Just because you want to teach your kids kooky things that contradict reality, it does not make you a "minority". You are employing a fallacy of equivocation.
I am told that a republican congressman recently confided to a pundit that he spends all his time in Washington trying to convince people he's not crazy and then he spends all his time in his district trying to convince people he is crazy. The monster the republicans have created has gotten loose.
Your observation is correct, however. The Republican party exists to forward the agenda of the rich. They don't have the numbers needed to win elections in a straightforward manner so they have to manipulate the stupid, rig elections and disenfranchise voters. Basically, they have to cheat, steal and bribe their way to power.
Also consider that democratic officials generally start from a background of community service, whereas republicans are often drafted by the party from business roles. You will rarely see a business person run as a democrat because democrats generally understand that government isn't a business and can't be run like a business.
Republicans have gone so far over the ideological cliff that they can't even compromise any more. Compromise is a foundational principal in a democracy and they revile compromise so much that the hint of working with a democrat is enough to get you run out in a primary.
The media has a great deal of blame for this situation. They have allowed the republicans cow them into reporting their insane shit with a straight face and have legitimized anti-science and anti-intellectualism. The republicans have also forced the media to portray global warming(and any other issue) into a 50/50 opinion split instead of a Fringe 1% of scientists paid for by Big Oil and Big Coal vs the rest of the legitimate scientific community. Fact checking is a thing of the past and political reporting has devolved into click bait and doing what you can to get more viewers. This means not talking seriously about policy and instead creating Punch and Judy shows.
When you hear "there is a liberal bias in the media" what's being said is there is a factual and intellectual bias in the media. Unfortunately, that is no longer true. The media have been cowed by the constant accusations of being biased and there really isn't a liberal media beyond a handful of websites and Democracy Now which doesn't run on any national network.
OK, so you need to do some research. GMO foods have saved millions of lives by making drought resistant crops available to people who would otherwise starve to death.
You are arguing from a position of ignorance. Do yourself a favor and look at what the scientists are up to. They don't want to fuck it up. They are very conscientious and test far more than you think. In fact, I bet they have a better handle on what the dangers might be than you do(since it is their field of expertise). I had a botanist walk me through one of the GMO changes that was made to corn. They basically doubled up on a protein(or enzyme I forget which) that is naturally produced in corn. This protein ends up blocking the intestines of insects. The guy(a professor of botany with a huge research lab) told me he'd have no issue eating tablespoons full of that protein because it's completely harmless to people(because we have giant guts compared to insects). You'll never even get a gram of that stuff in your system at once by eating the corn so it's benign. But even eating pounds of it aren't going to do anything to you except maybe give you the runs, but you can do that now with beer and taco bell.
It reminds me of physics teachers who do stunts that a lay person thinks, using common sense, is dangerous. These guys are very serious and very talented scientists. They know what they're doing. If you really think you're in a position to argue against the experts, you should probably consider worrying about power lines and radio waves too.
Random mutation is a lot more dangerous than specific deliberate mutation. Random mutation is old school genetic engineering that we've done for thousands of years. Now we're not throwing the dice anymore, we're being very deliberate and meticulous about the changes we're making and the testing we're doing. traditional farmers are not checking to see what kind of random mutations are happening in his field and he's not testing to see how new strains of his crops might affect people. Why don't you have the same insistence on testing for traditional genetic engineering?
It's called the natural fallacy. You see the traditional methods as natural and you have a bias toward natural VS "artificial". The problem here is two fold. One is that traditional farming isn't natural, it's artificial selection that relies on random mutations. Second is that there is nothing inherently more dangerous about something that is artificial versus something that is "natural".
I would also like to point out that there is more evidence for the safety of GMO than there is for man made global warming. If you're freaking out about GMO, then you're not only in the anti-vaxxer camp, but you're also in the anti Global warming camp.
But the good news is that you're an intelligent person and you can read the research and change your mind. That's the great thing about being scientifically minded. Changing your mind when presented with enough evidence is not a reason to be shamed but quite the opposite.
I would also like to point out that with technology like CRISPR we are going to be able to make crops that are better for you than any other crops man has ever seen. They will be more hardy and far more nutritious.... if the anti GMO religious nuts don't kill the technology because of their irrational fears. We have only begun to scratch the surface and we're getting very good results.
However, people should take a close look at how companies like Monsanto pervert IP laws in order to force farmers to pay them even if they don't use Monsanto's products and to dominate the market. Shady business practices are not a reason to kill GMO, but with a cheap and incredibly effective technology like CRISPR we could see a lot of smaller players come into the GMO market and up end Monsanto and ADM's stranglehold on the GMO industry. That's a very good thing.
It was -6 degrees Fahrenheit where I live yesterday morning. We have had a pipe freeze and burst which caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage to our home. It's a very real risk if you lose heat in your home. If I had a nest and that happened to me two weeks ago I would have definitely had burst pipes in my home since I was out of town.
I can't help but wonder if they're writing their code in Javascript.
One thing I would like to see with autonomous cars is a new set of required lights when they are in operation. This way you can easily identify the cars that are driving themselves. Also at some point autonomous cars will network together on highways and form a virtual train. I think another beacon should be required when they are in this mode.
We really need to work on infrastructure in the US and making it easier for automated vehicles to be the norm would go a long way to reducing deaths and accidents and will pave the way to flying cars. I'm not kidding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The biggest issue with flying cars has been having people pilot the damn things. We're at the point now that we can automate the piloting of all vehicles. Imagine the reduction of congestion on roads if a huge number of people took to the sky. It's not that big of a deal to me since I work from home but I remember the suffering of a long commute. Autonomous vehicles both automobile and drone would help a lot of people tremendously. It would also generate a lot of economic activity.
Antarctica or other remote pole locations would be much cheaper and have better amenities while still being out of reach of the horde of humanity.
Personally I think learning to live in space is a better answer than Mars. The resources of the asteroid belt and the moon are enough to sustain a sufficiently large and technologically advanced civilization. We need to solve some technical issues and work on generating a critical mass of people so that we can flourish in space.
Probably won't happen for a very long time. Hundreds of years perhaps.
Yes, and the event that formed the moon probably gave us a larger molten iron core. I have seen a hypothesis that the gravitational forces from the moon also help keep the iron dynamo moving in the core. I don't know how likely that is, not being a physicist, but it is an interesting idea.
Domestic terrorism in the US is mostly perpetrated by white right wing males with guns or bombs. This is a fact.
I would go on to say that it's conservatism that is the real enemy. The liberals in all of the countries in the world want to cooperate with each other and build a society. Conservatives want to fight each other. Take Iran as an example. The liberals in the US and Iran wanted to stand down and create a working thriving peace. The Conservatives in both countries want war.
There is an unaddressed pathology at play in the conservative mind.
I love Bernie but he's probably not electable and even if by some miracle he were, I don't think he would be able to bend congress to his will.
The single biggest threat is American stupidity. Americans by and large are stupid and incredibly susceptible to propaganda.
I must point out how incredible it is that the republican field is filled with creationists, war mongers, misogynists and global warming deniers and the top three candidates have never held any public office. They truly are the party of stupidity.
The idea that science and Christianity are compatible is a comfortable lie(for some). You would never accept a new vaccine because someone had a vision in a dream and then woke up and wrote down the formula. You would use the scientific method to determine if a vaccine works or not. Religion demands that you take the word of some unknown person having a revelation thousands of years ago as the truth for some pretty important questions. You are forced to not investigate and not question. This is the antithesis of science.
When you have term limits you get self serving politicians like they have in Florida. Running a government is far different than running a business and should be. You want to encourage professionalism and ethics. Certainly many career politicians are awful, but a great many are fantastic. You throw the baby out with the bathwater when you talk about severe term limits and you ignore the responsibility of the citizenry to be engaged.
In Florida you have a high turnover rate because of ridiculous term limits and because of that you get a lot of amateurs running the government who know they aren't going to be holding the office for long so they set up some nice opportunities for themselves and their friends before they go. It's a nightmare.
Sure, some term limits are reasonable. You don't want executive positions in populous areas to be able to stay indefinitely, but often rural areas have a very small number of qualified people and that makes it almost impossible to have decent government when there are only two qualified people in town to be the town chair.
Simple answers to complex problems often do a lot of harm when applied to social constructs.
I love that the judge ruled so thoroughly and swiftly. Can you imagine single term limits for judges? In many states judges have to run for office.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you want to teach your kids kooky things that contradict reality, it does not make you a "minority". You are employing a fallacy of equivocation.
If only the religious people had someplace they could take their kids to learn about their religion, like Sunday School.
Vouchers is a way to get government to pay for religious indoctrination. Sounds like something you'd find in the middle east.
I am told that a republican congressman recently confided to a pundit that he spends all his time in Washington trying to convince people he's not crazy and then he spends all his time in his district trying to convince people he is crazy. The monster the republicans have created has gotten loose.
Your observation is correct, however. The Republican party exists to forward the agenda of the rich. They don't have the numbers needed to win elections in a straightforward manner so they have to manipulate the stupid, rig elections and disenfranchise voters. Basically, they have to cheat, steal and bribe their way to power.
Also consider that democratic officials generally start from a background of community service, whereas republicans are often drafted by the party from business roles. You will rarely see a business person run as a democrat because democrats generally understand that government isn't a business and can't be run like a business.
Republicans have gone so far over the ideological cliff that they can't even compromise any more. Compromise is a foundational principal in a democracy and they revile compromise so much that the hint of working with a democrat is enough to get you run out in a primary.
The media has a great deal of blame for this situation. They have allowed the republicans cow them into reporting their insane shit with a straight face and have legitimized anti-science and anti-intellectualism. The republicans have also forced the media to portray global warming(and any other issue) into a 50/50 opinion split instead of a Fringe 1% of scientists paid for by Big Oil and Big Coal vs the rest of the legitimate scientific community. Fact checking is a thing of the past and political reporting has devolved into click bait and doing what you can to get more viewers. This means not talking seriously about policy and instead creating Punch and Judy shows.
When you hear "there is a liberal bias in the media" what's being said is there is a factual and intellectual bias in the media. Unfortunately, that is no longer true. The media have been cowed by the constant accusations of being biased and there really isn't a liberal media beyond a handful of websites and Democracy Now which doesn't run on any national network.
No need for GMO?
OK, so you need to do some research. GMO foods have saved millions of lives by making drought resistant crops available to people who would otherwise starve to death.
You are arguing from a position of ignorance. Do yourself a favor and look at what the scientists are up to. They don't want to fuck it up. They are very conscientious and test far more than you think. In fact, I bet they have a better handle on what the dangers might be than you do(since it is their field of expertise). I had a botanist walk me through one of the GMO changes that was made to corn. They basically doubled up on a protein(or enzyme I forget which) that is naturally produced in corn. This protein ends up blocking the intestines of insects. The guy(a professor of botany with a huge research lab) told me he'd have no issue eating tablespoons full of that protein because it's completely harmless to people(because we have giant guts compared to insects). You'll never even get a gram of that stuff in your system at once by eating the corn so it's benign. But even eating pounds of it aren't going to do anything to you except maybe give you the runs, but you can do that now with beer and taco bell.
It reminds me of physics teachers who do stunts that a lay person thinks, using common sense, is dangerous. These guys are very serious and very talented scientists. They know what they're doing. If you really think you're in a position to argue against the experts, you should probably consider worrying about power lines and radio waves too.
Random mutation is a lot more dangerous than specific deliberate mutation. Random mutation is old school genetic engineering that we've done for thousands of years. Now we're not throwing the dice anymore, we're being very deliberate and meticulous about the changes we're making and the testing we're doing. traditional farmers are not checking to see what kind of random mutations are happening in his field and he's not testing to see how new strains of his crops might affect people. Why don't you have the same insistence on testing for traditional genetic engineering?
It's called the natural fallacy. You see the traditional methods as natural and you have a bias toward natural VS "artificial". The problem here is two fold. One is that traditional farming isn't natural, it's artificial selection that relies on random mutations. Second is that there is nothing inherently more dangerous about something that is artificial versus something that is "natural".
https://www.geneticliteracypro...
I would also like to point out that there is more evidence for the safety of GMO than there is for man made global warming. If you're freaking out about GMO, then you're not only in the anti-vaxxer camp, but you're also in the anti Global warming camp.
But the good news is that you're an intelligent person and you can read the research and change your mind. That's the great thing about being scientifically minded. Changing your mind when presented with enough evidence is not a reason to be shamed but quite the opposite.
I would also like to point out that with technology like CRISPR we are going to be able to make crops that are better for you than any other crops man has ever seen. They will be more hardy and far more nutritious.... if the anti GMO religious nuts don't kill the technology because of their irrational fears. We have only begun to scratch the surface and we're getting very good results.
However, people should take a close look at how companies like Monsanto pervert IP laws in order to force farmers to pay them even if they don't use Monsanto's products and to dominate the market. Shady business practices are not a reason to kill GMO, but with a cheap and incredibly effective technology like CRISPR we could see a lot of smaller players come into the GMO market and up end Monsanto and ADM's stranglehold on the GMO industry. That's a very good thing.
Just replacing the thermostat is difficult to do when you're a thousand miles away on vacation. Coming home to pipes that have burst is no fun.
It was -6 degrees Fahrenheit where I live yesterday morning. We have had a pipe freeze and burst which caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage to our home. It's a very real risk if you lose heat in your home. If I had a nest and that happened to me two weeks ago I would have definitely had burst pipes in my home since I was out of town.
I can't help but wonder if they're writing their code in Javascript.
One thing I would like to see with autonomous cars is a new set of required lights when they are in operation. This way you can easily identify the cars that are driving themselves. Also at some point autonomous cars will network together on highways and form a virtual train. I think another beacon should be required when they are in this mode.
We really need to work on infrastructure in the US and making it easier for automated vehicles to be the norm would go a long way to reducing deaths and accidents and will pave the way to flying cars. I'm not kidding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The biggest issue with flying cars has been having people pilot the damn things. We're at the point now that we can automate the piloting of all vehicles. Imagine the reduction of congestion on roads if a huge number of people took to the sky. It's not that big of a deal to me since I work from home but I remember the suffering of a long commute. Autonomous vehicles both automobile and drone would help a lot of people tremendously. It would also generate a lot of economic activity.
without *failing* to bring enough food.
Those domestic terrorists can't even set up a siege without bringing enough food with them. What makes you think they're going to read?
Antarctica or other remote pole locations would be much cheaper and have better amenities while still being out of reach of the horde of humanity. Personally I think learning to live in space is a better answer than Mars. The resources of the asteroid belt and the moon are enough to sustain a sufficiently large and technologically advanced civilization. We need to solve some technical issues and work on generating a critical mass of people so that we can flourish in space. Probably won't happen for a very long time. Hundreds of years perhaps.
I thought government was the problem and republicans didn't want "big brother".
Yes, and the event that formed the moon probably gave us a larger molten iron core. I have seen a hypothesis that the gravitational forces from the moon also help keep the iron dynamo moving in the core. I don't know how likely that is, not being a physicist, but it is an interesting idea.
It's my understanding that MIT, like Columbia, will find a way to fund you if you're good enough to get in.
The idea that you need guns in order to protect yourself from the government is anachronistic and paranoid in today's modern world.
Domestic terrorism in the US is mostly perpetrated by white right wing males with guns or bombs. This is a fact.
I would go on to say that it's conservatism that is the real enemy. The liberals in all of the countries in the world want to cooperate with each other and build a society. Conservatives want to fight each other. Take Iran as an example. The liberals in the US and Iran wanted to stand down and create a working thriving peace. The Conservatives in both countries want war.
There is an unaddressed pathology at play in the conservative mind.
No, it's more like 294 mass shootings in the US in 2015 ... so far.
You can't study any plans Trump has put out there, because he hasn't put any plans out there. He's a blowhard who is running a vanity campaign.
You obviously are not listening to Bernie, but instead are listening to propaganda about Bernie.
I love Bernie but he's probably not electable and even if by some miracle he were, I don't think he would be able to bend congress to his will.
The single biggest threat is American stupidity. Americans by and large are stupid and incredibly susceptible to propaganda.
I must point out how incredible it is that the republican field is filled with creationists, war mongers, misogynists and global warming deniers and the top three candidates have never held any public office. They truly are the party of stupidity.
People who resort to hyperbole are worse than Hitler.
The idea that science and Christianity are compatible is a comfortable lie(for some). You would never accept a new vaccine because someone had a vision in a dream and then woke up and wrote down the formula. You would use the scientific method to determine if a vaccine works or not. Religion demands that you take the word of some unknown person having a revelation thousands of years ago as the truth for some pretty important questions. You are forced to not investigate and not question. This is the antithesis of science.
When you have term limits you get self serving politicians like they have in Florida. Running a government is far different than running a business and should be. You want to encourage professionalism and ethics. Certainly many career politicians are awful, but a great many are fantastic. You throw the baby out with the bathwater when you talk about severe term limits and you ignore the responsibility of the citizenry to be engaged.
In Florida you have a high turnover rate because of ridiculous term limits and because of that you get a lot of amateurs running the government who know they aren't going to be holding the office for long so they set up some nice opportunities for themselves and their friends before they go. It's a nightmare.
Sure, some term limits are reasonable. You don't want executive positions in populous areas to be able to stay indefinitely, but often rural areas have a very small number of qualified people and that makes it almost impossible to have decent government when there are only two qualified people in town to be the town chair.
Simple answers to complex problems often do a lot of harm when applied to social constructs.
I love that the judge ruled so thoroughly and swiftly. Can you imagine single term limits for judges? In many states judges have to run for office.