Oh please, that's just hyperbole. There isn't a single example in all of human history of any Government using nuclear weapons on it's own citizenry.
Yet. We're only just now getting back to feudalism thanks to Wall Street and the Central Bankers, who seem willing to do *anything* if it minutely increases their ability to sell their Ponzi scheme.
Given the fact that even China hasn't resorted to this I'm not real worried about it happening as an American.
China, being communist, has a stated economic interest in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. American Capitalists, who really control the government through legalized bribery, have no such interest.
Do you really think the US military would carry out an order to drop an H-bomb on an American city?
It only takes ten million dollars and ten corruptible underpaid soldiers to do this *WITHOUT* an order. And even officers in the US Army are underpaid.
This isn't Nazi Germany -- our military doesn't swear a loyalty oath to the President.
The President isn't the enemy you need to worry about, he's just a puppet anyway.
They swear an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies and to follow the orders issued through the chain of command according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Yes they do. And in return we reward them with poverty, no VA benefits, and an utter lack of respect.
Apparently, it can also become nervous tissue: "Cerebral Palsy and other forms of pediatric brain injury have responded well to infusions of autologous cord blood in a clinical trial conducted at Duke University.[10] The Brain Injury Association of America[11] estimates that the prevalence of Cerebral Palsy is about 1 in 300 among children up to age 10."
I wish I had known about this earlier...I'll have to check with Christopher's physician. We were unable to donate his cord blood (we signed the paper, but ended up with an emergency c-section), but there must be a compatible donor out there. Maybe even one that will allow him to be potty trained.
I think the problem stems from the modern idea: Property cannot be human anymore. If that was true- then we'd have no legal basis for parenthood left, and the simple solution to every family problem would be to break up the family.
I'm all for grandparent rights.
"The "potential human" issue is more pressing, but still manages to never exit an ethical gray zone, especially when we take into account that these embryos were generally slated for destruction anyways. Is it better to utilize a potential human for the good of man, or better to incinerate them? I don't have a hard time, ehtically, on this issue. Yes, there are those on the extreme religious fringe who wants to implant ALL of them, and bring them to term, but I don't give them any credibility since they don't actually seem mindful of the consequences of this."
When in an ethical gray zone, the proper thing to do is ASK and take the chance that the answer will be no.
Seriously though, you're absolutely right, aborted tissue cannot be used for ESC because by the time the embryo is implanted and the mother knows she is pregnant, the embryo has no more ESC.
Really? I thought ESCs were still present in the cord blood at birth.
Yes. That is one potential downside, but I think it's a reasonable tradeoff to make sure insurance companies don't get ahold of it.
It was just a minor example. What bothers me more is the idea that one shouldn't have to pay the sources of the natural resources used to do one's job.
You're dealing with a tiny plastic tube with some frozen liquid in it.
If a species is defined by the DNA- then that frozen liquid has a very special description of an individual in it.
And it's probably labeled with a short series of numbers and letters, like T-F96.
Which is a database unique key to something. Usually a record. Which has foreign keys to other records.
If I was doing work on a clinical trial, where I was running samples on a patient, I would in fact be required to remove all identifying information about the person.
So if the sample turned out to have some deadly disease in it, you'd be required to not notify the patient?
In contrast to the internet, anonymity in science actually PROTECTS both the subject and the data.
Or at least, divorces the scientist from having to consider the needs of the subject.
Seems nearly impossible. Most of the researchers who are actually trying to use the stem cell lines probably have no access to the identifying information. If you're working on stem cell culture, you don't know and don't care who the cells were from, you respect their privacy
First of all, that seems unethical from the standpoint of the fact you're dealing with human beings, not just "cultures". I think I begin to see why the slippery slope in just this description.
Secondly, why the hell shouldn't donors be paid for essentially providing their family's information?
Until legalese gets arbitrarily in your way that is. It's not like the cells are labeled "Embryonic stem cells harvested from Jane Smith and Joe McDonald's aborted embryo."
In fact, if I understand it correctly, it should be labeled "Embyronic Stem Cells harvested from Jane Smith and Joe McDonald's unused embryo from fertility treatment", not an aborted embryo at all.
There's a third option: - Go around NIH's new requirements by simply going back to the donating couple and asking them if they'd like to sign a new contract.
Given what I've seen of the demographics of this issue, I'm willing to bet you'd free up 350 lines or more, out of the 700 available.
Don't know if this applies for a ball stuffed with something other than air, but my sister-in-law was forced to deflate her basketball when she went to Ireland for college. Something about the prop plane she was taking from Heathrow to Dublin not having a pressurized cabin, and they were afraid it would explode.
This was one of the complaints I got fired for. Nevermind that nobody on slashdot or technocrat at the time was stupid enough to think that an employee of ODOT was speaking for ODOT (especially since, in the article that got me in trouble, I only identified myself as being in a certain building not actually an employee).
the bible MOST CERTAINLY does claim to be the word of god.
Prove it. I gave you the quote where the Bible claims gives the title "The Word of God" to some sort of spiritual being, and you still claim that the Bible is the Word of God?
ok, I'm done here. you won't change your views and I won't change mine. that was an assumed conclusion, anyway.
Not by me it wasn't. In fact, I assumed you'd come up with something new at some point to challenge my world view- for only the uncomfortable are able to change.
my final thought: the motivations of those in the religious field is a historical concept.
Which you've also completely failed to prove for Christianity, let alone any other religion. You haven't even covered 1/6th of humanity for that.
one only has to look at the power structure of all religions to see that they were designed to control and scare primitive man.
Control you've got at least a half an argument for- Civilization itself is about controlling human beings, and religion is nothing if not the protector and builder of Civilization. But "scare"? You've got to actually have fear to be scared, and being autistic I don't experience that emotion.
some of us have seen thru this and 'won't be fooled again';)
I have to wonder though- how have you made it through 45 years and NOT figured out that there is more to the world than what you can personally see or experience?
I really wish you were right and there WAS/IS a god. how comforting to think of some watchful kind guy taking care of me?
That's not a god either. The only definition of God that makes sense to me is "That process or being which created the scientific laws of the universe and is omniscient enough to measure both the position and velocity of an electron". Oh, sure, some people might interpret the actions such a being causes as "watchful" and "kind", but in reality, it's just about the clockwork.
sadly, its a child's story and bears no resemblance to actual reality.
Well, that's something we can agree on. But just because you have wrong definitions influenced by a minority sect of a minority religion in a single culture (see post on probability where I extrapolated for all of human history, and came up with only MAYBE 10% for the belief system you've described), is no reason to give up on the concept of God given the wealth of *other* evidence out there. Especially since, that set of sects is rather irrational to begin with.
you're still very young. I have over 15 years on you, still.
Too bad you've wasted those 46 years on fundamentalist Biblical atheism. Though I will give you this- you're more consistent in your beliefs than most fundamentalist Christians I deal with regularly.
it is a form of mental impairment, to believe in spirits, ghosts and gods.
And yet, well over 90% of humanity throughout history has done so. Why do you think THAT is?
but I do realize that its 'comforting' to believe in fairy tales. that's the main reason why talking about religion is usually off-limits; it invades peoples' comfort levels by challenging the very fabric that they've build their whole view of reality on.
I LOVE challenging people's view of reality- only the uncomfortable ever grow. You seem to draw a great deal of comfort from being arrogant and superior, for instance, yet you didn't even know giganticism is a common human mutation or that it would be possible, given the interbreeding and isolation of certain communities of the time, for there to be a race of "giants" in a nearby town in living memory for King David, and thus written down in the Book of Genesis.
its very disturbing to learn that santa clause, easter bunny and the myth of jesus being something more than a man - is just fantasy to keep order within the very-afraid masses.
Well, actually, not all of those are 100% fantasy either, but you're too damn arrogant and superior to admit that there might have once been a real Saint Nicholas, aren't you?
I'm 100% convinced, due to sheer logic and observation, that the myth of gods is just that, a pure man-made myth.
Whose observations? YOURS? Why should we believe you over our own eyes?
there can be no other conclusion based on what we can observe and experiment with.
100,000 books of scripture from disparate cultures around the world disagree with that conclusion, but you've only read the Bible as a Physics Textbook, so how would you know that?
As to your quotes, I don't find Einstien to be smart enough to make me doubt my own eyes, and the problem of evil is one for babies and toddlers to play with.
there are simply too many GOOD MINDS
There are no "GOOD MINDS" among human beings. At all.
If your beliefs are held only as a result of disciplined reasoning and experimentation then you're not a theist, are you?
See my argument further down- that in fact, given the overwhelming amount of theist literature and experimentation on the subject, anybody truly disciplined should at least be agnostic if not an outright theist. What I find a distinct lack of evidence for is the concept that there is no God.
The only way out is to become an atheist in how you treat reality.
You mean I have to bang my head against a brick wall until I forget the past 1.5 million years of experimentation with theism and all of the data that was collected?
You can still be a theist in the realm of spirituality, but you have got to let the natural world be what it is.
Not terribly hard, when you consider that most theism stems from observations taken from the natural world.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, the programmer took the time to pre-render the graphics. Exactly my point (well, a large part of it).
True. A part of what I meant.
You're right. I'm so used to today's supercomputers that I forgot that standard VGA was 128K, not 128MB.
Had beautiful graphics and ran on a 386sx with a 128 MB VGA card and a 2D GPU.
So I call Bullshit- the only reason a high powered GPU is necessary is because game programmers have become LAZY.
Oh please, that's just hyperbole. There isn't a single example in all of human history of any Government using nuclear weapons on it's own citizenry.
Yet. We're only just now getting back to feudalism thanks to Wall Street and the Central Bankers, who seem willing to do *anything* if it minutely increases their ability to sell their Ponzi scheme.
Given the fact that even China hasn't resorted to this I'm not real worried about it happening as an American.
China, being communist, has a stated economic interest in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. American Capitalists, who really control the government through legalized bribery, have no such interest.
Do you really think the US military would carry out an order to drop an H-bomb on an American city?
It only takes ten million dollars and ten corruptible underpaid soldiers to do this *WITHOUT* an order. And even officers in the US Army are underpaid.
This isn't Nazi Germany -- our military doesn't swear a loyalty oath to the President.
The President isn't the enemy you need to worry about, he's just a puppet anyway.
They swear an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies and to follow the orders issued through the chain of command according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Yes they do. And in return we reward them with poverty, no VA benefits, and an utter lack of respect.
Actually the Bill of Rights just codified our rights. Our rights are inalienable regardless of whether or not they are listed in the Bill of Rights.
Only if your government doesn't have nuclear weapons. What is inalienable has changed considerably since 1776.
It's from the wikipedia article YOU pointed me to. My doctor did NOT even suggest this.
Too bad- we've had some real problems with his language and Sensory Perception Disorder.
Apparently, it can also become nervous tissue:
"Cerebral Palsy and other forms of pediatric brain injury have responded well to infusions of autologous cord blood in a clinical trial conducted at Duke University.[10] The Brain Injury Association of America[11] estimates that the prevalence of Cerebral Palsy is about 1 in 300 among children up to age 10."
I wish I had known about this earlier...I'll have to check with Christopher's physician. We were unable to donate his cord blood (we signed the paper, but ended up with an emergency c-section), but there must be a compatible donor out there. Maybe even one that will allow him to be potty trained.
As long as it is voluntary, I've got no problem with it.
I think the problem stems from the modern idea: Property cannot be human anymore. If that was true- then we'd have no legal basis for parenthood left, and the simple solution to every family problem would be to break up the family.
I'm all for grandparent rights.
"The "potential human" issue is more pressing, but still manages to never exit an ethical gray zone, especially when we take into account that these embryos were generally slated for destruction anyways. Is it better to utilize a potential human for the good of man, or better to incinerate them? I don't have a hard time, ehtically, on this issue. Yes, there are those on the extreme religious fringe who wants to implant ALL of them, and bring them to term, but I don't give them any credibility since they don't actually seem mindful of the consequences of this."
When in an ethical gray zone, the proper thing to do is ASK and take the chance that the answer will be no.
It was my understanding previous to this that cord blood contained totally undifferentiated cells. Do you have a link to what you describe?
Fine, then let the researchers donate their own tissue.
Seriously though, you're absolutely right, aborted tissue cannot be used for ESC because by the time the embryo is implanted and the mother knows she is pregnant, the embryo has no more ESC.
Really? I thought ESCs were still present in the cord blood at birth.
Yes. That is one potential downside, but I think it's a reasonable tradeoff to make sure insurance companies don't get ahold of it.
It was just a minor example. What bothers me more is the idea that one shouldn't have to pay the sources of the natural resources used to do one's job.
You're dealing with a tiny plastic tube with some frozen liquid in it.
If a species is defined by the DNA- then that frozen liquid has a very special description of an individual in it.
And it's probably labeled with a short series of numbers and letters, like T-F96.
Which is a database unique key to something. Usually a record. Which has foreign keys to other records.
If I was doing work on a clinical trial, where I was running samples on a patient, I would in fact be required to remove all identifying information about the person.
So if the sample turned out to have some deadly disease in it, you'd be required to not notify the patient?
In contrast to the internet, anonymity in science actually PROTECTS both the subject and the data.
Or at least, divorces the scientist from having to consider the needs of the subject.
Seems nearly impossible. Most of the researchers who are actually trying to use the stem cell lines probably have no access to the identifying information. If you're working on stem cell culture, you don't know and don't care who the cells were from, you respect their privacy
First of all, that seems unethical from the standpoint of the fact you're dealing with human beings, not just "cultures". I think I begin to see why the slippery slope in just this description.
Secondly, why the hell shouldn't donors be paid for essentially providing their family's information?
Until legalese gets arbitrarily in your way that is. It's not like the cells are labeled "Embryonic stem cells harvested from Jane Smith and Joe McDonald's aborted embryo."
In fact, if I understand it correctly, it should be labeled "Embyronic Stem Cells harvested from Jane Smith and Joe McDonald's unused embryo from fertility treatment", not an aborted embryo at all.
Agreed. the original memcpy is as outdated as coding a double-linked list by hand.
There's a third option:
- Go around NIH's new requirements by simply going back to the donating couple and asking them if they'd like to sign a new contract.
Given what I've seen of the demographics of this issue, I'm willing to bet you'd free up 350 lines or more, out of the 700 available.
Don't know if this applies for a ball stuffed with something other than air, but my sister-in-law was forced to deflate her basketball when she went to Ireland for college. Something about the prop plane she was taking from Heathrow to Dublin not having a pressurized cabin, and they were afraid it would explode.
This was one of the complaints I got fired for. Nevermind that nobody on slashdot or technocrat at the time was stupid enough to think that an employee of ODOT was speaking for ODOT (especially since, in the article that got me in trouble, I only identified myself as being in a certain building not actually an employee).
http://outsidetheautisticasylum.blogspot.com/2009/05/slow-and-steady-makes-right.html is a discussion that split off of my reply to this post.
the bible MOST CERTAINLY does claim to be the word of god.
;)
Prove it. I gave you the quote where the Bible claims gives the title "The Word of God" to some sort of spiritual being, and you still claim that the Bible is the Word of God?
ok, I'm done here. you won't change your views and I won't change mine. that was an assumed conclusion, anyway.
Not by me it wasn't. In fact, I assumed you'd come up with something new at some point to challenge my world view- for only the uncomfortable are able to change.
my final thought: the motivations of those in the religious field is a historical concept.
Which you've also completely failed to prove for Christianity, let alone any other religion. You haven't even covered 1/6th of humanity for that.
one only has to look at the power structure of all religions to see that they were designed to control and scare primitive man.
Control you've got at least a half an argument for- Civilization itself is about controlling human beings, and religion is nothing if not the protector and builder of Civilization. But "scare"? You've got to actually have fear to be scared, and being autistic I don't experience that emotion.
some of us have seen thru this and 'won't be fooled again'
I have to wonder though- how have you made it through 45 years and NOT figured out that there is more to the world than what you can personally see or experience?
I really wish you were right and there WAS/IS a god. how comforting to think of some watchful kind guy taking care of me?
That's not a god either. The only definition of God that makes sense to me is "That process or being which created the scientific laws of the universe and is omniscient enough to measure both the position and velocity of an electron". Oh, sure, some people might interpret the actions such a being causes as "watchful" and "kind", but in reality, it's just about the clockwork.
sadly, its a child's story and bears no resemblance to actual reality.
Well, that's something we can agree on. But just because you have wrong definitions influenced by a minority sect of a minority religion in a single culture (see post on probability where I extrapolated for all of human history, and came up with only MAYBE 10% for the belief system you've described), is no reason to give up on the concept of God given the wealth of *other* evidence out there. Especially since, that set of sects is rather irrational to begin with.
MOD PARENT UP! Especially for this line:
" The only thing they have going for them is that they have worked so far - or at least, we believe that we remember that they have."
you're still very young. I have over 15 years on you, still.
Too bad you've wasted those 46 years on fundamentalist Biblical atheism. Though I will give you this- you're more consistent in your beliefs than most fundamentalist Christians I deal with regularly.
it is a form of mental impairment, to believe in spirits, ghosts and gods.
And yet, well over 90% of humanity throughout history has done so. Why do you think THAT is?
but I do realize that its 'comforting' to believe in fairy tales. that's the main reason why talking about religion is usually off-limits; it invades peoples' comfort levels by challenging the very fabric that they've build their whole view of reality on.
I LOVE challenging people's view of reality- only the uncomfortable ever grow. You seem to draw a great deal of comfort from being arrogant and superior, for instance, yet you didn't even know giganticism is a common human mutation or that it would be possible, given the interbreeding and isolation of certain communities of the time, for there to be a race of "giants" in a nearby town in living memory for King David, and thus written down in the Book of Genesis.
its very disturbing to learn that santa clause, easter bunny and the myth of jesus being something more than a man - is just fantasy to keep order within the very-afraid masses.
Well, actually, not all of those are 100% fantasy either, but you're too damn arrogant and superior to admit that there might have once been a real Saint Nicholas, aren't you?
I'm 100% convinced, due to sheer logic and observation, that the myth of gods is just that, a pure man-made myth.
Whose observations? YOURS? Why should we believe you over our own eyes?
there can be no other conclusion based on what we can observe and experiment with.
100,000 books of scripture from disparate cultures around the world disagree with that conclusion, but you've only read the Bible as a Physics Textbook, so how would you know that?
As to your quotes, I don't find Einstien to be smart enough to make me doubt my own eyes, and the problem of evil is one for babies and toddlers to play with.
there are simply too many GOOD MINDS
There are no "GOOD MINDS" among human beings. At all.
If your beliefs are held only as a result of disciplined reasoning and experimentation then you're not a theist, are you?
See my argument further down- that in fact, given the overwhelming amount of theist literature and experimentation on the subject, anybody truly disciplined should at least be agnostic if not an outright theist. What I find a distinct lack of evidence for is the concept that there is no God.
The only way out is to become an atheist in how you treat reality.
You mean I have to bang my head against a brick wall until I forget the past 1.5 million years of experimentation with theism and all of the data that was collected?
You can still be a theist in the realm of spirituality, but you have got to let the natural world be what it is.
Not terribly hard, when you consider that most theism stems from observations taken from the natural world.