Republicans? Last I checked Carter was a Democrat. Half of our unbelievably disasterous foreign policy started with that clown. Not that I have much love for Republicans, but at least let's be honest here. Carter is the one that started the crap in Afghanistan in '79. Reagan continued it, but he didn't start it.
Yeah...it is a damned shame that the public can't grasp the difference between the word "theory" as it is used in every day language and what "Scientific Theory" actually means...
Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena. --National Acadamy of Sciences
Though...unless I am misreading your post...you sound like one of the tools that doesn't understand what a scientific theory is. So hopefully the definition I provided will help you.
Why do these stories keep getting put on slashdot? Wired is god aweful reporting to begin with, and they make EVERY military related story into some stupid diatribe article. One day they are laughing that the Air Force allows users to surf the web, the next they are talking about how the Air Force is some draconian government gestapo crushing freedom because it blocked social networking sites. These people are tools...I mean for christ's sake there is a huge picture of Neo stopping bullets at the top of the article. The Air Force could discover the cure for cancer and these assholes would write a story about how they are killing millions of cells in humans.
I mean seriously...the DoD only has the largest enterprise network in the world. The DoD was a big part of the Internet even happening in the first place. I think it is pretty assinine to point and laugh and take quotes from the non technical people and further warp them by putting them out of context. Wired is pathetic.
Hey now. I think "Republican" and "Democrat" does deserve to be treated worse than any of those you mentioned. They are the most legitimate and pressing threat to our society!
$100,000 per year? So your plan is to turn the patent office into 2 employees working in the dark out of a cardboard box in a bad part of town? Someone is a bit out of touch with reality in terms of money.
Because breaking in in the hundreds of other ways or just kicking my ass in the parking lot is FAR easier than going through all of that rigamarole. My point is this is probably the most difficult and time consuming method to achieve the goal with minimal benefit. That goes along the same lines of saying that gun control laws stop murder. If the criminal is going to commit murder with the gun, do you think it really matters to him that he is breaking the law by owning the gun?
It seems to me that the number of incidences where this could possibly be an issue is astronomically slim. Need picture of key, need to know where the key goes, and need the method of duplicating key with picture accurately enough to be of use. Then there has to be a pretty impresive reason why any of the other less complicated and faster ways of breaking in wouldn't be useful.
Wow...you really do pay attention don't you. You know...there was that part where I talked about how it was the CIVILIAN LEADERSHIP to blame for the disaster there. That the prisons were emptied and terrorists looking for a piece of the fragmented power base came pouring across the borders. I'm not saying that throwing that nation into chaos isn't a travesty, but the military isn't the ones that made the choice, nor is the military the ones doing most of the killing and terrorizing. It is an excellent move by the right wing to get everyone blaming the soldiers for the politicians decisions.
I'm glad someone covered this piece of it. I am so sick of people acting like the military is out there murdering civilians. Yes, some of them have done that, and guess what, the military ones that do that have gotten in worlds more trouble than the "security firms" operating there. Fact is, it is a war zone, and it is easy to armchair quarterback about what should and shouldn't happen from the comfort and safety of your computer, but the guys there are putting up with 120+ degree heat, sand, bullets, rockets, roadside bombs, and all manner of other horrible things. The fact that there hasn't been a wholesale slaughter of everyone that shows their face is a testiment to how our military behaves. In fact, there are TONS of stories of soldiers, marines, and airmen writing home and having care packages sent that include blankets and clothing and the like for the civilian populaces near the bases. How much have all of these people bitching about the military sent over?
That said...I think Gitmo has a problem that noone seems to want to discuss. Its 2am...out of nowhere guys come charging through the streets with NVGs and assault weapons and you are in your home with your family. It isn't like our guys can broadcast "Hey, we are looking for Person X at this time". So I imagine many of those people aren't related to any terrorism as much as they are frightened out of bed and wanting to protect their family from the ensuing chaos. I know that if a bunch of heavily armed guys swooped into town out of nowhere doing sweeps looking for their target shouting in a language that I don't understand I probably wouldn't spend a whole lot of time trying to discern their purpose before moving to defend myself. The bitch of this is that scared innocent people with guns shooting at you isn't significantly different than known terrorists shooting at you...everyone gets put in a really shitty situation where you have to do what you think you need to survive.
This is by no means an endorsement for McCain, but I for one am really damned sick of having leaders that can make these decisions to fight these kinds of wars having never dealt with it themselves. Go look up some of the things Eisenhower said about "preventive war" or war in general. He is a stark contrast to the modern Republican chickenhawk.
The actions of the RIAA/MPAA are increasingly resembling those of a band of criminals.
s/RIAA\/MPAA/government
That is why. Seriously...let us look at one of the many ways our DoJ has acted. When facing the law that says: ""torture" means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;"
Then has these exchanges:
Senator Sheldon: "Is waterboarding constitutional?"
AG Mukasey: "If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional"
Senator Kennedy: "Would waterboarding be torture if it were done to you?"
AG Mukasey: "I would feel that it was."
Yet...refuses to declare waterboarding torture. You expect a DoJ with that kind of behavior towards basic human rights to do anything about a bunch of file swapping nonsense?
Yes, because correlation is the same as causation. Did you know that ice cream causes rape? It's true, when ice cream sales increase the rate of violent rape in public places goes up. Clearly ice cream must be the cause. It couldn't possibly be something outside of that like its too cold for a rapist to whip his junk out in the park at night during the seasons where ice cream sales are down. Or maybe there are fewer people out in a vulnerable place when it is freezing out. I maintain that ice cream causes rape. I can even show you the charts verifying this, and I can be really clever and blow them up really big so I have to get on a lift to show the increase.
Whoa whoa whoa...say what you will about MTV and their hordes of Real World style bullshit shows, but Jackass is awesome.
1. They act like idiots. They know they act like idiots. They go over the top acting like idiots. Idiot watching is amazing so long as the idiots are safely corraled and can be observed from a safe distance. Even before Jackass, think back to all the videos emailed around and such...almost all of the videos were of people doing something monumentally stupid, all viewed from the safety of your PC. Idiots are only a problem when they run free.
2. It causes other idiots to run free! This is education at its finest. These morons severly injure themselves trying to pull Jackass style stunts not understanding that the Jackass crew is "professionals" (a bit of a stretch of the term, but they aren't just doing ameture dumbass shit, they have crews on hand to handle things). You can tell a kid not to jump off a roof onto a fence wearing roller skates...but you can be sure that he will fully understand why after he does it once and will probably never do anything even remotely as stupid again.
3. The hilarious disclaimer at the beginning of the episode to absolve themselves for the legal liability of reason 2.
Now, to address the internet having dignity. That was gone a LONG LONG time ago if it ever even existed. Goatse, tubgirl, GNAA, geocities, myspace, twitter, facebook, etc...nevermind that the majority of the internet is porn or other sex related pills, pumps, and so on. Why you are worried about MTV having any impact on the dignity of the internet is beyond me.
Is this a problem we really want solved? Look at the ever growing piles of data governments and companies are collecting on people. Is this something that we really want preserved forever?
That also warps the market, because then noone will bother to do the expensive/complicated/rare treatments because noone needs them.
Honestly, healthcare has got to be one of the most totally fucked "markets" out there. You are dealing with peoples lives here, and there is pretty much no limit to what people will pay for that.
I wouldn't call that clever, I would call it political grandstanding by a politico who is struggling to be relevant while spending at least half the movie taking cheap shots at Bush. Not that I don't enjoy a good cheap shot at Bush, but that is hardly the place to do it. Further, this is EXACTLY why this whole thing is championed by ultraliberal and dismissed by ultraconservative. Once again...political grandstanding instead of serious scientific discourse
The lefties get their little pet champions and trot them out with cherry picked evidence presentations, the right wingers fund a ton of pseudoscience stuff to counter that, and at the end of the day it is reduced to nothing more than a vehicle for vote gathering rather than an issue being addressed.
No my friend...Al Gore is a damned tool and only serves to muddy the water with his nonsense. I will even admit that the video is nowhere as outlandish as the right wingers claim it is, but it still is little more than political grandstanding by someone trying to be relevant. It would have been nice if it was a real presentation with real scientific views rather than stupid jokes about how he should have been president or childhood stories.
You can't separate them from the money without either given everything to them and compounding the problem, or trying to lock them into a specific middle lifestyle and compounding the trouble with bribery. However, I don't know that a policy of a government run accounting for all of the personal finances and purchases of congress critters wouldn't be at least marginally better. Hmm...you got a lexus huh? Well our records indicate you didn't purchase a lexus...EXECUTION!:)
The other problem is not all special interests are created equal. Civil liberties for blacks was in the realm of special interests. They eventually turned from chattle to citizens because of that. Advocacy for military members and their families is definitely a special interest. People don't seem to realize that the government is more than happy to shit all over the military while flag waving about how patriotic the military is. It wasn't that long ago that it was perfectly legal for them to just not pay the military, and that happened. Congress didn't approve the budget, no military member got paychecks for a while, yet it was still illegal as hell for those military members to abdandon their posts. So you had unpaid people guarding nuclear weapons during the cold war. So...there are "special interests" that are indeed positive.
My biggest concern is how to fix things so that the government does fear the people without things going horribly wrong in either direction. Let's face it, a bunch of gun toting redneck "revolutionaries" like Timmy McVeigh aren't exactly a suitable replacement for our current problems.
Ok...I'll bite. Our current setup is unbelievably and undeniably broken, and anyone who stands and tells you with a straight face that this is the best has obviously never had to deal with a serious medical condition, a long term prescription, or really anything more than a $20 copay to get some cold meds. Hospitals have employees whose sole purpose in life is to wrangle with the insurance companies so that the families of sick or dying patients don't have to. I have had the joy of dealing with our insurance company trying to rewrite one of my wife's prescriptions because they didn't want to pay for it and the resulting 3 day battle of the original doctor telling them "No, I really meant what I wrote". I mean after all, it is awesome that those people go to medical school so they can work for an insurance company deciding what is medically required...wait...they don't have medical training? I mentioned this to one of the docs I work with from time to time and she nearly went nuclear on having to deal with insurance companies pulling those kinds of stunts all the time. There was another incident of a boy in the area with a horrible skin condition that basically boils down to his skin never grows that protective layer, immediately blisters on touch, and is a life of agony with a death expected well before 30. Insurance refuses to pay for his treatment so one of the local pizza places has done a few days where they donate ALL money brought in that day to the kids fund. Yet another case in the area of a woman who went to the ER while pregnant, fetus dies from whatever medical emergency it was, but because the doctor had started treatment before the fetus died the insurance company called it an elective abortion and refused to pay. So this "oh no government healthcare!" scare bullshit is laughable at best. Then we have the joys of the pharma industry...holy crap I want to beat their reps every time I see them. Listening to them cry about recouping research costs when most of their spending goes into the marketing of the new wonder drugs is disgusting. These little bastards are slimey little shits using all kinds of bribery style tactics to peddle their bullshit. Let us not forget, there is no profit in a cure, but there is a tremendous profit in treatment. There is NO NADA ZIP ZERO ZILCH money in something like the cure for cancer, but there are billions to be made keeping cancer patients alive and suffering as long as possible.
However, I think there is a two fold fix here
1. Nothing like the threat of having all of your money and control taken away to get you to start behaving. I think there is no better way to get things fixed than to threaten the very existance of these medical insurance companies and pharma companies. Better to behave and stay afloat than to keep up your greedy antics and lose it all. These companies need to have their backs broken if things are to get any better.
2. Nothing like government healthcare to convince people that there is a better way.
AAAAAHAHAHA Oh yeah, that will TOTALLY fix this. Let me see...we have corrupt little shits running for office knowing full well that they will get taken care of by special interests. So instead of nailing them to walls to make the risk not worth the reward, we will skip that and just give them a blank check to do what they wish. That way we can skip the pretense of anyone actually trying to run for office that wants to accomplish something. I mean hell...no better way to form a permanent good ol boys club than to give the existing members the unlimited resources to help get their buddies in too.
No...this is a risk vs reward thing, and if we executed these assholes for their treason then you can be damned sure that fewer would get involved in it. I think our death penalty is extremely backwards. Government with the ability to execute citizens is a recipe for disaster. However, citizens with the ability to execute members of the government is a recipe for a very well behaved government.
Go do your homework on what ID really is. The whole "Intelligent Design" terminology is designed specifically to fool people like you. I got into this with someone else the other day. What YOU are talking about is Theistic Evolution, which is even supported by ACTUAL renouned scientsit Francis Collins and does not attack any of the science of evolution.
Intelligent Design relies on that pseudoscience nonsense of "irreducable complexity" and their text book Pandas and People shows almost a word for word replacement of God/Creator and Intelligent Design/Creationism after the court ruled that God/Creationism couldn't be taught as science. You sir have been duped by the fundie agenda, which is EXACTLY why they approached it as "Intelligent Design". It is hidden right in the name, that humans are too complex to have evolved so they must have been designed by an intelligent creator.
So no, Intelligent Design does not "only defend that randomness was not a factor". It advocates that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved naturally. And again, what you are talking about is represented in Theistic Evolution or BioLogos as Francis Collins calls it. Intelligent Design is indeed a scientific hoax. Worse than that it uses word play and politics to seem legitimate to the casual observer.
:) Ken Miller's presentation is an amazing watch. Outside of eviscerating the whole ID nonsense, he actually talked about a lot of genetic evidence that I had not previously heard before (not that I really keep up on such things, but I am a geek and enjoy the science news when I find it).
ID is predominatly championed by pseudoscience, stupid Institute for Discovery, and ultimately relies on the whole "irreducible complexity" crap that boils down to "this is too hard to figure out, so it musta been magic!". Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote a book called Language of God. He describes basically what you are describing in that evvolution happened as we have observed scientifically, but that there was a higher power that influenced the direction things took. He basically puts forward Theistic Evolution calling it BioLogos.
1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, by the hand of God, approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got under way no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
These stories always amuse me in a strange way. Everyone is so concerned with being "human" above their animalistic insticts that they forget those insticts are there. I think you aren't really human without moving past most of that, but you lose something when you try to deny the animal base. So many people think they can escape that animal nature, that the laws of nature no longer apply to them. Some just take the approach that someone else will kill for them, so they can still be "pure". Vegans take the most bizarre appraoch and refuse to use any animal products for "moral" reasons...and then kill plants with the same zeal that others kill animals. "They don't have feelings" apparently is only acceptable when used against plants, not animals. (Though there have been expieriments that seem to indicate otherwise for plants...creepy as shit if you ask me).
To be honest I have fairly similar views as you. I have no intention of killing any living thing with my gun, but I am certainly not opposed to the idea. My only problems with hunting and fishing is that I find them terribly boring and the process of haul/skin/butcher/etc afterwards just doesn't seem to be an appealing way to spend the afternoon. Grocery store meat for me isn't about avoiding killing so much as it is about avoiding all of the hastle and mess of farming, tracking, cleaning, butchering, etc. I think the whole killing for sport and then not using everything is disgusting (eat it, pack it and sell it, just don't leave it to rot).
At the end of the day regardless of how "civilized" we deem ourselves it still boils down to survival. A hungry lion isn't going to have a moral dilema over whether or not it eats you.
Slashdot Mirror
Republicans? Last I checked Carter was a Democrat. Half of our unbelievably disasterous foreign policy started with that clown. Not that I have much love for Republicans, but at least let's be honest here. Carter is the one that started the crap in Afghanistan in '79. Reagan continued it, but he didn't start it.
Yeah...it is a damned shame that the public can't grasp the difference between the word "theory" as it is used in every day language and what "Scientific Theory" actually means...
Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena. --National Acadamy of Sciences
Though...unless I am misreading your post...you sound like one of the tools that doesn't understand what a scientific theory is. So hopefully the definition I provided will help you.
But the broadcasters are unhappy...
I seriously don't know what to think now.
Why do these stories keep getting put on slashdot? Wired is god aweful reporting to begin with, and they make EVERY military related story into some stupid diatribe article. One day they are laughing that the Air Force allows users to surf the web, the next they are talking about how the Air Force is some draconian government gestapo crushing freedom because it blocked social networking sites. These people are tools...I mean for christ's sake there is a huge picture of Neo stopping bullets at the top of the article. The Air Force could discover the cure for cancer and these assholes would write a story about how they are killing millions of cells in humans.
I mean seriously...the DoD only has the largest enterprise network in the world. The DoD was a big part of the Internet even happening in the first place. I think it is pretty assinine to point and laugh and take quotes from the non technical people and further warp them by putting them out of context. Wired is pathetic.
You mean they didn't take pictures of the keys and use a complex process to reproduce the keys to unlock the doors?
Hey now. I think "Republican" and "Democrat" does deserve to be treated worse than any of those you mentioned. They are the most legitimate and pressing threat to our society!
$100,000 per year? So your plan is to turn the patent office into 2 employees working in the dark out of a cardboard box in a bad part of town? Someone is a bit out of touch with reality in terms of money.
Go program your VCR.
How do I metamoderate this being moderated as +Informative as +Funny?
Because breaking in in the hundreds of other ways or just kicking my ass in the parking lot is FAR easier than going through all of that rigamarole. My point is this is probably the most difficult and time consuming method to achieve the goal with minimal benefit. That goes along the same lines of saying that gun control laws stop murder. If the criminal is going to commit murder with the gun, do you think it really matters to him that he is breaking the law by owning the gun?
It seems to me that the number of incidences where this could possibly be an issue is astronomically slim. Need picture of key, need to know where the key goes, and need the method of duplicating key with picture accurately enough to be of use. Then there has to be a pretty impresive reason why any of the other less complicated and faster ways of breaking in wouldn't be useful.
Wow...you really do pay attention don't you. You know...there was that part where I talked about how it was the CIVILIAN LEADERSHIP to blame for the disaster there. That the prisons were emptied and terrorists looking for a piece of the fragmented power base came pouring across the borders. I'm not saying that throwing that nation into chaos isn't a travesty, but the military isn't the ones that made the choice, nor is the military the ones doing most of the killing and terrorizing. It is an excellent move by the right wing to get everyone blaming the soldiers for the politicians decisions.
I'm glad someone covered this piece of it. I am so sick of people acting like the military is out there murdering civilians. Yes, some of them have done that, and guess what, the military ones that do that have gotten in worlds more trouble than the "security firms" operating there. Fact is, it is a war zone, and it is easy to armchair quarterback about what should and shouldn't happen from the comfort and safety of your computer, but the guys there are putting up with 120+ degree heat, sand, bullets, rockets, roadside bombs, and all manner of other horrible things. The fact that there hasn't been a wholesale slaughter of everyone that shows their face is a testiment to how our military behaves. In fact, there are TONS of stories of soldiers, marines, and airmen writing home and having care packages sent that include blankets and clothing and the like for the civilian populaces near the bases. How much have all of these people bitching about the military sent over?
That said...I think Gitmo has a problem that noone seems to want to discuss. Its 2am...out of nowhere guys come charging through the streets with NVGs and assault weapons and you are in your home with your family. It isn't like our guys can broadcast "Hey, we are looking for Person X at this time". So I imagine many of those people aren't related to any terrorism as much as they are frightened out of bed and wanting to protect their family from the ensuing chaos. I know that if a bunch of heavily armed guys swooped into town out of nowhere doing sweeps looking for their target shouting in a language that I don't understand I probably wouldn't spend a whole lot of time trying to discern their purpose before moving to defend myself. The bitch of this is that scared innocent people with guns shooting at you isn't significantly different than known terrorists shooting at you...everyone gets put in a really shitty situation where you have to do what you think you need to survive.
This is by no means an endorsement for McCain, but I for one am really damned sick of having leaders that can make these decisions to fight these kinds of wars having never dealt with it themselves. Go look up some of the things Eisenhower said about "preventive war" or war in general. He is a stark contrast to the modern Republican chickenhawk.
Pause...think...slowly...
The actions of the RIAA/MPAA are increasingly resembling those of a band of criminals.
s/RIAA\/MPAA/government
That is why. Seriously...let us look at one of the many ways our DoJ has acted. When facing the law that says: ""torture" means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;"
Then has these exchanges:
Senator Sheldon: "Is waterboarding constitutional?"
AG Mukasey: "If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional"
Senator Kennedy: "Would waterboarding be torture if it were done to you?"
AG Mukasey: "I would feel that it was."
Yet...refuses to declare waterboarding torture. You expect a DoJ with that kind of behavior towards basic human rights to do anything about a bunch of file swapping nonsense?
Yes, because correlation is the same as causation. Did you know that ice cream causes rape? It's true, when ice cream sales increase the rate of violent rape in public places goes up. Clearly ice cream must be the cause. It couldn't possibly be something outside of that like its too cold for a rapist to whip his junk out in the park at night during the seasons where ice cream sales are down. Or maybe there are fewer people out in a vulnerable place when it is freezing out. I maintain that ice cream causes rape. I can even show you the charts verifying this, and I can be really clever and blow them up really big so I have to get on a lift to show the increase.
Whoa whoa whoa...say what you will about MTV and their hordes of Real World style bullshit shows, but Jackass is awesome.
1. They act like idiots. They know they act like idiots. They go over the top acting like idiots. Idiot watching is amazing so long as the idiots are safely corraled and can be observed from a safe distance. Even before Jackass, think back to all the videos emailed around and such...almost all of the videos were of people doing something monumentally stupid, all viewed from the safety of your PC. Idiots are only a problem when they run free.
2. It causes other idiots to run free! This is education at its finest. These morons severly injure themselves trying to pull Jackass style stunts not understanding that the Jackass crew is "professionals" (a bit of a stretch of the term, but they aren't just doing ameture dumbass shit, they have crews on hand to handle things). You can tell a kid not to jump off a roof onto a fence wearing roller skates...but you can be sure that he will fully understand why after he does it once and will probably never do anything even remotely as stupid again.
3. The hilarious disclaimer at the beginning of the episode to absolve themselves for the legal liability of reason 2.
Now, to address the internet having dignity. That was gone a LONG LONG time ago if it ever even existed. Goatse, tubgirl, GNAA, geocities, myspace, twitter, facebook, etc...nevermind that the majority of the internet is porn or other sex related pills, pumps, and so on. Why you are worried about MTV having any impact on the dignity of the internet is beyond me.
Is this a problem we really want solved? Look at the ever growing piles of data governments and companies are collecting on people. Is this something that we really want preserved forever?
That also warps the market, because then noone will bother to do the expensive/complicated/rare treatments because noone needs them.
Honestly, healthcare has got to be one of the most totally fucked "markets" out there. You are dealing with peoples lives here, and there is pretty much no limit to what people will pay for that.
I wouldn't call that clever, I would call it political grandstanding by a politico who is struggling to be relevant while spending at least half the movie taking cheap shots at Bush. Not that I don't enjoy a good cheap shot at Bush, but that is hardly the place to do it. Further, this is EXACTLY why this whole thing is championed by ultraliberal and dismissed by ultraconservative. Once again...political grandstanding instead of serious scientific discourse
The lefties get their little pet champions and trot them out with cherry picked evidence presentations, the right wingers fund a ton of pseudoscience stuff to counter that, and at the end of the day it is reduced to nothing more than a vehicle for vote gathering rather than an issue being addressed.
No my friend...Al Gore is a damned tool and only serves to muddy the water with his nonsense. I will even admit that the video is nowhere as outlandish as the right wingers claim it is, but it still is little more than political grandstanding by someone trying to be relevant. It would have been nice if it was a real presentation with real scientific views rather than stupid jokes about how he should have been president or childhood stories.
Well I see two problems here.
:)
You can't separate them from the money without either given everything to them and compounding the problem, or trying to lock them into a specific middle lifestyle and compounding the trouble with bribery. However, I don't know that a policy of a government run accounting for all of the personal finances and purchases of congress critters wouldn't be at least marginally better. Hmm...you got a lexus huh? Well our records indicate you didn't purchase a lexus...EXECUTION!
The other problem is not all special interests are created equal. Civil liberties for blacks was in the realm of special interests. They eventually turned from chattle to citizens because of that. Advocacy for military members and their families is definitely a special interest. People don't seem to realize that the government is more than happy to shit all over the military while flag waving about how patriotic the military is. It wasn't that long ago that it was perfectly legal for them to just not pay the military, and that happened. Congress didn't approve the budget, no military member got paychecks for a while, yet it was still illegal as hell for those military members to abdandon their posts. So you had unpaid people guarding nuclear weapons during the cold war. So...there are "special interests" that are indeed positive.
My biggest concern is how to fix things so that the government does fear the people without things going horribly wrong in either direction. Let's face it, a bunch of gun toting redneck "revolutionaries" like Timmy McVeigh aren't exactly a suitable replacement for our current problems.
Ok...I'll bite. Our current setup is unbelievably and undeniably broken, and anyone who stands and tells you with a straight face that this is the best has obviously never had to deal with a serious medical condition, a long term prescription, or really anything more than a $20 copay to get some cold meds. Hospitals have employees whose sole purpose in life is to wrangle with the insurance companies so that the families of sick or dying patients don't have to. I have had the joy of dealing with our insurance company trying to rewrite one of my wife's prescriptions because they didn't want to pay for it and the resulting 3 day battle of the original doctor telling them "No, I really meant what I wrote". I mean after all, it is awesome that those people go to medical school so they can work for an insurance company deciding what is medically required...wait...they don't have medical training? I mentioned this to one of the docs I work with from time to time and she nearly went nuclear on having to deal with insurance companies pulling those kinds of stunts all the time. There was another incident of a boy in the area with a horrible skin condition that basically boils down to his skin never grows that protective layer, immediately blisters on touch, and is a life of agony with a death expected well before 30. Insurance refuses to pay for his treatment so one of the local pizza places has done a few days where they donate ALL money brought in that day to the kids fund. Yet another case in the area of a woman who went to the ER while pregnant, fetus dies from whatever medical emergency it was, but because the doctor had started treatment before the fetus died the insurance company called it an elective abortion and refused to pay. So this "oh no government healthcare!" scare bullshit is laughable at best. Then we have the joys of the pharma industry...holy crap I want to beat their reps every time I see them. Listening to them cry about recouping research costs when most of their spending goes into the marketing of the new wonder drugs is disgusting. These little bastards are slimey little shits using all kinds of bribery style tactics to peddle their bullshit. Let us not forget, there is no profit in a cure, but there is a tremendous profit in treatment. There is NO NADA ZIP ZERO ZILCH money in something like the cure for cancer, but there are billions to be made keeping cancer patients alive and suffering as long as possible.
However, I think there is a two fold fix here
1. Nothing like the threat of having all of your money and control taken away to get you to start behaving. I think there is no better way to get things fixed than to threaten the very existance of these medical insurance companies and pharma companies. Better to behave and stay afloat than to keep up your greedy antics and lose it all. These companies need to have their backs broken if things are to get any better.
2. Nothing like government healthcare to convince people that there is a better way.
AAAAAHAHAHA Oh yeah, that will TOTALLY fix this. Let me see...we have corrupt little shits running for office knowing full well that they will get taken care of by special interests. So instead of nailing them to walls to make the risk not worth the reward, we will skip that and just give them a blank check to do what they wish. That way we can skip the pretense of anyone actually trying to run for office that wants to accomplish something. I mean hell...no better way to form a permanent good ol boys club than to give the existing members the unlimited resources to help get their buddies in too.
No...this is a risk vs reward thing, and if we executed these assholes for their treason then you can be damned sure that fewer would get involved in it. I think our death penalty is extremely backwards. Government with the ability to execute citizens is a recipe for disaster. However, citizens with the ability to execute members of the government is a recipe for a very well behaved government.
Go do your homework on what ID really is. The whole "Intelligent Design" terminology is designed specifically to fool people like you. I got into this with someone else the other day. What YOU are talking about is Theistic Evolution, which is even supported by ACTUAL renouned scientsit Francis Collins and does not attack any of the science of evolution.
Intelligent Design relies on that pseudoscience nonsense of "irreducable complexity" and their text book Pandas and People shows almost a word for word replacement of God/Creator and Intelligent Design/Creationism after the court ruled that God/Creationism couldn't be taught as science. You sir have been duped by the fundie agenda, which is EXACTLY why they approached it as "Intelligent Design". It is hidden right in the name, that humans are too complex to have evolved so they must have been designed by an intelligent creator.
So no, Intelligent Design does not "only defend that randomness was not a factor". It advocates that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved naturally. And again, what you are talking about is represented in Theistic Evolution or BioLogos as Francis Collins calls it. Intelligent Design is indeed a scientific hoax. Worse than that it uses word play and politics to seem legitimate to the casual observer.
:) Ken Miller's presentation is an amazing watch. Outside of eviscerating the whole ID nonsense, he actually talked about a lot of genetic evidence that I had not previously heard before (not that I really keep up on such things, but I am a geek and enjoy the science news when I find it).
ID is predominatly championed by pseudoscience, stupid Institute for Discovery, and ultimately relies on the whole "irreducible complexity" crap that boils down to "this is too hard to figure out, so it musta been magic!". Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote a book called Language of God. He describes basically what you are describing in that evvolution happened as we have observed scientifically, but that there was a higher power that influenced the direction things took. He basically puts forward Theistic Evolution calling it BioLogos.
1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, by the hand of God, approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got under way no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
These stories always amuse me in a strange way. Everyone is so concerned with being "human" above their animalistic insticts that they forget those insticts are there. I think you aren't really human without moving past most of that, but you lose something when you try to deny the animal base. So many people think they can escape that animal nature, that the laws of nature no longer apply to them. Some just take the approach that someone else will kill for them, so they can still be "pure". Vegans take the most bizarre appraoch and refuse to use any animal products for "moral" reasons...and then kill plants with the same zeal that others kill animals. "They don't have feelings" apparently is only acceptable when used against plants, not animals. (Though there have been expieriments that seem to indicate otherwise for plants...creepy as shit if you ask me).
To be honest I have fairly similar views as you. I have no intention of killing any living thing with my gun, but I am certainly not opposed to the idea. My only problems with hunting and fishing is that I find them terribly boring and the process of haul/skin/butcher/etc afterwards just doesn't seem to be an appealing way to spend the afternoon. Grocery store meat for me isn't about avoiding killing so much as it is about avoiding all of the hastle and mess of farming, tracking, cleaning, butchering, etc. I think the whole killing for sport and then not using everything is disgusting (eat it, pack it and sell it, just don't leave it to rot).
At the end of the day regardless of how "civilized" we deem ourselves it still boils down to survival. A hungry lion isn't going to have a moral dilema over whether or not it eats you.