"No, because if people are created by God (as I believe), then it would make sense for God to give us a innate tendency to believe in Him,"
Why stop with an innate tendency to believe in him? If there were this brilliant DNA creating God, wouldn't it make sense that he would have encoded the scriptures in our genetic code to be expressed as memories? Then we wouldn't have to wonder which book that claims to be the word of god, is the word of god; we would automatically know it. That probably would have saved a lot of bloodshed in human history and even today. Plus, it would save all the time wasted in argument about who's god is God or if there are any gods so that we could concentrate on the business of doing whatever it is (s)he/it put us here to do.
Evolution along with peer pressure is the better explanation for religion, imo.
I do not see the need to specify Polish plumbers. There are many fine Italian, German, English, Japanese and Kenyan plumbers who do just as top notched work as the Polish.
"(1cm^3 of pure water doesn't weight 1g at sea level for no reason, for example...)."
That is one of the things I love about metric. I am in the USA and the other day I decided to make bread from a French recipe. The ingredients were specified in grams. I just made a simple balance beam scale and used known volumes of water as the counter weight. The bread turned out well despite my poor French. (I gave up on computer translations when it said "to prepare the necessity of fold the dough up in wallet":-))
One thing did bug me though. The temperature was given in some funky non-standard unit something like "T2" or "R3." It took me a while to find a conversion for that.
Anyway, my two centidollars as far as the US switching over: They should simply stop putting both units on everything. I mean, is it really so damn difficult to look at a road sign that says 110 k.p.h. and make the little needle on your speedometer line up with 110 k.p.h? People would figure out most stuff practically overnight just as we did with soft drinks coming in 2 or 3 liter bottles.
You said "The poor person in this case is obviously not working as hard." That if he had just applied himself in the right way, he would no longer be poor. In other words, if I understand you correctly, you say the poor person is poor because he is lazy. He is too lazy to look into ways to better himself. So he takes up a cushy manual labor job.
What I am trying to say is that the poor person may be stupid or have suffered circumstances you cannot even begin to comprehend. He may be poor and stay poor through no fault of his own. It isn't the 'moral' shortcoming on his part your self-righteous tone seems to imply.
I am also saying that there is nothing cushy about many manual labor jobs compared to most thinking jobs.
"Incorrect. The poor person in this case is obviously not working as hard. He obviously didn't work as hard at school, nor has he worked hard enough to acquire the extra education needed to get a better job. He has not worked hard enough to learn how to make more money. He has not learnt the most productive ways in which to direct his hard work."
That's a nice steaming pile of shit from the back end of the GOP elephant.
Out of high school I worked as a ditch digger for years trying to pay my way through college. I would get up at 4 a.m. and work until 5p.m. 6 days a week. When I came home, I collapsed into bed, usually too tired to eat supper or even watch TV. I slept covered in dirt and sand from the ditches. Social life, hah! I was one of the lucky ones because I had a fairly good head on my shoulders. I was able to alternate working 6 months and 6 months of college. (Living with my parents at low rent and getting all the financial aide I could, and driving a $220 car.)
Many of my coworkers were too stupid to go to college or otherwise better their income. They worked harder than I did since I'm just a pencil necked geek. They are stuck in that kind of work through no fault of their own. They absolutely were not lazy. They worked their asses off an had very little to show for it. I escaped with a ruined back and arthritis is many joints at age 25.
I do thinking jobs now. Having done both, I can say you are totally full of shit if you think desk jobs and hard academic work can hold a candle to hard manual labor. The only nice thing about manual labor is your mind is free to think, however, that is only when you aren't delirious from heat and exhaustion which was most days in Florida.
"Cows eat around 100 lbs a day, that's a lot of feed and consequently requires intensive farming"
I think something is screwy with the number. I had two steers, and when we penned them to fatten them up, together they were only eating about 15 pounds of non-drugged feed and maybe 20-30 pounds of hay per day. They ended up being much fatter than I like.
"Typically, people say to themselves 'animals don't feel pain or fear like we do', while there is no denying that cows are not exactly equipped with the sharpest tools in the box, anyone who has had a cat or dog (or even say, a horse) knows they can be happy, bored, confused, in a bad mood and dream in a way that's instantly recognizable to us (and of course, people can and do eat cats and dogs too)."
The same is true of cattle. They apparently have moods and feelings like we do. They even show tender, mostly non-sexual affection to each other. Actually I'm convinced the smaller steer was gay, but the bigger one wasn't into being a bottom, or even a top. The big steer did show platonic affection to the smaller one though.
They are stupid, but they aren't the unfeeling vegetables most people seem to assume they are. It is uncomfortably similar, imo, especially in hindsight, to eating infants or very retarded people.
I went along with the slaughter because I couldn't afford to buy out my partners. The beef was tender and delicious but I gave away most of it. Now, I avoid mammalian meat, turkey too, they are much brighter and human-like than rumor has it.
"Between the Salem Witch Trials, Blue laws, and various other puritanical ideologies that made there way into lawbooks, it is obvious that Judeo-Christian values were a normal part of society. The fact that still a very high percent of US citizens claim a version of Christianity would imply that a government by the people and for the people would continue to reflect those values"
The purpose of our form of government is to protect the individual from the masses. The existence of Blue Laws indicates a failure of government to do its job of protecting me for the will of the mob. The same goes for all the other Christian BS that has worked its way into law; it is a perversion of our government. Just because in the past people allowed Christians to corrupt our government, doesn't mean we have to continue allowing it to do so today.
"What most Christians are opposed to is one sided removal of Christianity from anything public for the fear of breaking the establishment clause."
I am not sure what you see as being the other side? If you mean you don't want to see other religions becoming part of government, I'm with them. Government should be totally free of religion.
"and theories about large portions of the population being able to function without their spiritual side. (I remember reading that there's a specific area in the brain for spiritual experiences. Make of it what you wish, but try disabling one function of your brain - not fun.)"
I used to be a Christian and am now an atheist.
In my experience, being an atheist does not require me to disable the spiritual part of my brain. Music, art, literature, mathematics, science, anything that is deeply beautiful, easily replaces God. My experiences with these things are more profound than anything I experienced in religion because they are not only deeply moving on an emotional level, they are also part of reality and therefore of potential use to living within reality.
I think that part of the brain helps us to survive by providing motivation to study and learn so that we are prepared for life. Religion mostly does not prepare one for life but it does seem to give a cheap thrill to this brain center. Religion reminds me of cocaine in that the drug makes one feel good for no real reason.
I don't think I am special, so I assume the vast majority of people could get their "spiritual" highs from things more worthwhile than religion.
"There is no such thing as addicted to the internet, or a video game, or anything except for a chemically addictive substance."
You are obviously in a state of denial. The first step to overcoming your Internet addiction is to admit that you are addicted. The more you deny it, the worse your problem is.
"2. With the amount of progress being made in the fields of complexion altering makeup and cheap plastic surgery, we will soon be reaching a point where the traits you are marrying into will no longer be genetically transferable. "
The author of the article also ignores that genetic engineering is rapidly advancing. I predict (not that I'm qualified) that within a century people will have a whole library of genetic traits they can patch into their DNA. There will finally be some intelligent design in human evolution so it will occur much more quickly and deliberately. There will probably also be ways to make the new genes express themselves so that the ugly can grow a pretty face over the course of months or years. In time, the technology will probably be affordable enough that even the poor can take advantage of it.
Very few people would choose to be dim-witted, fat, ugly and sickly.
It also ignores developments in nanotech and cybernetics and ???? that might make genetics irrelevant.
1. Religious fundamentalism spreading like the plague. 2. It being "cool" to be stupid. Widespread anti-intellectualism. 3. News media gave up on prestige and reporting what is important in favor of getting rich on nude tits and other irrelevant but fun stories and sound-bites. 4. Educational system based on pseudoscientific sociological and psychological mysticism. 5. The Southeast rose again spreading its culture of #1 and to a lesser extent #2. 6. Widespread belief that all politicians are horribly corrupt and there isn't a thing that can be done about it--apathy. 7. Conspiracy theories widely presented as fact. (Incidentally, I think the omission of Evolution from the list was most likely was an honest mistake, or maybe done by some low ranking bible thumping government employee on purpose. The/. headline for this article reeks of #3 & #7)
These things tend to feed off each other. #4 brings #2 plus leaves the mind defenseless to #1. #2 makes #3 cool. #3 makes #2 seem acceptable. #1 promotes #2. It is a tangled web of interactions.
As someone else pointed out, watch out, it's all coming your way. I suggest fighting every instance you see of it while it is a small problem in Canada.
"I don't think history will be too kind on the Bush Administration. I think its time in office will be seen as a point of inflection for the course of the United States."
Yes, please!
"The point at which it's preeminance in the world began to fade."
Noooo. [drunken gut wrenching moan]
I was really hoping you would say it was the point at which Americans said "enough," came to their senses and elected some decent leaders and fixed what is broken in our system. Leave it to historians to determine when America's time in the sun ended. If we say it is over now, then it is over.
Now that Bush has refreshed our memories about tyrannical leaders, let's do our best to see to it that no one like him ever holds office again. We have two years to make sure that the guy who wins each presidential primary is someone we would actually want as a president. Very soon we get to exchange one set of congresscritters for a hopefully less offensive and more capable group.
It is also high time for everyone who is not a right wing bible thumping jackass to "witness" to their neighbors who are. Convert them to reason.
These are my happy thoughts about what the future holds so that I can sleep tonight.
Also, I'm just going to say that I used OS 9 extensively, and for a while in preference to OS X while games and programs made the transition, and I have never had nearly as many problems with OS 9 as with any version of the Windows operating system up to that point.
I have had a dual G5 Mac for three years. I can't say anything about customer service since I haven't needed any. It may seem like a silly thing, but I would guess a major reason Mac users are happier than Win users is simply because the error messages aren't as frequent or as offensive.
For example, power goes out on a windows box causing a reboot. After a lot of dickheadish grinding of the hard drives a message pops up that says something to the effect of "You stupid ass, you didn't shut down windows correctly. Do it next time dumbass or I'll XOR every byte on my hard-drive." (It's been years since I've bothered with Windows so that may not be an exact quote:-) Its obnoxiousness is more subtle than that.) In that situation, my Mac reboots without saying saying a thing. In general, I'd say Windows has many more error/warning messages than are needed and they tend to put the blame on the user. Mac only displays messages when it is something important and it doesn't try to lay blame on anyone.
That may be a silly matter, but combined with all annoying flaws, blue screens of death, reboots for the hell of it and other annoying aspects of Windows, I find that attitude brings me close to putting a fist through the monitor.
"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination" (Leviticus 18:22).
Your Levitical sig, makes you look like an ignorant, religiously crazed, fool who is probably terrified deep down that he may be gay. You are, of course, free to be any or all of those things, but of them I personally think gay is the more honorable and respectable by far.
What did Hitler do to Jews and homosexuals and criminals? How long did he do it? What do fundamentalist Christians think their god will do to the vast majority of humans? For how long? To how many humans? Doesn't the Christian god make sadistic old Hitler look like a pretty nice fellow in comparison? For that matter, even Satan looks like the better being. Why go against your entire nature and deny yourself some perfectly normal and healthy lusts and fantasies just to please that sort of beast?
Take this example: Florida makes Oranges, but the oranges there are watery, overly-tart, and have terrible texture. That's why they go into juice. 99% of the Oranges you eat (table oranges) come from California (although Austrialia has some tasty naval varieties too), because they have superior flavor, and texture.
It is very rare that I have anything nice to say about Florida, but I have to call BS. Every California orange I've had has been thick skinned, bitter, tasteless and mealy compared to FL oranges. I spent many days of my childhood riding horses in FL orange groves and sampling fruit. There are oranges out there that would blow your mind they are so good.
Granted, I haven't had a California orange since 1978 so things may have changed since.
I suspect if FL oranges truly are inferior now, it is because of economic reasons. Perhaps people are more likely to drink OJ than they are to eat fresh fruit? In the 1980's we had severe freezes which wiped out many thousands of acres of groves. That would have been an opportunity to replant with more profitable juice trees. Just a guess.
Say all you want about the Bible thumping homophobic bitch who used to be spokeswoman for FL oranges. She knew oranges, but she didn't know about the better bipedal fruits that have evolved:-) >sorry
I don't gamble. However the control freaks in D.C. have gone beyond pissing me off with this crap and all the other loads of bull. I've been toying with the idea of becoming a citizen of another country. I seem to get a little more serious about it every day.
Am I the only one thinking along those lines? Can anyone recommend a country? My ideal country wouldn't be hot, reasonable taxes, lowish cost of living, lots of freedom, easy immigration laws.
Violence that begets violence never ends. Violence that results in financial and social penalties has a limited life span.
Submission to violence also begets violence. In school, I always turned the other cheek and tried to consider myself morally superior for doing it. What started as 1 bully in 7th grade, grew to 1,000 bullies by 12th grade. Even many teachers and other adults at school jumped on the bandwagon and bullied me. Thank you Jesus for lying your ass off to me.
No kid should have to go through that. I often wonder how different my life would be if I'd just taken a stand. It is difficult to have any self-respect when it hasn't been defended and earned.
I do agree with you that bullies, and sometimes their parents, should be fined or otherwise punished. When that happens, maybe "turn the other cheek" will work out better. Until then, I say kick the bullies in the happy sacks and try to break a few bones.
The first computer I saw was the mainframe at the newspaper where my father worked, seemed to take up acres. That was roughly 1972.
The first one I got to touch was a TRS-80 in algebra class. I was shaking so badly with excitement I could barely hunt and peck my way around the keyboard.
My first computer was a C64. I had a game called Pit Stop and the cartridge for doing assembly language programming and a cassette tape deck. My family was too poor to get me any other accessories. Still it was a great deal of fun.
One of the great things about it was the openness of the technology. It came with a full schematic and a good manual describing the guts of the thing. At one point I had it wired up to the remote control unit of my toy car. I wanted a camera for it because, blind it wasn't good for much besides terrorizing the dogs. In the early 1980s, it seemed everyone was naive enough to think full fledge real time computer vision could be done on a C64.
Of course that and more became possible in 1995 when I downloaded the Hamilton 95 OS to it and my electric toothbrush:-) Does anyone remember Hamilton 95?
Losing weight does cost some time. I spend about an hour and a half every day on exercise and counting calories. I agree that it would be nice if restaurants at least provided an approximation of calorie content. However, it seems to me you are using the lack of such information as an excuse to do nothing about the fact that you are killing yourself.
Stop eating out. Two slices of whole wheat bread, two slices of salami, a slice of Swiss Cheese, a teaspoon of mustard, and a chunk of lettuce is 440 kcal for the brands I use. That and a glass of water is all you need for lunch, takes less time to make it than it takes to wait in line at a restaurant. Have two other 600 calorie meals and carry a bag of 40 nuts with you to snack on every day. I made a spreadsheet of everything I like to eat, makes it really quick and easy to plan my meals for the day.
If your God won't let you spend an hour and a half of *your* time to save *your* life, then screw God and whatever the hell he rode in on. But really, you are just using God as an excuse to do nothing so any blasphemy here is in your court.
I stayed home from high school to watch the launch because my school wasn't going to tune in. I didn't see the launch live on TV. I watched it from the front yard with my naked eyes.
The strangest memory distortion is that I remember it filling the sky from NASA's horizon to 20 degrees past vertical and about that wide. I also remember seeing hundreds of chunks of it tumbling and burning, not just smoke trails. Since I was at least 50 miles away, I'm pretty sure there is no chance I could have seen that much. I think perhaps I've overlain a zoomed in camera shot I must have seen on TV.
I also remember seeing a satellite re-enter the atmosphere one night within a few years of 1986. I remember seeing bits of it tumbling through the air and enveloped in green, blue and red(?) plasma. I also remember a soft hissing sound as it moved. I get the feeling that those memories are exaggerated too, but I don't think it has anything to do with TV since I remember we couldn't find a news story about it.
I visited my old elementary school when I was 26 after not having seen it since I was there in the 3rd grade. It seemed much smaller than I remembered.
Of course, it does nothing to sway radicals but then nothing would sway them.
I would say that I was a radical Republican until about midway through George II's reign. Now I'd say I'm basically a libertarian who is pessimistic about them ever winning anything due to the large proportion of nuts in the ranks. My current plan is to vote Democrat for every office unless there is a viable libertarian in the running. I feel very strongly that a Republican majority in control is seriously detrimental to America's future. At least the kind of America I wish to live in. I'd rather see things split between both major parties so they spend more time attacking each other than us and other countries.
Anyway, up to George II, when I'd see a Democrat on TV they'd almost always strike me as sniveling little wimps with geeky pretensions. Republicans didn't necessarily thrill me either, but I didn't dislike them on first impression. Now the Democrats don't seem so wimpy and whiny. Although with most politicians, I think there is a strong chance they are lying when their lips are moving. But what is most interesting to me, is the degree of loathing I feel at the sight of George the Second and anyone associated with him. At one point during the hurricane Katrina incident, I got so mad, I jumped off the couch and yelled at the TV and barely stopped myself from throwing a shoe at his image. That's very unlike me. It doesn't surprise me that politics turns off logic and turns on emotion in the human brain.
I think further study should be done to see if people can purposely turn on their logic centers while in debate.
Slashdot Mirror
"No, because if people are created by God (as I believe), then it would make sense for God to give us a innate tendency to believe in Him,"
Why stop with an innate tendency to believe in him? If there were this brilliant DNA creating God, wouldn't it make sense that he would have encoded the scriptures in our genetic code to be expressed as memories? Then we wouldn't have to wonder which book that claims to be the word of god, is the word of god; we would automatically know it. That probably would have saved a lot of bloodshed in human history and even today. Plus, it would save all the time wasted in argument about who's god is God or if there are any gods so that we could concentrate on the business of doing whatever it is (s)he/it put us here to do.
Evolution along with peer pressure is the better explanation for religion, imo.
Not to nit pick but...
I do not see the need to specify Polish plumbers. There are many fine Italian, German, English, Japanese and Kenyan plumbers who do just as top notched work as the Polish.
"(1cm^3 of pure water doesn't weight 1g at sea level for no reason, for example...)."
That is one of the things I love about metric. I am in the USA and the other day I decided to make bread from a French recipe. The ingredients were specified in grams. I just made a simple balance beam scale and used known volumes of water as the counter weight. The bread turned out well despite my poor French. (I gave up on computer translations when it said "to prepare the necessity of fold the dough up in wallet":-))
One thing did bug me though. The temperature was given in some funky non-standard unit something like "T2" or "R3." It took me a while to find a conversion for that.
Anyway, my two centidollars as far as the US switching over: They should simply stop putting both units on everything. I mean, is it really so damn difficult to look at a road sign that says 110 k.p.h. and make the little needle on your speedometer line up with 110 k.p.h? People would figure out most stuff practically overnight just as we did with soft drinks coming in 2 or 3 liter bottles.
You said "The poor person in this case is obviously not working as hard." That if he had just applied himself in the right way, he would no longer be poor. In other words, if I understand you correctly, you say the poor person is poor because he is lazy. He is too lazy to look into ways to better himself. So he takes up a cushy manual labor job.
What I am trying to say is that the poor person may be stupid or have suffered circumstances you cannot even begin to comprehend. He may be poor and stay poor through no fault of his own. It isn't the 'moral' shortcoming on his part your self-righteous tone seems to imply.
I am also saying that there is nothing cushy about many manual labor jobs compared to most thinking jobs.
"Incorrect. The poor person in this case is obviously not working as hard. He obviously didn't work as hard at school, nor has he worked hard enough to acquire the extra education needed to get a better job. He has not worked hard enough to learn how to make more money. He has not learnt the most productive ways in which to direct his hard work."
That's a nice steaming pile of shit from the back end of the GOP elephant.
Out of high school I worked as a ditch digger for years trying to pay my way through college. I would get up at 4 a.m. and work until 5p.m. 6 days a week. When I came home, I collapsed into bed, usually too tired to eat supper or even watch TV. I slept covered in dirt and sand from the ditches. Social life, hah! I was one of the lucky ones because I had a fairly good head on my shoulders. I was able to alternate working 6 months and 6 months of college. (Living with my parents at low rent and getting all the financial aide I could, and driving a $220 car.)
Many of my coworkers were too stupid to go to college or otherwise better their income. They worked harder than I did since I'm just a pencil necked geek. They are stuck in that kind of work through no fault of their own. They absolutely were not lazy. They worked their asses off an had very little to show for it. I escaped with a ruined back and arthritis is many joints at age 25.
I do thinking jobs now. Having done both, I can say you are totally full of shit if you think desk jobs and hard academic work can hold a candle to hard manual labor. The only nice thing about manual labor is your mind is free to think, however, that is only when you aren't delirious from heat and exhaustion which was most days in Florida.
"Cows eat around 100 lbs a day, that's a lot of feed and consequently requires intensive farming"
I think something is screwy with the number. I had two steers, and when we penned them to fatten them up, together they were only eating about 15 pounds of non-drugged feed and maybe 20-30 pounds of hay per day. They ended up being much fatter than I like.
"Typically, people say to themselves 'animals don't feel pain or fear like we do', while there is no denying that cows are not exactly equipped with the sharpest tools in the box, anyone who has had a cat or dog (or even say, a horse) knows they can be happy, bored, confused, in a bad mood and dream in a way that's instantly recognizable to us (and of course, people can and do eat cats and dogs too)."
The same is true of cattle. They apparently have moods and feelings like we do. They even show tender, mostly non-sexual affection to each other. Actually I'm convinced the smaller steer was gay, but the bigger one wasn't into being a bottom, or even a top. The big steer did show platonic affection to the smaller one though.
They are stupid, but they aren't the unfeeling vegetables most people seem to assume they are. It is uncomfortably similar, imo, especially in hindsight, to eating infants or very retarded people.
I went along with the slaughter because I couldn't afford to buy out my partners. The beef was tender and delicious but I gave away most of it. Now, I avoid mammalian meat, turkey too, they are much brighter and human-like than rumor has it.
"... edges as you move my hand between the two serrated edges I'm creating..."
Is this a little like a Ouija board?
"Between the Salem Witch Trials, Blue laws, and various other puritanical ideologies that made there way into lawbooks, it is obvious that Judeo-Christian values were a normal part of society. The fact that still a very high percent of US citizens claim a version of Christianity would imply that a government by the people and for the people would continue to reflect those values"
The purpose of our form of government is to protect the individual from the masses. The existence of Blue Laws indicates a failure of government to do its job of protecting me for the will of the mob. The same goes for all the other Christian BS that has worked its way into law; it is a perversion of our government. Just because in the past people allowed Christians to corrupt our government, doesn't mean we have to continue allowing it to do so today.
"What most Christians are opposed to is one sided removal of Christianity from anything public for the fear of breaking the establishment clause."
I am not sure what you see as being the other side? If you mean you don't want to see other religions becoming part of government, I'm with them. Government should be totally free of religion.
"and theories about large portions of the population being able to function without their spiritual side. (I remember reading that there's a specific area in the brain for spiritual experiences. Make of it what you wish, but try disabling one function of your brain - not fun.)"
I used to be a Christian and am now an atheist.
In my experience, being an atheist does not require me to disable the spiritual part of my brain. Music, art, literature, mathematics, science, anything that is deeply beautiful, easily replaces God. My experiences with these things are more profound than anything I experienced in religion because they are not only deeply moving on an emotional level, they are also part of reality and therefore of potential use to living within reality.
I think that part of the brain helps us to survive by providing motivation to study and learn so that we are prepared for life. Religion mostly does not prepare one for life but it does seem to give a cheap thrill to this brain center. Religion reminds me of cocaine in that the drug makes one feel good for no real reason.
I don't think I am special, so I assume the vast majority of people could get their "spiritual" highs from things more worthwhile than religion.
"There is no such thing as addicted to the internet, or a video game, or anything except for a chemically addictive substance."
You are obviously in a state of denial. The first step to overcoming your Internet addiction is to admit that you are addicted. The more you deny it, the worse your problem is.
"2. With the amount of progress being made in the fields of complexion altering makeup and cheap plastic surgery, we will soon be reaching a point where the traits you are marrying into will no longer be genetically transferable. "
The author of the article also ignores that genetic engineering is rapidly advancing. I predict (not that I'm qualified) that within a century people will have a whole library of genetic traits they can patch into their DNA. There will finally be some intelligent design in human evolution so it will occur much more quickly and deliberately. There will probably also be ways to make the new genes express themselves so that the ugly can grow a pretty face over the course of months or years. In time, the technology will probably be affordable enough that even the poor can take advantage of it.
Very few people would choose to be dim-witted, fat, ugly and sickly.
It also ignores developments in nanotech and cybernetics and ???? that might make genetics irrelevant.
The article is meant as a joke, imo.
At least it is not 1.21 gigawatts:-)
"What the hell happened? I want my old USA back."
/. headline for this article reeks of #3 & #7)
You and me both.
I think maybe there are many causes including:
1. Religious fundamentalism spreading like the plague.
2. It being "cool" to be stupid. Widespread anti-intellectualism.
3. News media gave up on prestige and reporting what is important in favor of getting rich on nude tits and other irrelevant but fun stories and sound-bites.
4. Educational system based on pseudoscientific sociological and psychological mysticism.
5. The Southeast rose again spreading its culture of #1 and to a lesser extent #2.
6. Widespread belief that all politicians are horribly corrupt and there isn't a thing that can be done about it--apathy.
7. Conspiracy theories widely presented as fact. (Incidentally, I think the omission of Evolution from the list was most likely was an honest mistake, or maybe done by some low ranking bible thumping government employee on purpose. The
These things tend to feed off each other. #4 brings #2 plus leaves the mind defenseless to #1. #2 makes #3 cool. #3 makes #2 seem acceptable. #1 promotes #2. It is a tangled web of interactions.
As someone else pointed out, watch out, it's all coming your way. I suggest fighting every instance you see of it while it is a small problem in Canada.
"I still have a soft spot for the Brief editor (which Borland acquired at some point from UnderWare), too"
I wonder if Brief and UnderWare will be replaced by FreeBalling 1.0.0?
"I don't think history will be too kind on the Bush Administration. I think its time in office will be seen as a point of inflection for the course of the United States."
Yes, please!
"The point at which it's preeminance in the world began to fade."
Noooo. [drunken gut wrenching moan]
I was really hoping you would say it was the point at which Americans said "enough," came to their senses and elected some decent leaders and fixed what is broken in our system. Leave it to historians to determine when America's time in the sun ended. If we say it is over now, then it is over.
Now that Bush has refreshed our memories about tyrannical leaders, let's do our best to see to it that no one like him ever holds office again. We have two years to make sure that the guy who wins each presidential primary is someone we would actually want as a president. Very soon we get to exchange one set of congresscritters for a hopefully less offensive and more capable group.
It is also high time for everyone who is not a right wing bible thumping jackass to "witness" to their neighbors who are. Convert them to reason.
These are my happy thoughts about what the future holds so that I can sleep tonight.
I have had a dual G5 Mac for three years. I can't say anything about customer service since I haven't needed any. It may seem like a silly thing, but I would guess a major reason Mac users are happier than Win users is simply because the error messages aren't as frequent or as offensive.
For example, power goes out on a windows box causing a reboot. After a lot of dickheadish grinding of the hard drives a message pops up that says something to the effect of "You stupid ass, you didn't shut down windows correctly. Do it next time dumbass or I'll XOR every byte on my hard-drive." (It's been years since I've bothered with Windows so that may not be an exact quote:-) Its obnoxiousness is more subtle than that.) In that situation, my Mac reboots without saying saying a thing. In general, I'd say Windows has many more error/warning messages than are needed and they tend to put the blame on the user. Mac only displays messages when it is something important and it doesn't try to lay blame on anyone.
That may be a silly matter, but combined with all annoying flaws, blue screens of death, reboots for the hell of it and other annoying aspects of Windows, I find that attitude brings me close to putting a fist through the monitor.
Your Levitical sig, makes you look like an ignorant, religiously crazed, fool who is probably terrified deep down that he may be gay. You are, of course, free to be any or all of those things, but of them I personally think gay is the more honorable and respectable by far.
What did Hitler do to Jews and homosexuals and criminals? How long did he do it? What do fundamentalist Christians think their god will do to the vast majority of humans? For how long? To how many humans? Doesn't the Christian god make sadistic old Hitler look like a pretty nice fellow in comparison? For that matter, even Satan looks like the better being. Why go against your entire nature and deny yourself some perfectly normal and healthy lusts and fantasies just to please that sort of beast?
Sincerely,
an Abomination
It is very rare that I have anything nice to say about Florida, but I have to call BS. Every California orange I've had has been thick skinned, bitter, tasteless and mealy compared to FL oranges. I spent many days of my childhood riding horses in FL orange groves and sampling fruit. There are oranges out there that would blow your mind they are so good.
Granted, I haven't had a California orange since 1978 so things may have changed since.
I suspect if FL oranges truly are inferior now, it is because of economic reasons. Perhaps people are more likely to drink OJ than they are to eat fresh fruit? In the 1980's we had severe freezes which wiped out many thousands of acres of groves. That would have been an opportunity to replant with more profitable juice trees. Just a guess.
Say all you want about the Bible thumping homophobic bitch who used to be spokeswoman for FL oranges. She knew oranges, but she didn't know about the better bipedal fruits that have evolved:-) >sorry
I don't gamble. However the control freaks in D.C. have gone beyond pissing me off with this crap and all the other loads of bull. I've been toying with the idea of becoming a citizen of another country. I seem to get a little more serious about it every day.
Am I the only one thinking along those lines? Can anyone recommend a country? My ideal country wouldn't be hot, reasonable taxes, lowish cost of living, lots of freedom, easy immigration laws.
Submission to violence also begets violence. In school, I always turned the other cheek and tried to consider myself morally superior for doing it. What started as 1 bully in 7th grade, grew to 1,000 bullies by 12th grade. Even many teachers and other adults at school jumped on the bandwagon and bullied me. Thank you Jesus for lying your ass off to me.
No kid should have to go through that. I often wonder how different my life would be if I'd just taken a stand. It is difficult to have any self-respect when it hasn't been defended and earned.
I do agree with you that bullies, and sometimes their parents, should be fined or otherwise punished. When that happens, maybe "turn the other cheek" will work out better. Until then, I say kick the bullies in the happy sacks and try to break a few bones.
The first computer I saw was the mainframe at the newspaper where my father worked, seemed to take up acres. That was roughly 1972.
The first one I got to touch was a TRS-80 in algebra class. I was shaking so badly with excitement I could barely hunt and peck my way around the keyboard.
My first computer was a C64. I had a game called Pit Stop and the cartridge for doing assembly language programming and a cassette tape deck. My family was too poor to get me any other accessories. Still it was a great deal of fun.
One of the great things about it was the openness of the technology. It came with a full schematic and a good manual describing the guts of the thing. At one point I had it wired up to the remote control unit of my toy car. I wanted a camera for it because, blind it wasn't good for much besides terrorizing the dogs. In the early 1980s, it seemed everyone was naive enough to think full fledge real time computer vision could be done on a C64.
Of course that and more became possible in 1995 when I downloaded the Hamilton 95 OS to it and my electric toothbrush:-) Does anyone remember Hamilton 95?
Losing weight does cost some time. I spend about an hour and a half every day on exercise and counting calories. I agree that it would be nice if restaurants at least provided an approximation of calorie content. However, it seems to me you are using the lack of such information as an excuse to do nothing about the fact that you are killing yourself.
Stop eating out. Two slices of whole wheat bread, two slices of salami, a slice of Swiss Cheese, a teaspoon of mustard, and a chunk of lettuce is 440 kcal for the brands I use. That and a glass of water is all you need for lunch, takes less time to make it than it takes to wait in line at a restaurant. Have two other 600 calorie meals and carry a bag of 40 nuts with you to snack on every day. I made a spreadsheet of everything I like to eat, makes it really quick and easy to plan my meals for the day.
If your God won't let you spend an hour and a half of *your* time to save *your* life, then screw God and whatever the hell he rode in on. But really, you are just using God as an excuse to do nothing so any blasphemy here is in your court.
I stayed home from high school to watch the launch because my school wasn't going to tune in. I didn't see the launch live on TV. I watched it from the front yard with my naked eyes.
The strangest memory distortion is that I remember it filling the sky from NASA's horizon to 20 degrees past vertical and about that wide. I also remember seeing hundreds of chunks of it tumbling and burning, not just smoke trails. Since I was at least 50 miles away, I'm pretty sure there is no chance I could have seen that much. I think perhaps I've overlain a zoomed in camera shot I must have seen on TV.
I also remember seeing a satellite re-enter the atmosphere one night within a few years of 1986. I remember seeing bits of it tumbling through the air and enveloped in green, blue and red(?) plasma. I also remember a soft hissing sound as it moved. I get the feeling that those memories are exaggerated too, but I don't think it has anything to do with TV since I remember we couldn't find a news story about it.
I visited my old elementary school when I was 26 after not having seen it since I was there in the 3rd grade. It seemed much smaller than I remembered.
Maybe memories just grow?
I would say that I was a radical Republican until about midway through George II's reign. Now I'd say I'm basically a libertarian who is pessimistic about them ever winning anything due to the large proportion of nuts in the ranks. My current plan is to vote Democrat for every office unless there is a viable libertarian in the running. I feel very strongly that a Republican majority in control is seriously detrimental to America's future. At least the kind of America I wish to live in. I'd rather see things split between both major parties so they spend more time attacking each other than us and other countries.
Anyway, up to George II, when I'd see a Democrat on TV they'd almost always strike me as sniveling little wimps with geeky pretensions. Republicans didn't necessarily thrill me either, but I didn't dislike them on first impression. Now the Democrats don't seem so wimpy and whiny. Although with most politicians, I think there is a strong chance they are lying when their lips are moving. But what is most interesting to me, is the degree of loathing I feel at the sight of George the Second and anyone associated with him. At one point during the hurricane Katrina incident, I got so mad, I jumped off the couch and yelled at the TV and barely stopped myself from throwing a shoe at his image. That's very unlike me. It doesn't surprise me that politics turns off logic and turns on emotion in the human brain.
I think further study should be done to see if people can purposely turn on their logic centers while in debate.
Their faith meme has evolved to include running amok yet again. So if they have the faith, they run amok and it is a problem.
Season's Greetings;-)