By the time Bomber Command was bombing Germany, the autobahn had become a military weakness- we were using it to move our OWN troops into Germany in an invasion. Sometimes military targets are actually valuable to both sides.
Nobody ever said Eisenhower was rational. Or, for that matter, and to Godwin the argument, Hitler (though, I suppose in this case, since the Autobahn is Hitler's one POSITIVE legacy, is it really a Godwin? Eisenhower thought the concept was good enough to steal, and so we have the Interstate Highway system which enabled those trucks to replace trains which has to pay for not only shipping efficiency, but the cost of building and maintaining the rails as well).
The effects of a handheld Higgs Generator are to reduce or increase or decrease the mass of subatomic particles. Done precisely enough, you could change not only the neutron mass of a given element but *also* it's number of electrons- which would effectively transmute it into a different element.
"Well, create something. Whether it's new arable land, or, for example, a bunch of stuff that's not land, arable or otherwise, is another matter."
That's an engineering problem, not a physics problem precisely.
"And perhaps the atoms in a bunch of other things in the vicinity, including your body. I'll leave it to actual particle physicists to indicate whether you could zero out the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field in a limited region of space, and, if so, what would happen if you did."
I didn't say you wouldn't have to be careful with the device- or that it wouldn't have other uses as well, even potentially weaponized ones.
Thanks for just justifying in my mind a switch from buiy-American-Fossil-Fueled Ford to Chinese Zap Zebra- I'm funding the Chinese either way, and the Zap Zebra I can potentially fuel on water (hydropower).
The reason for that is military strategy. Rails only go where the rails are, trucks and tanks go anywhere. The civilian usage just followed the subsidy.
Not too terribly expensive. You don't exactly have to have a high capacity stick to do this- looks like you can pick up 32MB sticks for approximately 89 cents each in bulk and that's enough to put a "phone home and FTP up a hard drive" application on autorun under a cute cat video.
Because without a God, all you have is random events without causes happening for no reason at all, at which point any sort of attempt at prediction or discovering laws is as pointless as following Allah.
Well, given the fact that eventually, a handheld Higgs generator could allow you to take a patch of rocky desert, disintegrate the rocks, and transmute some of the larger atomic numbers into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (which are pretty light elements by comparison and certainly by reducing the mass of the higher elements you can make the lower ones), and create *new arable land* vs. turning the same generator on your fellow human being to make him not only disappear, but all of the atoms in his body whiz off in different directions at the speed of light; I'd say like anything else science has discovered, it is a tool that can be used for good OR evil.
In Catholicism, miracles are not necessarily inexplicable. They're just fortunate coincidences that sometimes we don't understand the mechanism behind (supernatural- that is, beyond our current understanding of the natural universe). This is NOT equal to "we will never understand so don't research it", and lodestone is still miraculous to the shepherd who uses it to retrieve his crook, and peacock meat is still miraculous to the hungry traveler using it in the Sahara Desert as a preservative- despite science's ability to explain both.
Of course, it took Catholicism to suggest that a third leg to the three legged stool of revelation was observation of the natural universe.
Yes. Any Axiomatic Definition is equivalent to what Religions are talking about when they say "faith". If you use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of religions, then it is equally correct to use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of Mathematics, or Geology, or Biology, or Cosmology, or Physics. There is good reason why it took Judeo-Christianity, after 8000 years of trying other religions, to develop the scientific method. While the Greeks did science first, and while the Islamics more recently took a stab at it, ultimately the theology that held Jupiter and Allah to be beyond human reason also defeated the scientific method, because you can't trust a universe where God can Change His Mind!
I'm not so sure about the "thought through better" part (opinions differ and if anything is truly subjective, it's likes and dislikes), but you've pretty much described the Catholic view of God otherwise.
It's the only useful thing his presidency accomplished- running a huge psyops under the name of Star Wars to push the Russians into a weapons race for weapons that could not possibly ever work.
He won- but only just barely. It is arguable that the crash of 2008 is directly tied to his economic theories.
With the Higgs Boson though, quantum disintegrators might be the next step. A lot less messy than the plague and a LOT more surgical- all you need to do is block the mass of all the atoms in a given area, and people just turn into smoke that whizzes away at the speed of light.
The Iraq war is a great example of why consequentialism is a heresy. YES, we went in with noble aspirations (though I think the timing was a bit off, seeing as how bin Laden would evade us for another 7-8 years as a result). But we failed to take into account *what the Iraqis really wanted* which is NOTHING like the government we gave them. And that's why it failed- because good intentions aren't enough. To switch from Catholicism to Buddhism for a second, you've got to have ALL eight rights of the eightfold path to be successful (I was once known as a Zen Catholic as well)- right intention alone isn't enough.
That's why I kind of disagree with the more modern just war theories, even though they're taught by the church, and go back to the Augustinian instead: A Just War has three marks- you are defending something you love, you are fighting in your own territory (and stop when you get to the border, invasion is little more than revenge), and you are showing love for your enemy by giving him the simple human dignity of looking in his eyes when you kill him.
Almost no modern warfare has all three of those marks, and thus, almost no modern warfare can become just under the Augustinian model, which is why we invented the more complex just war theory, which oddly enough, STILL almost no modern warfare fits.
A huge part of the reason for this is something that the atheist George Orwell noted and used in his novels (yes, I did find something good in atheism though this is a bit of a negative): To win a war, you have to become as unjust as the enemy you are facing. If you're not willing to do that, you will not win. I say this is the reason why the Christeros lost the Mexican Revolution.
I find that IT skills are very much a bell curve. You can be at the leading edge or the trailing edge and your skills are worth more. Be in the middle with the most popular, your skills are worth far less.
Yep, I've read all of those- and I agree that Crisis Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, and America Magazine are all written by dissenting Cafeteria Catholics (though Crisis is an interesting foil in that list, for it dissents in a fiscally liberal, rather than sexually liberal, methodology, and thus has less to argue with traditional Catholicism, because fiscal libertarians are what I call "nice atheists" in that they leave their neighbor alone, unlike the New Atheists of the Freedom From Religion Foundation).
I've read most of Thomas Wood's stuff, along with Hayek and Mises who he introduced me to. But you see, that is the problem- both Hayek and Mises were atheistic materialists.
Thomas E. Woods, when Pope Benedict XVI wrote _Caritas In Veritate_ in his review admitted outright that he is a dissenter on the subject of Catholic Social Justice, because it isn't practical from a materialist point of view. I reject atheist materialism as immoral, and thus, I am forced to reject Thomas E. Woods as an authority on the subject of economics.
That's interesting, I have never seen that site before, though I've long wanted such a thing, is there one that reviews blogs as well as books?
Austrian Libertarians, like Soviet Socialists, approach economics entirely from a Atheist/materialist point of view. Their only purpose is to prevent rebellion while enabling a central group or organization to centralize as many resources as possible. Thus, many of their moral claims are rather dubious at best; downright murderous at worst. The only real difference is in who is in charge of the collective- politician con artists or C-level executive con artists. For the Soviets, all the real wealth will concentrate into the control and hands of the politicians; for the Austrians all the real wealth will concentrate into the control and the hands of the business people; and neither group cares one whit who they hurt to achieve this.
BTW, I should note that no right is without limit; by an absolute right of private property I mean that every citizen should be granted enough productive property with which to feed his family, which cannot be bought, sold, taxed, or gambled away, that is his from conception until natural death.
Whether he uses that property or not, and what profit he gains from it, is up to him, his God-given talents, and the work he puts in.
"And, how to you reconcile an absolute right to private property with forced taxation?"
Paying for services rendered. Including rent on money, which is properly owned by the government under the American system thanks to the 1873 Supreme Court Interpretation of Article I Sections 8 & 10, which gives Congress (and therefore the FED) a monopoly on the ownership of money.
Beyond that- the concept of the common good, for which the free market has shown itself to be absolutely dismal at providing for.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time Bomber Command was bombing Germany, the autobahn had become a military weakness- we were using it to move our OWN troops into Germany in an invasion. Sometimes military targets are actually valuable to both sides.
Nobody ever said Eisenhower was rational. Or, for that matter, and to Godwin the argument, Hitler (though, I suppose in this case, since the Autobahn is Hitler's one POSITIVE legacy, is it really a Godwin? Eisenhower thought the concept was good enough to steal, and so we have the Interstate Highway system which enabled those trucks to replace trains which has to pay for not only shipping efficiency, but the cost of building and maintaining the rails as well).
The effects of a handheld Higgs Generator are to reduce or increase or decrease the mass of subatomic particles. Done precisely enough, you could change not only the neutron mass of a given element but *also* it's number of electrons- which would effectively transmute it into a different element.
"Well, create something. Whether it's new arable land, or, for example, a bunch of stuff that's not land, arable or otherwise, is another matter."
That's an engineering problem, not a physics problem precisely.
"And perhaps the atoms in a bunch of other things in the vicinity, including your body. I'll leave it to actual particle physicists to indicate whether you could zero out the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field in a limited region of space, and, if so, what would happen if you did."
I didn't say you wouldn't have to be careful with the device- or that it wouldn't have other uses as well, even potentially weaponized ones.
Thanks for just justifying in my mind a switch from buiy-American-Fossil-Fueled Ford to Chinese Zap Zebra- I'm funding the Chinese either way, and the Zap Zebra I can potentially fuel on water (hydropower).
The reason for that is military strategy. Rails only go where the rails are, trucks and tanks go anywhere. The civilian usage just followed the subsidy.
The Gangsters have been running the federal police since the death of Elliot Ness.
Not too terribly expensive. You don't exactly have to have a high capacity stick to do this- looks like you can pick up 32MB sticks for approximately 89 cents each in bulk and that's enough to put a "phone home and FTP up a hard drive" application on autorun under a cute cat video.
And that is the difference between a CEO and a loser?
Because without a God, all you have is random events without causes happening for no reason at all, at which point any sort of attempt at prediction or discovering laws is as pointless as following Allah.
Well, given the fact that eventually, a handheld Higgs generator could allow you to take a patch of rocky desert, disintegrate the rocks, and transmute some of the larger atomic numbers into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (which are pretty light elements by comparison and certainly by reducing the mass of the higher elements you can make the lower ones), and create *new arable land* vs. turning the same generator on your fellow human being to make him not only disappear, but all of the atoms in his body whiz off in different directions at the speed of light; I'd say like anything else science has discovered, it is a tool that can be used for good OR evil.
In Catholicism, miracles are not necessarily inexplicable. They're just fortunate coincidences that sometimes we don't understand the mechanism behind (supernatural- that is, beyond our current understanding of the natural universe). This is NOT equal to "we will never understand so don't research it", and lodestone is still miraculous to the shepherd who uses it to retrieve his crook, and peacock meat is still miraculous to the hungry traveler using it in the Sahara Desert as a preservative- despite science's ability to explain both.
Of course, it took Catholicism to suggest that a third leg to the three legged stool of revelation was observation of the natural universe.
Yes. Any Axiomatic Definition is equivalent to what Religions are talking about when they say "faith". If you use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of religions, then it is equally correct to use the word "faith" when talking about the Axiomatic Definitions of Mathematics, or Geology, or Biology, or Cosmology, or Physics. There is good reason why it took Judeo-Christianity, after 8000 years of trying other religions, to develop the scientific method. While the Greeks did science first, and while the Islamics more recently took a stab at it, ultimately the theology that held Jupiter and Allah to be beyond human reason also defeated the scientific method, because you can't trust a universe where God can Change His Mind!
Which pretty much requires a God, and not just any God, but a *RATIONAL* God.
I'm not so sure about the "thought through better" part (opinions differ and if anything is truly subjective, it's likes and dislikes), but you've pretty much described the Catholic view of God otherwise.
It's the only useful thing his presidency accomplished- running a huge psyops under the name of Star Wars to push the Russians into a weapons race for weapons that could not possibly ever work.
He won- but only just barely. It is arguable that the crash of 2008 is directly tied to his economic theories.
With the Higgs Boson though, quantum disintegrators might be the next step. A lot less messy than the plague and a LOT more surgical- all you need to do is block the mass of all the atoms in a given area, and people just turn into smoke that whizzes away at the speed of light.
And the first article today on that site is very excellent.
The Iraq war is a great example of why consequentialism is a heresy. YES, we went in with noble aspirations (though I think the timing was a bit off, seeing as how bin Laden would evade us for another 7-8 years as a result). But we failed to take into account *what the Iraqis really wanted* which is NOTHING like the government we gave them. And that's why it failed- because good intentions aren't enough. To switch from Catholicism to Buddhism for a second, you've got to have ALL eight rights of the eightfold path to be successful (I was once known as a Zen Catholic as well)- right intention alone isn't enough.
That's why I kind of disagree with the more modern just war theories, even though they're taught by the church, and go back to the Augustinian instead: A Just War has three marks- you are defending something you love, you are fighting in your own territory (and stop when you get to the border, invasion is little more than revenge), and you are showing love for your enemy by giving him the simple human dignity of looking in his eyes when you kill him.
Almost no modern warfare has all three of those marks, and thus, almost no modern warfare can become just under the Augustinian model, which is why we invented the more complex just war theory, which oddly enough, STILL almost no modern warfare fits.
A huge part of the reason for this is something that the atheist George Orwell noted and used in his novels (yes, I did find something good in atheism though this is a bit of a negative): To win a war, you have to become as unjust as the enemy you are facing. If you're not willing to do that, you will not win. I say this is the reason why the Christeros lost the Mexican Revolution.
I find that IT skills are very much a bell curve. You can be at the leading edge or the trailing edge and your skills are worth more. Be in the middle with the most popular, your skills are worth far less.
Yep, I've read all of those- and I agree that Crisis Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, and America Magazine are all written by dissenting Cafeteria Catholics (though Crisis is an interesting foil in that list, for it dissents in a fiscally liberal, rather than sexually liberal, methodology, and thus has less to argue with traditional Catholicism, because fiscal libertarians are what I call "nice atheists" in that they leave their neighbor alone, unlike the New Atheists of the Freedom From Religion Foundation).
I've read most of Thomas Wood's stuff, along with Hayek and Mises who he introduced me to. But you see, that is the problem- both Hayek and Mises were atheistic materialists.
Thomas E. Woods, when Pope Benedict XVI wrote _Caritas In Veritate_ in his review admitted outright that he is a dissenter on the subject of Catholic Social Justice, because it isn't practical from a materialist point of view. I reject atheist materialism as immoral, and thus, I am forced to reject Thomas E. Woods as an authority on the subject of economics.
That's interesting, I have never seen that site before, though I've long wanted such a thing, is there one that reviews blogs as well as books?
Austrian Libertarians, like Soviet Socialists, approach economics entirely from a Atheist/materialist point of view. Their only purpose is to prevent rebellion while enabling a central group or organization to centralize as many resources as possible. Thus, many of their moral claims are rather dubious at best; downright murderous at worst. The only real difference is in who is in charge of the collective- politician con artists or C-level executive con artists. For the Soviets, all the real wealth will concentrate into the control and hands of the politicians; for the Austrians all the real wealth will concentrate into the control and the hands of the business people; and neither group cares one whit who they hurt to achieve this.
BTW, I should note that no right is without limit; by an absolute right of private property I mean that every citizen should be granted enough productive property with which to feed his family, which cannot be bought, sold, taxed, or gambled away, that is his from conception until natural death.
Whether he uses that property or not, and what profit he gains from it, is up to him, his God-given talents, and the work he puts in.
"And, how to you reconcile an absolute right to private property with forced taxation?"
Paying for services rendered. Including rent on money, which is properly owned by the government under the American system thanks to the 1873 Supreme Court Interpretation of Article I Sections 8 & 10, which gives Congress (and therefore the FED) a monopoly on the ownership of money.
Beyond that- the concept of the common good, for which the free market has shown itself to be absolutely dismal at providing for.
Rerum Novarum- his answer to Karl Marx. Linked to here along with the rest of The Seven Economics Encyclicals