In the terms of THIRTY years of being on a fiat currency, ten of that favors fiat currencies.
It is still a losing score.
Blame business. not just big business. Small business, big business, medium business, serious business
Business was already there, the difference is fiat money.
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
These were always at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. That's how you control people, by threatening them with *death* not controlling the gold supply.
It is said that war is politics by other means. All empires seek to control the money supply and most of those were based on a desire to control trade. Even today, war is intimately tied to finance anyway, so your point doesn't make any sense.
When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
That's a fallacy, appeal to a higher authority.
No, it's saying that if the process of taking the people's wealth through a cycle of inflation and deflation was predicted as a scam 200 years ago, when it now happens it is extremely naive to put it down to incompetence rather than malice.
Further more, further investigating the nature of that quote reveals that he called into question the ability for our nation to keep a steady stream of competent economists to keep the thing afloat.
Well, I didn't quote him, but here are a few: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm "That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. --Thomas Jefferson to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817. ME 15:113
"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:276
"It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper in its intrinsic worthless form." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:426
You took me out of context
There is no context in which your statement "The crash has nothing to do with money supply" is correct.
When you look at the dollar versus Gold over the last 100 years, when we've kept track of the value of Gold versus the buying power of the dollar, there has been atleast one period where an ounce of Gold in constant dollars was worth half of what an ounce of gold would traditionally buy. It was called the 90's.
So from a hundred years, about 10 are in favour of fiat money. Great.
Yes you would. Rising wages, rising minimum wages, and lowered prices really do balance all of that out.
And yet a working man's wage used to be enough to support the family and now it isn't, most families require two income earners.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations....
By history you mean, cranks like Alex Jones?
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
There seems to be always at least one group at a time, usually more. Sometimes working relatively openly, sometimes more secretly. When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
When you've got shitheads in the Federal Reserve who think that lending at %1 and now less than %1 is a great idea and federal regulators who believe that banks and the economic system can do no wrong, then competency and hard work go right out the window and the fiat currency is based on nothing, and as such, eventually takes a huge shit.
So we are in basic agreement about the flaws of the fiat money system, but you think we can mitigate the effects of the shitheats but I think they will always be more of a problem than the issues to be had from gold/silver etc.
The crash has nothing to do with money supply
You'd better call the President and let him know then.
So do you think it's snobbery to let an MD make medical decisions over someone who watches general hospital a lot?
Also I wouldn't take the advise of an MD on building a bridge, over that of a civil engineer.
My wife and I had a doctor look us in the face and tell us our daughter couldn't breastfeed. It was really odd, because she was breastfeeding at the time, right in front of him. I don't know what caused this expert to ignore the reality right in front of him, but I've seen that sort of thing happen enough times that I'm forced to reserve judgement to myself.
Experts where in charge of the financial system, it seems. Certainly we should take advantage of expertise, but to blindy trust on that basis is unwise.
Just to clarify, though, I am not in favor of public school creationism science classes, just making a comment on experts.
Yeah but utility really does help us determine how viable a market is for a particular commodity in the long term.
So why don't you do your best to examine the gold market for, say, the last four thousand years, and tell me if you think it's going to be viable long term. You could even compare the value of gold to paper dollars since 1913. I suppose the dollar has kept it's value very well compared to gold, hasn't it? I mean, since you assert that gold has no value and that fiat currency is better, that would mean that people pay less dollars for gold now than then, right? Right?
Let's say that A HUGE lode of gold is discovered and the supply of gold shoots out of the stratosphere. Under a theoretical Gold standard, the value of the dollar would shit itself as there would be an abundance of Gold. Under a fiat system, the value of the dollar wouldn't move much under this kind of discovery. Not in the same way it would be if we base our monetary policy on shiny ass yellow rocks.
An increased supply of gold would not oblige the government to mint more money. The price of gold coins is generally about double the value of the gold in them as they are valued as a product manufactured from gold. Nevertheless, even given the possibility of a rapid increase in gold supply devaluing money, if you look at how the value of the (fiat) dollar has been devalued over time you will see that you haven't been protected from that by fiat money at all anyway.
We're not basing it on debt per se, we're basing it on our ability pay back said debt.
Have you been paying attention to the news much for the last six months? How's that working out? Political and corporate manipulation of that system (which won't stop, regardless of new regulation, because it is human nature) is what has caused the current financial services meltdown.
It's not a matter of "control"(which puts us dangerously in the realm of Alex Jones kookery), it's a matter of flexible monetary supply.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. If they succeed they are written into the history books as empires, if not, as conspirators. The idea that there is not a group of people intent on controlling our financial and political systems doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There always will be, and the maintenance of civil liberties will always depend on understanding the methods used and countering them as much as possible. Any market can be manipulated, including gold, but fiat currency much more easily.
Basing our currency on a unit that is determined by what we have is dangerous. It doesn't give a great idea of what's actually going on in our market place and our interactions in the international scene.
It tells you exactly what's been happening because it is determined by production. Fiat currency is based on what we hope happens, which may or may not work out at any particular time.
I don't know of any modern gold or other commodity backed currency. Period.
You also don't know of any country unaffected by the money supply crash in the US due to unpaid loans. What's your point?
Use the --quota option with the url in a file for input. Did you submit that upstream or just dive straight into the source without reading the manual?:) From the wget manual:
-Q quota
--quota=quota
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be
specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), or
megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if
you specify wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz, all of
the ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several
URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota is
respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input
file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will
be aborted when the quota is exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.
The purpose of school is to make you more submissive, not more productive. Most jobs today could be done by people with 2-4 years of good education. I'm not advocating that little education, just making an observation about the relationship between school and current work requirements.
GOLD HAS NO VALUE. Not like say, iPods, Mazda Miatas, or refridgerators.
There are these creatures called "women" who like to decorate themselves with it. Think about it for awhile and you will stop making stupid comments like "gold has no value".
You need to find out what value means. Value != utility. Gold has always been valued. People are willing to exchange other goods and services for gold, without the government telling them to. Fiat currency only has value because the government forces it to be accepted as payment of debts.
Further more, when tied up with a gold standard, interest rates move much too slowly to respond to crisis situations.
Oh no, a stable financial system, how could we cope? You think volatile interest rates is a good thing? I know the basing of our economy on debt instead of capital is widely accepted but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt has been known for thousands of years as a method of bringing people under control. Using it as the basis for currency ought not be accepted by any people who wish to remain free.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
In our day and age, that process would be ridiculously hard. Further more, you're missing two hundred years of constitutional law that disagrees with you thoroughly.
In a free country it is supposed to be hard to expand government power. If you can't convince enough people that your proposed government action is worth a constitutional amendment, then perhaps it isn't. The government's long and inevitable habit of usurping the rights of the people was expected and is not a valid reason to abandon the highest law of the land in favour of arbitrary government expansion.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
Which is better than the supply of shiny rocks permanently drying up because we mined it all out of the ground thus leading us to a fiat money system *anyway.*
Gold is not the only commodity available for exchange you know. The only "value" of a fiat money system is that it allows the spending of wealth before it has been generated on a national scale rather than being restricted to the handful of idiots who can be allowed to go broke. Fiat money allows us all to have the results of idiocy! Hooray!
You don't seem to understand what capitalism is. State confiscation of private property (even through inflation) and redistribution to government selected bodies isn't it. Doesn't seem to be exactly socialism either but it certainly isn't capitalism.
I thought Libertarians were the private property advocates par excellence. Why would they not support strong IP, other than the fact that the government enforces it?
Speaking just for myself, because when you legally obtain something, it is your property, not any longer the property of the person who produced it.
I don't like the Fed either, but if we give Congress, a body of people who are heavily influenced by the shift in political tides, direct control over interest rates, it would be pretty dangerous. Reform? Definitely. Abolishment? Not so much.
There's this stuff called gold...
The problem is not interest rates, it is the unfettered creation of fiat money by printing and government backed fractional reserve lending. http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html
It's the rest of their wacky, if it's not strictly in the constitution don't do it, ideas that make me worried.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
Not only that, but when money dries up, it's got to come back into the system some how.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
He doesn't have the option to declare that the fire department (which I help pay for) should not put out the flames when his pot catches his house on fire.
Do you have even one example of this happening?
He doesn't have the option to declare that the police (which I help pay for) should not protect him from his dealer.
A situation that, to the extent that it exists at all, exists solely because people like you have made it impossible for dealers to recover debts through legal processes.
Your arguments are precisely the reason some people don't want government controlled health care or government controlled education, etc. If those programs allow you to make demands on my labour and my recreation time, without any opportunity for me to opt out then it leads naturally to a slave state. The problem is not the stoner, it is the government that forces you to live as a collective rather than as an individual.
You don't pay more because someone else pays less, you pay more because the government raised your taxes. Fight the real enemy.
There has already been at least one ISP that offered filtering as a service, ISP level, not the programs they all offer for free. I don't remember the name so I don't know if it is still in business. I used the connection, it didn't work very well.
So what you are saying is that, the hypothesis does not make any predictions, so it is "Not even wrong" ?
I'm as far as it gets from an expert on creationism, but are we certain that it does not make any predictions that we could test to try and disprove it?
Of course there are predictions:
'It will be in the last days, says God,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.
Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.
Your young men will see visions.
Your old men will dream dreams.
Yes, and on my servants and on my handmaidens in those days,
I will pour out my Spirit, and they will prophesy.
I will show wonders in the sky above,
and signs on the earth beneath;
blood, and fire, and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned into darkness,
and the moon into blood,
before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes.
It will be, that whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.'
and:
He who overcomes, I will give him these things. I will be his God, and he will be my son. But for the cowardly, unbelieving, sinners, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their part is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
Among others. I'm not sure how you would go about falsification of these, but eventually we'll all find out.
Oh great, I had a massive reply but somehow clicked cancel or reloaded the page after stretching!
doh! I hate that.
no I certainly don't think it's working!
Agreed. Hence my rejection of that organisational structure on both theological and practical grounds.
The excuse I have heard for it was that the spirit was given out in a special way to the apostles on pentecost, and that it was only for them (I suppose you could say as a boost to the fledgling church).
And yet when Peter explained it in Acts 2 But this is what has been spoken through the prophet Joel: 'It will be in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. he was quite specific that it was the "last days" or possibly better described "last age". So that would make the following period of time without the spirit the "post-last days", which I have a problem with. Biblically the outpouring of the spirit at pentecost should be current up to the final judgement. Also, as for it being just for the apostles, that ignores a number of other times in Acts when it was given to others.
Unless someone I'd known to be incurably ill was miraculously healed then I'd probably think it was an act..
I believe it is possible to be able to do that. However, since I recently had someone close to me die of cancer, I won't put myself forward at this stage as an example of how it should be done.
Go back 1000 years, before there was any argument against the '6 days', and I'm sure you won't find a single theotard interpreting the words to mean otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo#Creation Well you're wrong, although Augustine argued for instantaneous creation rather than long ages. This is an interesting part: Apart from his specific views, Augustine recognizes that the interpretation of the creation story is difficult, and remarks that we should be willing to change our mind about it as new information comes up.
So the willingness to change interpretation in response to new information has been accepted by some in the christian tradition for about 1600 years.
Then there is the "firmament" and the claim that there is water above the sky, which we know to be wrong.
Having come down for the flood:)
You could say: "well the people at the time just wouldn't have been able to understand the real process".
Nonsense.
God: Aeons past, I created a life from the dust of the earth, too small to see. The life grew and changed, through the generations, and gave rise to all other forms of life, including my people.
The idea that God could not give a sufficiently good explanation of evolution to people is just a weak minded excuse for people who can't commit to either evolution or biblical inerrancy. You could go to any place that still has people living a primitive tribal lifestyle and adequately describe evolution.
Also Genesis always mentions a morning and an evening - how clear can you possibly be about referring to an actual day?
Good call, but if that's not enough:
Exodus 20: 8-11 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Stop slacking off on the weekends, people. I sure am looking forward to our thousand years off!
This also clarifies that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." does not allow for long periods of time as claimed by ProzacPatient, who might need an increased dose.
I think the requirement for qualification in preaching in the Free Church or any church would more be just to ensure that complete garbage is not being taught
Do you think that's working? The way I see it, if the bible is true and people were following god properly, we ought to see people being healed, even raised from the dead, etc. I can well accept that it wouldn't happen all the time (can't have people hanging around here forever, think of the overpopulation) but if it is not at all?
If someone came and healed a paraplegic by laying on hands, a monotone sermon wouldn't be enough to put me off.
I Corinthians 2:4,5 My speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith wouldn't stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
I've never heard what I considered a decent reason why it should not be so today.
You can preach in church without qualification, but to be an ordained Free Church minister with your own full time congregation I presume you'd have to have gone through the college.
So we have a situation where to be an ordained minister requires a higher standard than is met by most of the writers of the bible. I don't know how you view this, but is seems to me that it is a subtle rejection of the teachers in the bible, including Jesus, and as a consequence of that, a rejection of most of the bible itself.
Matthew 15: 7-9 You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, 'These people draw near to me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine rules made by men.'
Slashdot Mirror
In the terms of THIRTY years of being on a fiat currency, ten of that favors fiat currencies.
It is still a losing score.
Blame business. not just big business. Small business, big business, medium business, serious business
Business was already there, the difference is fiat money.
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
These were always at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. That's how you control people, by threatening them with *death* not controlling the gold supply.
It is said that war is politics by other means. All empires seek to control the money supply and most of those were based on a desire to control trade. Even today, war is intimately tied to finance anyway, so your point doesn't make any sense.
When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
That's a fallacy, appeal to a higher authority.
No, it's saying that if the process of taking the people's wealth through a cycle of inflation and deflation was predicted as a scam 200 years ago, when it now happens it is extremely naive to put it down to incompetence rather than malice.
Further more, further investigating the nature of that quote reveals that he called into question the ability for our nation to keep a steady stream of competent economists to keep the thing afloat.
Well, I didn't quote him, but here are a few: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm
"That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. --Thomas Jefferson to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817. ME 15:113
"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:276
"It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper in its intrinsic worthless form." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:426
You took me out of context
There is no context in which your statement "The crash has nothing to do with money supply" is correct.
When you look at the dollar versus Gold over the last 100 years, when we've kept track of the value of Gold versus the buying power of the dollar, there has been atleast one period where an ounce of Gold in constant dollars was worth half of what an ounce of gold would traditionally buy. It was called the 90's.
So from a hundred years, about 10 are in favour of fiat money. Great.
Yes you would. Rising wages, rising minimum wages, and lowered prices really do balance all of that out.
And yet a working man's wage used to be enough to support the family and now it isn't, most families require two income earners.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. ...
By history you mean, cranks like Alex Jones?
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
There seems to be always at least one group at a time, usually more. Sometimes working relatively openly, sometimes more secretly. When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
When you've got shitheads in the Federal Reserve who think that lending at %1 and now less than %1 is a great idea and federal regulators who believe that banks and the economic system can do no wrong, then competency and hard work go right out the window and the fiat currency is based on nothing, and as such, eventually takes a huge shit.
So we are in basic agreement about the flaws of the fiat money system, but you think we can mitigate the effects of the shitheats but I think they will always be more of a problem than the issues to be had from gold/silver etc.
The crash has nothing to do with money supply
You'd better call the President and let him know then.
So do you think it's snobbery to let an MD make medical decisions over someone who watches general hospital a lot?
Also I wouldn't take the advise of an MD on building a bridge, over that of a civil engineer.
My wife and I had a doctor look us in the face and tell us our daughter couldn't breastfeed. It was really odd, because she was breastfeeding at the time, right in front of him. I don't know what caused this expert to ignore the reality right in front of him, but I've seen that sort of thing happen enough times that I'm forced to reserve judgement to myself.
Experts where in charge of the financial system, it seems. Certainly we should take advantage of expertise, but to blindy trust on that basis is unwise.
Just to clarify, though, I am not in favor of public school creationism science classes, just making a comment on experts.
Yeah but utility really does help us determine how viable a market is for a particular commodity in the long term.
So why don't you do your best to examine the gold market for, say, the last four thousand years, and tell me if you think it's going to be viable long term. You could even compare the value of gold to paper dollars since 1913. I suppose the dollar has kept it's value very well compared to gold, hasn't it? I mean, since you assert that gold has no value and that fiat currency is better, that would mean that people pay less dollars for gold now than then, right? Right?
Let's say that A HUGE lode of gold is discovered and the supply of gold shoots out of the stratosphere. Under a theoretical Gold standard, the value of the dollar would shit itself as there would be an abundance of Gold. Under a fiat system, the value of the dollar wouldn't move much under this kind of discovery. Not in the same way it would be if we base our monetary policy on shiny ass yellow rocks.
An increased supply of gold would not oblige the government to mint more money. The price of gold coins is generally about double the value of the gold in them as they are valued as a product manufactured from gold. Nevertheless, even given the possibility of a rapid increase in gold supply devaluing money, if you look at how the value of the (fiat) dollar has been devalued over time you will see that you haven't been protected from that by fiat money at all anyway.
We're not basing it on debt per se, we're basing it on our ability pay back said debt.
Have you been paying attention to the news much for the last six months? How's that working out? Political and corporate manipulation of that system (which won't stop, regardless of new regulation, because it is human nature) is what has caused the current financial services meltdown.
It's not a matter of "control"(which puts us dangerously in the realm of Alex Jones kookery), it's a matter of flexible monetary supply.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. If they succeed they are written into the history books as empires, if not, as conspirators. The idea that there is not a group of people intent on controlling our financial and political systems doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There always will be, and the maintenance of civil liberties will always depend on understanding the methods used and countering them as much as possible. Any market can be manipulated, including gold, but fiat currency much more easily.
Basing our currency on a unit that is determined by what we have is dangerous. It doesn't give a great idea of what's actually going on in our market place and our interactions in the international scene.
It tells you exactly what's been happening because it is determined by production. Fiat currency is based on what we hope happens, which may or may not work out at any particular time.
I don't know of any modern gold or other commodity backed currency. Period.
You also don't know of any country unaffected by the money supply crash in the US due to unpaid loans. What's your point?
Use the --quota option with the url in a file for input. Did you submit that upstream or just dive straight into the source without reading the manual? :) From the wget manual:
-Q quota
--quota=quota
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be
specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), or
megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if
you specify wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz , all of
the ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several
URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota is
respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input
file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will
be aborted when the quota is exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.
The government can force many things upon us:
Up to a point. People won't tolerate everything.
* attend school (to make one more productive)
The purpose of school is to make you more submissive, not more productive. Most jobs today could be done by people with 2-4 years of good education. I'm not advocating that little education, just making an observation about the relationship between school and current work requirements.
GOLD HAS NO VALUE. Not like say, iPods, Mazda Miatas, or refridgerators.
There are these creatures called "women" who like to decorate themselves with it. Think about it for awhile and you will stop making stupid comments like "gold has no value".
You need to find out what value means. Value != utility. Gold has always been valued. People are willing to exchange other goods and services for gold, without the government telling them to. Fiat currency only has value because the government forces it to be accepted as payment of debts.
Further more, when tied up with a gold standard, interest rates move much too slowly to respond to crisis situations.
Oh no, a stable financial system, how could we cope? You think volatile interest rates is a good thing? I know the basing of our economy on debt instead of capital is widely accepted but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt has been known for thousands of years as a method of bringing people under control. Using it as the basis for currency ought not be accepted by any people who wish to remain free.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
In our day and age, that process would be ridiculously hard. Further more, you're missing two hundred years of constitutional law that disagrees with you thoroughly.
In a free country it is supposed to be hard to expand government power. If you can't convince enough people that your proposed government action is worth a constitutional amendment, then perhaps it isn't. The government's long and inevitable habit of usurping the rights of the people was expected and is not a valid reason to abandon the highest law of the land in favour of arbitrary government expansion.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
Which is better than the supply of shiny rocks permanently drying up because we mined it all out of the ground thus leading us to a fiat money system *anyway.*
Gold is not the only commodity available for exchange you know. The only "value" of a fiat money system is that it allows the spending of wealth before it has been generated on a national scale rather than being restricted to the handful of idiots who can be allowed to go broke. Fiat money allows us all to have the results of idiocy! Hooray!
Nevertheless, nobody has an obligation to pursue a particular level of income just because you paid tax.
You don't seem to understand what capitalism is. State confiscation of private property (even through inflation) and redistribution to government selected bodies isn't it. Doesn't seem to be exactly socialism either but it certainly isn't capitalism.
I thought Libertarians were the private property advocates par excellence. Why would they not support strong IP, other than the fact that the government enforces it?
Speaking just for myself, because when you legally obtain something, it is your property, not any longer the property of the person who produced it.
I don't like the Fed either, but if we give Congress, a body of people who are heavily influenced by the shift in political tides, direct control over interest rates, it would be pretty dangerous. Reform? Definitely. Abolishment? Not so much.
There's this stuff called gold ...
The problem is not interest rates, it is the unfettered creation of fiat money by printing and government backed fractional reserve lending. http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html
It's the rest of their wacky, if it's not strictly in the constitution don't do it, ideas that make me worried.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
Not only that, but when money dries up, it's got to come back into the system some how.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
He doesn't have the option to declare that the fire department (which I help pay for) should not put out the flames when his pot catches his house on fire.
Do you have even one example of this happening?
He doesn't have the option to declare that the police (which I help pay for) should not protect him from his dealer.
A situation that, to the extent that it exists at all, exists solely because people like you have made it impossible for dealers to recover debts through legal processes.
Your arguments are precisely the reason some people don't want government controlled health care or government controlled education, etc. If those programs allow you to make demands on my labour and my recreation time, without any opportunity for me to opt out then it leads naturally to a slave state. The problem is not the stoner, it is the government that forces you to live as a collective rather than as an individual.
You don't pay more because someone else pays less, you pay more because the government raised your taxes. Fight the real enemy.
There has already been at least one ISP that offered filtering as a service, ISP level, not the programs they all offer for free. I don't remember the name so I don't know if it is still in business. I used the connection, it didn't work very well.
Perhaps the presence of anti-abortion sites on the list will change his mind.
http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7272:acma-list-of-prohibited-and-potentially-prohibited-overseas-hosted-content-&catid=72:australian-news&Itemid=29
The following categories of online content are the sole categories that are prohibited:
...
* Online content that is classified RC or X 18+. This includes real depictions of actual sexual activity,
Sites that promote euthanasia, for one, anti-abortion sites for another. Actual URLs I don't have, they are on the list though.
So what you are saying is that, the hypothesis does not make any predictions, so it is "Not even wrong" ?
I'm as far as it gets from an expert on creationism, but are we certain that it does not make any predictions that we could test to try and disprove it?
Of course there are predictions:
'It will be in the last days, says God,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.
Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.
Your young men will see visions.
Your old men will dream dreams.
Yes, and on my servants and on my handmaidens in those days,
I will pour out my Spirit, and they will prophesy.
I will show wonders in the sky above,
and signs on the earth beneath;
blood, and fire, and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned into darkness,
and the moon into blood,
before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes.
It will be, that whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.'
and:
He who overcomes, I will give him these things. I will be his God, and he will be my son. But for the cowardly, unbelieving, sinners, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their part is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
Among others. I'm not sure how you would go about falsification of these, but eventually we'll all find out.
Oh great, I had a massive reply but somehow clicked cancel or reloaded the page after stretching!
doh! I hate that.
no I certainly don't think it's working!
Agreed. Hence my rejection of that organisational structure on both theological and practical grounds.
The excuse I have heard for it was that the spirit was given out in a special way to the apostles on pentecost, and that it was only for them (I suppose you could say as a boost to the fledgling church).
And yet when Peter explained it in Acts 2 But this is what has been spoken through the prophet Joel: 'It will be in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. he was quite specific that it was the "last days" or possibly better described "last age". So that would make the following period of time without the spirit the "post-last days", which I have a problem with. Biblically the outpouring of the spirit at pentecost should be current up to the final judgement. Also, as for it being just for the apostles, that ignores a number of other times in Acts when it was given to others.
Unless someone I'd known to be incurably ill was miraculously healed then I'd probably think it was an act..
I believe it is possible to be able to do that. However, since I recently had someone close to me die of cancer, I won't put myself forward at this stage as an example of how it should be done.
Religion is the anti-thesis of science because you are not allowed to question in religion.
Yes, that's why there are no theology discussions and debates, and no differing opinions within religions.
However 4.5 billion years is not what I would call a "small margin of error".
4 thousand, 4 billion, anyone could do that. If it's good enough for the banks and the government, it's good enough for me!
Go back 1000 years, before there was any argument against the '6 days', and I'm sure you won't find a single theotard interpreting the words to mean otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo#Creation Well you're wrong, although Augustine argued for instantaneous creation rather than long ages. This is an interesting part: Apart from his specific views, Augustine recognizes that the interpretation of the creation story is difficult, and remarks that we should be willing to change our mind about it as new information comes up.
So the willingness to change interpretation in response to new information has been accepted by some in the christian tradition for about 1600 years.
Then there is the "firmament" and the claim that there is water above the sky, which we know to be wrong.
Having come down for the flood :)
You could say: "well the people at the time just wouldn't have been able to understand the real process".
Nonsense.
God: Aeons past, I created a life from the dust of the earth, too small to see. The life grew and changed, through the generations, and gave rise to all other forms of life, including my people.
The idea that God could not give a sufficiently good explanation of evolution to people is just a weak minded excuse for people who can't commit to either evolution or biblical inerrancy. You could go to any place that still has people living a primitive tribal lifestyle and adequately describe evolution.
Also Genesis always mentions a morning and an evening - how clear can you possibly be about referring to an actual day?
Good call, but if that's not enough:
Exodus 20: 8-11 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Stop slacking off on the weekends, people. I sure am looking forward to our thousand years off!
This also clarifies that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." does not allow for long periods of time as claimed by ProzacPatient, who might need an increased dose.
I think the requirement for qualification in preaching in the Free Church or any church would more be just to ensure that complete garbage is not being taught
Do you think that's working? The way I see it, if the bible is true and people were following god properly, we ought to see people being healed, even raised from the dead, etc. I can well accept that it wouldn't happen all the time (can't have people hanging around here forever, think of the overpopulation) but if it is not at all?
If someone came and healed a paraplegic by laying on hands, a monotone sermon wouldn't be enough to put me off.
I Corinthians 2:4,5 My speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith wouldn't stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
I've never heard what I considered a decent reason why it should not be so today.
You can preach in church without qualification, but to be an ordained Free Church minister with your own full time congregation I presume you'd have to have gone through the college.
So we have a situation where to be an ordained minister requires a higher standard than is met by most of the writers of the bible. I don't know how you view this, but is seems to me that it is a subtle rejection of the teachers in the bible, including Jesus, and as a consequence of that, a rejection of most of the bible itself.
Matthew 15: 7-9 You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, 'These people draw near to me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine rules made by men.'