Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
on
Religion in Video Games
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The Crusades resulted in the deaths of roughly ninety to one-hundred-eighty thousand non-combatants (nominal civilians, over a multi-century period. This was the 28th most severe invasion of the fertile crescent after all, falling behind only such other invasions as the Califate, The Hittite expansion, Assyria, Alexander the great, and 24 other wars with higher death tolls. If you include crusades not directed at the holy land, such as the Fourth Crusade versus Constantinople, the Albigensian Crusade versus the Cathars and the Northern Crusades, a Million is not an unreasonable death toll. That's both ways of course, not just the 'Christian side' body-counts, and includes wars where both sides claimed to be Christian.
The witch burnings were really post middle ages (about 1480 to 1700) spanning the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in a problem of figuring out which executions were witch related and which were of Cathars, political and nationalist based population obliterations and so on. Best estimates for a death toll definitely cross the line into the 100,000-110,000 range. but still taking over 200 years total to do so, and falling behind not just the rest of the thirty years war, but the hundred years war, maybe the English civil war, the Armenian atrocities, and a couple of mid 20th century events I won't bother to mention in the same areas. It's even possible that what Vlad personally did to combat the Muslim invaders of Transylvania resulted in more civilian deaths than the witch trials.
The best estimates for the Spanish Inquisition come from the church's own records, and thousands of people who wouldn't convert is quite accurate, in fact the best guess is around 32,000. I wouldn't mind seeing a game in this setting, but if it's a typical first person shooter, The Player will probably have to gibe that many personally to get a high score.
Caffeine Theobromine (in Chocolate, with lesser amounts in Cola nuts and Acai berries) L-Theanine (particularly in green tea). And compositionally enhanced direct electro-magnetic stimulation of one of the brain's most developed centers (the visual cortex). Wheeee!!!
Much as I love them, Dr Who and Torchwood were/are "mostly high-brow entertainment that nobody with an IQ below room temperature finds entertaining"? Yeah, pull the other one. BBC Three, now with Weevil Fight Club, for the win. (Notice how I didn't even have to mention Graham Norton?).
Non-disabled vet - ending up a bit after the desert storm era. I only put 13 years in, so I really am not entitled to much in the way of VA care. (Because I set up in the field right next to to the Paladins a few times (that's artillary), I have a notch in my low frequency hearing on record, and technically, the VA might be legally required to follow through with regular auditory testing, but I've never bothered to push that issue.). I paid for my degree before I got commissioned, and most of it before I even enlisted, so I haven't taken government assistance for education (not even a civilian Pell grant) I do have legal entitlement to cheaper VA loan rates if I buy a house. Haven't used it, but it's in the contract. If I ever do, I won't feel guilty about taking the benefit. You've paid a lot bigger price than I have, and I'm genuinely grateful for your service.
Social Security is not part of the general taxation system, but has its own tax. The need to soon pay for some of those costs out of the general revenue is because money was borrowed from it into the general fund, and now has to be paid back. Arguing that you don't need social security or medicare is simply a lie, unless you are arguing that you didn't benefit from anything the government already spent that borrowed money on instead. Arguing that it's OK for the federal government to repudiate its debts, just so they are to elderly retirees and not treasury bond investors or foreign governments, is equally vile. If you regard payback as optional, you become a parasite who doesn't want to repay what you took by force, and thinks it's morally acceptable to target old people, while claiming moral sanction under some twisted form of Libertarianism, but ignoring that the government already took money in your name, dispersed some part of that money to you, and is now trying desperately to cover up that fact. Would you really want to go there?
Just incidentally, your actual 'facts' in the form of percentages are all terribly wrong. I'm sure if I had just argued facts, you would have come back with some claim that the amounts didn't matter as the moral principle still stands, so since I've shot that down, it will be interesting to see if you concoct some desperate lie to avoid facing what this implies about your moral worth. Man up! Either pay your debts, or prove that the government didn't spend any of that borrowed money on you or with your consent (I've never met anyone over the age of 25 in the US who could honestly prove that, and I really doubt you could either, so just "Man Up!". Pay back what your representitives took for you and only then talk about what you think is morally acceptable.). I'm pretty confident that the government didn't have your informed consent, as you don't sound like that sort, but they did it in your name, and if you're old enough to have voted at least once, you technically had an opportunity to register your real opinions just as the rest of us have had one or more.
If you're genuinely surprised to find out that the only reason social security is at risk is that the government borrowed massively from it, then I appologise for the tone of this post. If you had no idea that what the right wing is calling the year Social Security goes bankrupt (2034), is really the year the system is first projected to have only 75% of pay outs coming in (due to the baby boomers moving into the system at rates that will temporarily exceed new employees), and not the year the fund would actually have no money, then you are not alone, but please read up on it. If you didn't realize that there are many items of the defense budget hidden in many other departments, but not vice versa, again please educate yourself.
(As just three examples: One, all long term care for wounded veterans is clearly a defense related cost, but it's in those 'welfare' budget areas you decry. Two, look at federal dept. of transportation budgets for roads which are four or six lanes, run through a military base, narrow to two lanes afterwards to serve a community of 500 people or less, can be closed as needed by troops on post, but are described as access roads to small impoverished opportunity zones in their funding. Three, look at aid to buy helicopters and fixed wing aircraft for Central American countries as part of the DEA's activities, and then look at how much foreign aid to the entire region south of our border is earmarked for buying military assets only, to balance those extra helicopters and planes, because many other countries are worried what happens if the big DEA recipients use those assets for something besides the war on drugs).
So let's stipulate that those 12 laptops were actually used for six months each by either typical government employees or corporate management types, and lets include that at least one of those persons is a boss's nephew type. NOW what would happen?
I can't believe I'm posting to this point, but, to register an Asimov-bot as a corporation still means one or more humans would have to be its President and Treasurer (and in some states, probably a third slot would legally need filled at incorporation). Ergo the robot would still be a slave. (Probably an S corp would be the best legal approach for slavery, as all profits pass through automatically.). If you put any legal terms in the articles of incorporation that gave the robot itself control of the corporate decision making process, corporate responsibility, assigned assets or profits, those could still be challenged by a claim that the robot was not a person. Until there's an Adam Link decision, robots are screwed.
A decently smart robot could spin off such a web of shell corps and interlocking contracts that they could probably slip through, of course.
Several Protestant versions of Christianity have Bishops and even Archbishops, and of course, the Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox faiths do as well, plus maybe some of the Coptic branches and some others. These wear hats and robes at formal occasions that may look a lot like the Pope's hats and robes, and may carry a shepherd's crook that looks a lot like his too.
The Pope usuallly wears white, and his cardinals red, but in the protestant faiths, Bishops mostly wear colors depending on the church year and the four colors normally associated (usually red, white, green, and purple), which, even if sticking very close to the official color system allows white a lot. (Although I've noticed several female Episcopal or Anglican bishops who tend to stick with purple more, most of the male bishops wear white often). (When not officiating, male Episcopal bishops mostly seem to like tweed jackets, sometimes Houndstooth patterns with leather elbow patches. Female bishops seem to also like jackets, but split about fifty-fifty for skirts or slacks with these. Tartans are a fairly common but minority option).
Here we have a 'schism group', as you put it. They don't use all the Roman Catholic symbols (Most Episcopal churches have a cross rather than a crucifix), and the 'chain of command' structure definitely doesn't go to cardinals or really a single leader (The Archbishop of Canterbury is definitely not analogous to the Pope in terms of authority over the other bishops). But it's still got look and feel that could, as you put it, cause confusion.
I'm actually wondering if this action could somehow be intended to result in some sort of look and feel claim in court, either for copyright or more likely for trademark. Either seems like a long shot, but I suppose it's possible. Maybe someone more familiar with the Lutheran faith or the various Orthodox forms could comment on whether the appearance is as similar there too.
This appears to be a reference to Stalin's remark "The Pope? How many Divisions does he have?" (Where Stalin was talking about military divisions, and making the point that without them, what the Pope said about whatever the USSR did didn't really matter.).
Romeo and Juliet? You mean like Lion King 2 but with a sad ending?
(Hamlet = Lion King 1 with a sad ending. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead = Lion King 3 with a sad ending (Indeed Stoppard's characters are certainly less existentially absurd than Timmon and Pumbah). Lion King 4 will doubtless be King Lear, but with the loyal daughter eventually being recognised for her virtues and showing her two sisters the error of their ways).
let's see: 'Starmaker' is to 'Last and First Men' as 'The Mummy 2' is to 'The Mummy', or at most, as 'Second Stage Lensman' is to 'Triplanetary', only Stapledon was more spherical (less glossy surface, much more interior volume). More seriously, Stapledon's 'Starmaker' is to his 'Darkness and the Light', as 'Last and First' is to 'Starmaker'. (And incidentally, I'm talking about the Fraser/Weisz Mummy films above, not the greater originals.) Stapledon's non-fiction isn't equivalent to any of these, but 'Waking World' and 'Seven Pillars of Peace' most particularly aren't like any of his fiction. Yet, Stapledon and Lovecraft both put a very similar emphasis on dreaming.
My real point, above, is Starmaker is a sequel, one where the author deliberately tried to re-do what he had already done, but (again, deliberately) on a bigger scale. That's an odd choice to cite as a unique work.
'Doom that Came to Sarnath' is 'The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth' is any of a dozen Twilight Zone Episodes transposed to a more clearly fantastic setting. (And Dunsany said 'fortress' was 'Masque of the Red Death', but that's clearly impossible, as 'masque' is Lovecraft's 'The Outsider', not 'Doom that Came'). Since Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' is also obviously Poe's 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym','Doom that came to Sarnath' just about has to be Poe's 'Hopfrog', yet 'Hopfrog' is even more obviously 'Shadows over Insmouth'. My real point, this time, is that Lovecraft considered 'Doom' to be one of his deliberate pastiches of Lord Dunsany's works, which again makes it seem odd to call the work unconventional, or outside of type.
Still, 'Dreams in the Witch House' is definitely 'Man Goes on a Journey', while 'The Dunwich Horror' is definitely 'A Stranger Comes to Town'. 'Nyarlathotep' is only a fragment, so it must be of the form 'A Stranger Com...'.
Two might be a 'little' low, but at least as many as there are good storytellers strikes me as just a trifle high, by your own examples.
If you get right down to it, the psiops tricks you are claiming are being used against libertarianism by equating it with anarchy are the ones once used against anarchy (and they evidently worked, at least on you - nothing personal, they have worked on most people). Literally translated from the Latin, anarchy does not mean no laws, but no rulers. A lot of its advocates are simply advocating that there be no ruling class - for example just about everyone in the UK who opposes the institution of the Monarchy has been listed as an Anarchist even if they support a house of commons with no house of lords type system.
One of the most infamous 'anarchists' of all time, Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Arch-Duke Ferdinand, wanted merely a non-imperial government over an independent Slovic state, not no government. (although his actions led to a period of chaos where there were zones no government could honestly claim to control). A little reading on this case will make anyone in modern America wonder why they were taught that the people in this plot were "anarchists' instead of terrorists. The name 'anarchist' was used for Sacco and Vanzetti and others in the 1920's, but so was 'communist', and again, they were part of an organization that advocated serious power be placed in the hands of certain people, just not a Noble class, so by the standards of the USA, they definitely weren't real anarchists.
It would be possible to fairly call oneself an anarchist just by advocating that the Jury system is the model for all government systems, and groups of people who are our general peers should be assembled to run all functions of government, and kept in place for only short times to avoid them thinking they are somehow privileged. Indeed, strict term limits are a small step towards Anarchy, and indexing salaries (or health plans) for government officials to the average income (or insurance coverage) of their constituents might even fit the definition. While I wouldn't class Jefferson as a complete Anarchist, there are various times in Payne's writing career when he certainly was.
Some of the modern Anarchists, and just about all the people who call themselves Anarcho-capitalists, have very definitely lost sight of the older definitions.
Not that I agree with everything the person you are debating said, but... There is another point to a stimulus bill. That point frequently gets stated only as one part of a compound point, rather than by itself, so what we often see in the press is something such as "to spend money in ways that boost the economy."
Spend on infrastructure? A bridge to an area with existing industry is better than a bridge to nowhere. If there's reason to think better access would help an industry grow, or keep one from failing, better still. So, what if we give the money to the NSF to decide if flue research will help the economy grow better than Melanoma research or not, if we trust the NSF experts to do a good job of deciding?
Better still, the first stimulus package (Bush administration - early 2008), a number was tossed around - that was that 68% of all spending was from consumer demand. So, it would have made sense if you wanted to most greatly boost the overall economy if at least 68% of the money had gone to consumers. There are good arguments for going higher, but none that were made publicly for going lower. In fact, with the schedule 179 acceleration for businesses also in the plan, less than 50% actually went to consumer spending.
The new stimulus packages are all worse. By the metric everybody in congress and the white house seems to accept (still about 68%), giving 68% of the bank bailout to existing home-owners to pay off their mortgages early or get out from underwater status would have stimulated the economy much more than giving it to the banks. By sub-metrics that show how much of total spending is driven by the poorest, large tax rebates for first time home buyers and new car purchasers would have been better aimed at getting the drivers of rusted out gas guzzlers to upgrade, even if it was only to half decent used cars and not necessarily to hybreds and such.
In the same way raising the number of children for EIC to 3 this year will benefit the poorest (which is not a bad thing in my opinion, but some of you may disagree with the need for government to use your tax dollars for charity), but raising the child care credit more and EIC less would have benefited the working poor more compared to the non-working poor, and boosted the economy by letting more people get educations as well. If you don't give a damn one way or the other about government based charity with your money, but wanted to stimulate the economy, that was the way to go.
Which, you have to admit, is most of us. I know I've bumped the filters a few times. And to be a grammer nazi, shouldn't that be "All of us who already tried..."?
If you aren't careful, some idiot will now go to all sorts of extremes to prove Vannevar didn't invent Javascript. It will be just like the misquote attributed to Al Gore about inventing the Internet. You do realize that, a thousand years from now, this will have been garbled to where everyone 'knows' Algore really did invent the net, and the Algore-ythms that primitive computers used, as the very name proves. Oh, and the Chinese discovered both America and the Moon. they'll keep repeating those claims until everyone 'knows' them too.
And I (age 52) and you were both 'forced' to allow the government to draw out from that retirement system, and leave it full of IOUs, or there would be a lot more money in it, enough so you would probably see it as well. Hell, enough your hypothetical grandkids probably would. I'm not even sure it will last until I reach 68. But you and I are not what's imposing on each other's freedom. You can resent being 'forced' to provide for me if you want to fall for that line. Maybe I should resent the 13 years I put in in the armed forces, as 13 is not enough to get military retirement and if I see any retirement benefits from it, they will come from paying into social security during my hitches instead. It looks like you, and maybe a lot of other freedom loving people resent having to keep the promises their government made to people such as me.
So I have to ask, just what's not fair? "It's not fair" that people you had a chance to vote for (or against) drew money out of the Social Security fund, and promised to pay it back with taxes they are now unwilling to raise just to keep their promises? "It's not fair" that you should bear any responsibility to see that the government cuts some other expenditures rather than break its promise to repay what's been borrowed from the SS fund? I don't blame you for not wanting to throw money into a system where it drains out everywhere, but the very people who are spending your taxes on everything but fixing Social Security and Medicare are evidently telling you that the cure is to abandon the lazy parasites such as me. It may not be fair, but a lot of people such as you are going to either be forced to fix what's really wrong, or to to see the money get sucked from your pockets anyway and not even do that. The best, the very best you might see is a lot of your hard work go to actually fix the government. Abandoning those programs as 'socialist' instead won't encourage the government to stop the drain, it's just another 'us' vrs. 'them' trick to let the real leaches keep sucking us both dry.
True, but the only way this affects, or should affect, Myspace is if they somehow knew there was a plan to screw the artists out of their share. That's difficult to prove. Imeem still had a right to sell assets, even if that right was presumably limited by the requirement to use those funds from the sale to pay off their debts. This isn't like a case of receiving and concealing stolen property, where both parties can be completely bared by the law from making a legal contract - baring proof of some sort of collusion, the contract itself is still entirely legal. Myspace had legitimate intent (unless someone can prove otherwise), and Imeem had legitimate intent towards Myspace even if they may have had intent to defraud other parties that were not in the contract.
At this point, the East Anglia issues that have any actual evidence are twofold. Out of hundreds of thousands of e-mails, a very few seem to show signs of a couple of scientists wanting to make some data that has odd properties fit the rest of their data. The second issue is actually the bigger one - how can it be science if data is privileged and so not necessarily available to anyone else wishing to double check the original experiments. The problem of unverifiable sources is actually the bigger issue, IMHO.
But the data problem itself is not unusual for science - people doing real science in perfectly legitimate ways sometimes have to make judgement calls about how much weight to give different data, and peer review and other methods sometimes involve meta-judgements about those.
A legitimate example would be where there were, say, four studies that all included at least 100 cases or more in their sample size, and a fifth study that had a much smaller size, say 13 cases. There is more than one means of statistically weighting that fifth study so it can be included but not given as much significance as the others, and the question of which methods to use is not always clear. I'd argue that since the first e-mail to draw attention was about some tree ring data that gave pretty good predictions up to the early 1960's, but that didn't predict the actual observed numbers very well post 1960, and they had other tree ring data from multiple areas that kept on giving good predictions up to the latest samples (about 1999), they had a similar problem. High altitude or latitude tree samples are certainly a smaller database than those for more common regions, as well. So, the data that didn't match well with everything else and didn't predict now established observations very well either seemed to also come from a special case database in other ways.
Yes, it shows that scientific integrity isn't always happening at every possible level. I don't think the researchers in question looked hard enough at how to treat the data fairly - they probably saw it as flawed enough that it simply couldn't be relied on, and wanted to have no part of it. Since the data had some useful predictive value for pre-1960 records, it was really more like a minority opinion than true bunkum, and the researchers should have considered what were the ethical limits of manipulating that data - but it does seem to be data where some types of manipulation (by which I mean mathematical normalisation, not a big red eraser approach) are justified.
But I think we have always had that problem. People do get caught cooking data and publishing deliberate frauds. Anyone who follows science knows not every practitioner is infalliably honest, constantly committed to absolute integrity, or adheres to all the formal principles of science. If that's the standard for science to earn respect, there are enough doctors that don't fully follow the oath that we should have no respect what-so-ever for medicine, and I shudder to think what would be a proportionate response to politicians. Here, somebody literally stole those e-mails, and it seems safe to construe that theft as a politically motivated act. If anyone wants to argue that the theft was motivated by the noble persuit of the TRUTH, I'd listen, but right now, I don't believe it.
Don't even sweat the FTC - What do you think the IRS does about people not declaring anything over De Minimus items as income? An old rule of thumb has been that items of less than 50 $ are trivial benifits. However, one of the last IRS decisions on employee receipt of employer distributed goods held that the limit where an item was too trivial to report lay somewhere between providing coffee and doughnuts for breakfast (acceptable without bothering to keep records or report) and actually providing a full breakfast such as biscuits, bacon and eggs. Given what an Egg McMuffin, for example, costs, the ruling means people may well be required to report all gifts with a value of about 2.00 $ US and up as miscellanious income, subject to the individual Income tax, and Social Security and Medicare taxes.
I was in the military long enough to get totally adapted to CS gas. The first exposure as a private was the usual nastiness, but by the time I became my unit's Nuke-Bio-Chem defense officer, I could have probably drank the stuff. All it tends to do to me is the same feeling as using nose spray. My eyes don't even tear up. There were times I took off my mask and called an admin time out in a training exercise, (for example so I could fix a newly commissioned lieutenant's miss-adjusted mask and get her back in it, hopefully before she puked any more), and had only a bit of a runny nose, and eventually, even that stopped. Pepper spray still affects me a little, but not nearly as much as it seems to most people.
But that was not me you saw punching that hole in the fence - I agree there are people like that, and not all of them get that way from illegal drugs, some just get that way from legal exposure - but I was nowhere near that fence.
The WoD is a big part of it. We have this classic model of what drug abusers do, that I could sum up as "The Junkie climbing out the window with your TV". We have been telling police for decades that enforcing the drug laws is their second chance to get that junkie, when they didn't manage to prevent the robbery. Often, it's some variant on that, i.e. "You didn't catch the robber at the scene, you didn't catch him selling the stolen goods, now catch him buying his fix!".
The problem is, fewer people will report a drug transaction than would a burglary. There is some percentage of the populace, although it is sometimes very low, that would bother to call 911 if they saw or heard someone breaking and entering, and there's a fair chance the home-owner, at least, would cooperate with gathering evidence. Drug sales don't normally make noise, they can be consummated in private, and the chance a policeman would happen to just observe on in passing is far lower than for violent crimes or robberies. We need to stop it when a DA or supervisor implies that getting a drug conviction is a second chance to fix a police failure in other areas, as it's a lousy second chance at best, and treating it as one encourages some police to use such methods as illegal surveillance or even planting evidence to improve their odds.
What about your right to be judged by ethical standards? The government hasn't just made Pot illegal, the government has directed its employees to lie, classing the drug as a narcotic, claiming it is chemically related to the opiates, and falsifying scientific reports on its effects. They've done the same in claiming that crack is somehow worse than regular Cocaine, claiming that various herbs and designer drugs have caused overdoses, suicides and murders where the statistical evidence shows no correlation at all, and in many, many other ways. The crack laws are essentially "Possession of Cocaine while Black" charges. Most of the others are set up as "Possession of a drug while too poor to afford a 'treatment program' which won't cure you but will get the charge suppressed".
If speeding laws resulted in a tremendous percentage of selective convictions against people on their way to vote in certain districts, or noise ordinances were being applied chiefly to some political rallies in the inner cities and were ignoring suburban 2 am parties, then they would be political and violate basic rights as well. As you put it, context matters, and part of that context is that certain groups have a much higher chance of being convicted once charged, or of getting much harsher sentences.
Naah! You'd probably end up with your 'likely mark' being Bob Howard, and since he isn't cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the wards in his personnel file would keep him from turning into anything, and since, as an uber-geek, Bob is already pretty much a quivering mass, a paradox would result, a paradox big enough that Cthulhu would be the one who would have to turn into something instead.
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The Crusades resulted in the deaths of roughly ninety to one-hundred-eighty thousand non-combatants (nominal civilians, over a multi-century period. This was the 28th most severe invasion of the fertile crescent after all, falling behind only such other invasions as the Califate, The Hittite expansion, Assyria, Alexander the great, and 24 other wars with higher death tolls.
If you include crusades not directed at the holy land, such as the Fourth Crusade versus Constantinople, the Albigensian Crusade versus the Cathars and the Northern Crusades, a Million is not an unreasonable death toll. That's both ways of course, not just the 'Christian side' body-counts, and includes wars where both sides claimed to be Christian.
The witch burnings were really post middle ages (about 1480 to 1700) spanning the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in a problem of figuring out which executions were witch related and which were of Cathars, political and nationalist based population obliterations and so on. Best estimates for a death toll definitely cross the line into the 100,000-110,000 range. but still taking over 200 years total to do so, and falling behind not just the rest of the thirty years war, but the hundred years war, maybe the English civil war, the Armenian atrocities, and a couple of mid 20th century events I won't bother to mention in the same areas. It's even possible that what Vlad personally did to combat the Muslim invaders of Transylvania resulted in more civilian deaths than the witch trials.
The best estimates for the Spanish Inquisition come from the church's own records, and thousands of people who wouldn't convert is quite accurate, in fact the best guess is around 32,000. I wouldn't mind seeing a game in this setting, but if it's a typical first person shooter, The Player will probably have to gibe that many personally to get a high score.
Caffeine
Theobromine (in Chocolate, with lesser amounts in Cola nuts and Acai berries)
L-Theanine (particularly in green tea).
And compositionally enhanced direct electro-magnetic stimulation of one of the brain's most developed centers (the visual cortex).
Wheeee!!!
Much as I love them, Dr Who and Torchwood were/are "mostly high-brow entertainment that nobody with an IQ below room temperature finds entertaining"? Yeah, pull the other one. BBC Three, now with Weevil Fight Club, for the win. (Notice how I didn't even have to mention Graham Norton?).
Non-disabled vet - ending up a bit after the desert storm era. I only put 13 years in, so I really am not entitled to much in the way of VA care. (Because I set up in the field right next to to the Paladins a few times (that's artillary), I have a notch in my low frequency hearing on record, and technically, the VA might be legally required to follow through with regular auditory testing, but I've never bothered to push that issue.). I paid for my degree before I got commissioned, and most of it before I even enlisted, so I haven't taken government assistance for education (not even a civilian Pell grant) I do have legal entitlement to cheaper VA loan rates if I buy a house. Haven't used it, but it's in the contract. If I ever do, I won't feel guilty about taking the benefit. You've paid a lot bigger price than I have, and I'm genuinely grateful for your service.
Social Security is not part of the general taxation system, but has its own tax. The need to soon pay for some of those costs out of the general revenue is because money was borrowed from it into the general fund, and now has to be paid back. Arguing that you don't need social security or medicare is simply a lie, unless you are arguing that you didn't benefit from anything the government already spent that borrowed money on instead. Arguing that it's OK for the federal government to repudiate its debts, just so they are to elderly retirees and not treasury bond investors or foreign governments, is equally vile. If you regard payback as optional, you become a parasite who doesn't want to repay what you took by force, and thinks it's morally acceptable to target old people, while claiming moral sanction under some twisted form of Libertarianism, but ignoring that the government already took money in your name, dispersed some part of that money to you, and is now trying desperately to cover up that fact. Would you really want to go there?
Just incidentally, your actual 'facts' in the form of percentages are all terribly wrong. I'm sure if I had just argued facts, you would have come back with some claim that the amounts didn't matter as the moral principle still stands, so since I've shot that down, it will be interesting to see if you concoct some desperate lie to avoid facing what this implies about your moral worth. Man up! Either pay your debts, or prove that the government didn't spend any of that borrowed money on you or with your consent (I've never met anyone over the age of 25 in the US who could honestly prove that, and I really doubt you could either, so just "Man Up!". Pay back what your representitives took for you and only then talk about what you think is morally acceptable.). I'm pretty confident that the government didn't have your informed consent, as you don't sound like that sort, but they did it in your name, and if you're old enough to have voted at least once, you technically had an opportunity to register your real opinions just as the rest of us have had one or more.
If you're genuinely surprised to find out that the only reason social security is at risk is that the government borrowed massively from it, then I appologise for the tone of this post. If you had no idea that what the right wing is calling the year Social Security goes bankrupt (2034), is really the year the system is first projected to have only 75% of pay outs coming in (due to the baby boomers moving into the system at rates that will temporarily exceed new employees), and not the year the fund would actually have no money, then you are not alone, but please read up on it. If you didn't realize that there are many items of the defense budget hidden in many other departments, but not vice versa, again please educate yourself.
(As just three examples: One, all long term care for wounded veterans is clearly a defense related cost, but it's in those 'welfare' budget areas you decry. Two, look at federal dept. of transportation budgets for roads which are four or six lanes, run through a military base, narrow to two lanes afterwards to serve a community of 500 people or less, can be closed as needed by troops on post, but are described as access roads to small impoverished opportunity zones in their funding. Three, look at aid to buy helicopters and fixed wing aircraft for Central American countries as part of the DEA's activities, and then look at how much foreign aid to the entire region south of our border is earmarked for buying military assets only, to balance those extra helicopters and planes, because many other countries are worried what happens if the big DEA recipients use those assets for something besides the war on drugs).
So let's stipulate that those 12 laptops were actually used for six months each by either typical government employees or corporate management types, and lets include that at least one of those persons is a boss's nephew type. NOW what would happen?
I can't believe I'm posting to this point, but, to register an Asimov-bot as a corporation still means one or more humans would have to be its President and Treasurer (and in some states, probably a third slot would legally need filled at incorporation). Ergo the robot would still be a slave. (Probably an S corp would be the best legal approach for slavery, as all profits pass through automatically.). If you put any legal terms in the articles of incorporation that gave the robot itself control of the corporate decision making process, corporate responsibility, assigned assets or profits, those could still be challenged by a claim that the robot was not a person. Until there's an Adam Link decision, robots are screwed.
A decently smart robot could spin off such a web of shell corps and interlocking contracts that they could probably slip through, of course.
Several Protestant versions of Christianity have Bishops and even Archbishops, and of course, the Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox faiths do as well, plus maybe some of the Coptic branches and some others. These wear hats and robes at formal occasions that may look a lot like the Pope's hats and robes, and may carry a shepherd's crook that looks a lot like his too.
The Pope usuallly wears white, and his cardinals red, but in the protestant faiths, Bishops mostly wear colors depending on the church year and the four colors normally associated (usually red, white, green, and purple), which, even if sticking very close to the official color system allows white a lot. (Although I've noticed several female Episcopal or Anglican bishops who tend to stick with purple more, most of the male bishops wear white often). (When not officiating, male Episcopal bishops mostly seem to like tweed jackets, sometimes Houndstooth patterns with leather elbow patches. Female bishops seem to also like jackets, but split about fifty-fifty for skirts or slacks with these. Tartans are a fairly common but minority option).
Here we have a 'schism group', as you put it. They don't use all the Roman Catholic symbols (Most Episcopal churches have a cross rather than a crucifix), and the 'chain of command' structure definitely doesn't go to cardinals or really a single leader (The Archbishop of Canterbury is definitely not analogous to the Pope in terms of authority over the other bishops). But it's still got look and feel that could, as you put it, cause confusion.
I'm actually wondering if this action could somehow be intended to result in some sort of look and feel claim in court, either for copyright or more likely for trademark. Either seems like a long shot, but I suppose it's possible. Maybe someone more familiar with the Lutheran faith or the various Orthodox forms could comment on whether the appearance is as similar there too.
Please cite the bible verse which addresses Lesbianism.
This appears to be a reference to Stalin's remark "The Pope? How many Divisions does he have?" (Where Stalin was talking about military divisions, and making the point that without them, what the Pope said about whatever the USSR did didn't really matter.).
Romeo and Juliet? You mean like Lion King 2 but with a sad ending?
(Hamlet = Lion King 1 with a sad ending. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead = Lion King 3 with a sad ending (Indeed Stoppard's characters are certainly less existentially absurd than Timmon and Pumbah). Lion King 4 will doubtless be King Lear, but with the loyal daughter eventually being recognised for her virtues and showing her two sisters the error of their ways).
let's see: 'Starmaker' is to 'Last and First Men' as 'The Mummy 2' is to 'The Mummy', or at most, as 'Second Stage Lensman' is to 'Triplanetary', only Stapledon was more spherical (less glossy surface, much more interior volume). More seriously, Stapledon's 'Starmaker' is to his 'Darkness and the Light', as 'Last and First' is to 'Starmaker'. (And incidentally, I'm talking about the Fraser/Weisz Mummy films above, not the greater originals.) Stapledon's non-fiction isn't equivalent to any of these, but 'Waking World' and 'Seven Pillars of Peace' most particularly aren't like any of his fiction. Yet, Stapledon and Lovecraft both put a very similar emphasis on dreaming.
My real point, above, is Starmaker is a sequel, one where the author deliberately tried to re-do what he had already done, but (again, deliberately) on a bigger scale. That's an odd choice to cite as a unique work.
'Doom that Came to Sarnath' is 'The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth' is any of a dozen Twilight Zone Episodes transposed to a more clearly fantastic setting. (And Dunsany said 'fortress' was 'Masque of the Red Death', but that's clearly impossible, as 'masque' is Lovecraft's 'The Outsider', not 'Doom that Came'). Since Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' is also obviously Poe's 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym','Doom that came to Sarnath' just about has to be Poe's 'Hopfrog', yet 'Hopfrog' is even more obviously 'Shadows over Insmouth'. My real point, this time, is that Lovecraft considered 'Doom' to be one of his deliberate pastiches of Lord Dunsany's works, which again makes it seem odd to call the work unconventional, or outside of type.
Still, 'Dreams in the Witch House' is definitely 'Man Goes on a Journey', while 'The Dunwich Horror' is definitely 'A Stranger Comes to Town'. 'Nyarlathotep' is only a fragment, so it must be of the form 'A Stranger Com...'.
Two might be a 'little' low, but at least as many as there are good storytellers strikes me as just a trifle high, by your own examples.
If you get right down to it, the psiops tricks you are claiming are being used against libertarianism by equating it with anarchy are the ones once used against anarchy (and they evidently worked, at least on you - nothing personal, they have worked on most people). Literally translated from the Latin, anarchy does not mean no laws, but no rulers. A lot of its advocates are simply advocating that there be no ruling class - for example just about everyone in the UK who opposes the institution of the Monarchy has been listed as an Anarchist even if they support a house of commons with no house of lords type system.
One of the most infamous 'anarchists' of all time, Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Arch-Duke Ferdinand, wanted merely a non-imperial government over an independent Slovic state, not no government. (although his actions led to a period of chaos where there were zones no government could honestly claim to control). A little reading on this case will make anyone in modern America wonder why they were taught that the people in this plot were "anarchists' instead of terrorists. The name 'anarchist' was used for Sacco and Vanzetti and others in the 1920's, but so was 'communist', and again, they were part of an organization that advocated serious power be placed in the hands of certain people, just not a Noble class, so by the standards of the USA, they definitely weren't real anarchists.
It would be possible to fairly call oneself an anarchist just by advocating that the Jury system is the model for all government systems, and groups of people who are our general peers should be assembled to run all functions of government, and kept in place for only short times to avoid them thinking they are somehow privileged. Indeed, strict term limits are a small step towards Anarchy, and indexing salaries (or health plans) for government officials to the average income (or insurance coverage) of their constituents might even fit the definition. While I wouldn't class Jefferson as a complete Anarchist, there are various times in Payne's writing career when he certainly was.
Some of the modern Anarchists, and just about all the people who call themselves Anarcho-capitalists, have very definitely lost sight of the older definitions.
Not that I agree with everything the person you are debating said, but...
There is another point to a stimulus bill. That point frequently gets stated only as one part of a compound point, rather than by itself, so what we often see in the press is something such as "to spend money in ways that boost the economy."
Spend on infrastructure? A bridge to an area with existing industry is better than a bridge to nowhere. If there's reason to think better access would help an industry grow, or keep one from failing, better still. So, what if we give the money to the NSF to decide if flue research will help the economy grow better than Melanoma research or not, if we trust the NSF experts to do a good job of deciding?
Better still, the first stimulus package (Bush administration - early 2008), a number was tossed around - that was that 68% of all spending was from consumer demand. So, it would have made sense if you wanted to most greatly boost the overall economy if at least 68% of the money had gone to consumers. There are good arguments for going higher, but none that were made publicly for going lower. In fact, with the schedule 179 acceleration for businesses also in the plan, less than 50% actually went to consumer spending.
The new stimulus packages are all worse. By the metric everybody in congress and the white house seems to accept (still about 68%), giving 68% of the bank bailout to existing home-owners to pay off their mortgages early or get out from underwater status would have stimulated the economy much more than giving it to the banks. By sub-metrics that show how much of total spending is driven by the poorest, large tax rebates for first time home buyers and new car purchasers would have been better aimed at getting the drivers of rusted out gas guzzlers to upgrade, even if it was only to half decent used cars and not necessarily to hybreds and such.
In the same way raising the number of children for EIC to 3 this year will benefit the poorest (which is not a bad thing in my opinion, but some of you may disagree with the need for government to use your tax dollars for charity), but raising the child care credit more and EIC less would have benefited the working poor more compared to the non-working poor, and boosted the economy by letting more people get educations as well. If you don't give a damn one way or the other about government based charity with your money, but wanted to stimulate the economy, that was the way to go.
Possessed Congresscritters all act like Joe Lieberman. Not good, even on Phobos.
Which, you have to admit, is most of us. I know I've bumped the filters a few times. And to be a grammer nazi, shouldn't that be "All of us who already tried..."?
If you aren't careful, some idiot will now go to all sorts of extremes to prove Vannevar didn't invent Javascript. It will be just like the misquote attributed to Al Gore about inventing the Internet. You do realize that, a thousand years from now, this will have been garbled to where everyone 'knows' Algore really did invent the net, and the Algore-ythms that primitive computers used, as the very name proves. Oh, and the Chinese discovered both America and the Moon. they'll keep repeating those claims until everyone 'knows' them too.
And I (age 52) and you were both 'forced' to allow the government to draw out from that retirement system, and leave it full of IOUs, or there would be a lot more money in it, enough so you would probably see it as well. Hell, enough your hypothetical grandkids probably would. I'm not even sure it will last until I reach 68. But you and I are not what's imposing on each other's freedom. You can resent being 'forced' to provide for me if you want to fall for that line. Maybe I should resent the 13 years I put in in the armed forces, as 13 is not enough to get military retirement and if I see any retirement benefits from it, they will come from paying into social security during my hitches instead. It looks like you, and maybe a lot of other freedom loving people resent having to keep the promises their government made to people such as me.
So I have to ask, just what's not fair? "It's not fair" that people you had a chance to vote for (or against) drew money out of the Social Security fund, and promised to pay it back with taxes they are now unwilling to raise just to keep their promises? "It's not fair" that you should bear any responsibility to see that the government cuts some other expenditures rather than break its promise to repay what's been borrowed from the SS fund? I don't blame you for not wanting to throw money into a system where it drains out everywhere, but the very people who are spending your taxes on everything but fixing Social Security and Medicare are evidently telling you that the cure is to abandon the lazy parasites such as me. It may not be fair, but a lot of people such as you are going to either be forced to fix what's really wrong, or to to see the money get sucked from your pockets anyway and not even do that. The best, the very best you might see is a lot of your hard work go to actually fix the government. Abandoning those programs as 'socialist' instead won't encourage the government to stop the drain, it's just another 'us' vrs. 'them' trick to let the real leaches keep sucking us both dry.
True, but the only way this affects, or should affect, Myspace is if they somehow knew there was a plan to screw the artists out of their share. That's difficult to prove. Imeem still had a right to sell assets, even if that right was presumably limited by the requirement to use those funds from the sale to pay off their debts. This isn't like a case of receiving and concealing stolen property, where both parties can be completely bared by the law from making a legal contract - baring proof of some sort of collusion, the contract itself is still entirely legal. Myspace had legitimate intent (unless someone can prove otherwise), and Imeem had legitimate intent towards Myspace even if they may have had intent to defraud other parties that were not in the contract.
At this point, the East Anglia issues that have any actual evidence are twofold. Out of hundreds of thousands of e-mails, a very few seem to show signs of a couple of scientists wanting to make some data that has odd properties fit the rest of their data. The second issue is actually the bigger one - how can it be science if data is privileged and so not necessarily available to anyone else wishing to double check the original experiments. The problem of unverifiable sources is actually the bigger issue, IMHO.
But the data problem itself is not unusual for science - people doing real science in perfectly legitimate ways sometimes have to make judgement calls about how much weight to give different data, and peer review and other methods sometimes involve meta-judgements about those.
A legitimate example would be where there were, say, four studies that all included at least 100 cases or more in their sample size, and a fifth study that had a much smaller size, say 13 cases. There is more than one means of statistically weighting that fifth study so it can be included but not given as much significance as the others, and the question of which methods to use is not always clear. I'd argue that since the first e-mail to draw attention was about some tree ring data that gave pretty good predictions up to the early 1960's, but that didn't predict the actual observed numbers very well post 1960, and they had other tree ring data from multiple areas that kept on giving good predictions up to the latest samples (about 1999), they had a similar problem. High altitude or latitude tree samples are certainly a smaller database than those for more common regions, as well. So, the data that didn't match well with everything else and didn't predict now established observations very well either seemed to also come from a special case database in other ways.
Yes, it shows that scientific integrity isn't always happening at every possible level. I don't think the researchers in question looked hard enough at how to treat the data fairly - they probably saw it as flawed enough that it simply couldn't be relied on, and wanted to have no part of it. Since the data had some useful predictive value for pre-1960 records, it was really more like a minority opinion than true bunkum, and the researchers should have considered what were the ethical limits of manipulating that data - but it does seem to be data where some types of manipulation (by which I mean mathematical normalisation, not a big red eraser approach) are justified.
But I think we have always had that problem. People do get caught cooking data and publishing deliberate frauds. Anyone who follows science knows not every practitioner is infalliably honest, constantly committed to absolute integrity, or adheres to all the formal principles of science. If that's the standard for science to earn respect, there are enough doctors that don't fully follow the oath that we should have no respect what-so-ever for medicine, and I shudder to think what would be a proportionate response to politicians. Here, somebody literally stole those e-mails, and it seems safe to construe that theft as a politically motivated act. If anyone wants to argue that the theft was motivated by the noble persuit of the TRUTH, I'd listen, but right now, I don't believe it.
Don't even sweat the FTC - What do you think the IRS does about people not declaring anything over De Minimus items as income? An old rule of thumb has been that items of less than 50 $ are trivial benifits. However, one of the last IRS decisions on employee receipt of employer distributed goods held that the limit where an item was too trivial to report lay somewhere between providing coffee and doughnuts for breakfast (acceptable without bothering to keep records or report) and actually providing a full breakfast such as biscuits, bacon and eggs. Given what an Egg McMuffin, for example, costs, the ruling means people may well be required to report all gifts with a value of about 2.00 $ US and up as miscellanious income, subject to the individual Income tax, and Social Security and Medicare taxes.
I was in the military long enough to get totally adapted to CS gas. The first exposure as a private was the usual nastiness, but by the time I became my unit's Nuke-Bio-Chem defense officer, I could have probably drank the stuff. All it tends to do to me is the same feeling as using nose spray. My eyes don't even tear up. There were times I took off my mask and called an admin time out in a training exercise, (for example so I could fix a newly commissioned lieutenant's miss-adjusted mask and get her back in it, hopefully before she puked any more), and had only a bit of a runny nose, and eventually, even that stopped. Pepper spray still affects me a little, but not nearly as much as it seems to most people.
But that was not me you saw punching that hole in the fence - I agree there are people like that, and not all of them get that way from illegal drugs, some just get that way from legal exposure - but I was nowhere near that fence.
The WoD is a big part of it. We have this classic model of what drug abusers do, that I could sum up as "The Junkie climbing out the window with your TV". We have been telling police for decades that enforcing the drug laws is their second chance to get that junkie, when they didn't manage to prevent the robbery. Often, it's some variant on that, i.e. "You didn't catch the robber at the scene, you didn't catch him selling the stolen goods, now catch him buying his fix!".
The problem is, fewer people will report a drug transaction than would a burglary. There is some percentage of the populace, although it is sometimes very low, that would bother to call 911 if they saw or heard someone breaking and entering, and there's a fair chance the home-owner, at least, would cooperate with gathering evidence. Drug sales don't normally make noise, they can be consummated in private, and the chance a policeman would happen to just observe on in passing is far lower than for violent crimes or robberies. We need to stop it when a DA or supervisor implies that getting a drug conviction is a second chance to fix a police failure in other areas, as it's a lousy second chance at best, and treating it as one encourages some police to use such methods as illegal surveillance or even planting evidence to improve their odds.
Has anyone ever succeeded at that? I ask only because maybe I could piggyback on it and get a +5 Offtopic.
What about your right to be judged by ethical standards? The government hasn't just made Pot illegal, the government has directed its employees to lie, classing the drug as a narcotic, claiming it is chemically related to the opiates, and falsifying scientific reports on its effects. They've done the same in claiming that crack is somehow worse than regular Cocaine, claiming that various herbs and designer drugs have caused overdoses, suicides and murders where the statistical evidence shows no correlation at all, and in many, many other ways. The crack laws are essentially "Possession of Cocaine while Black" charges. Most of the others are set up as "Possession of a drug while too poor to afford a 'treatment program' which won't cure you but will get the charge suppressed".
If speeding laws resulted in a tremendous percentage of selective convictions against people on their way to vote in certain districts, or noise ordinances were being applied chiefly to some political rallies in the inner cities and were ignoring suburban 2 am parties, then they would be political and violate basic rights as well. As you put it, context matters, and part of that context is that certain groups have a much higher chance of being convicted once charged, or of getting much harsher sentences.
Naah! You'd probably end up with your 'likely mark' being Bob Howard, and since he isn't cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the wards in his personnel file would keep him from turning into anything, and since, as an uber-geek, Bob is already pretty much a quivering mass, a paradox would result, a paradox big enough that Cthulhu would be the one who would have to turn into something instead.