There is no evidence that will convince a creationist that he is wrong.
My existence proves the above statement incorrect.
I'm a creationist, but I would accept evolution as a plausible explanation for the origins of life (what Darwin claimed) if this explanation fit the available evidence. I have no theological problem with the fact - and I do accept it as fact - that God used natural selection as at least one of the mechanisms by which He created life. This is one definition of evolution, and one that as a Bible-believing creationist I have no problem with. Changes in allele frequency over time? No problem there either: you can prove this in a laboratory, or observe it in frequently-reproducing species such as bacteria. Neither I, nor any creationist I know, has any issue with anything that can be observed and repeated, or plausibly inferred therefrom.
But it is often asserted that life started with some single-celled organism and that natural selection ALONE explains how we got from that point to all the life that exists today. I just don't see enough evidence to accept this as fact. I find it much more plausible to believe that God - or, if you prefer, aliens from outer space, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster - created a wide variety of life, and that over a long period of time, with various ecological, environmental and other pressures coming into play, this wide variety became even wider through natural selection, leading to where we are now. The difference: we probably started with some variety already built-in, and don't need to explain the huge gaps between different phyla with no surviving evidence of intermediate forms. I can't prove this either, but it fits better with the facts as I understand them than any other explanation, and I fully expect that one day science and faith will come to a similar understanding. Or - seemingly unlike many of the loudest proponents of either creation or evolution - I might be wrong. In which case I'm willing to re-evaluate my beliefs and views accordingly.
Speaking as a Bible-believing Christian (or at least aspiring Christian), who accepts creation and natural selection but neither macroevolution nor "intelligent design" (in all cases, based on my understanding of the evidence):
You don't hand-wave away any part of Scripture, if you consider it to be the revealed word of God. But you do try to understand it as best you can, taking into account that it was given in what probably is not your native language.
And unlike the Greek of the New Testament, the Hebrew of the Old Testament, including Genesis, is highly metaphorical and descriptive. Translating into English implies a degree of precision that is simply not there in the original. You get the opposite problem in the NT: Greek is far more precise than English and many Greek concepts cannot be expressed easily in English. In either case you must avoid forcing English language concepts into the original languages. If you can do a word study using Strong's, or better yet learn a little bit of biblical Hebrew and Greek, that helps a lot; or you can consult any of hundreds of commentaries written by people fluent in both.
I just don't see it as being that big a deal whether a day in Genesis meant a literal, 24 hour day or not. I personally rather doubt it, but I could be wrong.
I do consider it significant that Jesus referred to Adam and Eve as literal persons, and that people (but not animals or other life, at least insofar as recorded in Scripture) are said to be created in God's image. One's position on the validity of evolution does not change either of these.
Kudos to you! Like you I've realized all along that Ron Paul would not be our next President, but that his message could be quite powerful as a means to focus the hopes of tens of millions of Americans who are sick of "business of usual" and of freedom taking a back seat to war and welfare and everything else that the federal government should not be doing in the first place.
I've been involved in other pro-freedom movements before, but none of them had even a fraction of the numbers or enthusiasm as this one. Ron Paul's Presidential hopes may have ended, but the "Ron Paul Revolution" will live on, and, as you probably know but the political establishment doesn't yet, it is laying the foundation for an entire generation of grassroots pro-freedom activism.
The current economic crisis will get worse before it becomes better, because no one sees the root cause, which is massive overspending, over-regulation, and under-investment, compared to the most nimble of our peers. Much of it is related to war, but much of it results from more ordinary instances of living beyond our means, individually and as a nation. The recession itself isn't what worries me, since it will correct itself as all recessions do. What worries me much more are these larger underlying problems, which will far outlast the current crisis, and which have the potential to reduce the economic and political stability of the entire world.
The falling dollar will first expose, and then hopefully correct, many of these problems, but will require quite a bit of adjustment as our salaries, energy and housing prices fall in line with those in the rest of the moderately-industrialized world. At that point, we have a choice. We can choose to become more productive, through education, training, and reduction in (or at least sanity injected into) the vast regulatory, tax, and healthcare bureaucracies that stifle competition, innovation, and growth today. Or we can continue down the road of protectionism, socialism/fascism, and communism (different stages along the same road, as Frederic Bastiat pointed out well over a century ago). In which case we will get exactly what we deserve, good and hard, just like everyone else who's gone this way. Unfortunately in that case much of the rest of the world will get it right along with us.
They both make valid points, and are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
As an aspiring Christian, and Ron Paul supporter, Mr. Paul's message speaks more directly to me. But Mr. Obama's message is admittedly broader. He is attempting to draw others into the discussion. There is room for both approaches, because we are a very diverse country with many different points of view. As a libertarian I favor freedom because, among many other reasons, only in a free society can all of these divergent viewpoints coexist more or less peacefully. I would oppose any candidate who would attempt to write any of them, except for a few of the absolutely most necessary and uncontroversial (don't murder, don't steal, etc.) into law.
Ron Paul supporter here . . . . I disagree with Obama on nearly every issue . . . but I'd still prefer him over any of the other clowns running (except of course Paul should he manage to pull it off), because for at least a little while he will not be part of the "entrenched politics and more of the same old."
We can't really know how much our lives might be different because of the innovation that never happened because of Microsoft. But imagine just as an example if there were no Google, no Yahoo, nothing like either of these . . . just a bloated, Windows-only MSN. Imagine no Java and no Open Source. These are all areas of innovation that have positively affected all of our lives, and which Microsoft tried with varying degrees of mostly non-success to kill. There were many technologies which Microsoft did manage to kill, and many more that never saw the light of day due to the noncompetitive "marketplace" resulting from its illegal behavior. I don't think it's a stretch to say that without Microsoft our everyday lives would be very different.
I don't know all the answers. I know only that I should love God with all my being, love my neighbor (all other humans) as myself, and seek forgiveness from any/all of the above when I mess up, which is frequent. When I've figured that part out, I'll work on the other pressing matters of theology and chronology.
I am an aspiring Christian, and I would agree with this, but the lamentable fact is that by this standard most people, including most Christians, have not passed kindergarten yet.:( Witness all those folks who claim to be Christians, yet hate other people, while the Bible makes it clear that to love God *and* our neighbor are the greatest commandments, and also that we cannot love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not love our neighbor, whom we have.
The ultimate goal of Christianity as I understand it is a restored relationship with God and with the rest of creation (and particularly our fellow human beings). There are rules we are supposed to follow, which exist not for their own sake, but because they are an essential part of the means to this ultimate goal. For instance, we cannot love our neighbor by lying about him, killing him, and taking his wife. We cannot love God by ignoring Him or using His name as a swear word. But too many people get hung up in the rules and regulations - especially the ones that they see others break, not so much the ones they break themselves. So they find in them excuses to dislike, dishonor, and even hate other people who don't have the "right" religion or skin color or economic beliefs or whatever.:(
We are created in God's image and thus of infinite worth . . . yet we act in ways that fall short of that image, and as a result manage to infinitely mess things up. This is an infinitely big problem that takes an infinitely big God to solve. What you learn in the "kindergarten" version of Christianity is that Jesus Christ, who was both God and man, has made a way for us to be reconciled, both with Him, and with one another.
Once I'm a little better at living as though I truly understood all this, I hope to be able to graduate from "kindergarten," and explore a little bit more the wonders of life that become possible when you don't spend it hating and messing things up. And I hope others would do likewise.
Thank you. That makes sense, but it also suggests a possible solution, given sufficient demand (which I have to think must exist). The same problem used to exist for Linux and Linux apps maybe 10-15 years ago. People could find, download, compile and install the kernel, and gcc, and emacs, and X, and whatnot; but getting all of those things integrated and working together was a big problem, until Yggdrasil and Slackware and other Linux distributions came along to not only simplify the process, but, equally importantly, test to ensure that the various pieces of the software ecosystem worked well together. Perhaps a similar approach would work here. As a distributed systems developer I routinely write "glue" that ties together disparate components, often on different platforms, with different character sets, etc., to produce a consistent and unified result. It's a slightly different problem than this one, but not drastically so. I really do think it is solvable.
I'm not an expert on this particular subject (e-mail/messaging/workflow systems). But a number of other high-profile OSS projects, such as Linux and Apache, scale well beyond typical enterprise-class workloads. I'm curious whether the e-mail/messaging/workflow problem poses scalability issues not encountered elsewhere, or perhaps whether it's simply an itch that OSS developers simply have not yet found a need to scratch. Or maybe neither of the above. What would be your take on that?
For what it's worth, I don't see it as a hard problem, especially compared to many others that the OSS community have solved well. But like I said, I'm not an expert. Maybe I'm missing something.
That possibility, although remote, disturbs me. In most of the dreams I remember, I'm a guerilla soldier fighting to defend and/or free my society from an oppressive "government." But my rules of engagement vary greatly from one dream to the next. In some, I've done pretty awful things, like hurting and even killing innocent people, and in some of those (but not others) I've felt minimal or even no remorse. Clearly if this is a different but real universe, I'm a different person entirely there, not just different from now, but different from one dream to the next (thus suggesting not just one but multiple additional realities). And I don't much like who I am in most of them.
On the other hand . . . in some of my dreams I sacrifice myself to avoid having to kill innocents. In some, I forgive people who've done horrible things to me, and some of those turned around to do even worse things afterwards. I can recall numerous examples of different behaviors on my part, followed by different and not always predictable behaviors on the part of others around me.
Which seems to me to suggest that this is at least in part a mental exercise designed to train my moral self, such as it is, so that if and when this situation really does happen for real - as I believe is very likely - I'll have some practice at dealing with the really, intensely, insanely morally difficult choices that will then be forced upon me.
To do without "modern conveniences" like being able to live in places that would be uninhabitable without heat in the winter, A/C in the summer, or transportation between the places with affordable homes and those with jobs to pay for them would effectively erase 4,000+ years of human civilization and progress, and reduce the planet's carrying capacity to millions rather than tens of billions.
We are blessed with the potential to create abundant, cheap, and safe nuclear energy. It is not perfectly abundant, safe, nor cheap; but it is more abundant, more safe, and more cheap than the current alternatives. I see no good reason not to use it.
A decently-sized battalion of archers, or even a single one firing from a well-concealed position, would not leave the machine gunner much time to contemplate his technological superiority. One should not underestimate the capacity of our species to destroy itself, with *or* without technology.
It was well-understood in ancient times that arrows contaminated with fecal matter (not hard to find in a battlefield) would kill the victim by infection even if the wound itself was not severe. Also, the importance of sanitation was understood by many ancient societies, though not all, even if they did not fully understand the mechanics of why it was important.
Granted, it would be easier to maintain freedom once achieved, than to achieve it starting from where we are now.
But even the mild minarchist form of libertarianism does provide several simple ways to stop, punish, and deter abuses of power. Among many others: returning to Constitutional compliance (not the end-all of freedom, but certainly a valid first step); trials for those guilty of abusing power; elimination of most of the governmental and corporate structures that allow for the abuse to continue. In the worst case, all libertarian theory justifies retaliatory force (against armed aggressors ONLY - never innocents) if all other means short of this fail. People can, and should, defend themselves against abuses of power, by whatever means necessary.
I am an anarcho-capitalist, and I do not condone any governmental or limited-liability corporate structures in the first place. These have always been the primary vehicles for abuse of power. If I could, I would phase these out rather rapidly, and do everything within my ability to educate people so that they would not allow them to simply be re-created again, under any guise or excuse.
Last but not least, governments do not last forever, and ours is pretty close to collapse. The resulting power vacuum will probably be filled by the least scrupulous and honest among the ruling class, as is usual; however, nothing says it inherently has to be, especially if there is sufficient resistance by the rest of us.
I have mentioned this before but will again: the two parties squabble and fight until they encounter legislation that infringes or removes rights of the people. When that happens they vote almost as a single block for it.
You've just discovered why voting for the "lesser of two evils" does not work. If enough other people discover this same fact, and refuse to support either of the evils, then, for the first time in a LONG time, there will be hope.
It is rare, but there does happen to be a non-evil candidate running for president now.
The majority of conservatives seem unwilling to re-examine their fundamental premises to see if they might possibly be mistaken... even when the observed world differs wildly from their conceptual model.
Agreed. I however am one of the minority who did question these assumptions, and continue to do so on a regular basis. This questioning has unfailingly pushed me toward a belief that no person or group of persons has the right to rule over any other without the latter's informed consent.
I do not reject law in its highest form (that law which is discovered, not made, and which is necessary for human beings to interact in peace). I understand this law in much the same way that conservatives do. But I do reject the idea that some have an exclusive right to enforce it whereas others do not. Therefore, I also reject the idea that I may rule over others, either directly or indirectly, by attempting to enforce my understanding of this law beyond the absolute minimum degree necessary for society to function (e.g., I would enforce laws against murder, rape or theft, but probably not against gambling, consensual sex, or nonviolent drug abuse). I also reject wars of aggression, as virtually all wars tend to be.
I do not reject every potential form of government there could be, but I do reject all of those that exist now, because all are premised on the belief that some are entitled to rule others without their consent, and I reject that belief. Any form of government that would be acceptable to me would have to be completely voluntary. Same thing with any tax, any regulation, any program, any anything. For I believe that ALL human interactions should be voluntary, and not coerced. Anything less violates the fundamental dignity and worth of not only the person being directly violated, but in the end, ALL of us, because I agree with the great liberal Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at least in that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Liberals, on the other hand, are willing to reconsider their own viewpoint; the worst do constantly, without any conviction that some answers really can be wrong.
In my experience, and in the U.S. (the meanings of the word vary elsewhere), today's "liberals" are socialists, but usually won't admit it, and usually tend to be as unwilling to question their fundamental assumptions as are most conservatives. They may be motivated by genuine desire to make life better for all, especially the disadvantaged. But the methods they have chosen invariably achieve the opposite result. They typically believe that giving a state more and more power to tax, regulate, and redistribute wealth will create a better, more equal, and more just society. In reality, it only enshrines the powerful, and forces those who accept the "benefits" into virtual slavery, as the strings that are attached are designed to benefit not the "beneficiaries" but those in power, and to keep them as dependent upon continued "benefits" as possible.
Freedom transcends "conservative" and "liberal" and provides the only possible framework in which people of diverse beliefs, ideals, assumptions, and goals can work together to achieve them. Any "solution" to any "problem" which denies freedom, either by design or even if only by effect, tends to worsen the problem and to create new problems worse than the original one. And in fact this is exactly how the people with power want it: they have no end to the "problems" they can unleash on society, and no end to "solutions" that allow them to continue to build on their already-existing power ad infinitum.
Two years of anal rape, followed by significant likelihood of death from AIDS and/or tuberculosis . . . for the victimless so-called "crime" of consensual gambling??
Does that strike anyone else as being just a bit insane?
But you're assuming that potential enemy weapons would have limited range and/or limited numbers. So we can reliably shoot down 100 Sunburn or comparable ballistic missiles, with almost no chance of even a single getting through? They're cheap. Iran has hundreds but could probably afford thousands. They don't need much payload; the momentum alone will create a significant and potentially decisive impact. Think you can take out all the launch sites in advance? You need to know about them first. They'll probably be concealed in urban areas. Willing to nuke a major city full of civilians? That may well be what it would take (and if the U.S. does that I hope the rest of the world retaliates in kind, because if we allow that, we deserve it.)
Fundamentally, you still have the problem that while any particular missile may have a small chance of reaching the target, the law of averages says that by firing enough of them an opposing force WILL eventually get some through. And then you're screwed. Your assumptions (and mine) are likely to be tested in the near future, and I suspect the result will be a MAJOR re-evaluation of the role of carriers in conflicts of greater than low intensity.
I'm not an expert in the field, so maybe you can correct any misstatements and/or mis-assumptions on my part. But it seems to me that even the most modern carriers are vulnerable to cheap and low-tech weapons that any regional power should have in abundance. For instance, don't the Iranians possess several hundred Russian-made "Sunburn" ballistic missiles, and the Chinese many more? How many of these would it take to sink a carrier? How confident can you be that the anti-missile technology, even if it worked well, would take out enough of those missiles to keep the odd stray from severely damaging or even sinking the carrier?
However, back to the China question: we will be involved in military confrontations with them at some point there is no doubt.
That is far from inevitable. I do not see a reason for the Chinese to directly confront the U.S., now or at any time in the future. If current trends continue, China will easily defeat the U.S. economically. It will own what it wishes, and will be able to take what it wishes, without any force, coercion, or threats. The U.S. will be powerless to resist, and will not try. Now, if the U.S. population were to wake up, and replace the current so-called "government" with one even just slightly more sane, a different scenario would likely unfold: the U.S. would halt and hopefully reverse its present decline, and the two nations would grow together, and would grow so mutually interdependent, much like the U.S. and Canada or even the U.S. and Japan, that the very thought of military confrontation will seem unthinkable, a relic of a more barbarous and violent past that at that point will hopefully be behind us. I obviously hope for the latter scenario, but either way, whether the U.S. chooses to commit economic and cultural suicide or not, the Chinese are very unlikely to do so, and thus unlikely to ever be in such a weak position that they can only achieve their goals via military force.
But while war is not inevitable, neither is peace. The most likely flashpoint for now at least is not Taiwan, but Iran. It will be almost impossible to confine a conflict between Iran and the U.S./Israel to the Middle East: both sides have the ability and the will to take actions that would draw in Russia and almost certainly China as well, at least by proxy.
Interesting . . . from my viewpoint as a libertarian and anarcho-capitalist . . . Europe and Japan prosper today, while the US continues to stagnate and in many ways decline, LARGELY because Europe and Japan managed to avoid spending most of their surplus wealth, but invested it into the future instead, while the U.S. government managed to take nearly every penny from the U.S. middle class, largely for military purposes, and largely in hidden ways, such as slow but steady long-term inflation, onerous regulations and indirect taxes that force up the cost of living, tariffs that until relatively recently limited foreign competition in U.S. markets, and in numerous other ways.
On paper, the U.S. has the best (most free) economic system, China the worst, and Europe and Japan someplace in between. But I suspect the current reality to be just the opposite. Time will tell. But I think China has managed to realize that even if you want to redistribute wealth (a goal I do understand, though I do not share), you have to allow the creation of wealth in the first place, and a relatively free market is the best and fastest way to do so. I would say it is the most fair as well, which, if I am correct, they will soon begin to understand also. Europe and Japan lag behind the Chinese in understanding this, and thus place restrictions on their economies which hurt them in the long run, but they at least do not spend all of their increase (and then some) for military purposes. The U.S. claims to be free and capitalist, but is in fact fascist (in the economic sense at least, and arguably politically as well). It's managed to drive out all business EXCEPT big business, but now that the dollar is in a free fall, we are soon poised to see cheap foreign imports of everything dry up, leaving us without sufficient energy, food, or any other essentials of life, none of which we produce here anymore in sufficient amounts. (A low dollar would ultimately help reverse this, but not anytime soon, and the low dollar is not the only problem: regulations that prop up big business at the expense of all other business, usually by putting up costly barriers to market entry, play a large role as well and will probably continue.)
It is seldom the avowed warmongers that die in war; it is the common man (and often woman), many of whom oppose war, but are drawn into it anyway, either by living too close to a battle zone, by being drafted, or by being economically raped to such a degree that the military salary and "benefits" actually look good by comparison to any likely alternative.
And I say this as a libertarian, with conservative personal beliefs (one of which is that I do not attempt to force these beliefs on others, and therefore do not vote for those who do). And one who initially, if naively, supported military action against the Taliban (though not what the Afghanistan war has since morphed into, and certainly not Iraq or any other war of blatant aggression).
True conservatives, true liberals, and decent people of any other political persuasion - or none in particular - ought to be able to agree on this much at the very least: that of all possible choices, war should be the LAST resort, or very nearly so, not the first. This is not to say we may not defend ourselves if attacked, nor that there aren't things worth fighting and dying for - freedom certainly comes to mind - but even those things do not justify attacking the innocent, in any way.
First of all, I'd rather be physically fit even if doing so shortened my life a bit. The increased quality of life would still be worth it to me.
But you're very correct that BMI is a useless indicator of fitness.
I'm a tad over 40 years old. 4 months ago I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. I drank 4-5 liters of Pepsi per day. I looked like a big blob of partially hydrogenated whale blubber, marinated in high fructose corn syrup made from genetically modified corn. I couldn't climb 2 flights of stairs, bench-press half my weight, or even take what I now consider to be a deep breath.
Knowing either it was this or insulin, I decided to hit the gym, and to give up the Pepsi. It's worked out very well for me. I've more than doubled my strength, and probably improved my cardiovascular endurance tenfold (I couldn't walk half a mile before; now I can power-walk for over an hour, although I still can't jog or run because the weight is too hard on my legs).
I feel infinitely better, and even look somewhat better.
Yet my weight only dropped slightly during this whole time, by about 10 pounds (from 215 to 205). Thus my BMI also changed only slightly. I've gained significant muscle mass, and thus lost significantly more than 10 pounds of fat. The increased muscle mass should, with any luck, help increase my metabolism, making it easier to burn the remaining excess fat. The BMI reflects none of this. According to the BMI, I was obese before, and only slightly less obese now. But I sure as hell do feel better, and it seems pretty certain that I will have a far better quality and quantity of life, assuming I keep up the present level of exercise (and don't get hit by a bus), than if I did not.
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There is no evidence that will convince a creationist that he is wrong.
My existence proves the above statement incorrect.
I'm a creationist, but I would accept evolution as a plausible explanation for the origins of life (what Darwin claimed) if this explanation fit the available evidence. I have no theological problem with the fact - and I do accept it as fact - that God used natural selection as at least one of the mechanisms by which He created life. This is one definition of evolution, and one that as a Bible-believing creationist I have no problem with. Changes in allele frequency over time? No problem there either: you can prove this in a laboratory, or observe it in frequently-reproducing species such as bacteria. Neither I, nor any creationist I know, has any issue with anything that can be observed and repeated, or plausibly inferred therefrom.
But it is often asserted that life started with some single-celled organism and that natural selection ALONE explains how we got from that point to all the life that exists today. I just don't see enough evidence to accept this as fact. I find it much more plausible to believe that God - or, if you prefer, aliens from outer space, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster - created a wide variety of life, and that over a long period of time, with various ecological, environmental and other pressures coming into play, this wide variety became even wider through natural selection, leading to where we are now. The difference: we probably started with some variety already built-in, and don't need to explain the huge gaps between different phyla with no surviving evidence of intermediate forms. I can't prove this either, but it fits better with the facts as I understand them than any other explanation, and I fully expect that one day science and faith will come to a similar understanding. Or - seemingly unlike many of the loudest proponents of either creation or evolution - I might be wrong. In which case I'm willing to re-evaluate my beliefs and views accordingly.
Speaking as a Bible-believing Christian (or at least aspiring Christian), who accepts creation and natural selection but neither macroevolution nor "intelligent design" (in all cases, based on my understanding of the evidence):
You don't hand-wave away any part of Scripture, if you consider it to be the revealed word of God. But you do try to understand it as best you can, taking into account that it was given in what probably is not your native language.
And unlike the Greek of the New Testament, the Hebrew of the Old Testament, including Genesis, is highly metaphorical and descriptive. Translating into English implies a degree of precision that is simply not there in the original. You get the opposite problem in the NT: Greek is far more precise than English and many Greek concepts cannot be expressed easily in English. In either case you must avoid forcing English language concepts into the original languages. If you can do a word study using Strong's, or better yet learn a little bit of biblical Hebrew and Greek, that helps a lot; or you can consult any of hundreds of commentaries written by people fluent in both.
I just don't see it as being that big a deal whether a day in Genesis meant a literal, 24 hour day or not. I personally rather doubt it, but I could be wrong.
I do consider it significant that Jesus referred to Adam and Eve as literal persons, and that people (but not animals or other life, at least insofar as recorded in Scripture) are said to be created in God's image. One's position on the validity of evolution does not change either of these.
Kudos to you! Like you I've realized all along that Ron Paul would not be our next President, but that his message could be quite powerful as a means to focus the hopes of tens of millions of Americans who are sick of "business of usual" and of freedom taking a back seat to war and welfare and everything else that the federal government should not be doing in the first place.
I've been involved in other pro-freedom movements before, but none of them had even a fraction of the numbers or enthusiasm as this one. Ron Paul's Presidential hopes may have ended, but the "Ron Paul Revolution" will live on, and, as you probably know but the political establishment doesn't yet, it is laying the foundation for an entire generation of grassroots pro-freedom activism.
The current economic crisis will get worse before it becomes better, because no one sees the root cause, which is massive overspending, over-regulation, and under-investment, compared to the most nimble of our peers. Much of it is related to war, but much of it results from more ordinary instances of living beyond our means, individually and as a nation. The recession itself isn't what worries me, since it will correct itself as all recessions do. What worries me much more are these larger underlying problems, which will far outlast the current crisis, and which have the potential to reduce the economic and political stability of the entire world.
The falling dollar will first expose, and then hopefully correct, many of these problems, but will require quite a bit of adjustment as our salaries, energy and housing prices fall in line with those in the rest of the moderately-industrialized world. At that point, we have a choice. We can choose to become more productive, through education, training, and reduction in (or at least sanity injected into) the vast regulatory, tax, and healthcare bureaucracies that stifle competition, innovation, and growth today. Or we can continue down the road of protectionism, socialism/fascism, and communism (different stages along the same road, as Frederic Bastiat pointed out well over a century ago). In which case we will get exactly what we deserve, good and hard, just like everyone else who's gone this way. Unfortunately in that case much of the rest of the world will get it right along with us.
They both make valid points, and are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
As an aspiring Christian, and Ron Paul supporter, Mr. Paul's message speaks more directly to me. But Mr. Obama's message is admittedly broader. He is attempting to draw others into the discussion. There is room for both approaches, because we are a very diverse country with many different points of view. As a libertarian I favor freedom because, among many other reasons, only in a free society can all of these divergent viewpoints coexist more or less peacefully. I would oppose any candidate who would attempt to write any of them, except for a few of the absolutely most necessary and uncontroversial (don't murder, don't steal, etc.) into law.
Ron Paul supporter here . . . . I disagree with Obama on nearly every issue . . . but I'd still prefer him over any of the other clowns running (except of course Paul should he manage to pull it off), because for at least a little while he will not be part of the "entrenched politics and more of the same old."
We can't really know how much our lives might be different because of the innovation that never happened because of Microsoft. But imagine just as an example if there were no Google, no Yahoo, nothing like either of these . . . just a bloated, Windows-only MSN. Imagine no Java and no Open Source. These are all areas of innovation that have positively affected all of our lives, and which Microsoft tried with varying degrees of mostly non-success to kill. There were many technologies which Microsoft did manage to kill, and many more that never saw the light of day due to the noncompetitive "marketplace" resulting from its illegal behavior. I don't think it's a stretch to say that without Microsoft our everyday lives would be very different.
I don't know all the answers. I know only that I should love God with all my being, love my neighbor (all other humans) as myself, and seek forgiveness from any/all of the above when I mess up, which is frequent. When I've figured that part out, I'll work on the other pressing matters of theology and chronology.
I am an aspiring Christian, and I would agree with this, but the lamentable fact is that by this standard most people, including most Christians, have not passed kindergarten yet. :( Witness all those folks who claim to be Christians, yet hate other people, while the Bible makes it clear that to love God *and* our neighbor are the greatest commandments, and also that we cannot love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not love our neighbor, whom we have.
The ultimate goal of Christianity as I understand it is a restored relationship with God and with the rest of creation (and particularly our fellow human beings). There are rules we are supposed to follow, which exist not for their own sake, but because they are an essential part of the means to this ultimate goal. For instance, we cannot love our neighbor by lying about him, killing him, and taking his wife. We cannot love God by ignoring Him or using His name as a swear word. But too many people get hung up in the rules and regulations - especially the ones that they see others break, not so much the ones they break themselves. So they find in them excuses to dislike, dishonor, and even hate other people who don't have the "right" religion or skin color or economic beliefs or whatever. :(
We are created in God's image and thus of infinite worth . . . yet we act in ways that fall short of that image, and as a result manage to infinitely mess things up. This is an infinitely big problem that takes an infinitely big God to solve. What you learn in the "kindergarten" version of Christianity is that Jesus Christ, who was both God and man, has made a way for us to be reconciled, both with Him, and with one another.
Once I'm a little better at living as though I truly understood all this, I hope to be able to graduate from "kindergarten," and explore a little bit more the wonders of life that become possible when you don't spend it hating and messing things up. And I hope others would do likewise.
Thank you. That makes sense, but it also suggests a possible solution, given sufficient demand (which I have to think must exist). The same problem used to exist for Linux and Linux apps maybe 10-15 years ago. People could find, download, compile and install the kernel, and gcc, and emacs, and X, and whatnot; but getting all of those things integrated and working together was a big problem, until Yggdrasil and Slackware and other Linux distributions came along to not only simplify the process, but, equally importantly, test to ensure that the various pieces of the software ecosystem worked well together. Perhaps a similar approach would work here. As a distributed systems developer I routinely write "glue" that ties together disparate components, often on different platforms, with different character sets, etc., to produce a consistent and unified result. It's a slightly different problem than this one, but not drastically so. I really do think it is solvable.
I'm not an expert on this particular subject (e-mail/messaging/workflow systems). But a number of other high-profile OSS projects, such as Linux and Apache, scale well beyond typical enterprise-class workloads. I'm curious whether the e-mail/messaging/workflow problem poses scalability issues not encountered elsewhere, or perhaps whether it's simply an itch that OSS developers simply have not yet found a need to scratch. Or maybe neither of the above. What would be your take on that?
For what it's worth, I don't see it as a hard problem, especially compared to many others that the OSS community have solved well. But like I said, I'm not an expert. Maybe I'm missing something.
That possibility, although remote, disturbs me. In most of the dreams I remember, I'm a guerilla soldier fighting to defend and/or free my society from an oppressive "government." But my rules of engagement vary greatly from one dream to the next. In some, I've done pretty awful things, like hurting and even killing innocent people, and in some of those (but not others) I've felt minimal or even no remorse. Clearly if this is a different but real universe, I'm a different person entirely there, not just different from now, but different from one dream to the next (thus suggesting not just one but multiple additional realities). And I don't much like who I am in most of them.
On the other hand . . . in some of my dreams I sacrifice myself to avoid having to kill innocents. In some, I forgive people who've done horrible things to me, and some of those turned around to do even worse things afterwards. I can recall numerous examples of different behaviors on my part, followed by different and not always predictable behaviors on the part of others around me.
Which seems to me to suggest that this is at least in part a mental exercise designed to train my moral self, such as it is, so that if and when this situation really does happen for real - as I believe is very likely - I'll have some practice at dealing with the really, intensely, insanely morally difficult choices that will then be forced upon me.
To do without "modern conveniences" like being able to live in places that would be uninhabitable without heat in the winter, A/C in the summer, or transportation between the places with affordable homes and those with jobs to pay for them would effectively erase 4,000+ years of human civilization and progress, and reduce the planet's carrying capacity to millions rather than tens of billions.
We are blessed with the potential to create abundant, cheap, and safe nuclear energy. It is not perfectly abundant, safe, nor cheap; but it is more abundant, more safe, and more cheap than the current alternatives. I see no good reason not to use it.
A decently-sized battalion of archers, or even a single one firing from a well-concealed position, would not leave the machine gunner much time to contemplate his technological superiority. One should not underestimate the capacity of our species to destroy itself, with *or* without technology.
It was well-understood in ancient times that arrows contaminated with fecal matter (not hard to find in a battlefield) would kill the victim by infection even if the wound itself was not severe. Also, the importance of sanitation was understood by many ancient societies, though not all, even if they did not fully understand the mechanics of why it was important.
Granted, it would be easier to maintain freedom once achieved, than to achieve it starting from where we are now.
But even the mild minarchist form of libertarianism does provide several simple ways to stop, punish, and deter abuses of power. Among many others: returning to Constitutional compliance (not the end-all of freedom, but certainly a valid first step); trials for those guilty of abusing power; elimination of most of the governmental and corporate structures that allow for the abuse to continue. In the worst case, all libertarian theory justifies retaliatory force (against armed aggressors ONLY - never innocents) if all other means short of this fail. People can, and should, defend themselves against abuses of power, by whatever means necessary.
I am an anarcho-capitalist, and I do not condone any governmental or limited-liability corporate structures in the first place. These have always been the primary vehicles for abuse of power. If I could, I would phase these out rather rapidly, and do everything within my ability to educate people so that they would not allow them to simply be re-created again, under any guise or excuse.
Last but not least, governments do not last forever, and ours is pretty close to collapse. The resulting power vacuum will probably be filled by the least scrupulous and honest among the ruling class, as is usual; however, nothing says it inherently has to be, especially if there is sufficient resistance by the rest of us.
I have mentioned this before but will again: the two parties squabble and fight until they encounter legislation that infringes or removes rights of the people. When that happens they vote almost as a single block for it.
You've just discovered why voting for the "lesser of two evils" does not work. If enough other people discover this same fact, and refuse to support either of the evils, then, for the first time in a LONG time, there will be hope.
It is rare, but there does happen to be a non-evil candidate running for president now.
The majority of conservatives seem unwilling to re-examine their fundamental premises to see if they might possibly be mistaken... even when the observed world differs wildly from their conceptual model.
Agreed. I however am one of the minority who did question these assumptions, and continue to do so on a regular basis. This questioning has unfailingly pushed me toward a belief that no person or group of persons has the right to rule over any other without the latter's informed consent.
I do not reject law in its highest form (that law which is discovered, not made, and which is necessary for human beings to interact in peace). I understand this law in much the same way that conservatives do. But I do reject the idea that some have an exclusive right to enforce it whereas others do not. Therefore, I also reject the idea that I may rule over others, either directly or indirectly, by attempting to enforce my understanding of this law beyond the absolute minimum degree necessary for society to function (e.g., I would enforce laws against murder, rape or theft, but probably not against gambling, consensual sex, or nonviolent drug abuse). I also reject wars of aggression, as virtually all wars tend to be.
I do not reject every potential form of government there could be, but I do reject all of those that exist now, because all are premised on the belief that some are entitled to rule others without their consent, and I reject that belief. Any form of government that would be acceptable to me would have to be completely voluntary. Same thing with any tax, any regulation, any program, any anything. For I believe that ALL human interactions should be voluntary, and not coerced. Anything less violates the fundamental dignity and worth of not only the person being directly violated, but in the end, ALL of us, because I agree with the great liberal Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at least in that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Liberals, on the other hand, are willing to reconsider their own viewpoint; the worst do constantly, without any conviction that some answers really can be wrong.
In my experience, and in the U.S. (the meanings of the word vary elsewhere), today's "liberals" are socialists, but usually won't admit it, and usually tend to be as unwilling to question their fundamental assumptions as are most conservatives. They may be motivated by genuine desire to make life better for all, especially the disadvantaged. But the methods they have chosen invariably achieve the opposite result. They typically believe that giving a state more and more power to tax, regulate, and redistribute wealth will create a better, more equal, and more just society. In reality, it only enshrines the powerful, and forces those who accept the "benefits" into virtual slavery, as the strings that are attached are designed to benefit not the "beneficiaries" but those in power, and to keep them as dependent upon continued "benefits" as possible.
Freedom transcends "conservative" and "liberal" and provides the only possible framework in which people of diverse beliefs, ideals, assumptions, and goals can work together to achieve them. Any "solution" to any "problem" which denies freedom, either by design or even if only by effect, tends to worsen the problem and to create new problems worse than the original one. And in fact this is exactly how the people with power want it: they have no end to the "problems" they can unleash on society, and no end to "solutions" that allow them to continue to build on their already-existing power ad infinitum.
Two years of anal rape, followed by significant likelihood of death from AIDS and/or tuberculosis . . . for the victimless so-called "crime" of consensual gambling??
Does that strike anyone else as being just a bit insane?
But you're assuming that potential enemy weapons would have limited range and/or limited numbers. So we can reliably shoot down 100 Sunburn or comparable ballistic missiles, with almost no chance of even a single getting through? They're cheap. Iran has hundreds but could probably afford thousands. They don't need much payload; the momentum alone will create a significant and potentially decisive impact. Think you can take out all the launch sites in advance? You need to know about them first. They'll probably be concealed in urban areas. Willing to nuke a major city full of civilians? That may well be what it would take (and if the U.S. does that I hope the rest of the world retaliates in kind, because if we allow that, we deserve it.)
Fundamentally, you still have the problem that while any particular missile may have a small chance of reaching the target, the law of averages says that by firing enough of them an opposing force WILL eventually get some through. And then you're screwed. Your assumptions (and mine) are likely to be tested in the near future, and I suspect the result will be a MAJOR re-evaluation of the role of carriers in conflicts of greater than low intensity.
I'm not an expert in the field, so maybe you can correct any misstatements and/or mis-assumptions on my part. But it seems to me that even the most modern carriers are vulnerable to cheap and low-tech weapons that any regional power should have in abundance. For instance, don't the Iranians possess several hundred Russian-made "Sunburn" ballistic missiles, and the Chinese many more? How many of these would it take to sink a carrier? How confident can you be that the anti-missile technology, even if it worked well, would take out enough of those missiles to keep the odd stray from severely damaging or even sinking the carrier?
However, back to the China question: we will be involved in military confrontations with them at some point there is no doubt.
That is far from inevitable. I do not see a reason for the Chinese to directly confront the U.S., now or at any time in the future. If current trends continue, China will easily defeat the U.S. economically. It will own what it wishes, and will be able to take what it wishes, without any force, coercion, or threats. The U.S. will be powerless to resist, and will not try. Now, if the U.S. population were to wake up, and replace the current so-called "government" with one even just slightly more sane, a different scenario would likely unfold: the U.S. would halt and hopefully reverse its present decline, and the two nations would grow together, and would grow so mutually interdependent, much like the U.S. and Canada or even the U.S. and Japan, that the very thought of military confrontation will seem unthinkable, a relic of a more barbarous and violent past that at that point will hopefully be behind us. I obviously hope for the latter scenario, but either way, whether the U.S. chooses to commit economic and cultural suicide or not, the Chinese are very unlikely to do so, and thus unlikely to ever be in such a weak position that they can only achieve their goals via military force.
But while war is not inevitable, neither is peace. The most likely flashpoint for now at least is not Taiwan, but Iran. It will be almost impossible to confine a conflict between Iran and the U.S./Israel to the Middle East: both sides have the ability and the will to take actions that would draw in Russia and almost certainly China as well, at least by proxy.
Interesting . . . from my viewpoint as a libertarian and anarcho-capitalist . . . Europe and Japan prosper today, while the US continues to stagnate and in many ways decline, LARGELY because Europe and Japan managed to avoid spending most of their surplus wealth, but invested it into the future instead, while the U.S. government managed to take nearly every penny from the U.S. middle class, largely for military purposes, and largely in hidden ways, such as slow but steady long-term inflation, onerous regulations and indirect taxes that force up the cost of living, tariffs that until relatively recently limited foreign competition in U.S. markets, and in numerous other ways.
On paper, the U.S. has the best (most free) economic system, China the worst, and Europe and Japan someplace in between. But I suspect the current reality to be just the opposite. Time will tell. But I think China has managed to realize that even if you want to redistribute wealth (a goal I do understand, though I do not share), you have to allow the creation of wealth in the first place, and a relatively free market is the best and fastest way to do so. I would say it is the most fair as well, which, if I am correct, they will soon begin to understand also. Europe and Japan lag behind the Chinese in understanding this, and thus place restrictions on their economies which hurt them in the long run, but they at least do not spend all of their increase (and then some) for military purposes. The U.S. claims to be free and capitalist, but is in fact fascist (in the economic sense at least, and arguably politically as well). It's managed to drive out all business EXCEPT big business, but now that the dollar is in a free fall, we are soon poised to see cheap foreign imports of everything dry up, leaving us without sufficient energy, food, or any other essentials of life, none of which we produce here anymore in sufficient amounts. (A low dollar would ultimately help reverse this, but not anytime soon, and the low dollar is not the only problem: regulations that prop up big business at the expense of all other business, usually by putting up costly barriers to market entry, play a large role as well and will probably continue.)
It is seldom the avowed warmongers that die in war; it is the common man (and often woman), many of whom oppose war, but are drawn into it anyway, either by living too close to a battle zone, by being drafted, or by being economically raped to such a degree that the military salary and "benefits" actually look good by comparison to any likely alternative.
And I say this as a libertarian, with conservative personal beliefs (one of which is that I do not attempt to force these beliefs on others, and therefore do not vote for those who do). And one who initially, if naively, supported military action against the Taliban (though not what the Afghanistan war has since morphed into, and certainly not Iraq or any other war of blatant aggression).
True conservatives, true liberals, and decent people of any other political persuasion - or none in particular - ought to be able to agree on this much at the very least: that of all possible choices, war should be the LAST resort, or very nearly so, not the first. This is not to say we may not defend ourselves if attacked, nor that there aren't things worth fighting and dying for - freedom certainly comes to mind - but even those things do not justify attacking the innocent, in any way.
First of all, I'd rather be physically fit even if doing so shortened my life a bit. The increased quality of life would still be worth it to me.
But you're very correct that BMI is a useless indicator of fitness.
I'm a tad over 40 years old. 4 months ago I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. I drank 4-5 liters of Pepsi per day. I looked like a big blob of partially hydrogenated whale blubber, marinated in high fructose corn syrup made from genetically modified corn. I couldn't climb 2 flights of stairs, bench-press half my weight, or even take what I now consider to be a deep breath.
Knowing either it was this or insulin, I decided to hit the gym, and to give up the Pepsi. It's worked out very well for me. I've more than doubled my strength, and probably improved my cardiovascular endurance tenfold (I couldn't walk half a mile before; now I can power-walk for over an hour, although I still can't jog or run because the weight is too hard on my legs).
I feel infinitely better, and even look somewhat better.
Yet my weight only dropped slightly during this whole time, by about 10 pounds (from 215 to 205). Thus my BMI also changed only slightly. I've gained significant muscle mass, and thus lost significantly more than 10 pounds of fat. The increased muscle mass should, with any luck, help increase my metabolism, making it easier to burn the remaining excess fat. The BMI reflects none of this. According to the BMI, I was obese before, and only slightly less obese now. But I sure as hell do feel better, and it seems pretty certain that I will have a far better quality and quantity of life, assuming I keep up the present level of exercise (and don't get hit by a bus), than if I did not.