I see no logical reason why the human species should be set apart specially from everything else, and no reason to arbitrarily define human actions as "unnatural."
Most people are unwilling to view humans as merely a part of the complex biological system that exists on the surface of the planet.
That's because the position is moronic. At best it is a self-indulgent argument about what "natural" means.
"Natural" is commonly used to mean "not man-made". The argument that "man is part of nature" invokes a different meaning -- rather than "not man-made" it means "part of the system of physical laws that govern the planet, and the universe". By that argument everything is "natural" (so long as it isn't supernatural) so the common use of "natural" no longer has any meaning.
If you're unable to handle words with different meanings based on context, just paste in "not man-made" whenever someone says "natural", and stop wasting everyone's time arguing that disposable diapers and nuclear waste are "natural".
"Natural Vs contrived?" is irrelevant for the purposes of determining whether we should worry about this. Comets have hit the earth before, and they're entirely "natural", but that doesn't mean they are benign, or that you would live through one. Abrupt climate change can, and has, caused mass extinctions. Species have survived, but survival is a very, very low standard. Are you ready to advocate watching billions of people starve to death?
Talking about "natural vs contrived" is only relevant when we want to address the problem and need to understand the root causes.
Ebay can be expensive but perhaps even more importantly, digital video projector prices are dropping *very* quickly. A quote from projectorcentral:
To put it in perspective, it might be helpful to compare the Z2 to the Sharp XV-Z9000. That DLP unit came out two years ago at a price of $11,000 and was heralded as an outstanding achievement. Like the Z2 it had 1280x720 resolution and an 800 ANSI lumen rating. And at the time people were blown away by the Z9000's dazzling contrast--rated at 1100:1. The fact is you would not be far off to think of the Z2 as better-performing Sharp Z9000 for one-fifth the price.
... with the technology changing this fast it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy on ebay. You'll save a bit on the retail cost and lose a wad on performance.
Rear projection units, frankly, don't hold a candle to the latest generation of projectors in the same price range. I spent less than a rear projector would have cost me and got a much nicer product.
Of course image quality is subjective, and there are endless other factors to consider like room lighting, room size, and so-forth.
I never watch videos in daylight hours and I never watch broadcast TV at all, so the decision was easier. But depending on the room it can be quite cheap to control the light with some blackout cloth.
I also didn't want an enormous box in the room. The projector is very discrete and not in the way of anything. With young children it's almost impossible to make it to a theater any more, but with a beautiful projection on a 100" screen I don't feel the need to.
If you don't mind going extinct, like the dinosaur you mention, then there's no point in harping on it.
If it actually bothers you that abrupt climate change will extinguish much life on the planet, then it is worth harping on.
One of the first things to go would be coastal lands, which includes most of our farm land. Mass starvation is a likely result. And note that the land doesn't have to be under water. Very slight changes in sea level can push the fresh/salt water boundary back for miles, which makes the land useless.
You may be making less money but end up better off or the same as you are now.
This is true if you only consider cost-of-living. It's not true if you consider how much wealth you will aquire. You can work for 30 years on the West coast of the US and pay off a mortgage on a half million dollar house. You can work 30 years someplace else, earning less money, and own a less expensive house. Your lifestyle may be similar, but at the end of 30 years on the West coast you own something worth half a million dollars. If you're making less money someplace else you end up owning something of less value.
The low income route only makes sense if you're committed to living there forever and will never need to pull your money out and take it somewhere else.
A biblical scholar may have made these predictions (although you provided no references) but as human beings we are very prone to making mistakes. Actually if you read the Bible you'll find that none of the above examples are even mentioned.
This is largely a restatement of what I just said. I'm not sure what your point is. I could theorize that my liver is made of cheese and it would not be contradicted by any of these examples, either. That doesn't mean it's true. The test of a theory is whether it can make positive predictions. In the case of the "liver made of cheese" theory and the cosmology of the Bible, the answer is "no, it can't." Or, to be as generous as possible, "no, it hasn't."
Christianity has always survived by reinterpreting the source material. Be it the motions of the planets, the age of the earth, catastrophism, the role of special creation in the modern world, the possible existance of life on other planets, the immutability of species, or what-have-you, Christians merely proclaim that all of their previous interpretations were wrong, but they know the truth, now.
They will pretty much always be able to do this because virtually all of the information in the Bible is heavily dependent on interpretation. Much like a cold-reader, if you provide vague enough information it can be made to fit any data.
A more interesting question is "How many predictions about the universe, founded upon readings of the Bible, have turned out to be true?" The measure of a theory, after all, is how well it makes predictions. In this case the answer is "few, or none". Biblical scholars did predict that the Earth was the center of the universe, that the Sun orbited the Earth, that the surface of the Earth was static (not shaped by plate tectonics and erosion), that Earth was the only home of life (and, indeed, the only planet), that species were static, that the Earth (and the universe) were a few thousand years old, and on, and on, and on.
They have been consistently wrong. If this were an issue of science instead of faith the Christian cosmology would be dead -- its predictive value is zero.
But of course all scientific knowledge is tentative. Even with overwhelming evidence the strongest statement a scientist will make is that a particular theory is the best fit to the data, or that a particular theory is a very poor fit to the data. Faith, then, trumps all. If you believe in a particular story just because you like it you can always wedge yourself into that space in the philosophy of science, however infinitesimal, that allows that our understanding may be wrong.
The 2000 vote was the problem it was because the vote was inside the margin of error, thus no amount of fiddling, recounting, whatever, could possibly resolve the issue.
This isn't true. The notion of a recount is a misnomer. The machines have a fairly high ballot rejection rate. In particular, if the voter punches part of the ballot incorrectly, the whole thing is skipped by the machines. By (state) law the ballot is supposed to be counted if the intent of the voter is clear. So parts of the ballot that are marked correctly are supposed to be counted, but they have to be counted by hand.
This process was spun in the media as recounting, when in fact the ballots had never been counted. This is the process that was blocked by rioting Republicans flown in by the party. The rejection rate is higher in lower income areas in part because the machines are of lower quality, meaning that without a hand count votes from lower income areas count for less (more of them dropped by the machines).
but I really cringe at suggestions that the government take all defense spending and
You've really lost touch with the size of our defense spending if you think it would take all of it to address these issues. Putting just a few percent into domestic issues would dramatically increase the funding they are getting today. That's why defense spending continues to be such a contentious issue: if we spared just the loose change from the bags of money we send to the Pentagon we could fully fund practically every domestic issue on the table. Energy independence, better education, affordable health care -- all of it.
I found RotK borderline unwatchable, because it was so focused on the battles. Three hours of cgi, and the actors got about a dozen lines apiece. Oh, and "24, 25, 26" doesn't count as dialog. This is a movie? I found TTT theatrical relase to be unwatchable, too -- more like a music video than a movie. The extended relase was better. I doubt they can extend RotK as much, though. It's so damn long already.
By the end of the battle for Minas Tirith I was cringing with the thought "lord, they have another battle to render." It was a struggle to sit through the whole thing -- not because of the length, but because of the unceasing battle cgi. It's like staring at a screen saver for three hours.
I feel a bit sorry for the actors. Many of them did great jobs, but there's so little of them on-screen it seems unlikely that they will get much recognition for their work.
IMHO, Sean Bean did the most amazing work for the movies as a whole. His performance was flawless. Too bad his character died early in the story.
You could cut all of the cgi, leave just the moving performances like Bean's, and arguably have a more watchable set of movies.
> With the exception of the Microsoft handslapping, the judicial system has been pretty fair and removed from Govt politics.
After the last decade I have to disagree with that. The Federalist Society judiciary have been deeply and profoundly partisan -- involving themselves in the seamiest of political intrigues, and not always being completely honest about it when called on to preside over cases directly related in their antics. And the situation is only getting worse. These people are being consistently advanced in the judicial system. They are growing and gaining power.
> I don't deny that conservatives want to lower taxes for the rich. What always gets left out is that we also want to lower taxes for the middle class, the poor, and whatever other groups you can name.
Then why don't you ever do it? Bush's "tax cuts" have been more than overtaken by tax increases at the state level to make up for funding they used to get from the fed. Plus Bush passed a bunch of unfunded mandates, like NCLB, requiring states to increases taxes even more.
So the under $200,000/year crowd is paying higher taxes under Bush's "tax cuts", and watching the economy go down the shitter because Bush has no economic plan.
What's more, Clinton streamlined the federal government, making it dramatically smaller -- the smallest federal workforce in 30-odd years -- while increasing social benefit programs (loans for education, etc.). Bush is bloating it back up again.
Bush and the neocons are idealogues. They spout a lot of lines, but they don't know the first thing about policy, and their policies never further the values they claim to hold. They only serve special interests.
I've seen George Will lie about Clark lying. Will cut-n-paste the transcript from the June 15th Meet the Press to construct statements Clark never said. I've seen Rush repeat Will's lie in the WSJ. I haven't seen Clark lie.
The transcript for the Meet the Press episode is available online.
... the difference being that Clinton didn't fight because he was morally opposed to the war, and Bush didn't fight because he felt serving his country was beneath him. He's not of that class, you know.
There's hardly a Vietnam veteran in politics today that hasn't been smeared by draft-dodging right-wingers.
> a) The troops were not delayed, do some reading up on the matter. They were not scheduled to arrive until later in the week, but favorable conditions allowed them to arrive ahead of time.
You know, this argument makes no sense. Their scheduled arrival time is irrelevant to whether they were made to wait for the staging of this event.
Errr.... hey clueboy, all of the 'Gore lies' were manufactured by the press. His statements on Love Canal, working on a farm, Love Story, and etc. were all true. He was widely misquoted by right-wing liars to give the impression that he was exaggerating.
The fixing of consumer prices only affected who was being robbed. So the distributor ate it, instead of customers. That didn't contribute to the phony shortage.
> You are on the virge of enlightenment: the anti-big-government, anti-careless-spending rhetoric isn't associated with a political view, it's associated with being the party out of power.
When Clinton was in office he championed smaller, more efficient government at the same time that he increased social services. Federal employment rolls went DOWN by 200k people (its lowest level in 30 year), services went UP, and unemployment went DOWN.
> No! The republicans and the democrats is one party with two names!
That sounded plausible until W took office and we learned just how quickly a bunch of idealogues can plow this country into the ground. Borrowing a metaphor, W is so far to the right he's in the break-down lane. If you can't tell him from Clinton, you are in a bad way.
It's time for anyone who believes in freedom and representative government to get involved in the Democratic Party. Really. Go to the meetings. Volunteer. It's your responsibility.
If you really want to vote Green, work inside the Democratic Party in support of instant run-off or Condorcet voting, and vote Green after it passes. We have to pull together NOW. The alternative is to lose your country.
Solar power, however, isn't. There is a lot of promising research in the field, and higher efficiency panels are possible (over 20%, not near 100%). But research continues on shoe-string budgets.
Some rough numbers:
Yearly direct oil industry subsidies in the mid 90's: $11.9 billion... including Persian Gulf defense prior to W: $35.2 billion
W's proposed budget for developing alternatives: solar: $42.9 million, wind: $20.5 million
These numbers were found with google and shouldn't be taken as gospel truth, though I believe they are roughly accurate.
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I see no logical reason why the human species should be set apart specially from everything else, and no reason to arbitrarily define human actions as "unnatural."
Most people are unwilling to view humans as merely a part of the complex biological system that exists on the surface of the planet.
That's because the position is moronic. At best it is a self-indulgent argument about what "natural" means.
"Natural" is commonly used to mean "not man-made". The argument that "man is part of nature" invokes a different meaning -- rather than "not man-made" it means "part of the system of physical laws that govern the planet, and the universe". By that argument everything is "natural" (so long as it isn't supernatural) so the common use of "natural" no longer has any meaning.
If you're unable to handle words with different meanings based on context, just paste in "not man-made" whenever someone says "natural", and stop wasting everyone's time arguing that disposable diapers and nuclear waste are "natural".
"Natural Vs contrived?" is irrelevant for the purposes of determining whether we should worry about this. Comets have hit the earth before, and they're entirely "natural", but that doesn't mean they are benign, or that you would live through one. Abrupt climate change can, and has, caused mass extinctions. Species have survived, but survival is a very, very low standard. Are you ready to advocate watching billions of people starve to death?
Talking about "natural vs contrived" is only relevant when we want to address the problem and need to understand the root causes.
To put it in perspective, it might be helpful to compare the Z2 to the Sharp XV-Z9000. That DLP unit came out two years ago at a price of $11,000 and was heralded as an outstanding achievement. Like the Z2 it had 1280x720 resolution and an 800 ANSI lumen rating. And at the time people were blown away by the Z9000's dazzling contrast--rated at 1100:1. The fact is you would not be far off to think of the Z2 as better-performing Sharp Z9000 for one-fifth the price.
... with the technology changing this fast it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy on ebay. You'll save a bit on the retail cost and lose a wad on performance.
Rear projection units, frankly, don't hold a candle to the latest generation of projectors in the same price range. I spent less than a rear projector would have cost me and got a much nicer product.
Of course image quality is subjective, and there are endless other factors to consider like room lighting, room size, and so-forth.
I never watch videos in daylight hours and I never watch broadcast TV at all, so the decision was easier. But depending on the room it can be quite cheap to control the light with some blackout cloth.
I also didn't want an enormous box in the room. The projector is very discrete and not in the way of anything. With young children it's almost impossible to make it to a theater any more, but with a beautiful projection on a 100" screen I don't feel the need to.
Why are we harping so much on this?
If you don't mind going extinct, like the dinosaur you mention, then there's no point in harping on it.
If it actually bothers you that abrupt climate change will extinguish much life on the planet, then it is worth harping on.
One of the first things to go would be coastal lands, which includes most of our farm land. Mass starvation is a likely result. And note that the land doesn't have to be under water. Very slight changes in sea level can push the fresh/salt water boundary back for miles, which makes the land useless.
You may be making less money but end up better off or the same as you are now.
This is true if you only consider cost-of-living. It's not true if you consider how much wealth you will aquire. You can work for 30 years on the West coast of the US and pay off a mortgage on a half million dollar house. You can work 30 years someplace else, earning less money, and own a less expensive house. Your lifestyle may be similar, but at the end of 30 years on the West coast you own something worth half a million dollars. If you're making less money someplace else you end up owning something of less value.
The low income route only makes sense if you're committed to living there forever and will never need to pull your money out and take it somewhere else.
A biblical scholar may have made these predictions (although you provided no references) but as human beings we are very prone to making mistakes. Actually if you read the Bible you'll find that none of the above examples are even mentioned.
This is largely a restatement of what I just said. I'm not sure what your point is. I could theorize that my liver is made of cheese and it would not be contradicted by any of these examples, either. That doesn't mean it's true. The test of a theory is whether it can make positive predictions. In the case of the "liver made of cheese" theory and the cosmology of the Bible, the answer is "no, it can't." Or, to be as generous as possible, "no, it hasn't."
How can any religion survive that revelation?
Christianity has always survived by reinterpreting the source material. Be it the motions of the planets, the age of the earth, catastrophism, the role of special creation in the modern world, the possible existance of life on other planets, the immutability of species, or what-have-you, Christians merely proclaim that all of their previous interpretations were wrong, but they know the truth, now.
They will pretty much always be able to do this because virtually all of the information in the Bible is heavily dependent on interpretation. Much like a cold-reader, if you provide vague enough information it can be made to fit any data.
A more interesting question is "How many predictions about the universe, founded upon readings of the Bible, have turned out to be true?" The measure of a theory, after all, is how well it makes predictions. In this case the answer is "few, or none". Biblical scholars did predict that the Earth was the center of the universe, that the Sun orbited the Earth, that the surface of the Earth was static (not shaped by plate tectonics and erosion), that Earth was the only home of life (and, indeed, the only planet), that species were static, that the Earth (and the universe) were a few thousand years old, and on, and on, and on.
They have been consistently wrong. If this were an issue of science instead of faith the Christian cosmology would be dead -- its predictive value is zero.
But of course all scientific knowledge is tentative. Even with overwhelming evidence the strongest statement a scientist will make is that a particular theory is the best fit to the data, or that a particular theory is a very poor fit to the data. Faith, then, trumps all. If you believe in a particular story just because you like it you can always wedge yourself into that space in the philosophy of science, however infinitesimal, that allows that our understanding may be wrong.
If you really refuse to believe that, I'll dig up some Soviet GDP numbers and military spending as a fraction thereof.
Please do. I've seen reviews of the numbers before, and they showed the USSR made little or no change in military spending in response to Reagan.
The 2000 vote was the problem it was because the vote was inside the margin of error, thus no amount of fiddling, recounting, whatever, could possibly resolve the issue.
This isn't true. The notion of a recount is a misnomer. The machines have a fairly high ballot rejection rate. In particular, if the voter punches part of the ballot incorrectly, the whole thing is skipped by the machines. By (state) law the ballot is supposed to be counted if the intent of the voter is clear. So parts of the ballot that are marked correctly are supposed to be counted, but they have to be counted by hand.
This process was spun in the media as recounting, when in fact the ballots had never been counted. This is the process that was blocked by rioting Republicans flown in by the party. The rejection rate is higher in lower income areas in part because the machines are of lower quality, meaning that without a hand count votes from lower income areas count for less (more of them dropped by the machines).
The election in Florida wasn't really that close.
but I really cringe at suggestions that the government take all defense spending and
You've really lost touch with the size of our defense spending if you think it would take all of it to address these issues. Putting just a few percent into domestic issues would dramatically increase the funding they are getting today. That's why defense spending continues to be such a contentious issue: if we spared just the loose change from the bags of money we send to the Pentagon we could fully fund practically every domestic issue on the table. Energy independence, better education, affordable health care -- all of it.
... at least, not until a fly lands in the printer works. Damn fly was probably a terrorist, anyway.
I found RotK borderline unwatchable, because it was so focused on the battles. Three hours of cgi, and the actors got about a dozen lines apiece. Oh, and "24, 25, 26" doesn't count as dialog. This is a movie? I found TTT theatrical relase to be unwatchable, too -- more like a music video than a movie. The extended relase was better. I doubt they can extend RotK as much, though. It's so damn long already.
By the end of the battle for Minas Tirith I was cringing with the thought "lord, they have another battle to render." It was a struggle to sit through the whole thing -- not because of the length, but because of the unceasing battle cgi. It's like staring at a screen saver for three hours.
I feel a bit sorry for the actors. Many of them did great jobs, but there's so little of them on-screen it seems unlikely that they will get much recognition for their work.
IMHO, Sean Bean did the most amazing work for the movies as a whole. His performance was flawless. Too bad his character died early in the story.
You could cut all of the cgi, leave just the moving performances like Bean's, and arguably have a more watchable set of movies.
> With the exception of the Microsoft handslapping, the judicial system has been pretty fair and removed from Govt politics.
After the last decade I have to disagree with that. The Federalist Society judiciary have been deeply and profoundly partisan -- involving themselves in the seamiest of political intrigues, and not always being completely honest about it when called on to preside over cases directly related in their antics. And the situation is only getting worse. These people are being consistently advanced in the judicial system. They are growing and gaining power.
> I don't deny that conservatives want to lower taxes for the rich. What always gets left out is that we also want to lower taxes for the middle class, the poor, and whatever other groups you can name.
Then why don't you ever do it? Bush's "tax cuts" have been more than overtaken by tax increases at the state level to make up for funding they used to get from the fed. Plus Bush passed a bunch of unfunded mandates, like NCLB, requiring states to increases taxes even more.
So the under $200,000/year crowd is paying higher taxes under Bush's "tax cuts", and watching the economy go down the shitter because Bush has no economic plan.
What's more, Clinton streamlined the federal government, making it dramatically smaller -- the smallest federal workforce in 30-odd years -- while increasing social benefit programs (loans for education, etc.). Bush is bloating it back up again.
Bush and the neocons are idealogues. They spout a lot of lines, but they don't know the first thing about policy, and their policies never further the values they claim to hold. They only serve special interests.
So tell me, what has Clark lied about?
I've seen George Will lie about Clark lying. Will cut-n-paste the transcript from the June 15th Meet the Press to construct statements Clark never said. I've seen Rush repeat Will's lie in the WSJ. I haven't seen Clark lie.
The transcript for the Meet the Press episode is available online.
http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/927000.asp?cp1=1
... the difference being that Clinton didn't fight because he was morally opposed to the war, and Bush didn't fight because he felt serving his country was beneath him. He's not of that class, you know.
There's hardly a Vietnam veteran in politics today that hasn't been smeared by draft-dodging right-wingers.
> a) The troops were not delayed, do some reading up on the matter. They were not scheduled to arrive until later in the week, but favorable conditions allowed them to arrive ahead of time.
You know, this argument makes no sense. Their scheduled arrival time is irrelevant to whether they were made to wait for the staging of this event.
Errr.... hey clueboy, all of the 'Gore lies' were manufactured by the press. His statements on Love Canal, working on a farm, Love Story, and etc. were all true. He was widely misquoted by right-wing liars to give the impression that he was exaggerating.
The fixing of consumer prices only affected who was being robbed. So the distributor ate it, instead of customers. That didn't contribute to the phony shortage.
> You are on the virge of enlightenment: the anti-big-government, anti-careless-spending rhetoric isn't associated with a political view, it's associated with being the party out of power.
When Clinton was in office he championed smaller, more efficient government at the same time that he increased social services. Federal employment rolls went DOWN by 200k people (its lowest level in 30 year), services went UP, and unemployment went DOWN.
So I don't buy this "party out of power" line.
> John Ashcroft has been touring to gain popular support for Patriot Act II.
Jim Hightower speaking on the subject of the Bush administration using John Ashcroft to gain popular support:
"John Ashcroft?! Was Bella Lugosi not available?"
... and Elvis' brain was "arguably" stolen by space aliens and is being used to telepathically control George W. Bush in the Whitehouse.
On the other hand, if we set our standard of evidence somewhere above zero, none of these proposals are arguable.
> No! The republicans and the democrats is one party with two names!
That sounded plausible until W took office and we learned just how quickly a bunch of idealogues can plow this country into the ground. Borrowing a metaphor, W is so far to the right he's in the break-down lane. If you can't tell him from Clinton, you are in a bad way.
It's time for anyone who believes in freedom and representative government to get involved in the Democratic Party. Really. Go to the meetings. Volunteer. It's your responsibility.
If you really want to vote Green, work inside the Democratic Party in support of instant run-off or Condorcet voting, and vote Green after it passes. We have to pull together NOW. The alternative is to lose your country.
This article is clearly a pie-in-the-sky dream.
... including Persian Gulf defense prior to W: $35.2 billion
Solar power, however, isn't. There is a lot of promising research in the field, and higher efficiency panels are possible (over 20%, not near 100%). But research continues on shoe-string budgets.
Some rough numbers:
Yearly direct oil industry subsidies in the mid 90's: $11.9 billion
W's proposed budget for developing alternatives:
solar: $42.9 million, wind: $20.5 million
These numbers were found with google and shouldn't be taken as gospel truth, though I believe they are roughly accurate.