I apologize for the statement then, but it is typically the same braindead reasoning that goes along with "well they were provoked". No...they weren't, just like every fundamentalist wackjob they are just waiting for an event to use as justification, that isn't being provoked.
Actually, again you grossly misrepresent things, and while accusing me of abridging a quote. From the same section you attempt to quote from...
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; This means that the appropriations must be reviewed and reissued every two years, this does not mean that they only can pay for 2 years and then must stop. In fact, this happens every year, not two, so they are doing better than the minimum here. This explicitly allows for the formation of a standing army so long as congress can turn off the money flow within 2 years of any decision.
To provide and maintain a navy; This seems pretty straightforward.
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; Same here
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
If you bother to read that whole section it is very clear that a standing military is supported so long as Congress ultimatelty has the power to cut the funding and shut it down. So a civilian organization has the power to shut it down, and a civilian President has the command over it so long as it is there.
I don't understand what you are trying to get at by me forgetting the last two lines. Who do you think the patriots are? In fact, you adding the words I forgot strengthens my point. How do you expect to use the blood of a tyrant without a patriot soldier? Yell at him until he stabs himself?
I am so sick of people blaming the military for things going wrong. It is a bunch of assclown civilians that are calling the shots...those assclowns are elected by the populace. You want to fix what the military is doing, then get everyone to quit electing asshats to make the decisions. Second, do you really want a situation where the military tells those civilian asshats "no"? That is a military takeover...which is a patently bad thing. The military is a tool to be used by civilian leaders and is not meant to make its own decisions. Only a fool blames the hammer when he hits himself on the thumb.
It amuses me to no end to watch people like you go on about how christian fundamentalists are attacking (group they hate of the week) unprovoked, yet maintain that islamic fundamentalists were provoked. Not that I think or foreign policy in that part of the world has helped one bit, but seriously, that is some bullshit stink of an argument.
And let me point out that the Federalist papers covered the topic of having a standing army quite a bit. This was not a case of founding fathers were opposed to having a standing army at all as you try to make it out to be. There was a tremendous amount of debate over the risks of having a standing military weighed against the risk of not having one. Ultimately (and rightfully so) the decision was made that not having a standing army with proper training and organization was more of a threat to the Union than having a standing army. This is exactly the reason why the commander in chief of all military forces is an elected civilian. Yet ironically, it has been our combat veterans that have made some of the best leadership decisions involved in the use of military force (or rather not using it). General Eisenhower had lengthy speaches warning against the development of the military industrial complex. He also flat out said that anyone who tried to promote the idea of a preemptive war was a fool. In fact, this rolls right into your point about the people ignoring the intelligence at hand so they could use the military as a tool of foreign policy...they were civilians... Almost everyone who pushed that bullshit were draft dodging cowards, or used other methods to dodge the vietnam war (which was another catastrophic screwup driven by political bullshit).
Seriously...the idea that the founding fathers opposed the military, or that it shouldn't be considered patriotic are a gross misrepresentation of the history. "The tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of patriots."
Well...we have the terribly well thought out War on Terror... We have the continuation of the War on Drugs... We have the constant bailouts for big business... We have all manner of subsidies... Then the specific record I was refering to was actually the pork spending. No...his plans of SS reform were a disaster and largely fueled by the fact that he was taking money out of the SS bucket to fund his other bad policy.
It was like a million conservatives cried out and then were suddenly silenced.
You do realize how many neocon types just had their heads implode due to your statement there right? I mean, I generally consider myself conservative (in the old sense, when it mean fiscal and political conservative and social liberal because a real conservative doesn't want the government mucking in the personal affairs of people.). I most certainly do not consider myself a Republican. The modern Republicans have fucked our nation up possibly beyond repair with their rhetoric and god aweful policy. They have the balls to claim Democrats will spend more when they currently hold the record for spending!
Uhm...come again? So...if we produce X gallons of gas per day based on our current oil intake, and then we increase that oil intake how exactly are we supposed to get more gas if we don't operate the refineries with more efficiency? If the funnel (refineries) are a limiting factor in the production of gas, then increasing the oil won't help. Even under the plan of go drill more the only way we get more gas is to refine more gas, a capability we have now that we are not using.
The price change in regard to supply and demand is most certainly not backwards from an economic perspective and I suggest you go take some econ classes. That is a perfectly natural market reaction. The trouble is the elasticity of gasoline is rather poor so the price goes up as supply goes down. However, if that elasticity can be changed (through introduction of alternate fuels) it will cause a reduction in demand and more efficient use (through better technology) will cause a decrease in demand. Demand affects price, not the other way around. A rising price is a function of the new intersection of supply and demand at the new lowered supply. The only way to change that is to change the demand or change the supply. Economists do see this, study it clearly, and which is why they continue to point out how our current oil hungry friends in office have fucked the living hell out of us with their assinine policy and wonderful subsidies.
That said...this is most certainly not the single thing that will tank the economy. The mass destruction to our economy is coming from predatory lending and easy credit. The fact that my tax dollars are being used to bail out THREE greedy fuck predatory lending companies pisses me off more than the price of gas. The best part is, for all the cries about how it was the CRA and regulation that caused it, most of the banks involved in this were not under those regulations! You see...an increase of income causes demand to rise, which while holding supply constant, causes prices to rise. So...when you extend tens to hundreds of thousands of easy credit, you are effectively causing a short term increase in income. Demand goes up, prices go up, and when it comes time to pay the piper you most people so far in debt that they are barely able to pay the monthly interest with their income. So now you have created a chain of unbacked debt that is growing faster than it can be paid. That has precious little to do with the price of gas. The only thing the price of gas has done is to make it even more evident how precariously balanced our debt situation is. The collapse we are watching as the credit companies buckle and the fed bails out the biggest ones has precious little to do with the price of gas. It happened to be part of the catalyst that caused it to go faster, but it would have happened regardless.
A more cynical person would say that they passed line item veto under Clinton while they had control of congress with the belief that they would be getting their own man into office following Clinton. It would certainly look less, you know...politically bad if they gave it to a Democrat for his last term before taking it for themselves.
In otherwords, Bush tried to get around the unconstitutional nature of it by rewording it. Good thing he managed to bypass the constitution on so many issues like wiretapping and eminent domain. Wouldn't want that "damned piece of paper" getting in the way of good solid executive government.
Not that I am a fan of Democrats, but the Republican Regime has been a rather destructive force for America.
Funny, I thought it would happen when demand went down. You know, when things like high efficiency vehicles or alternate energy made it to the market. I mean seriously...oil companies parntering up with vehicle makers to bring us high efficiency vehicles? You have got to be joking. Even outside of the whole fact that we are currently exporting a ton of oil, my understanding is that we aren't even operating our refineries at 100%. So lets talk about more drilling when all of the other things that can be done have been met to include demand reduction.
Oh...but Bush, Cheney, Condi, and the gang are all oil people. I can't imagine why they would try to hold the nation by the balls to get more money for their pet industry rather than actually do anything to solve the problem.
It is actually pretty simple. Party A proposes "We must do X" but opposes doing Y. Party B says "Well, we will only let you do X if you let us do Y". So then a bill that was meant to address a specific issue gets a ton of compromise crap added into it, which is frequently unrelated, but it is all just bargaining chips to try and get the original bill passed by both sides. Now, of course, a great deal of those bargaining chips come down to various congress critters come down to "well if you tack on 10 million for my pet project I will vote yes" and then multiply that out by however many votes are needed to pass the stupid thing.
The other frequent occurance is a bill that has no chance of failing. "Let us vote to declare Cancer a bad thing and that we should research ways to fight it!" well of course everyone is going to vote yes, so all those little congress critters start tacking on a bunch of crap knowing that they can add a ton of garbage before a bill like that has a chance of failure.
The biggest problem is the naming of bills. PATRIOT ACT for example. You can't vote against it, if you vote against it you are not a patriot and you support terrorists. Or the Child Online Protection Act...can't vote against it unless you support pedophiles. Doesn't matter how aweful the language in the bill is, the name is what people here and form their own warped ideas of what the bill ACTUALLY does.
Ultimately, this was the reason "line item veto" was proposed. Normally the President has to shoot down the whole bill or pass the whole thing. He wanted line item veto to "stop the pork and unrelated stuff" so he could veto out parts of the bill and leave the rest. Now, the reality is, for someone who has been paying attention, he has been using signing statements like they are line item vetos (or attempting to). A signing statement is just a note about "this is how I interpret the bill, and as long as it is interpreted this way I pass it". So...the real goal was to once again expand executive power so that he could line item veto out oversight clauses and the like. So he could basically rewrite any law AFTER it had passed out of congress and then sign it into effect.
Please stop...you don't understand what you just said...but you said it...and it is horrible. "produces ASCII for "This being copyright God..."
This is only going to add fuel to those asshat evangelical fires. The English language happend LONG after that whole God being involved with human daily life business, he did not speak English. Jesus was not white. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Mary, etc are NOT their real names, they were anglicized. Hell Jesus isn't even the guys real name, and the anglicized form is correctly pronounsed "Heysoos". Christ was not his last name, it is a title and his real name was Yeshua!
Two of my favorite things to do with the hardcore Bible thumpers is to walk by as they try to pass out their Bibles or get in peoples faces and say "Jesus was such a jew" and watch them get pissed for some bizarre reason. My other fun one is when asked "Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior!?"... "Well, no, I don't know who this Jesus guy is, but I try to follow Yeshuas teachings" and then watch them work themselves up in a fit of evangelical rage about heathens. (By the way, you don't have to buy the whole "Son of God" story to think his teachings were good stuff, if you read the parts where he is talking he basically just repeats "quit being pricks to eachother and that will make God happy", he was very against rules lawyering of religion and that is ultimately what got him killed, and the thing that strikes me funny is that I don't remember him ever refering to himself as the Son of God except in the context that we are all children of God, it was others that seemed to start that one.)
Thankfully, it will be tagged with all kinds of obscure spending bullshit so that the Dems can posture about freedom and liberty while still stealing our money. The Republicans of course will either try to tack on their own spending or stand up and blather about security while pointing out how noble they are for voting it down because of all the Democrat spending bills attached.
Either way, we can be pretty much assured that things like this that take power away from the government will never really see the light of day and both parties will get their "cater to the base" points in for bringing it up and bickering about it.
Let me boil down your comment. We should allow gross speculation to continue to fuck up our market, and in fact, rely on wild speculation to attempt to control the price. In other words...disasterous policy with a proven track record of doing unbelievable damage. In the mean time, as long as you are going to make that silly domestic oil/national security rant, why don't you start with "Immediately halt all of the oil exports from the US". The US is exporting a ton of oil right now. So your argument is to drill for more oil to increase domestic supply, when we are exporting our existing domestic supply, and somehow the magical oil fairy will come bless us with lower prices and the magical decision to not export even more of that newly pumped oil?
On education. I have finally gotten off my ass to finish up my degree (mostly just gen ed crap that I never wanted to deal with). My schedule means that I have to take online classes. I have realized by comparing my grades now to my grades in my early academic endeavors and my attitude towards each that there is a significant difference in the methods being used. In school memorization is key. Closed book tests, memorize every possible answer, and you will be lucky to find a teacher that teaches good research techniques rather than just hammering perfection in documentation of research (wonder why wikipedia is such a thorn in their sides now). However, my online classes are 100% reversed. It is all about research ability. Everything is open book, you read the chapters, get a base understanding, and then come test/quiz/assignment time you use the book and materials freely to find your answers in a timed environment. Only a few of my classes have had proctored closed book tests at the end. It actually teaches the student to rely on the material rather than their own memory.
People think I am very smart, but the reality is, I am a quick learner with a terrible memory. I know how to dig up information and analyze it. I absolutley suck at remembering it and I frequently have to "relearn" how I solved a given problem.
Bah, asteroids are so cliche. I am hoping for a interesting doom out of the LHC. Black holes, strange quark conversions, apparently even a vaccuum bubble issue.
Funny you mention the money. $2 bills (Jefferson) are all but gone, and not many people have enough money to routinely handle the Benjamins. Conspiracy I tell you!
Given how horrible Monsanto products typically are, I suspect most of the reading/research is actually done by the legal or marketing departments. Agent Orange, Round Up, Aspertame, BGH, etc.
I have tried to figure out the education problem and I just can't pin it down. I hear people cry about how government education is horrible and that we need to privitize and I am torn. Government education is a wonderful tool of bad regimes to teach what they want, however, privitized education is a disaster (See Phoenix, Apollo Group, and other degree mills). What I really don't get is when the US was at the top of science and technology and whatnot, we were operating on government education. It seems we need to go back to what we were doing right then rather than reinvent the wheel. It seems to be a horrible lack in the ability to teach critical thinking skills and I have no idea where that breakdown is really happening.
I enjoy a good rant, don't get me wrong, it is just terribly pointless. Louis Black, George Carlin, and Robin Williams are some of my heroes when it comes to ranting. It all depends on the rant. Ranting due to gallows humor makes sense, we are all doomed, might as well go down laughing insanely. Ranting in some misguided attempt to fix things, at best you might get a few decades of reasonable change before it all goes back to hell in some new way.
Ah yes, but you see, as you are ranting now about the same things they were ranting about then it shows how none of it will really change. So your best bet is to really just stay clear of the madmen and eat, drink, and be merry for tommorow the world may end.
Honestly, anymore, it is safer to read things here since it forces the powers that be to actually work a little harder to get your information. It seems there are a growing number of cases where libraries are reporting your actions and allowing the powers that be to take all of their records. You wouldn't want to be associated with literary works written by the likes of the treasonous felons and revolutionaries Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. In fact, it is almost getting to the point where it is best not to be associated with the ability to read and research. The Lipstick on a Pig debacle pretty much shows what our current leaders expect our attention span to be. McCain Camp "That sexist bastard called her a pig!" Obama Camp: "Mr. McCain, you realize you said the same thing recently talking about Hillary right?". Go back farther to Rummy saying that the Administration claimed Saddam was an immediate threat is "some kind of mythology, and he never heard anyone in the administration say that", the reporters proceeded to read no less than 3 direct quotes of Rummy himself saying "I know of no greater or immediate threat".
The joy of our modern system is that it does not really rely on slave labor style oppression. It relies on the drone worker/consumer. Much more sustainable in the long run. We have evolved technologically FAR faster than we have evolved socially. Anymore, I suspect that we will destroy ourselves (or a significant number of ourselves) long before we become socially evolved enough to get past this old ape power struggle crap.
Let me shorten that up for you. This is hardly a new issue.
... iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses....
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81)
Translation: ... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man,
the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time
handed out military command, high civil office, legions -- everything, now
restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things:
bread and circuses
Oh no, I don't mean you don't find idiocy tied to religion. I mean that idiocy is not specific only to religion. To be honest I view organized religion as a huge affront to whatever God there may be. In my belief, God is far more complex than making playdough snakes. I also don't view God as some magical father figure coming to help us. I view God as the creater...the voice at time=0 that said "because I fucking said so" and all the rules of existance came to be. I find the notion of a creator building this infinite and expanding universe that operates on an unbelievably complex set of rules to be quite inspiring. The *bamf* magic God seems intellectually lazy. The ultimate painter that gets to both make the masterpiece, and the perfect observer with the desire to examine and appreciate every minute detail. I think it is pretty insulting to said creater to say no, we were *bamf* magic created as humans and we did not come to exist through billions of years of processes that eventually allowed elements to combine in such a way that they became alive and grew into increasingly complex critters.
That said, I think God is also a personal issue, not a group decision. Organized religion is just a clever way to get a bunch of people to think the same and follow orders.
Are you tired of your old job?! Call today! You too can earn your Super Leet Computer Professional Certification and start making $50-60k per year!
That pretty much sums up what happened. Mass manufactured "IT" trained monkeys from a variety of "technical training centers available everywhere". I can assure you as soon as there are radio ads like this for becomming a doctor or a lawyer you will see those tests pop up in those fields. "Ok, look, are you really a professional in the field, or did you hear and ad on the radio?"
Neither should Democracy then eh? Just because a shitty leader rallies support for a war by saying it is to "free" some people from oppression it should be Democracy that gets punished and not allowed to play 'innocent bystander'? The blame religion is just the same as blame the corporations and all of that silly shit. It is a wonderful way to continue cycles of hate, avoid holding anyone personally responsible for anything, and ultimately leave the powers that be in charge. Every time I hear people "blame the corporations" I cringe. Corporations are a terribly good thing, it has allowed unbelievable growth and productivity. That doesn't negate that idiot assholes wind up at the top and then do bad things. This is yet another byproduct of our society avoiding personal responsibility at all costs. It allows all manner of shitheads to rise to the top. The same thing happened during various timeframes of various churches. When they held their clergy above the law, ambitious idiot assholes climed the ladder and warped things for their own purpose. That has nothing to do with religion, or corporations, or democracy, and everything to do with human nature when no personal accountability is the norm.
People only can be controlled by any of these things when they are willfully ignorant. The kind of propoganda that gets used for any of these falls apart rather quickly under any kind of educated examination. I know an atheist that voted for George Bush because a talking fucking cartoon donkey on a Snickers commercial said "I invented the internet" and he "knew that was a lie" so he voted against the Donkey. So willfully ignorant morons come in all shapes and sizes and are not tied to religion in any specific way.
Let us be real here. There has been precious little slaughter because of religion itself. However, there has been a great deal of slaughter due to money, power, etc and justified by religion. The people that lead most of those bloody events would have found another way to rope the masses into it. Religion is just the easiest one to use, and probably one of the most effective given that you can play the "for your immortal soul" card as payment rather than actually having to fork over some of real spoils of war.
The vast majority of horrific things done in the name of religion are no more about religion than rape is about sex. It is about power, control, money, etc.
Religion just makes for an excellent excuse to liberate earthly goods from "heathens".
I would like to point out that if the Unicorn is Invisible then by definition it cannot be Pink. So yes you can disprove the existence of Invisible Pink Unicorns.
I didn't say which side to eliminate first. I fully suspect that eliminating the fundies would be far more effective in defanging this. In the absense of the militant atheist the fundie will turn on the next group least like them and call them Godless. I suspect the vast majority of the militant atheists would go away if the fundies weren't around making asses of themselves. I think both sides are largly nonsensical arrogant assholes, but I suspect that you are right and the militant atheists would silence themselves in the absense of fundies.
I honestly don't care if people want to be atheists, that is their business, just like any other choice of religion or not. Its when they start getting on soap boxes about how better they are than everyone else that they are no different than your average fundie.
I have fought this battle more times than I can count. You are either with them or against them. The most ironic thing is that both cling to the same insane structure of religion/god/etc whether they agree or disagree. The thing I have been pushing lately is that Science is "how" and Religion is "why" and when they cross into each others territory bad shit ensues. Science only describes how everything works, but ultimately "why" everything exists is beyond the scope of Science. Trying to limit the "how" based on interpretations of "why" is nonsenseical. The notion that whatever "God" there may be can't understand the finer points of quantum physics or molecular biology when "God" is supposed to have been the creator of such things is a little screwy.
So because Aristotle said that all matter was made of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water you can discount that all matter is made of smaller component elements? Just because the popular belief involves a shitty explanation does not mean it should be discounted. Thankfully, there were a number of people that didn't discount it completely and found better ways to describe it and here we are on the brink of finding some rather elusive elemental components of all matter.
So some teenager saying he doesn't beleive in God because a bunch of wackaloons are morons is a fairly stupid statement. What do a bunch of wackaloon judgemental assholes have to do with the existence of God? (In fact, their own damned book speaks a great deal about both not judging, how the majority who claim to know Jesus/God etc will be false, and ironically the hero of their story was VERY vocally against the legalese approach to religion saying the only thing that really mattered was "love thy neighbor")
Again, by your argument here, creationism is valid science now. Because we cannot prove the exact evolutionary path of man you must now disprove creationism. Proving a negative is pretty a logical impossibility, to watch atheists rely on that while touting logic amuses me greatly. I will agree with your claim about having knowledge of "how" the universe works, that absolutely does require evidence. Religion fails miserably when they continue to attempt to answer "how". Now, as far as proving/disproving God goes. If you can prove God, then there is no faith required. If you can disprove God, then you are beliving in a lie. So faith basically puts God outside the scope of being proven or disproven. What you CAN prove/disprove is various descriptions of God, just like you can prove/disprove various descriptions of natural events. A few minutes with the Bible for example and you can pull out hundreds of examples major logical problems.
The real problem is when Science or Religion tries to cross into eachothers territory. Science works with "how" and Religion works with "why". Water for example, one of the few substances known to man that decreases in density as it freezes. This is a terribly critical property of water in terms of life as we know it. Now, Science answers "how" that works. How does water act behave that way is because the hydrogen bonds natrually form in a way that creates a very open crystaline structure making it less dense. Science gets down in the weeds of how the polarity of a water molecule works, the electrons and protons and all of that wonderful stuff. When ultimately the why does water act so uniquely is that at some point at time=0 some cosmic force in some fashion said "because I fucking said so".
To be fair, I have great problems with the religious crowd when they try to explain "how" based on a couple thousand year old book written based on an even longer "telephone game". My version of "God" is a hell of a lot more complex than playdough snakes. (However, given human stupidity I find it hard to challenge that whole story about being conned into eating something based on the reassurances of a talking snake...we do that to this day every election). I also don't insist on a personied God. Every human culture has personified things, trees, birds, spirits, angels, whatever. When Religion X says "well everyone does it and it is silly, except when we do it" it shows a willfull ignorance of reality. I think the religious crowd saying God didn't do XYZ because they don't understand the science of it is a tad insulting to God. "Well, because we were to stupid to understand molecular biology a few thousand years ago that means God clearly could not understand it either!". I am inclined to give a bit more credit to the force that is supposed to be responsible for all creation. In my belief "God" is the ultimate scientist, all we can do is observe the existing (and undeniably unbelievably complex) rules of existence, arguably God would have had to bring all of those
Funny how I every time I mention the militant atheists in a bad light I get modded down as a troll, but when I challenge the roaming fundies here I get modded insightful. It is almost as if by virtue of being an athiest they believe they are a better person. Stunning that I hear that same logic from the religious folk.
Slashdot Mirror
I apologize for the statement then, but it is typically the same braindead reasoning that goes along with "well they were provoked". No...they weren't, just like every fundamentalist wackjob they are just waiting for an event to use as justification, that isn't being provoked.
Actually, again you grossly misrepresent things, and while accusing me of abridging a quote. From the same section you attempt to quote from...
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; This means that the appropriations must be reviewed and reissued every two years, this does not mean that they only can pay for 2 years and then must stop. In fact, this happens every year, not two, so they are doing better than the minimum here. This explicitly allows for the formation of a standing army so long as congress can turn off the money flow within 2 years of any decision.
To provide and maintain a navy; This seems pretty straightforward.
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; Same here
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
If you bother to read that whole section it is very clear that a standing military is supported so long as Congress ultimatelty has the power to cut the funding and shut it down. So a civilian organization has the power to shut it down, and a civilian President has the command over it so long as it is there.
I don't understand what you are trying to get at by me forgetting the last two lines. Who do you think the patriots are? In fact, you adding the words I forgot strengthens my point. How do you expect to use the blood of a tyrant without a patriot soldier? Yell at him until he stabs himself?
I am so sick of people blaming the military for things going wrong. It is a bunch of assclown civilians that are calling the shots...those assclowns are elected by the populace. You want to fix what the military is doing, then get everyone to quit electing asshats to make the decisions. Second, do you really want a situation where the military tells those civilian asshats "no"? That is a military takeover...which is a patently bad thing. The military is a tool to be used by civilian leaders and is not meant to make its own decisions. Only a fool blames the hammer when he hits himself on the thumb.
It amuses me to no end to watch people like you go on about how christian fundamentalists are attacking (group they hate of the week) unprovoked, yet maintain that islamic fundamentalists were provoked. Not that I think or foreign policy in that part of the world has helped one bit, but seriously, that is some bullshit stink of an argument.
And let me point out that the Federalist papers covered the topic of having a standing army quite a bit. This was not a case of founding fathers were opposed to having a standing army at all as you try to make it out to be. There was a tremendous amount of debate over the risks of having a standing military weighed against the risk of not having one. Ultimately (and rightfully so) the decision was made that not having a standing army with proper training and organization was more of a threat to the Union than having a standing army. This is exactly the reason why the commander in chief of all military forces is an elected civilian. Yet ironically, it has been our combat veterans that have made some of the best leadership decisions involved in the use of military force (or rather not using it). General Eisenhower had lengthy speaches warning against the development of the military industrial complex. He also flat out said that anyone who tried to promote the idea of a preemptive war was a fool. In fact, this rolls right into your point about the people ignoring the intelligence at hand so they could use the military as a tool of foreign policy...they were civilians... Almost everyone who pushed that bullshit were draft dodging cowards, or used other methods to dodge the vietnam war (which was another catastrophic screwup driven by political bullshit).
Seriously...the idea that the founding fathers opposed the military, or that it shouldn't be considered patriotic are a gross misrepresentation of the history. "The tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of patriots."
Well...we have the terribly well thought out War on Terror... We have the continuation of the War on Drugs... We have the constant bailouts for big business... We have all manner of subsidies... Then the specific record I was refering to was actually the pork spending. No...his plans of SS reform were a disaster and largely fueled by the fact that he was taking money out of the SS bucket to fund his other bad policy.
Magnetic Pole flip and death by cosmic radiation!
It was like a million conservatives cried out and then were suddenly silenced.
You do realize how many neocon types just had their heads implode due to your statement there right? I mean, I generally consider myself conservative (in the old sense, when it mean fiscal and political conservative and social liberal because a real conservative doesn't want the government mucking in the personal affairs of people.). I most certainly do not consider myself a Republican. The modern Republicans have fucked our nation up possibly beyond repair with their rhetoric and god aweful policy. They have the balls to claim Democrats will spend more when they currently hold the record for spending!
Uhm...come again? So...if we produce X gallons of gas per day based on our current oil intake, and then we increase that oil intake how exactly are we supposed to get more gas if we don't operate the refineries with more efficiency? If the funnel (refineries) are a limiting factor in the production of gas, then increasing the oil won't help. Even under the plan of go drill more the only way we get more gas is to refine more gas, a capability we have now that we are not using.
The price change in regard to supply and demand is most certainly not backwards from an economic perspective and I suggest you go take some econ classes. That is a perfectly natural market reaction. The trouble is the elasticity of gasoline is rather poor so the price goes up as supply goes down. However, if that elasticity can be changed (through introduction of alternate fuels) it will cause a reduction in demand and more efficient use (through better technology) will cause a decrease in demand. Demand affects price, not the other way around. A rising price is a function of the new intersection of supply and demand at the new lowered supply. The only way to change that is to change the demand or change the supply. Economists do see this, study it clearly, and which is why they continue to point out how our current oil hungry friends in office have fucked the living hell out of us with their assinine policy and wonderful subsidies.
That said...this is most certainly not the single thing that will tank the economy. The mass destruction to our economy is coming from predatory lending and easy credit. The fact that my tax dollars are being used to bail out THREE greedy fuck predatory lending companies pisses me off more than the price of gas. The best part is, for all the cries about how it was the CRA and regulation that caused it, most of the banks involved in this were not under those regulations! You see...an increase of income causes demand to rise, which while holding supply constant, causes prices to rise. So...when you extend tens to hundreds of thousands of easy credit, you are effectively causing a short term increase in income. Demand goes up, prices go up, and when it comes time to pay the piper you most people so far in debt that they are barely able to pay the monthly interest with their income. So now you have created a chain of unbacked debt that is growing faster than it can be paid. That has precious little to do with the price of gas. The only thing the price of gas has done is to make it even more evident how precariously balanced our debt situation is. The collapse we are watching as the credit companies buckle and the fed bails out the biggest ones has precious little to do with the price of gas. It happened to be part of the catalyst that caused it to go faster, but it would have happened regardless.
A more cynical person would say that they passed line item veto under Clinton while they had control of congress with the belief that they would be getting their own man into office following Clinton. It would certainly look less, you know...politically bad if they gave it to a Democrat for his last term before taking it for themselves.
In otherwords, Bush tried to get around the unconstitutional nature of it by rewording it. Good thing he managed to bypass the constitution on so many issues like wiretapping and eminent domain. Wouldn't want that "damned piece of paper" getting in the way of good solid executive government.
Not that I am a fan of Democrats, but the Republican Regime has been a rather destructive force for America.
Hey...where are your empathy circuits?! I can't believe you would call Republicans seriously handicapped...
Funny, I thought it would happen when demand went down. You know, when things like high efficiency vehicles or alternate energy made it to the market. I mean seriously...oil companies parntering up with vehicle makers to bring us high efficiency vehicles? You have got to be joking. Even outside of the whole fact that we are currently exporting a ton of oil, my understanding is that we aren't even operating our refineries at 100%. So lets talk about more drilling when all of the other things that can be done have been met to include demand reduction.
Oh...but Bush, Cheney, Condi, and the gang are all oil people. I can't imagine why they would try to hold the nation by the balls to get more money for their pet industry rather than actually do anything to solve the problem.
It is actually pretty simple. Party A proposes "We must do X" but opposes doing Y. Party B says "Well, we will only let you do X if you let us do Y". So then a bill that was meant to address a specific issue gets a ton of compromise crap added into it, which is frequently unrelated, but it is all just bargaining chips to try and get the original bill passed by both sides. Now, of course, a great deal of those bargaining chips come down to various congress critters come down to "well if you tack on 10 million for my pet project I will vote yes" and then multiply that out by however many votes are needed to pass the stupid thing.
The other frequent occurance is a bill that has no chance of failing. "Let us vote to declare Cancer a bad thing and that we should research ways to fight it!" well of course everyone is going to vote yes, so all those little congress critters start tacking on a bunch of crap knowing that they can add a ton of garbage before a bill like that has a chance of failure.
The biggest problem is the naming of bills. PATRIOT ACT for example. You can't vote against it, if you vote against it you are not a patriot and you support terrorists. Or the Child Online Protection Act...can't vote against it unless you support pedophiles. Doesn't matter how aweful the language in the bill is, the name is what people here and form their own warped ideas of what the bill ACTUALLY does.
Ultimately, this was the reason "line item veto" was proposed. Normally the President has to shoot down the whole bill or pass the whole thing. He wanted line item veto to "stop the pork and unrelated stuff" so he could veto out parts of the bill and leave the rest. Now, the reality is, for someone who has been paying attention, he has been using signing statements like they are line item vetos (or attempting to). A signing statement is just a note about "this is how I interpret the bill, and as long as it is interpreted this way I pass it". So...the real goal was to once again expand executive power so that he could line item veto out oversight clauses and the like. So he could basically rewrite any law AFTER it had passed out of congress and then sign it into effect.
Please stop...you don't understand what you just said...but you said it...and it is horrible. "produces ASCII for "This being copyright God..."
This is only going to add fuel to those asshat evangelical fires. The English language happend LONG after that whole God being involved with human daily life business, he did not speak English. Jesus was not white. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Mary, etc are NOT their real names, they were anglicized. Hell Jesus isn't even the guys real name, and the anglicized form is correctly pronounsed "Heysoos". Christ was not his last name, it is a title and his real name was Yeshua!
Two of my favorite things to do with the hardcore Bible thumpers is to walk by as they try to pass out their Bibles or get in peoples faces and say "Jesus was such a jew" and watch them get pissed for some bizarre reason. My other fun one is when asked "Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior!?"... "Well, no, I don't know who this Jesus guy is, but I try to follow Yeshuas teachings" and then watch them work themselves up in a fit of evangelical rage about heathens. (By the way, you don't have to buy the whole "Son of God" story to think his teachings were good stuff, if you read the parts where he is talking he basically just repeats "quit being pricks to eachother and that will make God happy", he was very against rules lawyering of religion and that is ultimately what got him killed, and the thing that strikes me funny is that I don't remember him ever refering to himself as the Son of God except in the context that we are all children of God, it was others that seemed to start that one.)
Thankfully, it will be tagged with all kinds of obscure spending bullshit so that the Dems can posture about freedom and liberty while still stealing our money. The Republicans of course will either try to tack on their own spending or stand up and blather about security while pointing out how noble they are for voting it down because of all the Democrat spending bills attached.
Either way, we can be pretty much assured that things like this that take power away from the government will never really see the light of day and both parties will get their "cater to the base" points in for bringing it up and bickering about it.
Let me boil down your comment. We should allow gross speculation to continue to fuck up our market, and in fact, rely on wild speculation to attempt to control the price. In other words...disasterous policy with a proven track record of doing unbelievable damage. In the mean time, as long as you are going to make that silly domestic oil/national security rant, why don't you start with "Immediately halt all of the oil exports from the US". The US is exporting a ton of oil right now. So your argument is to drill for more oil to increase domestic supply, when we are exporting our existing domestic supply, and somehow the magical oil fairy will come bless us with lower prices and the magical decision to not export even more of that newly pumped oil?
Mr. McCain...is that you?
On education. I have finally gotten off my ass to finish up my degree (mostly just gen ed crap that I never wanted to deal with). My schedule means that I have to take online classes. I have realized by comparing my grades now to my grades in my early academic endeavors and my attitude towards each that there is a significant difference in the methods being used. In school memorization is key. Closed book tests, memorize every possible answer, and you will be lucky to find a teacher that teaches good research techniques rather than just hammering perfection in documentation of research (wonder why wikipedia is such a thorn in their sides now). However, my online classes are 100% reversed. It is all about research ability. Everything is open book, you read the chapters, get a base understanding, and then come test/quiz/assignment time you use the book and materials freely to find your answers in a timed environment. Only a few of my classes have had proctored closed book tests at the end. It actually teaches the student to rely on the material rather than their own memory.
People think I am very smart, but the reality is, I am a quick learner with a terrible memory. I know how to dig up information and analyze it. I absolutley suck at remembering it and I frequently have to "relearn" how I solved a given problem.
Bah, asteroids are so cliche. I am hoping for a interesting doom out of the LHC. Black holes, strange quark conversions, apparently even a vaccuum bubble issue.
Funny you mention the money. $2 bills (Jefferson) are all but gone, and not many people have enough money to routinely handle the Benjamins. Conspiracy I tell you!
Given how horrible Monsanto products typically are, I suspect most of the reading/research is actually done by the legal or marketing departments. Agent Orange, Round Up, Aspertame, BGH, etc.
I have tried to figure out the education problem and I just can't pin it down. I hear people cry about how government education is horrible and that we need to privitize and I am torn. Government education is a wonderful tool of bad regimes to teach what they want, however, privitized education is a disaster (See Phoenix, Apollo Group, and other degree mills). What I really don't get is when the US was at the top of science and technology and whatnot, we were operating on government education. It seems we need to go back to what we were doing right then rather than reinvent the wheel. It seems to be a horrible lack in the ability to teach critical thinking skills and I have no idea where that breakdown is really happening.
I enjoy a good rant, don't get me wrong, it is just terribly pointless. Louis Black, George Carlin, and Robin Williams are some of my heroes when it comes to ranting. It all depends on the rant. Ranting due to gallows humor makes sense, we are all doomed, might as well go down laughing insanely. Ranting in some misguided attempt to fix things, at best you might get a few decades of reasonable change before it all goes back to hell in some new way.
Ah yes, but you see, as you are ranting now about the same things they were ranting about then it shows how none of it will really change. So your best bet is to really just stay clear of the madmen and eat, drink, and be merry for tommorow the world may end.
Honestly, anymore, it is safer to read things here since it forces the powers that be to actually work a little harder to get your information. It seems there are a growing number of cases where libraries are reporting your actions and allowing the powers that be to take all of their records. You wouldn't want to be associated with literary works written by the likes of the treasonous felons and revolutionaries Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. In fact, it is almost getting to the point where it is best not to be associated with the ability to read and research. The Lipstick on a Pig debacle pretty much shows what our current leaders expect our attention span to be. McCain Camp "That sexist bastard called her a pig!" Obama Camp: "Mr. McCain, you realize you said the same thing recently talking about Hillary right?". Go back farther to Rummy saying that the Administration claimed Saddam was an immediate threat is "some kind of mythology, and he never heard anyone in the administration say that", the reporters proceeded to read no less than 3 direct quotes of Rummy himself saying "I know of no greater or immediate threat".
The joy of our modern system is that it does not really rely on slave labor style oppression. It relies on the drone worker/consumer. Much more sustainable in the long run. We have evolved technologically FAR faster than we have evolved socially. Anymore, I suspect that we will destroy ourselves (or a significant number of ourselves) long before we become socially evolved enough to get past this old ape power struggle crap.
Let me shorten that up for you. This is hardly a new issue.
... iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses. ...
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81)
... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man,
the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time
handed out military command, high civil office, legions -- everything, now
restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things:
bread and circuses
Translation:
Oh no, I don't mean you don't find idiocy tied to religion. I mean that idiocy is not specific only to religion. To be honest I view organized religion as a huge affront to whatever God there may be. In my belief, God is far more complex than making playdough snakes. I also don't view God as some magical father figure coming to help us. I view God as the creater...the voice at time=0 that said "because I fucking said so" and all the rules of existance came to be. I find the notion of a creator building this infinite and expanding universe that operates on an unbelievably complex set of rules to be quite inspiring. The *bamf* magic God seems intellectually lazy. The ultimate painter that gets to both make the masterpiece, and the perfect observer with the desire to examine and appreciate every minute detail. I think it is pretty insulting to said creater to say no, we were *bamf* magic created as humans and we did not come to exist through billions of years of processes that eventually allowed elements to combine in such a way that they became alive and grew into increasingly complex critters.
That said, I think God is also a personal issue, not a group decision. Organized religion is just a clever way to get a bunch of people to think the same and follow orders.
Are you tired of your old job?! Call today! You too can earn your Super Leet Computer Professional Certification and start making $50-60k per year!
That pretty much sums up what happened. Mass manufactured "IT" trained monkeys from a variety of "technical training centers available everywhere". I can assure you as soon as there are radio ads like this for becomming a doctor or a lawyer you will see those tests pop up in those fields. "Ok, look, are you really a professional in the field, or did you hear and ad on the radio?"
Neither should Democracy then eh? Just because a shitty leader rallies support for a war by saying it is to "free" some people from oppression it should be Democracy that gets punished and not allowed to play 'innocent bystander'? The blame religion is just the same as blame the corporations and all of that silly shit. It is a wonderful way to continue cycles of hate, avoid holding anyone personally responsible for anything, and ultimately leave the powers that be in charge. Every time I hear people "blame the corporations" I cringe. Corporations are a terribly good thing, it has allowed unbelievable growth and productivity. That doesn't negate that idiot assholes wind up at the top and then do bad things. This is yet another byproduct of our society avoiding personal responsibility at all costs. It allows all manner of shitheads to rise to the top. The same thing happened during various timeframes of various churches. When they held their clergy above the law, ambitious idiot assholes climed the ladder and warped things for their own purpose. That has nothing to do with religion, or corporations, or democracy, and everything to do with human nature when no personal accountability is the norm.
People only can be controlled by any of these things when they are willfully ignorant. The kind of propoganda that gets used for any of these falls apart rather quickly under any kind of educated examination. I know an atheist that voted for George Bush because a talking fucking cartoon donkey on a Snickers commercial said "I invented the internet" and he "knew that was a lie" so he voted against the Donkey. So willfully ignorant morons come in all shapes and sizes and are not tied to religion in any specific way.
Let us be real here. There has been precious little slaughter because of religion itself. However, there has been a great deal of slaughter due to money, power, etc and justified by religion. The people that lead most of those bloody events would have found another way to rope the masses into it. Religion is just the easiest one to use, and probably one of the most effective given that you can play the "for your immortal soul" card as payment rather than actually having to fork over some of real spoils of war.
The vast majority of horrific things done in the name of religion are no more about religion than rape is about sex. It is about power, control, money, etc.
Religion just makes for an excellent excuse to liberate earthly goods from "heathens".
I would like to point out that if the Unicorn is Invisible then by definition it cannot be Pink. So yes you can disprove the existence of Invisible Pink Unicorns.
I didn't say which side to eliminate first. I fully suspect that eliminating the fundies would be far more effective in defanging this. In the absense of the militant atheist the fundie will turn on the next group least like them and call them Godless. I suspect the vast majority of the militant atheists would go away if the fundies weren't around making asses of themselves. I think both sides are largly nonsensical arrogant assholes, but I suspect that you are right and the militant atheists would silence themselves in the absense of fundies.
I honestly don't care if people want to be atheists, that is their business, just like any other choice of religion or not. Its when they start getting on soap boxes about how better they are than everyone else that they are no different than your average fundie.
I have fought this battle more times than I can count. You are either with them or against them. The most ironic thing is that both cling to the same insane structure of religion/god/etc whether they agree or disagree. The thing I have been pushing lately is that Science is "how" and Religion is "why" and when they cross into each others territory bad shit ensues. Science only describes how everything works, but ultimately "why" everything exists is beyond the scope of Science. Trying to limit the "how" based on interpretations of "why" is nonsenseical. The notion that whatever "God" there may be can't understand the finer points of quantum physics or molecular biology when "God" is supposed to have been the creator of such things is a little screwy.
So because Aristotle said that all matter was made of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water you can discount that all matter is made of smaller component elements? Just because the popular belief involves a shitty explanation does not mean it should be discounted. Thankfully, there were a number of people that didn't discount it completely and found better ways to describe it and here we are on the brink of finding some rather elusive elemental components of all matter.
So some teenager saying he doesn't beleive in God because a bunch of wackaloons are morons is a fairly stupid statement. What do a bunch of wackaloon judgemental assholes have to do with the existence of God? (In fact, their own damned book speaks a great deal about both not judging, how the majority who claim to know Jesus/God etc will be false, and ironically the hero of their story was VERY vocally against the legalese approach to religion saying the only thing that really mattered was "love thy neighbor")
Again, by your argument here, creationism is valid science now. Because we cannot prove the exact evolutionary path of man you must now disprove creationism. Proving a negative is pretty a logical impossibility, to watch atheists rely on that while touting logic amuses me greatly. I will agree with your claim about having knowledge of "how" the universe works, that absolutely does require evidence. Religion fails miserably when they continue to attempt to answer "how". Now, as far as proving/disproving God goes. If you can prove God, then there is no faith required. If you can disprove God, then you are beliving in a lie. So faith basically puts God outside the scope of being proven or disproven. What you CAN prove/disprove is various descriptions of God, just like you can prove/disprove various descriptions of natural events. A few minutes with the Bible for example and you can pull out hundreds of examples major logical problems.
The real problem is when Science or Religion tries to cross into eachothers territory. Science works with "how" and Religion works with "why". Water for example, one of the few substances known to man that decreases in density as it freezes. This is a terribly critical property of water in terms of life as we know it. Now, Science answers "how" that works. How does water act behave that way is because the hydrogen bonds natrually form in a way that creates a very open crystaline structure making it less dense. Science gets down in the weeds of how the polarity of a water molecule works, the electrons and protons and all of that wonderful stuff. When ultimately the why does water act so uniquely is that at some point at time=0 some cosmic force in some fashion said "because I fucking said so".
To be fair, I have great problems with the religious crowd when they try to explain "how" based on a couple thousand year old book written based on an even longer "telephone game". My version of "God" is a hell of a lot more complex than playdough snakes. (However, given human stupidity I find it hard to challenge that whole story about being conned into eating something based on the reassurances of a talking snake...we do that to this day every election). I also don't insist on a personied God. Every human culture has personified things, trees, birds, spirits, angels, whatever. When Religion X says "well everyone does it and it is silly, except when we do it" it shows a willfull ignorance of reality. I think the religious crowd saying God didn't do XYZ because they don't understand the science of it is a tad insulting to God. "Well, because we were to stupid to understand molecular biology a few thousand years ago that means God clearly could not understand it either!". I am inclined to give a bit more credit to the force that is supposed to be responsible for all creation. In my belief "God" is the ultimate scientist, all we can do is observe the existing (and undeniably unbelievably complex) rules of existence, arguably God would have had to bring all of those
Funny how I every time I mention the militant atheists in a bad light I get modded down as a troll, but when I challenge the roaming fundies here I get modded insightful. It is almost as if by virtue of being an athiest they believe they are a better person. Stunning that I hear that same logic from the religious folk.