It's possible that he's really quitting early just to spend more time with his family, but what difference would one more year make, finishing out the term? So the timing certainly makes it seem like he's positioning to do what he does best, run a national campaign. I think he's too smart to be interested in Romney, and he's far too conservative to be interested in Guiliani. I'd say he's interested in working for the most likely next president, Fred Thompson. I think he would relish running a campaign against Hillary. Last two times the Clintons were pulling their tricks, no one on the other side knew how to respond to them.
the punishment should fit the crime. if you have a society where the punishment is worse than the crime, you don't have a just society
this is the test of civilization: the punishment has to be less severe than the crime
otherwise, it's just revenge
Okay, so whereas the Old Testament, if someone steals something, then depending on the circumstances he has to repay either 2, 4 or 5 times the amount. But according to you, this is not justice, as the punishment must be LESS than the crime, so he should only have to pay back, what HALF??? I think that would make stealing a little too profitable, don't you?
No, what's scary is that we sit in the United States talking about saving freedom by fighting terrorists and their supporters in the Middle East when we have an entire country like China who openly tracks and oppresses their people but we stand idly by and let their money pay for our war on the wrong tyrannies.
If you're suggesting that China is more oppressive than Baathist Iraq was, then one must conclude you know virtually nothing about either.
The kids'll start obsessing over sports, and then fall into a downward spiral known as neo-neanderthalism, where their bodies begin to become suited for less intellectual pursuits.
As none are present to defend themselves, I'd like to point out that neanderthals had larger brains than ours.
The conclusion in your second paragraph is wrong. Your premise seems to be that the innate logic that we have has 100% correlation with physical reality. However, our brains evolved with our innate logic to have a bigger chance of survival, not a better grasp on metaphysics. Raw truth has very little evolutionary value if it doesn't help you fend of that tiger or build that hut. Your statement that our innate logic somehow proves that consciousness is supernatural is therefore based on a false or at best extremely shaky premise. In fact it sounds like something coming straight out of Intelligent Design camp.
The perception of the supernatural nature of consciousness is not a proof in itself, just a common perception that I think is correct. It is, however, one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have. Unlike most things, which we can only study through our physical senses, we have direct experience of our consciousness, and therefore much greater access to studying it than what is typically afforded to the methods of science. However this makes its effective study necessarily more subjective.
Your assertion that it is an evolutionary feature selected for survival and reproduction seems a little incongruous though. How do math, philosophy, or metaphysics aid in survival and reproduction? Wouldn't one expect nature to very strongly select against the propensity to sit and contemplate nature's beauty at the edge of a crocodile-infested lake? Moreover, if you grouped all the earth's life forms, say by phyla, in order of their fitness for survival and reproduction, would not most successful life forms be the least conscious, with bacteria being the most successful of all? From what evidence do you conclude that, despite this, increasing consciousness was selected to aid in survivability on reproduction?
I agree on the science and math. I strongly disagree on the music - sure the ratio of tones might be a universal but there's a lot more to it that - music is tailored to our attention span for a start, things are repeated just enough for us to remember then, just before we get bored, a new theme is introduced. It seems unlikely that anything else would coincidentally have the same thresholds. And who's to say they wouldn't prefer their music at humming bird speeds? Or as a week long contest like a cricket match?! That argument only requires adjusting the tempo of the piece to the rate at which their brain functions, or, perhaps more likely, transposing it into the frequency range of their hearing. The work of art itself, and its mathematical-emotional content, stays the same; and I believe would be as universal as mathematics itself. Not to say it wouldn't take some work to get our heads around alien music -- it took me a while to first get my head around traditional Chinese music... and also grunge.
Benefit and detriment are human categories. By even considering that something can "benefit" or "detriment" the universe you are essentially anthropomorphizing it. I mean, that if you can "benefit" the universe, it has some agenda which can be fulfilled more efficiently with certain factors present/absent. This doesn't make any sense.
...When dealing with universal notions, such as humanity's relationship to the universe, we should acknowledge that humanity is just a property of the universe, a physical manifestation of the laws governing the cosmos.
Those statements contradict each other. If you truly believe that our consciousness is just a property of the laws of the universe, then our consciousness is the universe's consciousness, and our agenda is the universe's agenda, and the universe therefore does have a value system.
I think people tend to have an innate knowledge to the contrary, that the universe, the natural world, is in itself inanimate -- even though life can manifest itself within it. And therefore, from the very first people capable of thought, we have always tended (correctly, I believe) to understand consciousness to be supernatural.
"benefit" and "detriment" don't really make sense, wrt the universe, but perhaps life can/will/has helped to postpone the universe's heat-death - if only for a short time.
But aside from conscious beings being around to care about it, the heat-death of the universe is irrelevant. Ultimately, the only thing that can be said to have significance is consciousness and the things that consciousness cares about. Everything else is neutral.
Copyright protections explicitly do not apply to parody.
Try actually reading the law before posting about this again... or heck, just go rent "Larry Flynt for President."
While I'm sure you must feel very enlightened from the legal training you obtained by watching "Larry Flynt for President," your understanding of fair use is incorrect. If I thought you had any interest in actually understanding how the law worked, I'd explain it to you.
In the most pedantic sense, I agree with him - there ought to be limits to freedom. I ought to not have the freedom to rob a bank. But, of course, in that same sense of pedantry, there *are* limits like that to freedom. His use of 'ought to be' suggests that he meant there ought to be *more* limits, whereupon I and our commander in chief part company.
While the Washington Post article doesn't provide enough context to say definitively, based on the rest of the article, the president doesn't appear to have meant there should be *more* limits to freedom, only that the present limits are legitimate and should be enforced, such as those limits effected by federal election law and copyright law.
2006 will be a bad year for hurricanes... didnt happen
Unexpected El Niño.
Ah, okay. So these models can accurately predict the future state of weather systems, as long as you don't count any states that were unexpected . Impressive!
Is that really flame-bait? I'll try it without the sarcasm: A predictive system that requires the future to not include unexpected events is not very useful.
There is still quite a lot of data from all over the world that indicates temperatures are rising and that it's caused by the increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Please identify a single data point from anywhere in the world that indicates that some temperature somewhere, anywhere, has risen because of the increase in CO2.
Does anyone really believe that you can change the makeup of our atmosphere so drastically - increasing the CO2 by over 30% - and not have some detrimental effect? Even if you assumed that effect of changes in the atmosphere would be purely random, almost all possible changes would hurt us in some way.
First of all, a change in the concentration of CO2 from 0.031% to 0.038% does not constitute a "drastic change the makeup of our atmosphere." Second of all, the proven effects of such an increased concentration of CO2 are all positive, not random; including, higher crop yields and forest growth, increased resistance to drought in most forms of plant life, and the resulting resistance to desertification. These are all well-documented effects in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The claims of CO2's effect on global temperatures are not (or if they are, PLEASE point me to where I can read the study).
There are certain bits of data that indicate that global warming is real...
* Ice shelves in the arctic are breaking up and falling into the sea. I assume you mean antarctic? If there's an actual scientific theory that correlates this to antarctic warming, I have yet to hear it. AFAIK ice shelves break off and fall into the sea even during ice ages. * The north pole is melting. As well it should be. The Alaskan and Siberian mountain areas are warming, while the rest of the world is not, on average. This is exactly the data point that is ignored by AGW modelers and fundamentalist climatologist, because although it would be easy to show as a result of changes in insolation, it seems to be impossible to show as a result of changes in the greenhouse effect. * Glaciers all around the world are receding at an alarming rate. Some glaciers are receding while others are growing. The majority are receding, just as they have ever since they have been since the ice age ended. You see, glaciers form in ice ages. Then they melt. However, I suppose your statement is still true for anyone to whom any positive or negative number constitutes "an alarming rate." * This has led a number of ski areas to fear for their futures. I haven't heard of the theory that uses ski lodge owners' state of fear as a predictive factor in climate trends. It sounds promising though. If it's true, would could solve the "climate crisis" simply by shutting down the MSM. * Indonesia's islands are being submerged by the rising oceans. So is England for that matter. At an "alarming rate" of 100 microns per year. If you lived 14,000 years ago, you'd have to deal with a much more problematic 4 cm per year. You see, once the ice age ends, the ice melts. It keeps melting until the next one starts, though progressively slower as there is less of it left in areas that get above freezing. Island are at a greater risk from becoming submerged due to sudden geological changes than they are of additional sea level changes.
However, climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems.
Really? Show me, please.
In short, if you don't trust the computer models which nobody sees as perfect, don't bury your head in the sand. Look around with your own eyes and you will see that there's tons of other evidence that the world is changing.
Yes, the world is changing, and in ways that are far more troubling than anything that has to do with the climate.
If he does trully understand "the republic of science" and it associated procedures then I can only assume he is deliberately ignoring it when he infers that models are useless and climatologists are not "real" scientists. If either were true then ALL models and their results would be useless, science would be reduced to a series of anecdotes passed down by old people trying to sell books.
Models are useful for predicting results based on your assumptions. They are not useful for coming up with the right assumptions in the first place. The AGW assumptions are faith-based. Those assumptions are hard-coded in the models, and everything else is fair game for tweaking, in order to make the models' results fit as closely as possible the dataset we have (particularly the last 100 years of temperatures). This activity and its accompanying doctrine has nothing to with science, and its claims of prophetic power are, while typical among people of such strong faith, not to be confused with scientific prediction.
other is the growth of really old trees where the thickness of the year rings tells a lot of the climate, but unfortunately not everything. A warm dry summer gives a different result than a warm wet summer.
Tree ring data is interesting, but as you say, it's hard to shake out individual factors. One of the biggest problems with its use is when it's used to show a trend over a time when the CO2 level has changed -- because higher CO2 levels have pretty much the same effect on the tree as higher temperatures -- they make it grow faster, leaving a larger ring.
The point is that the climate is changing quickly, because we are affecting it. The question is what do we do about it.
No, comparatively speaking, the climate is changing extremely slowly. The most rapid changes happen at the start and end of each ice age. In the not-so-distant future the human race will once again see what real climate change is all about when the next ice age comes, and the reality of the ice age will make the even the most extreme fantasies about a warming crisis seem tame.
There's a lot about your post that indicates to me that you simply haven't done enough homework on this issue. Water vapor, for instance, serves mostly to reinforce warming trends caused by other forcings. It's not a long term forcing itself because it cycles out of the atmosphere so quickly. So to call it "the most important" greenhouse gas is misleading.
No, water vapor is by far the most important green house gas. There is no such thing as temperature forcing governed by trace gases such as CO2 and CH4, except in the computer models.
2006 will be a bad year for hurricanes... didnt happen
Unexpected El Niño.
Ah, okay. So these models can accurately predict the future state of weather systems, as long as you don't count any states that were unexpected. Impressive!
There is still quite a lot of data from all over the world that indicates temperatures are rising and that it's caused by the increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Please identify a single data point from anywhere in the world that indicates that some temperature somewhere, anywhere, has risen because of the increase in CO2.
Does anyone really believe that you can change the makeup of our atmosphere so drastically - increasing the CO2 by over 30% - and not have some detrimental effect? Even if you assumed that effect of changes in the atmosphere would be purely random, almost all possible changes would hurt us in some way.
First of all, a change in the concentration of CO2 from 0.031% to 0.038% does not constitute a "drastic change the makeup of our atmosphere." Second of all, the proven effects of such an increased concentration of CO2 are all positive, not random; including, significantly higher crop yields and forest growth, increased resistance to drought in most forms of plant life, and the resulting resistance to desertification.
No. Decidedly, no. Information has never and will never cause harm. It cannot. I do agree that some information, like certain pictures, can cause bodily harm because they induce the reproduction of your last meal, but you're free to ignore said information and keep your ham and eggs with you.
What about information about the future, which if known could cause a paradox which would tear apart the very fabric of spacetime? Also, "reproduction"... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yes, someone has to get paid. If we didn't have the possibility of people making a living with their music, do you really think we'd have ever gotten a Beethoven or a Mozart or Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin?
We'd have gotten none of those (except maybe a couple years of Floyd making LSD music -- but they'd have had to go get jobs sometime before they really got their act together 7 years later with Dark Side of the Moon).
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It's possible that he's really quitting early just to spend more time with his family, but what difference would one more year make, finishing out the term? So the timing certainly makes it seem like he's positioning to do what he does best, run a national campaign. I think he's too smart to be interested in Romney, and he's far too conservative to be interested in Guiliani. I'd say he's interested in working for the most likely next president, Fred Thompson. I think he would relish running a campaign against Hillary. Last two times the Clintons were pulling their tricks, no one on the other side knew how to respond to them.
This is Germany. How is the law imprisoning those who express doubt in the holocaust supposed to protect anyone?
Okay, so whereas the Old Testament, if someone steals something, then depending on the circumstances he has to repay either 2, 4 or 5 times the amount. But according to you, this is not justice, as the punishment must be LESS than the crime, so he should only have to pay back, what HALF??? I think that would make stealing a little too profitable, don't you?
If you're suggesting that China is more oppressive than Baathist Iraq was, then one must conclude you know virtually nothing about either.
As none are present to defend themselves, I'd like to point out that neanderthals had larger brains than ours.
The perception of the supernatural nature of consciousness is not a proof in itself, just a common perception that I think is correct. It is, however, one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have. Unlike most things, which we can only study through our physical senses, we have direct experience of our consciousness, and therefore much greater access to studying it than what is typically afforded to the methods of science. However this makes its effective study necessarily more subjective.
Your assertion that it is an evolutionary feature selected for survival and reproduction seems a little incongruous though. How do math, philosophy, or metaphysics aid in survival and reproduction? Wouldn't one expect nature to very strongly select against the propensity to sit and contemplate nature's beauty at the edge of a crocodile-infested lake? Moreover, if you grouped all the earth's life forms, say by phyla, in order of their fitness for survival and reproduction, would not most successful life forms be the least conscious, with bacteria being the most successful of all? From what evidence do you conclude that, despite this, increasing consciousness was selected to aid in survivability on reproduction?
I agree on the science and math. I strongly disagree on the music - sure the ratio of tones might be a universal but there's a lot more to it that - music is tailored to our attention span for a start, things are repeated just enough for us to remember then, just before we get bored, a new theme is introduced. It seems unlikely that anything else would coincidentally have the same thresholds. And who's to say they wouldn't prefer their music at humming bird speeds? Or as a week long contest like a cricket match?!
That argument only requires adjusting the tempo of the piece to the rate at which their brain functions, or, perhaps more likely, transposing it into the frequency range of their hearing. The work of art itself, and its mathematical-emotional content, stays the same; and I believe would be as universal as mathematics itself. Not to say it wouldn't take some work to get our heads around alien music -- it took me a while to first get my head around traditional Chinese music... and also grunge.
Those statements contradict each other. If you truly believe that our consciousness is just a property of the laws of the universe, then our consciousness is the universe's consciousness, and our agenda is the universe's agenda, and the universe therefore does have a value system.
I think people tend to have an innate knowledge to the contrary, that the universe, the natural world, is in itself inanimate -- even though life can manifest itself within it. And therefore, from the very first people capable of thought, we have always tended (correctly, I believe) to understand consciousness to be supernatural.
But aside from conscious beings being around to care about it, the heat-death of the universe is irrelevant. Ultimately, the only thing that can be said to have significance is consciousness and the things that consciousness cares about. Everything else is neutral.
Okay, if we are completely irrelevant as far as the universe as a whole is concerned, what exactly IS relevant.
While I'm sure you must feel very enlightened from the legal training you obtained by watching "Larry Flynt for President," your understanding of fair use is incorrect. If I thought you had any interest in actually understanding how the law worked, I'd explain it to you.
No, he didn't say "we need a little less free speech," he said "there should be limits to free speech," and any rational person would agree with him.
Right, as long as your definition of censorship includes enforcement of copyright protections.
While the Washington Post article doesn't provide enough context to say definitively, based on the rest of the article, the president doesn't appear to have meant there should be *more* limits to freedom, only that the present limits are legitimate and should be enforced, such as those limits effected by federal election law and copyright law.
Is that really flame-bait? I'll try it without the sarcasm: A predictive system that requires the future to not include unexpected events is not very useful.
Please identify a single data point from anywhere in the world that indicates that some temperature somewhere, anywhere, has risen because of the increase in CO2.
First of all, a change in the concentration of CO2 from 0.031% to 0.038% does not constitute a "drastic change the makeup of our atmosphere." Second of all, the proven effects of such an increased concentration of CO2 are all positive, not random; including, higher crop yields and forest growth, increased resistance to drought in most forms of plant life, and the resulting resistance to desertification. These are all well-documented effects in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The claims of CO2's effect on global temperatures are not (or if they are, PLEASE point me to where I can read the study).
* Ice shelves in the arctic are breaking up and falling into the sea.
I assume you mean antarctic? If there's an actual scientific theory that correlates this to antarctic warming, I have yet to hear it. AFAIK ice shelves break off and fall into the sea even during ice ages.
* The north pole is melting.
As well it should be. The Alaskan and Siberian mountain areas are warming, while the rest of the world is not, on average. This is exactly the data point that is ignored by AGW modelers and fundamentalist climatologist, because although it would be easy to show as a result of changes in insolation, it seems to be impossible to show as a result of changes in the greenhouse effect.
* Glaciers all around the world are receding at an alarming rate.
Some glaciers are receding while others are growing. The majority are receding, just as they have ever since they have been since the ice age ended. You see, glaciers form in ice ages. Then they melt. However, I suppose your statement is still true for anyone to whom any positive or negative number constitutes "an alarming rate."
* This has led a number of ski areas to fear for their futures.
I haven't heard of the theory that uses ski lodge owners' state of fear as a predictive factor in climate trends. It sounds promising though. If it's true, would could solve the "climate crisis" simply by shutting down the MSM.
* Indonesia's islands are being submerged by the rising oceans.
So is England for that matter. At an "alarming rate" of 100 microns per year. If you lived 14,000 years ago, you'd have to deal with a much more problematic 4 cm per year. You see, once the ice age ends, the ice melts. It keeps melting until the next one starts, though progressively slower as there is less of it left in areas that get above freezing. Island are at a greater risk from becoming submerged due to sudden geological changes than they are of additional sea level changes.
Really? Show me, please.
Yes, the world is changing, and in ways that are far more troubling than anything that has to do with the climate.
Models are useful for predicting results based on your assumptions. They are not useful for coming up with the right assumptions in the first place. The AGW assumptions are faith-based. Those assumptions are hard-coded in the models, and everything else is fair game for tweaking, in order to make the models' results fit as closely as possible the dataset we have (particularly the last 100 years of temperatures). This activity and its accompanying doctrine has nothing to with science, and its claims of prophetic power are, while typical among people of such strong faith, not to be confused with scientific prediction.
Tree ring data is interesting, but as you say, it's hard to shake out individual factors. One of the biggest problems with its use is when it's used to show a trend over a time when the CO2 level has changed -- because higher CO2 levels have pretty much the same effect on the tree as higher temperatures -- they make it grow faster, leaving a larger ring.
No, comparatively speaking, the climate is changing extremely slowly. The most rapid changes happen at the start and end of each ice age. In the not-so-distant future the human race will once again see what real climate change is all about when the next ice age comes, and the reality of the ice age will make the even the most extreme fantasies about a warming crisis seem tame.
No, water vapor is by far the most important green house gas. There is no such thing as temperature forcing governed by trace gases such as CO2 and CH4, except in the computer models.
Ah, okay. So these models can accurately predict the future state of weather systems, as long as you don't count any states that were unexpected . Impressive!
Please identify a single data point from anywhere in the world that indicates that some temperature somewhere, anywhere, has risen because of the increase in CO2.
First of all, a change in the concentration of CO2 from 0.031% to 0.038% does not constitute a "drastic change the makeup of our atmosphere." Second of all, the proven effects of such an increased concentration of CO2 are all positive, not random; including, significantly higher crop yields and forest growth, increased resistance to drought in most forms of plant life, and the resulting resistance to desertification.
Only if you chase it with one of these modified mice.
What about information about the future, which if known could cause a paradox which would tear apart the very fabric of spacetime? Also, "reproduction"... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yes, someone has to get paid. If we didn't have the possibility of people making a living with their music, do you really think we'd have ever gotten a Beethoven or a Mozart or Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin?
We'd have gotten none of those (except maybe a couple years of Floyd making LSD music -- but they'd have had to go get jobs sometime before they really got their act together 7 years later with Dark Side of the Moon).