It's an election year.... I suspect he'd wear a pink tutu and sing songs from Little Mermaid if he thought he'd get more votes.
OK, I'm game. I'll pitch in $50 for his re election campaign if he'll do that. Even just the tutu.
Where's that going to lead to though? Some sort of America's got talent / American Idol event preceding the election?
have you looked at the election process since they developed television??? Just about everybody from the late 50's on ahs been 'all hat and no cattle', to steal a phrase from my misspent redneck youth. The 'leaders' just gotta look and sound good. The real power is in the handlers.
Scientists have been incorrect and in some instances published fraudulent research studies yet you claim those whom believe in God lack intelligence, mental strength, or integrity? There is a fine balance but there are no perfect human beings. Even the natural world gets things "wrong" sometimes; (e.g.) homosexual behaviour and genocidal behaviour amongst animals other than homo sapiens.
The difference is, in science, they have these things called 'peer review' and 'empirical evidence'. You can claim to have discovered anything you want, but you better be ready to back it up with evidence, and show how you got there. Your experiments must be reproducable. Your results and your methods must be able to be tested as well. And your claims can (and damned well should) change under new evidence and examination. Anything else isn't science, it's philosophy.
Most people who believe in God belong to an organised religion of some stripe or other. Most of those religions get downright testy at any 'new thinking' that comes down the pike. For instance, that little disgreement the Pope at that time had with Galileo. Or the insistance by radically fundamentalist Muslims that the Koran is the end-all and be-all of all human knowledge and thus no further books need be written that directly caused the world of Islam to fall from the pinacle of advanced human civilisation welcoming scientific freedom of thought to its current 'Not Invented Here' notions, notions that are closely followed by the extreme fudamentalist Christians. You can claim that God told you all kinds of things, like, gays are immoral and must be killed, to scientists are the Anti-$MESSIAH and must be killed, to 'God told me to run for President so you must elect me in this one last final election', to 'science itself is evil and must not be taught', and by the unwritten 'rules' of the 'God-game', nobody is allowed to disagree with you, no evidence, peer review, nothing. And your followers must follow your teachings no matter what, with no input on anything. Several of these God-based religions demand the death of people who do not believe the same things as those who are 'spoken to by God'.
So, is there a difference between people of science and people of fundamentalist religions? I think so. Your mileage may vary.
This ban has nothing to do with second hand smoke. It's intended to reduce insurance and disability costs for the employer.
End of thread. Its not a big brother thing, not a conspiracy, or someone trying to control everyone. As with nearly everything, its saving money perceived as heavy-handed bureaucratic nefariousness. But the reality is they are trying to save a buck by riding the current anti-smoking wave. It is hardly the moral high ground, but in reality it's a business decision.
It's blatant discrimination based on a lifestyle choice. 'You smoke? Fuck you, we're not hiring you. And no, you can't get a government handout because we won't hire you." What's next, manditory nicotine tests on my Social Security check??? More discrimination against gays because in the NeoCon viewpoint, being gay is a choice?
The problem is that health insurance is tied to the workplace. A single payer health plan would have avoided that problem.
Right, in a single payer plan, the single payer would have the direct authority to tell you that you couldn't engage in risky activities, and to punish you for doing so. And "the people" would be all for it on the grounds that it would reduce their health care tax.
I didn't realise that smoking was illegal in Canada, the UK, and Sweden.
The only safe choice is to very strictly limit government power, so when unworthy people get elected, they can't hurt anyone.
Great idea. The problem, though, throughout history, has been that governments are like any other organism. They try to survive, expand, reproduce, and so forth. A government's 'reproduction' is its bureacracy. Once it starts growing, the end is in sight. Just ask the Confucian Chinese of the Old Empire. Ghenghis Khan conquered China alright, but within three generations, his grandson, Kublai Khan, had been assimulated, and the bureaucracy didn't even hiccup. Ghenghis couldn't rule China without them. Same thing as the Romans. The Senate of the Republic of Rome got discredited, and the Caesars moved in to become Emperors. Then the whole damned family started coming off the rails (see Caligula for an example). While the 'royal family' was busy carving each other up (when they weren't poisoning each other), the bureaucrats kept the Empire more or less viable. And let's not forget the United States. The Constitution was a masterpiece to restrain the federal government, but the government itself started almost from the beginning to get bigger, more powerful, more intrusive.
History tells us that no government is immune, and eventually, they all fall. Unfortunately, we haven't learned enough to do without one yet.
Canada would be able to just walk in and take what states it wanted..... and most would welcome them with open arms, or even go so far as to kill those that would stop them, at least after a few years.
I for one welcome our new Canadian overlords
A bottle of one liter of maple syrup has been sent to you, good sir.
If I demand that Harper stay home in Canada when the Royal Canadian Moose Mounties come marching over The Line, can I get 2 liters of maple syrup? That shit is worth more than heroin!!!
I'm having trouble seeing the distinction, in practical terms.
Simple enough, actually. Take, for instance, abortion. If you don't believe in abortion, don't have one. DON'T try to get legislation banning abortion passed to keep everybody from having an abortion just because you don't like it for reasons I'm sure you have every right to have. In the same way, don't tell me I can't have a cigarette in my own home or car when I'm all by myself. It's my choice. I'm aware of the consequences and I choose to live with them.
What happens if an explosive detector has a false positive? Most likely, a pistol in the face, possibly a bullet in the head, depending on how jumpy the guards are. After all, they don't know for sure if you're wired, but they have to act as though you are, and are about to go off at any second. As has been pointed out, if you are wired, they have no idea what can and will trigger the explosives. They have to assume you're more volitile than a bottle of nitroglycerine or they're wasting everybody's time.
I skimmed the link, looked like typical marketting pitch stuff. I didn't see any error rates on this marvelous new device. I'm curious as to how many false positives it's going to generate, and how often it will miss carry-on explosives. I'm also wondering how many days I'll need to stay away from the rifle range before I won't show any particulate explosives at one of these checkpoints.
I'm wondering how big those barrels are. If they were 55 gallon drums, that would be about 33,000 gallons recovered out of what, half a million supposedly out there?
No wonder they did it in an armed convoy. The recovered syrup increased in percieved value by 12 times! And dammit, I was gonna have pancakes this morning, too...
...and the rest of the world to be left in the dust fighting to survive miserable lives.
You don't seem to get the idea of the singularity. If a tiny fraction of the technology it develops is useful to baseline humans, then those humans will be leading lives of undreamed-of power in modern terms, miserable only compared to the transcendii. Well, either that or they'll be dismantled and turned into smartdust.
Why do I have problems believing that? Observed trends in my lifetime say expectations will continue to lower, the rich will get richer and own what little they don't already own, and the middle class will disappear. Even the superbright potentials among us will be stuck in the 99% that live on the dole ('People Chow', anyone?) with no way to escape. The 'baseline humans' you talk about will probably only belong to the 1% that owns everything worth owning. Forget the military, we're almost to the point of automating it already.
You might want to watch the Weather Channel some. From what I've seen, hurricanes are starting earlier, the season is getting longer, and the storms are moving further up the coasts than before. Of course, that could be that I'm just an old greybeard...
The Supremes are saying there are rules to the game and he wasn't playing by the rules. How convenient. Of course, if it was the government filing this case, they most likely would have heard it.
The tenth amendment says -
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Since there is no part in the Constitution giving the Congress such authority, they lack such authority. Simple as that.
Drone does not equal guns. Where do you get this? Because you can attach guns to them? A drone is just a plane with high fuel efficiency and long deployment times. Shit you can put guns on helicopters too, but I don't see anyone complaining about cops using them. They cannot bomb us if there are no bombs. This is a surveillance tool.
Some people in Pakistan and Iraq would like a word with you...
Oversight is provided by the executive branch. Leaders are often replaced when a change through the ballot box occurs.
If by federal alphabet agencies - you mean the FBI.. they are certainly better than the local police force; largely because of the degree of oversight. CIA has no jurisdiction within the borders and the NSA is an intelligence operation - without a warrant the data they collect isn't used for judicial function.
Sorry - you've jumped a touch past paranoid.
I wish I was looking at the world through rose-colored glasses like you seem to. Really, I do.
Ever hear of a thing called an executive order? Check it out sometime. Executive orders got us into 5 wars that I can name right off the top of my head, no 'oversight', no repercussions to the 'executive' in charge. Not for starting a war, that is. They've been used since Truman to increase the power of the executive by a penstroke, no appeal, damned little recourse. You can't even get the Supremes to rule on it until it goes through 'the proper channels', and by that time, the furor usually is over and everybody lets it slide. That's assuming the Supremes even bother to look over the case. They have the right to refuse to hear anything. Executive orders have the force of Federal law, and they're in the hands of somebody who, per the Constitution, has zero right or duty to create law. In the hands of a relatively benign executive like Truman or Carter, good things happen. In the hands of someone not quite so benign, like LBJ, we get the Vietnam War. In the hands of a total meatpuppet like Reagan or Bush 2, all kinds of stupidity happens. Re-read your American history.
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It's an election year. ... I suspect he'd wear a pink tutu and sing songs from Little Mermaid if he thought he'd get more votes.
OK, I'm game. I'll pitch in $50 for his re election campaign if he'll do that. Even just the tutu.
Where's that going to lead to though? Some sort of America's got talent / American Idol event preceding the election?
have you looked at the election process since they developed television??? Just about everybody from the late 50's on ahs been 'all hat and no cattle', to steal a phrase from my misspent redneck youth. The 'leaders' just gotta look and sound good. The real power is in the handlers.
There is an abundance of evidence in a creator. But of course evidence does not equate to proof.
What evidence? Where can I find this evidence? Has it been peer-reviewed? Tested for falibility?
Scientists have been incorrect and in some instances published fraudulent research studies yet you claim those whom believe in God lack intelligence, mental strength, or integrity? There is a fine balance but there are no perfect human beings. Even the natural world gets things "wrong" sometimes; (e.g.) homosexual behaviour and genocidal behaviour amongst animals other than homo sapiens.
The difference is, in science, they have these things called 'peer review' and 'empirical evidence'. You can claim to have discovered anything you want, but you better be ready to back it up with evidence, and show how you got there. Your experiments must be reproducable. Your results and your methods must be able to be tested as well. And your claims can (and damned well should) change under new evidence and examination. Anything else isn't science, it's philosophy.
Most people who believe in God belong to an organised religion of some stripe or other. Most of those religions get downright testy at any 'new thinking' that comes down the pike. For instance, that little disgreement the Pope at that time had with Galileo. Or the insistance by radically fundamentalist Muslims that the Koran is the end-all and be-all of all human knowledge and thus no further books need be written that directly caused the world of Islam to fall from the pinacle of advanced human civilisation welcoming scientific freedom of thought to its current 'Not Invented Here' notions, notions that are closely followed by the extreme fudamentalist Christians. You can claim that God told you all kinds of things, like, gays are immoral and must be killed, to scientists are the Anti-$MESSIAH and must be killed, to 'God told me to run for President so you must elect me in this one last final election', to 'science itself is evil and must not be taught', and by the unwritten 'rules' of the 'God-game', nobody is allowed to disagree with you, no evidence, peer review, nothing. And your followers must follow your teachings no matter what, with no input on anything. Several of these God-based religions demand the death of people who do not believe the same things as those who are 'spoken to by God'.
So, is there a difference between people of science and people of fundamentalist religions? I think so. Your mileage may vary.
This ban has nothing to do with second hand smoke. It's intended to reduce insurance and disability costs for the employer.
End of thread. Its not a big brother thing, not a conspiracy, or someone trying to control everyone. As with nearly everything, its saving money perceived as heavy-handed bureaucratic nefariousness. But the reality is they are trying to save a buck by riding the current anti-smoking wave. It is hardly the moral high ground, but in reality it's a business decision.
It's blatant discrimination based on a lifestyle choice. 'You smoke? Fuck you, we're not hiring you. And no, you can't get a government handout because we won't hire you." What's next, manditory nicotine tests on my Social Security check??? More discrimination against gays because in the NeoCon viewpoint, being gay is a choice?
Right, in a single payer plan, the single payer would have the direct authority to tell you that you couldn't engage in risky activities, and to punish you for doing so. And "the people" would be all for it on the grounds that it would reduce their health care tax.
I didn't realise that smoking was illegal in Canada, the UK, and Sweden.
The only safe choice is to very strictly limit government power, so when unworthy people get elected, they can't hurt anyone.
Great idea. The problem, though, throughout history, has been that governments are like any other organism. They try to survive, expand, reproduce, and so forth. A government's 'reproduction' is its bureacracy. Once it starts growing, the end is in sight. Just ask the Confucian Chinese of the Old Empire. Ghenghis Khan conquered China alright, but within three generations, his grandson, Kublai Khan, had been assimulated, and the bureaucracy didn't even hiccup. Ghenghis couldn't rule China without them. Same thing as the Romans. The Senate of the Republic of Rome got discredited, and the Caesars moved in to become Emperors. Then the whole damned family started coming off the rails (see Caligula for an example). While the 'royal family' was busy carving each other up (when they weren't poisoning each other), the bureaucrats kept the Empire more or less viable. And let's not forget the United States. The Constitution was a masterpiece to restrain the federal government, but the government itself started almost from the beginning to get bigger, more powerful, more intrusive.
History tells us that no government is immune, and eventually, they all fall. Unfortunately, we haven't learned enough to do without one yet.
If I demand that Harper stay home in Canada when the Royal Canadian Moose Mounties come marching over The Line, can I get 2 liters of maple syrup? That shit is worth more than heroin!!!
I'm having trouble seeing the distinction, in practical terms.
Simple enough, actually. Take, for instance, abortion. If you don't believe in abortion, don't have one. DON'T try to get legislation banning abortion passed to keep everybody from having an abortion just because you don't like it for reasons I'm sure you have every right to have. In the same way, don't tell me I can't have a cigarette in my own home or car when I'm all by myself. It's my choice. I'm aware of the consequences and I choose to live with them.
Been written about. Course, Zahn didn't come up with any conclusions why the Spinneret aliens were hiding, just that they were.
Makes me wonder if some civilisations are hiding, and what they're hiding from.
What happens if an explosive detector has a false positive? Most likely, a pistol in the face, possibly a bullet in the head, depending on how jumpy the guards are. After all, they don't know for sure if you're wired, but they have to act as though you are, and are about to go off at any second. As has been pointed out, if you are wired, they have no idea what can and will trigger the explosives. They have to assume you're more volitile than a bottle of nitroglycerine or they're wasting everybody's time.
I skimmed the link, looked like typical marketting pitch stuff. I didn't see any error rates on this marvelous new device. I'm curious as to how many false positives it's going to generate, and how often it will miss carry-on explosives. I'm also wondering how many days I'll need to stay away from the rifle range before I won't show any particulate explosives at one of these checkpoints.
Yes.
I'm wondering how big those barrels are. If they were 55 gallon drums, that would be about 33,000 gallons recovered out of what, half a million supposedly out there?
No wonder they did it in an armed convoy. The recovered syrup increased in percieved value by 12 times! And dammit, I was gonna have pancakes this morning, too...
...and the rest of the world to be left in the dust fighting to survive miserable lives.
You don't seem to get the idea of the singularity. If a tiny fraction of the technology it develops is useful to baseline humans, then those humans will be leading lives of undreamed-of power in modern terms, miserable only compared to the transcendii. Well, either that or they'll be dismantled and turned into smartdust.
Why do I have problems believing that? Observed trends in my lifetime say expectations will continue to lower, the rich will get richer and own what little they don't already own, and the middle class will disappear. Even the superbright potentials among us will be stuck in the 99% that live on the dole ('People Chow', anyone?) with no way to escape. The 'baseline humans' you talk about will probably only belong to the 1% that owns everything worth owning. Forget the military, we're almost to the point of automating it already.
You might want to watch the Weather Channel some. From what I've seen, hurricanes are starting earlier, the season is getting longer, and the storms are moving further up the coasts than before. Of course, that could be that I'm just an old greybeard...
Actually, he's not bad, as long as he plays the one character he knows well: Will Smith. Anything else, he loses it.
A street-legal rocket car....
California to New York in 2.5 hours. 3 hours trying to find a parking space.
You can't catch a fictitious enemy. Watch Loose Change on youtube - that will tell you who we should catch.
Sure you can. Just round up the Usual Suspects and provide them with a handy dandy membership card and decoder ring.
Al Qaeda was created out of gossamer by the FBI to try to get bin Laden indicted as a co-conspirator for the first round of WTC bombings.
You need to get your ass to mars.
Love to. Where can I get my exit visa?
"They declined because he filed in Florida, not DC."
Is he trying the case pro se? Because, I can't imagine a member of the Bar making such a basic fuckup.
Could be that he's a Florida resident, NOT a Michigan resident.
The Supremes are saying there are rules to the game and he wasn't playing by the rules. How convenient. Of course, if it was the government filing this case, they most likely would have heard it.
The tenth amendment says - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Since there is no part in the Constitution giving the Congress such authority, they lack such authority. Simple as that.
Who bells the cat? Who guards the guardians?
I'm voting Kang this time!
I'm thinking of Cthulhu this time around. Why fuck around with the lesser evil? After all, Fidel, the ultimate outsider, won't run this year...
Drone does not equal guns. Where do you get this? Because you can attach guns to them? A drone is just a plane with high fuel efficiency and long deployment times. Shit you can put guns on helicopters too, but I don't see anyone complaining about cops using them. They cannot bomb us if there are no bombs. This is a surveillance tool.
Some people in Pakistan and Iraq would like a word with you...
Oversight is provided by the executive branch. Leaders are often replaced when a change through the ballot box occurs. If by federal alphabet agencies - you mean the FBI .. they are certainly better than the local police force; largely because of the degree of oversight. CIA has no jurisdiction within the borders and the NSA is an intelligence operation - without a warrant the data they collect isn't used for judicial function.
Sorry - you've jumped a touch past paranoid.
I wish I was looking at the world through rose-colored glasses like you seem to. Really, I do.
Ever hear of a thing called an executive order? Check it out sometime. Executive orders got us into 5 wars that I can name right off the top of my head, no 'oversight', no repercussions to the 'executive' in charge. Not for starting a war, that is. They've been used since Truman to increase the power of the executive by a penstroke, no appeal, damned little recourse. You can't even get the Supremes to rule on it until it goes through 'the proper channels', and by that time, the furor usually is over and everybody lets it slide. That's assuming the Supremes even bother to look over the case. They have the right to refuse to hear anything. Executive orders have the force of Federal law, and they're in the hands of somebody who, per the Constitution, has zero right or duty to create law. In the hands of a relatively benign executive like Truman or Carter, good things happen. In the hands of someone not quite so benign, like LBJ, we get the Vietnam War. In the hands of a total meatpuppet like Reagan or Bush 2, all kinds of stupidity happens. Re-read your American history.