays with the less introspecitve among us, but one must move beyond that to have real faith. One must experience one's living faith to truly possess it. It is a deeply personal thing, but ultimately one must choose to believe in something rather than simply accept what they were raised in in my opinion. Otherwise, you're just going through the motions of faith.
Well, that's a pretty plausible rebuttal. Now I'm not sure if the show's pure sadism or a joke on the viewer. Either way, I hope I remember to look this up a couple of months from now when it's over to find out. I really do hope it's a joke on the viewer because the kind of people who would enjoy the show for its sadism NEED to be humbled.
I hate point-by-point rebuttals, but there's really no other format to address your "proof."
"Cut! Take two!" What? Do you think a fake reality TV show is bound by the "one take" rule of normal reality TV shows?
They've gotten their ad-revenue either way once the show's over and the joke's public. It doesn't matter to them.
Maybe they don't particularly care for reality shows (since they're the type of production company who uses scripts and actors to go about their business). Maybe they're actually contemptuous of their audience like many of suspect the creators of most reality TV shows that came after Survivor are. Maybe they're sick of reality TV as well and would like to see it die. Who knows?
While Endemol UK has a few companies that have done a lot of reality TV, the company doing Space Cadets is Zeppotron, a comedy producer. Many of their programs have a sort of in-your-face Dadaism about them. I wouldn't put it past a company like this to pull an Andy Kauffman on the British public.
You only have to keep it secret from the majority of your audience for six weeks or so since it's a short-run program. Even so, it's not the tabloids that have picked up on the issue so much as the nit-picky bloggers that big media still haven't got a good grip on yet. Besides, if you muddy the rumors enough, people may watch just to find out if it's a hoax or not. I admit that my only interest in the show is related to this, and I'd be watching it right now if I could just to see which way it goes based purely on the assumption that it is a hoax on the viewers. Otherwise, I'd have no interest.
Other than this? Come on, two of the contestants are actors, and that's nowhere in their bios! Do you think that's just coincidence?
Or the dumb blokes who watch reality TV show actually thinking those are real people?
There's someone earlier in the comments section who linked to a blog where somebody points out that 2 of the 3 contestants are ACTORS! He even has a picture of one of them from a commercial.
Have you read the bios of the contestants on the website? They're insane!
I love the idea. This has touches of Andy Kauffman-level genius at messing with the audience for entertainment. If I had cable, I'd be watching right now to see how they let the audience know they'd been had, 'cause THAT'S going to be fun.
Well the number one through three issues I can think of is whether or not it increases tendon and ligament strength. I'm pretty sure if all it does is block myostatin that it doesn't do either. If not, then you run the risk of having muscles way too strong for your joints.
Of course you run this same risk if you leap right into weight lifting with low-rep, heavy-weight work without spending the time to strengthen these joints with high-rep, low-weight work first.
On the other hand, since this almost certainly does nothing for neuromuscular response, you'll also end up with a lot of large but mostly useless muscle mass that's untappable for you.
In other words, don't expect this to substitute for working out for anyone who's not trying to stave off the decay of their existing muscles.
Well, they don't have that "Thou shalt not kill" commandment now do they?
You think you're being clever, but pretty much every culture that ever existed for more than a handful of years (both religious and secular) has had a prohibition against killing people that are members of your group and tacit encouragement for killing people outside of it. That's pack animal behavior, and we've all got some of it in us. Even if a culture admires the values of men who turn their back on baser instincts, a culture will still be shaped by them.
Every religious practice has invented a justification for killing people even if that religion's theory (i.e. scripture) prohibits it because religions are practiced by people, and people are never perfect. Human societies seek an excuse to kill outsiders because of mankind's natural xenophobia. This is not religion's fault because most religions embody a set of ideals that shun this sort of behavior. It is the flaws of the leaders who will kill to defeat "evil" in whatever form a culture sees evil as taking.
Hypocrisy here is not limited to the religious. How many secular societies could survive without telling their members that killing others was wrong and yet how many would still endorse the persecution of people with different values? If you think you're particular philosophy is so high and mighty, you need to concentrate harder on imaging what it would be like if it was popular enough for people to only pay lip-service to.
The only solution to this is the spread of a world-view that spreads tolerance of differing views. This does not have to be an irreligious or atheist world. It should instead be a world focused more on seeking commonality than difference. It should be a world about building a bigger and more inclusive "us" rather than seeking homogeny through excluding people into "them." People will be hated for being different for only so long as we embrace ideologies that emphasize the differences and inevitably condemn them.