Fuck the Trump administration. This decision is what will kill many, as kratom helps legions of people get off truly dangerous opiates. Kratom is not at all dangerous. Cheeseburgers are more dangerous than kratom. I thought it was impossible for me to hate the Trump administration any more than I already do, but now I hate them even more. How is it we keep electing the most awful people in the country?
Yeah, I think our electoral system was designed to select and elect people with cluster B personality disorders. http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/conditions/personality-disorder
It's been my experience that most of his detractors (at least the ones I've met) are absolutely resistant to understanding the nuances involved in what he said, let alone what he meant, and seem to be bent on clinging to the narrative that supports their notion that Al Gore is nothing more than a buffoon.
All one needs to do is look at the correlation to nearly any societal metric in religious societies vs. irreligious ones. Compare the plight of women for instance in Sweden and Saudi Arabia. The effect of religion on these metrics uniformly pushes them in the direction away from human well-being. People will argue that in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and North Korea were atheistic societies, this is far from true as the leaders, as you say, become the defacto religion. This is not an irreligious society. Kim Jung Il's requirements are even nuttier than the popes (e.g., he requires a duvet made of the softest down, which is supposedly the feathers from a sparrow's chin, so thousands of them had to die to satiate this weird requirement). I think the US is a great example of a country completely stymied by a hyper-religious minority. It is a terrible shame that this anti-scientific, know-nothing demographic has wielded its highly disproportionate power in a most destructive way.
How about we cut out the 'middleman' in this scenario, and quit sending so much of our hard earned money to the Feds in the first places?!?!?
But then the "red" states would suffer. You see, they take from the economically more productive "blue" states, on average. It is ironic that the GOP whines about income redistribution, when their states benefit from it.
I am happy we agree that she is not ready, at least in the capacity to hold a press conference. The fact that she is not able to face the press now, in my opinion, demonstrates a lack of curiosity about the world and our nation. I mean, Joe Biden is doing press conferences, and also just got nominated.
Here's one measure of "readiness" to be president: The ability to face the press. Where is Palin on the Sunday talk shows? She is missing (we do not see Obama hiding from the press). This is highly unusual for a VP candidate. If that Kilkenny letter has any truth in it (and it appears to be legit at first blush), she has a lot to answer for on her record, and our country is in great danger if this person ever gets put into power. I think we have had enough of authoritarians already. I get the impression that she is a female Cheney or Nixon.
I do appreciate your sincerity, but to me none of this is any more convincing than any other mythology. I guess my real issue with religion is that is contains zero fundamental truth. For example, Newton and Leibniz independently discovered calculus because it contains truth. There is little chance of this happening with religion (other than via plagiarism). The truth as far as we can tell, using reason, is that this story of genesis is not factual: The earth was not created in 6 days. Humans and plants evolved over millions of years. There have been in the past large scale extinctions and explosions of new life (e.g., the Cambrian explosion). None of this is mentioned in this book. In fact it gets a lot of things totally wrong: Bats are not birds, for example. The creator of the universe should know this. I regard this cruel, jealous, and petty god the way I regard all gods: He is an artifact from the infancy of our intellect, from the dark times when diseases were caused by witchcraft and not by germs (god in the bible does not seem to know about microorganisms, very curious). I know that the universe without god is a very scary place. There is no one watching over us. We are whizzing through time and space, living in a thin veneer of an atmosphere on a tiny speck of dust. It is scary that our existence is fleeting and, in too many cases, brutal. But I adhere to wisdom of Carl Sagan: It is better to see the world as it really is than to persist in delusion. To me, I am just glad to be alive. To observe the wonders of the universe. I will be just as content not to exist after my death as I was before I was born. I need no saviors.
It seems more nuanced than the video for sure. Still there are many other similarities to other past gods such as Mithras as well. Horus is by no means the only data point.
If this was really the word of some omniscient, omnipotent being, I would expect something more profound than a treatise that could've been written by a bronze-age sheep herder, which is what it is. I do not care if people want to believe in fairy tales. I do care when they want to govern based on them.
Religion generally falsifies itself. The Old Testament does so in the 1st chapter where there are two contradictory genesis stories. By the way, the Judaic religions are all based on astrology anyway and are largely plagiarisms from previous religions. Here is an excellent and brief treatment of this subject:
I went to the Apple store to buy one for my wife. I do not know about your particular store, but when I went they had an "express lane" for people who simply wanted to buy an iPhone or an iPod. I think it took less than 5 minutes. They did not try and sell me anything else, nor did they even ask what I would be using for an OS. In fact the cashier was quite a pleasant person. In fact, I have always found the employees at all of the Apple stores I've patronized to be uniformly courteous and helpful.
My point is that overwhelmingly the religion myth that one follows has more to do with indoctrination than any sort of truth. Please excuse my spelling errors as I was baked.
What if a natural explanation is found one day? What if it contradicts your faith? Will you then deny it? What would it take to change your mind? How do you even know which religious guess is right? Do you think that if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would believe the Christian myth? No, you would likely be a Muslim. If you were born in India, perhaps you would believe the Hindu creation myth, because you would be a Hindu. So my point in all this is to say that you were likely indoctrinated into your current belief system by the culture in which you live. The mythology you believe is completely arbitrary. I put no more stock in Christ than I would in Zues, Oden, Mithras, or Kirshna. I am an athiest because none of these mythologies are intellectually satisfying. What if it turns out that our existence is some sort of a computer simulation? This seems much more plausible than anything else I've heard. The fact is, science destroys mythologies. Many phenomena throughout history were attributed to the supernatural (e.g., lightening, the sun, the stars, etc.), only to later proven by science to be anything but. I would give up my atheism in a second if I saw any evidence for a god. The theist waving his holy book is the one making the claim that this entity exists. There lies the burden of proof.
Maybe I am missing something (I am not a philosopher), but to this pedestrian, science makes predictions that give us reason to have faith in it. Our whole existence would come crumbling down if science failed to be predictable (e.g., f != ma). The faith required for believing in the bible is blind. There is no reason to believe it over any other competing mythology. In fact it is due the utmost skepticism because of the nature of our psychology. Watch this video. Watch the experiment in the beginning. Look how our brains seem well suited to "magical thinking." This is how religious myths are born.
You really believe this? This is completely counter to everything I've experienced as a scientist. People become scientists because they love science not for the monetary rewards. If you want to be a rich climate scientist, all you need to do is get a job at the American Petroleum Institute. I am an "enviro" and could quite give a shit less in general about how you live your life, but yes, I will care what you do if it involves dumping dioxin into my local river. If that makes me a "nut" then I don't want to be sane.
Yeah we learned the lesson of judicial activism from you libbies. And WE are much better at controlling such processes. YOU are fucked. Have a great day.
Correction: We are ALL fucked*. You right-wingers just are too blinded by your prioritization of non-issues such as the Gay Marriage boogie man and Flag Burning. You vote against your own self-interest economically and even socially. I like the way the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas" put it: It is like the French Revolution in reverse: The poor and disenfranchised rally with their torches and pitchforks to the gates of the aristocracy yelling "We're here to cut your taxes!" Since 2000, you folks ran the government, lock, stock, and barrel. We have seen the results of right-wing government: an abysmal failure by almost any measure. This is patently obvious to all but a few "dead-enders." We are all fucked. This "booming" economy is subverting the middle class, the war in Iraq is draining our blood and treasure at an alarming rate and has become a terrorist training ground, the national debt continues to grow seemingly without bound (especially if calculated using standard corporate accounting measures), the dollar is dropping in value, and America has lost her moral compass, and with it, the respect of the entire world, when we started torturing, violating international agreements, and threw the Geneva Convention and Habeus in the trashcan.
Now the SCOTUS has:
1) Essentially gutted Brown (racists everywhere rejoice!), but affirmative action for the rich is still ok. It is just called "legacy admission." Our "president" benefited greatly from this, since he is like King Midas, except everything he touches turns to shit instead of gold. Such a person would never get into Yale or Harvard based on merit (or lack thereof) without this sort of institution.
2) Put a huge dent in the 1st amendment by actually considering the content of the speech, which is to say that Chief Justice Roberts is now the moral arbiter of what is and is not protected speech, and "Drugs Are Bad" is the only legal message for high school students on this particular subject. This is a slippery slope. For example: Can Mormons, who consider caffeine a drug, start banning Starbuck's t-shirts in school?
3) Banned a sometimes medically necessary abortion procedure where Justice Anthony Kennedy emphasized in his majority opinion "the bond of love" a mother has for a child and said some women come to regret an abortion, implying that women just cannot be trusted with any serious choices concerning family planning. This is a particularly troublesome ruling no matter what side of the abortion fence you are on. I would not want to go down the dark road of bans to avoid regret later in life.
And by the way, aren't you conservatives supposed to be the "moral" ones? If judicial activism is bad, then I am surprised to hear that you've not learned that two wrongs do not make a right. It is almost like all you guys skipped kindergarten where this sort of thing is taught...
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck the Trump administration. This decision is what will kill many, as kratom helps legions of people get off truly dangerous opiates. Kratom is not at all dangerous. Cheeseburgers are more dangerous than kratom. I thought it was impossible for me to hate the Trump administration any more than I already do, but now I hate them even more. How is it we keep electing the most awful people in the country?
Yeah, I think our electoral system was designed to select and elect people with cluster B personality disorders. http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/conditions/personality-disorder
I think relaxing ought to be an olympic sport. We could judge it by attaching biometric sensors to the competitors.
It's been my experience that most of his detractors (at least the ones I've met) are absolutely resistant to understanding the nuances involved in what he said, let alone what he meant, and seem to be bent on clinging to the narrative that supports their notion that Al Gore is nothing more than a buffoon.
All one needs to do is look at the correlation to nearly any societal metric in religious societies vs. irreligious ones. Compare the plight of women for instance in Sweden and Saudi Arabia. The effect of religion on these metrics uniformly pushes them in the direction away from human well-being. People will argue that in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and North Korea were atheistic societies, this is far from true as the leaders, as you say, become the defacto religion. This is not an irreligious society. Kim Jung Il's requirements are even nuttier than the popes (e.g., he requires a duvet made of the softest down, which is supposedly the feathers from a sparrow's chin, so thousands of them had to die to satiate this weird requirement). I think the US is a great example of a country completely stymied by a hyper-religious minority. It is a terrible shame that this anti-scientific, know-nothing demographic has wielded its highly disproportionate power in a most destructive way.
What we need is less religion, not more censorship...
But then the "red" states would suffer. You see, they take from the economically more productive "blue" states, on average. It is ironic that the GOP whines about income redistribution, when their states benefit from it.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/11/29/8192719/index.htm
Nixon also created the EPA and OSHA. In this sense, he bears no resemblance to Palin. My point is that they are both authoritarians.
No. I despise authoritarians. I would say I've read enough that she, by and large, fits this bill:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_Authoritarianism
I am happy we agree that she is not ready, at least in the capacity to hold a press conference. The fact that she is not able to face the press now, in my opinion, demonstrates a lack of curiosity about the world and our nation. I mean, Joe Biden is doing press conferences, and also just got nominated.
Here's one measure of "readiness" to be president: The ability to face the press. Where is Palin on the Sunday talk shows? She is missing (we do not see Obama hiding from the press). This is highly unusual for a VP candidate. If that Kilkenny letter has any truth in it (and it appears to be legit at first blush), she has a lot to answer for on her record, and our country is in great danger if this person ever gets put into power. I think we have had enough of authoritarians already. I get the impression that she is a female Cheney or Nixon.
I do appreciate your sincerity, but to me none of this is any more convincing than any other mythology. I guess my real issue with religion is that is contains zero fundamental truth. For example, Newton and Leibniz independently discovered calculus because it contains truth. There is little chance of this happening with religion (other than via plagiarism). The truth as far as we can tell, using reason, is that this story of genesis is not factual: The earth was not created in 6 days. Humans and plants evolved over millions of years. There have been in the past large scale extinctions and explosions of new life (e.g., the Cambrian explosion). None of this is mentioned in this book. In fact it gets a lot of things totally wrong: Bats are not birds, for example. The creator of the universe should know this. I regard this cruel, jealous, and petty god the way I regard all gods: He is an artifact from the infancy of our intellect, from the dark times when diseases were caused by witchcraft and not by germs (god in the bible does not seem to know about microorganisms, very curious). I know that the universe without god is a very scary place. There is no one watching over us. We are whizzing through time and space, living in a thin veneer of an atmosphere on a tiny speck of dust. It is scary that our existence is fleeting and, in too many cases, brutal. But I adhere to wisdom of Carl Sagan: It is better to see the world as it really is than to persist in delusion. To me, I am just glad to be alive. To observe the wonders of the universe. I will be just as content not to exist after my death as I was before I was born. I need no saviors.
Your link is to a Christian Apologetics site. I am sure they have an ax to grind. I would believe this site over the other:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa5.htm
It seems more nuanced than the video for sure. Still there are many other similarities to other past gods such as Mithras as well. Horus is by no means the only data point.
Ok, have you read this?
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/by_name.html
I bet you can find some contradictions to science here:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/abs/long.htm
If this was really the word of some omniscient, omnipotent being, I would expect something more profound than a treatise that could've been written by a bronze-age sheep herder, which is what it is. I do not care if people want to believe in fairy tales. I do care when they want to govern based on them.
Religion generally falsifies itself. The Old Testament does so in the 1st chapter where there are two contradictory genesis stories. By the way, the Judaic religions are all based on astrology anyway and are largely plagiarisms from previous religions. Here is an excellent and brief treatment of this subject:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1543831119879192379&hl=en
Damn it, Obama makes me feel optimistic. I'll take that over queasy any day.
I went to the Apple store to buy one for my wife. I do not know about your particular store, but when I went they had an "express lane" for people who simply wanted to buy an iPhone or an iPod. I think it took less than 5 minutes. They did not try and sell me anything else, nor did they even ask what I would be using for an OS. In fact the cashier was quite a pleasant person. In fact, I have always found the employees at all of the Apple stores I've patronized to be uniformly courteous and helpful.
My point is that overwhelmingly the religion myth that one follows has more to do with indoctrination than any sort of truth. Please excuse my spelling errors as I was baked.
What if a natural explanation is found one day? What if it contradicts your faith? Will you then deny it? What would it take to change your mind? How do you even know which religious guess is right? Do you think that if you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would believe the Christian myth? No, you would likely be a Muslim. If you were born in India, perhaps you would believe the Hindu creation myth, because you would be a Hindu. So my point in all this is to say that you were likely indoctrinated into your current belief system by the culture in which you live. The mythology you believe is completely arbitrary. I put no more stock in Christ than I would in Zues, Oden, Mithras, or Kirshna. I am an athiest because none of these mythologies are intellectually satisfying. What if it turns out that our existence is some sort of a computer simulation? This seems much more plausible than anything else I've heard. The fact is, science destroys mythologies. Many phenomena throughout history were attributed to the supernatural (e.g., lightening, the sun, the stars, etc.), only to later proven by science to be anything but. I would give up my atheism in a second if I saw any evidence for a god. The theist waving his holy book is the one making the claim that this entity exists. There lies the burden of proof.
Maybe I am missing something (I am not a philosopher), but to this pedestrian, science makes predictions that give us reason to have faith in it. Our whole existence would come crumbling down if science failed to be predictable (e.g., f != ma). The faith required for believing in the bible is blind. There is no reason to believe it over any other competing mythology. In fact it is due the utmost skepticism because of the nature of our psychology. Watch this video. Watch the experiment in the beginning. Look how our brains seem well suited to "magical thinking." This is how religious myths are born.
Maybe I am confused, but how do you explain this?
You really believe this? This is completely counter to everything I've experienced as a scientist. People become scientists because they love science not for the monetary rewards. If you want to be a rich climate scientist, all you need to do is get a job at the American Petroleum Institute. I am an "enviro" and could quite give a shit less in general about how you live your life, but yes, I will care what you do if it involves dumping dioxin into my local river. If that makes me a "nut" then I don't want to be sane.
Yeah we learned the lesson of judicial activism from you libbies. And WE are much better at controlling such processes. YOU are fucked. Have a great day.
Correction: We are ALL fucked*. You right-wingers just are too blinded by your prioritization of non-issues such as the Gay Marriage boogie man and Flag Burning. You vote against your own self-interest economically and even socially. I like the way the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas" put it: It is like the French Revolution in reverse: The poor and disenfranchised rally with their torches and pitchforks to the gates of the aristocracy yelling "We're here to cut your taxes!" Since 2000, you folks ran the government, lock, stock, and barrel. We have seen the results of right-wing government: an abysmal failure by almost any measure. This is patently obvious to all but a few "dead-enders." We are all fucked. This "booming" economy is subverting the middle class, the war in Iraq is draining our blood and treasure at an alarming rate and has become a terrorist training ground, the national debt continues to grow seemingly without bound (especially if calculated using standard corporate accounting measures), the dollar is dropping in value, and America has lost her moral compass, and with it, the respect of the entire world, when we started torturing, violating international agreements, and threw the Geneva Convention and Habeus in the trashcan.
Now the SCOTUS has:
1) Essentially gutted Brown (racists everywhere rejoice!), but affirmative action for the rich is still ok. It is just called "legacy admission." Our "president" benefited greatly from this, since he is like King Midas, except everything he touches turns to shit instead of gold. Such a person would never get into Yale or Harvard based on merit (or lack thereof) without this sort of institution.
2) Put a huge dent in the 1st amendment by actually considering the content of the speech, which is to say that Chief Justice Roberts is now the moral arbiter of what is and is not protected speech, and "Drugs Are Bad" is the only legal message for high school students on this particular subject. This is a slippery slope. For example: Can Mormons, who consider caffeine a drug, start banning Starbuck's t-shirts in school?
3) Banned a sometimes medically necessary abortion procedure where Justice Anthony Kennedy emphasized in his majority opinion "the bond of love" a mother has for a child and said some women come to regret an abortion, implying that women just cannot be trusted with any serious choices concerning family planning. This is a particularly troublesome ruling no matter what side of the abortion fence you are on. I would not want to go down the dark road of bans to avoid regret later in life.
And by the way, aren't you conservatives supposed to be the "moral" ones? If judicial activism is bad, then I am surprised to hear that you've not learned that two wrongs do not make a right. It is almost like all you guys skipped kindergarten where this sort of thing is taught...
*unless you are part of the aristocracy.
I tried being nice. It does not work. Yelling and cursing does not work either, but at least it is cathartic.