If the article is any true reflection, this was the worst-conducted study in the history of studies....or else they were just going after the low-hanging fruit for a press release, and not really concerned with science.
But we also know that intelligence is not material in nature,
No, you don't "know" any such thing. Barring the possibility of projects so black we've never even heard of them, no one seems to know what intelligence is. Least of all you or I. Claiming you know its nature at this point in the development of science is absurd.
The only way that's absurd, is if you take it to be absurd that someone else has experienced something of consciousness that you have not yet experienced. The state of humanity's understanding of technological matters is straightforward to assess, because those on its leading edge publish what they know in journals and publicize it. That is not the case we the state of our understanding of consciousness. Science doesn't know how to study it, as it's not in the realm of science. There's no scientific evidence that it exists, except our subjective experience of it. If you're satisfied with the explanation of human behavior as the response to stimuli from electrochemical neural networks, then you have an explanation which has no need of a concept of consciousness. Material events caused by material events -- consciousness is superfluous to the theory.
Likewise, your idea of intelligence, as far as I can tell, is what you recognize in behaviors that is evocative of your subjective experience of that aspect of consciousness. If intelligence and consciousness only have meaning in relationship with our subjective experience, (as is argued to be the case with God) what place can it have in science, and on what basis, other than a faith-based basis that seeks to discount non-material origins of things -- can we assign it a material origin?
"Weak AI" is a nonsense term made up by religious types who think intelligence is something mystical; they like to pretend it can't be created, when nature has already shown them it can.
No, we religious types know that intelligence can be created. But we also know that intelligence is not material in nature, and therefore that it can't be built out of material substance. I don't think we coined the term though. The term was probably coined by graduate students researching with neural networks, who wanted it to sound to the girls like they were on the verge of building HAL 9000.
Logically, we can deconstruct this: Either something is intelligent, or it is not;
Not exactly a rigorous definition. It doesn't give any idea of what you think intelligence is. You say mice are intelligent and rocks are not. What about ants? Ant colonies? Plants? Fungi? Bacteria? Disorganized large assorted collections of organic molecules?
There is no "weak AI." There is no AI at all, as yet, at least that has been made public. And BTW, you should have taken your warning from the Wikipedia article as soon as you saw the buzzword "philosophy" applied to a scientific issue.
I don't disagree that it's presumptuous to call the present research being done AI, but that's the accepted terminology, so I think it just serves to confuse by saying "there is no AI at all as yet". Ever since they started applying the buzzword "science" instead of "natural philosophy" there's been a trend to treat it more and more like a religion, attributing to it powers beyond what it has, and abandoning the philosophical underpinnings which keep it legitimate rational, and consistent. We could sure use another Newton right about now.
I don't think the implication of Goedel's theorem shows that we 'rise above' the Turing machine, but rather that we have a qualitatively different awareness or knowledge that a Turing machine doesn't have.
And what kind of awareness does a Turing machine have? The attribution of awareness or consciousness to any sort of physical machine, Turing or otherwise, is a giant leap of superstition that atheists, or rather naturalists, are largely forced to make. But it makes for some ugly thinking. A few have opted for the alternative of denying the existence of consciousness, but that theory has the unfortunate side-effect of denying its own existence.
Speaking of GPS vs. altimeter discrepancy - I've discovered even a WAAS enabled Garmin GPSMap 296 doesn't always agree w/ the airplane's altimeter. Unfortunately, at higher altitudes, the GPS errored several hundred feet on the high side (could possibly steer you into terrain in some cases if you were relying on it to keep you XXX feet above terrain) compared to the plane's altimeter, which was generally set to the nearest airport or whatever ATC provided. On the ground, however, they did agree. I was inclined to believe the altimeter, as the pressure altitude given by the Mode C transponder (which is always set to 29.92, then corrected by ATC to current barometer) was the same when ATC reported my altitude to other aircraft. Fortunately, it's a VFR (i.e. not in the clouds) only GPS (and wasn't mine, but borrowed), so I wouldn't be betting my life on it for terrain avoidance. In reality, it may have been a differing altimeter setting used on both ends that caused that discrepency. W/o a radar altimeter (which only works for a few thousand feet AGL), one will never know.
That's interesting. I wonder if WAAS could actually be degrading the GPS accuracy at high altitudes. After all, one of the major corrections it's performing is for atmospheric effects that you're experiencing less the higher you go. Geometrically, without WAAS, I would expect the altitude reading to get more accurate the higher you go, as more satellites become visible lower on the horizon, giving you signals with more variation along the height axis.
Technically, you'll need four or more satellites in view to calculate altitude. In general, you'll need (n+1) points of reference (satellites) to triangulate a point in an n-dimension space. (Assuming you want the position calculated in all n dimensions).
In practice, three satellites are adequate for ground and altitude calculation (since most other spatial possibilities can be ruled out as being 'ridiculous').
Or more technically still, you can calculate altitude with three satellites, but the calculation has two solutions -- one above the plane formed by the satellites and one below it. You're at the one below it.
This isn't quite a precedent, but it's certainly close enough to be relevant.
Interesting. Although I think an earthly court could make a much more plausible jurisdictional claim over a dispute with Satan than with God. However, one could certainly sue the Pope, who officially claims to be the vicarious representative on earth of Christ, who is God.
>Genetic engineering isn't "natural", but then again agriculture itself isn't "natural". Really? Can you make a tomato that contains fish genes by traditional agriculture?
Your argument has me 99% convinced that I should figure out how to make a homebrew genetic engineering setup so I can try putting fish genes in tomatoes. However, it doesn't address the fact that agriculture is just as "unnatural".
GM is not about feeding people. It's about starving people who can't afford to pay for your seeds.
Yeah, and the automotive industry is not about transportation. It's about running over people who stand in front of your car. *rolls eyes*
We evolved in the same biosphere as insects, so changes to a plant to prevent the insect from being able to eat them may also have effects on us. These are not properly tested. They should require many years of observation on animals feed these foods for a long time before they should be allowed on
Only if foods are being modified to produce new unknown compounds, which AFAIK is not the case. They are typically modified to produce well-known proteins, especially natural insecticides. Researchers are developing plant seeds that can save the lives of many communities in places that have become much less fertile since the end of the ice age, like much of Africa. Some of these researchers have also had their university labs firebombed by people spewing propaganda exactly like yours. Like The following:
GMOs are designed for one reason, to make money. They do not care what the long term effect is as long as they can spin it. These foods are not designed to help the worlds poor, but to sell more product, to make farmers dependent on it, to add the food supply to the ever growing list of things that a few corporations control.
Complete crap. GMOs are designed for research, to help the starving and the world at large, and for profit.
By the way, starvation is caused mostly by policy, not technology. There is more than sufficient food production. Maybe you should look into how the IMF & World Bank among others force third world countries into producing export crops, often even during times of starvation.
Hunger in Cuba and starvation in North Korea is a result of policy. Hunger and starvation in Africa is the result of the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia, which raised the Himalayas, which caused the monsoon cycle, which turned half of Africa into a desert, only relieved by the meltwater of the first couple thousand years after each ice age. Agriculture in most of Africa is a constant struggle against death. Where seeds have been allowed to be provided for disease-resistant yams, and other drought-resistant crops, it has literally made the difference between life and death.
But a particular line of genetically engineered corn might make it into every box of breakfast cereal in the country for a couple of years running before people notice that it is shrinking the pensis of our youth.
The human phallus as much larger than is necessary for reproduction, so I don't think we're in any serious danger. I'd risk it for some tastier corn.
Seriously, though, GM products replace a single gene known intentionally. Cross-breeding, which has been done for millennia, introduces thousands of new and unknown genes from one species into another, in a combination that may have never been tried before. This takes place in one generation just as with GM food. The difference is that GM food is dealing with a known effect, and a vastly smaller effect, but an effect selected for its desirability.
Well, if GM crops push out non-GM owned by you on your own land, you can sue the designers. If someone's non-GM crops push out your GM crops, you can sue the designer. That would be God, per the 90% of the population that believes in Him. Good luck with that. I hear the appeals process leaves a bit to be desired.
You'd need more than luck, as man v. God disputes fall under God's jurisdiction.
So, in other words, your position is that the US system is better because it has, so far, preserved the freedoms you care about, at the expense of the ones other people care about. Don't expect to convince anyone with that argument.
Oh, I never expect to convince people of anything. It's always a pleasant surprise. However, I'd love to hear why the freedom to abuse drugs is more important than political freedom, the freedom to be equipped for revolution, and the freedom of self-government.
Unlikely. Health insurance would be mostly eliminated, Medicare would be reformed, and legal liability can easily be brought in line with other countries (if it isn't already)...
And free lollipops and peace on earth.
Those are all drastic actions, but they would happen at the drop of a hat of the public was overwhelmingly against what the president was doing.
The public is overwhelmingly opposed (read any poll), and yet that hasn't happened.
No it's not. Read any poll... more closely. The president has a higher approval rating than Congress. A minority support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.
So, are you saying that we have 1000-year temperature trend data for other planets? That's what your progress from ice core data to extraterrestrial insolation data implies.
No, I am not. We only have evidence for very recent extraterrestrial temperature changes, which happen to correlate to the insolation upswing that Earth is currently in, according to the ice core data, and other evidence. We also don't have "global" 1000-year temperature trend data for Earth. On that time scale we only have ice cores and tree rings. If you want to extrapolate a global trend from the 1000-year ice core data, then we're in the middle of a significant global cooling. There is tons of tree ring data, but if it's possible to turn that data into a reliable temperature trend, then the theoretical framework for doing so has yet to be invented. I would venture that it be would easier to figure out a way to shoot down a barrage of incoming ICBMs.
Not CO2 poisoning, but "greenhouse effect" warming: our ideas about global climate change are largely informed by our studies of the Venusian atmosphere in the 1960s, and global warming was predicted long before evidence of temperature increases were actually measured (just as the depletion of the ozone layer was predicted long before the Antarctic ozone hole was discovered). The funny thing is that all the arguments against global climate change appear to be coming from a specific ideological position, while many of the arguments in favor of global climate change are coming from different ideological positions (and the "science" in opposition is mostly a matter of saving the phenomena, i.e., multiplying entities in an attempt to find benign explanations for observed phenomena, and attacking opposing positions not on their science, but on their supposed ideological motivations; the only rational argument I've seen against global climate change is the questioning of the "hockey stick" graph, and that merely holds force against predictions of the rate of climate change, not its existence).
There is no scientific basis for most of the assumptions of CO2's supposed role in increasing the greenhouse effect. Venus retains the amount of heat it does because its atmosphere is 90 times more dense than ours, not because it is made out of CO2 rather than than O2 and N2. The ice core data argues strongly against historical CO2 fluctuations having any causal effect on temperature change. Furthermore, the "global warming" data does not show "global" warming, it shows significant warming in mountainous regions of Alaska, Western Canada, and Russia, and no trends elsewhere, consistent with small increases in insolation (which is further confirmed by warming on other planets). There are no localized warming trends around high CO2 sources. The tree-ring data is widely misused (such as is found in the "hockey stick" and other supposed warming graphs. For tree-ring data to reflect temperature, it has to first be corrected for CO2 increases. CO2 increases makes trees grow faster, because it feeds them CO2, not because it makes them warmer. Of the many tree-ring studies I've seen, I can only remember one that even attempted to correct for this. I've read all the significant peer-reviewed research on the subject. I've never found any study that has been able to demonstrate that CO2 actually increases the greenhouse effect. I've seen one study (well conducted, but not published in a peer-reviewed journal) that experimentally showed that it did not. Several years ago, I started with the assumption there was at least some legitimacy to the "global warming via CO2" theory, but there is NONE.
However, policy and ideology should not have an influence over science. But this is what the Bush administration wants.
That is a left-wing fantasy. There is no instance of that. And no, on order that political appointees have the final say over federal regulations, is not an instance of it. Objectivity on climate change is not an instance of it.
A major problem with SDI, as many saw it, is that it was a massive waste of money. Scientists and engineers, who are the authorities on this matter, saw that the system was largely unworkable and required a huge amount of money.
Sure. The "scientific consensus" is that SDI is unworkable. We send a person to walk around on the moon, but it's impossible to shoot down a missile? Tell me another one. That and Doom-Through-Impending-CO2-Poisoning are examples of people, whether politicians or scientists, trying to gain political advantage through bastardized science.
In what parallel universe is it appropriate for anyone other than elected officials or political appointees to have "final say regarding federal agency regulations???" Anything else would fail to qualify as a democracy. Who the heck is this Union of Concerned Scientists? They don't happened to be named Dr. LeRoga, Dr. Gorael, Dr. Reagol, do they?
We started out with a lot more freedoms than any European country; they started out with less. That's one of the reasons many people came here in the first place. So I don't think this is a valid comparison. In many ways, people in Europe have more freedoms than we do. Try smoking pot in the US vs. Amsterdam and see what your punishment is. It seems to me that Europe (except Britain of course) has gotten greater freedoms in the past 50 years or so, while in the US we've gone the opposite direction, especially since 2000.
Try buying a handgun, in Amsterdam vs the US, or for that matter an assault rifle, and see what your punishment is. The right to bear arms is one of the primary fundamental rights of a free people. The right to smoke pot is an arbitrary and meaningless one, IMO.
It seems to me that Europeans have somewhat higher taxation, but in return get a lot more for their money: universal healthcare, public transit, etc. Healthcare and transportation is a huge portion of Americans' personal budgets, and healthcare in particular is skyrocketing higher all the time.
There is no argument of "getting a lot for your money" that can justify being essentially forced at gunpoint to buy the thing in the first place. Besides, I have never seen in my life an instance of goods or services bought through the go vernment being more cost effective than goods or services bought directly from the private sector... unless of course the transaction is being subsidized by some other poor sap who is paying part of your cost (at gunpoint).
In Europe, they pay a little more tax, but they don't have to pay huge insurance bills. In America, people with jobs have to pay huge premiums for health insurance (either out of their paycheck, or directly if they don't have a full-time job which most poorer people don't), so that they can help pay for all the uninsured people and illegal Mexicans who clog up the emergency rooms and don't pay for it (and consequently cost a lot more than if they had gotten some earlier preventive treatment instead of waiting until it was an emergency).
The cost of medical services in the U.S. has nothing to do with our form of government or tax rates, but is the result of a number of things revolving around insurance, Medicare, and legal liability. If we simply started buying the same services through the government, our costs would skyrocket even more.
Also very importantly, Europeans aren't paying huge taxes for a gigantic, bloated military force and an unjust war of aggression. How much is the Iraq war costing us? Over 1 trillion I believe so far. You don't think we have to pay for that with taxes?
The military is a fair chunk of what our taxes pay for. It's nearly the only LEGITIMATE thing our taxes pay for.
As far as I know, their governments have checks and balances just like ours, just not identical. I don't see any great instability brewing over there right now.
The U.S. is the world's oldest continuous constitutional democracy -- one continuous government since the revolution. Do you know how many governments France has had in that time period, or since its revolution? Or Italy? Or Germany? Italy and Germany are perfect examples of what happens in a democracy without the proper checks and balances. The elected these fellas named Mussolini and Hitler, and it caused all sorts of trouble.
It can be seen in present situation in Iraq.
That seems like a failure of the system if you ask me.
Naturally. You also spew out non sequiturs like "unjust war of aggression" and "illegal and unjust war" as if you either had turrets, or were talking about the invasion of Kuwait or Poland.
What about those checks and balances? Aren't they supposed to prevent one person from having too much power? The idea of having t
Better yet, instead of voting for the "one true and right way for all America", lets let people decide for themselves on most issues... on those few issues that absolutly require state intervention, lets keep the decision making as local as possible. Democracy wasn't supposed to be so much about collective mediocrity and the lowest common denominator, but more about ensuring self-determination. A more "direct-democracy" just means that America will elect Jack Bauer as president. The most direct form of democracy you can have is letting people make decisions for themselves.
Absolutely. If the Constitution was followed, and therefore things like welfare and social security could not exist at the federal level, things would be 1000x better. Socialists know that their programs would never succeed in that sort of situation, because every type of socialism ultimately requires some sort of wall to keep people from escaping, and we have no walls between the states.
Worse? How do you figure? They have exactly this in Europe, and I don't hear any Europeans complaining about it, saying they should move to the American-style two-party system. No, everything isn't rosy and wonderful in Europe, but politics definitely don't seem to be causing all the tensions there that they are here.
I think our system works a lot better than the parliamentary systems in Europe. For one thing, we've managed to retain significantly greater freedoms over the years than any European country, and less government intrusion. We have lower taxes than the vast majority of European countries. Our system provides a separation of powers that is not possible under any of the European parliamentary systems that I'm aware of, providing checks on the government that don't exist in Europe.
The larger point is what the founders said in the Federalist Papers: In a direct democracy there is no check on the tyranny of the majority. The purpose of having the people select representatives at fixed intervals is so that the people may govern themselves by their REASON rather than their PASSIONS. This part of it works exactly as it was supposed to. It can be seen in present situation in Iraq. There is no more reason left anywhere to be found on either side of that argument. But all questions of troop deployments fall SOLELY on one man, who is selected at an interval of every 4 years. So no matter how much people whoop and holler, or how much the other two branches of government say it's the wrong thing, they can't interfere; and the decision lies with the person the people selected (back when they were not all worked up about some particular issue) until the appointed time rolls around. This gives our system a certain predictability, stability, and sanity, that most parliamentary systems do not have.
"Wikipedia and YouTube are the most egalitarian media sources.... AND YOU HAVE A LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS."
1) Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a "media source". 2) What in hell is an "egalitarian media source" supposed to mean? 3) Wikipedia and YouTube necessarily have whatever biases that are possessed by their respective contributor populations. If the fact that the contributors comprise a larger group than, say the contributors to CNN or Fox News, in no way implies that the average bias expressed in them is less than the bias in expressed in CNN or Fox. On the contrary, there are very limited mechanisms on these "egalitarian sources" to filter out expressions of extreme bias.
Didn't the Democrats put 200,000 Japanese citizens in concentration camps during World War II? Run MK-ULTRA, and numerous CIA / FBI abuses during the Cold War? Allow J Edgar Hoover's FBI to amass data on US Citizens for almost 40 years? Run illegal wiretaps throughout every Presidency since Truman? The whole notion of Democrats having of moral superiority when it comes to civil rights has no historical basis in fact. Our best hope would have been to have conservatives acting like conservatives, gutting the government rather than expanding it.
You missed a few. The first Democrat, Andrew Jackson, pushed through the Indian Removal Act, invalidated the treaty with the Cherokees, and drove tens of thousands of them out of the U.S., killing thousands. (His nickname "the jackass" is the origin of the the Democratic mascot.) He also started the "spoils" system of removing officials in the Executive branch and replacing them with cronies, claiming it would reduce corruption.
Subsequently, the Democrats fought for decades to keep slavery legal. When their cause seemed the most tenuous, the Democratic Supreme Court declared that blacks weren't people under the Constitution, therefore laws restricting slavery were unconstitutional. After the slavery was finally outlawed by means of war, the Democrats spent many more decades trying to simulate as closely as possible the state of slavery for blacks with Jim Crow laws.
The Democrats are also the only political party in history to attack a human population with nuclear weapons, which it did twice.
Most recently, in Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Supreme Court repeated its former trick of declaring a class of people as "not people" under the Constitution, and mandating that they not be considered human by the states either.
That is a very narrow slice of the money landscape. It speaks nothing of soft money, which is where most of the money flows. Also, it should be kept in mind that we're talking about a social club. Democratic politicians give the impression of wanting to be accepted, loved and validated by Hollywood Elite. Why else would they do such things as inviting Leonardo DiCaprio to testify before Congress on global warming? It's not all about money.
Not quite. During most of the XX century, more often than not, Washington managed to strike a balance between business interests and the interests of society as a whole - think of the cries of corporate outrage when recordable cassettes and VCRs came out, how it supposedly signaled the end of the world as we now it, etc, and how Washington stood its' ground, deeming the technology legal for public consumption.
However, since the advent of the internet, something snapped. Panicking, ignorant fossils (democrats and republicans alike) who think in terms of dump trucks and series of tubes and don't even know how to bookmark a page in their browsers, have now allowed a few major corporate players to determine, one insidious step at a time, how the internet should work and what constitutes fair use and theft, in the exact opposite direction of what used to be the norm.
WTF are you saying? Congress hasn't changed the definition of fair use. They have (so far) not done anything significant to restrict the way in which the people of the world (some of whom have organized themselves into corporations, the bastards!) build and use the Internet. It's only the Democrats, like the yahoo in TFA, and those pushing the "net neutrality" propaganda, who want to start laying down the laws of the Internet, as if it belonged to them. But I don't think they have enough of a majority to cause any real harm.
What, voting for a third party is somehow going to help? They're just a different color of cat.
Obviously.
* Push for a new voting method. Approval voting, instant runoff, proportional representation... they're all better than what we have now. This is how you effect change in the long term, with an election structure that makes it easy for more than two parties to thrive.
None of those things are better. Moving closer to a more populist system or a direct-democracy will make things worse. To make things better, we should keep the voting method, but abolish political parties, so that no one can vote by party, i.e., by prepackaged ideological system. Rather the people must listen to the individual candidate to understand his beliefs, approach, intelligence, and competence. Instead of two-sided debates with congressmen trying to shoe-horn their beliefs into that of the party leadership, there would be hundred-sided debates, with the real issues being hashed out by the people who had been selected by the people to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
If the article is any true reflection, this was the worst-conducted study in the history of studies. ...or else they were just going after the low-hanging fruit for a press release, and not really concerned with science.
The only way that's absurd, is if you take it to be absurd that someone else has experienced something of consciousness that you have not yet experienced. The state of humanity's understanding of technological matters is straightforward to assess, because those on its leading edge publish what they know in journals and publicize it. That is not the case we the state of our understanding of consciousness. Science doesn't know how to study it, as it's not in the realm of science. There's no scientific evidence that it exists, except our subjective experience of it. If you're satisfied with the explanation of human behavior as the response to stimuli from electrochemical neural networks, then you have an explanation which has no need of a concept of consciousness. Material events caused by material events -- consciousness is superfluous to the theory.
Likewise, your idea of intelligence, as far as I can tell, is what you recognize in behaviors that is evocative of your subjective experience of that aspect of consciousness. If intelligence and consciousness only have meaning in relationship with our subjective experience, (as is argued to be the case with God) what place can it have in science, and on what basis, other than a faith-based basis that seeks to discount non-material origins of things -- can we assign it a material origin?
No, we religious types know that intelligence can be created. But we also know that intelligence is not material in nature, and therefore that it can't be built out of material substance. I don't think we coined the term though. The term was probably coined by graduate students researching with neural networks, who wanted it to sound to the girls like they were on the verge of building HAL 9000.
Not exactly a rigorous definition. It doesn't give any idea of what you think intelligence is. You say mice are intelligent and rocks are not. What about ants? Ant colonies? Plants? Fungi? Bacteria? Disorganized large assorted collections of organic molecules?
I don't disagree that it's presumptuous to call the present research being done AI, but that's the accepted terminology, so I think it just serves to confuse by saying "there is no AI at all as yet". Ever since they started applying the buzzword "science" instead of "natural philosophy" there's been a trend to treat it more and more like a religion, attributing to it powers beyond what it has, and abandoning the philosophical underpinnings which keep it legitimate rational, and consistent. We could sure use another Newton right about now.
And what kind of awareness does a Turing machine have? The attribution of awareness or consciousness to any sort of physical machine, Turing or otherwise, is a giant leap of superstition that atheists, or rather naturalists, are largely forced to make. But it makes for some ugly thinking. A few have opted for the alternative of denying the existence of consciousness, but that theory has the unfortunate side-effect of denying its own existence.
That's interesting. I wonder if WAAS could actually be degrading the GPS accuracy at high altitudes. After all, one of the major corrections it's performing is for atmospheric effects that you're experiencing less the higher you go. Geometrically, without WAAS, I would expect the altitude reading to get more accurate the higher you go, as more satellites become visible lower on the horizon, giving you signals with more variation along the height axis.
Or more technically still, you can calculate altitude with three satellites, but the calculation has two solutions -- one above the plane formed by the satellites and one below it. You're at the one below it.
Interesting. Although I think an earthly court could make a much more plausible jurisdictional claim over a dispute with Satan than with God. However, one could certainly sue the Pope, who officially claims to be the vicarious representative on earth of Christ, who is God.
Your argument has me 99% convinced that I should figure out how to make a homebrew genetic engineering setup so I can try putting fish genes in tomatoes. However, it doesn't address the fact that agriculture is just as "unnatural".
Yeah, and the automotive industry is not about transportation. It's about running over people who stand in front of your car. *rolls eyes*
Only if foods are being modified to produce new unknown compounds, which AFAIK is not the case. They are typically modified to produce well-known proteins, especially natural insecticides. Researchers are developing plant seeds that can save the lives of many communities in places that have become much less fertile since the end of the ice age, like much of Africa. Some of these researchers have also had their university labs firebombed by people spewing propaganda exactly like yours. Like The following:
Complete crap. GMOs are designed for research, to help the starving and the world at large, and for profit.
Hunger in Cuba and starvation in North Korea is a result of policy. Hunger and starvation in Africa is the result of the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia, which raised the Himalayas, which caused the monsoon cycle, which turned half of Africa into a desert, only relieved by the meltwater of the first couple thousand years after each ice age. Agriculture in most of Africa is a constant struggle against death. Where seeds have been allowed to be provided for disease-resistant yams, and other drought-resistant crops, it has literally made the difference between life and death.
Oooo...
*lightbulb lights up over head*
*does trademark search on "frankenfurter"*
The human phallus as much larger than is necessary for reproduction, so I don't think we're in any serious danger. I'd risk it for some tastier corn.
Seriously, though, GM products replace a single gene known intentionally. Cross-breeding, which has been done for millennia, introduces thousands of new and unknown genes from one species into another, in a combination that may have never been tried before. This takes place in one generation just as with GM food. The difference is that GM food is dealing with a known effect, and a vastly smaller effect, but an effect selected for its desirability.
You'd need more than luck, as man v. God disputes fall under God's jurisdiction.
Oh, I never expect to convince people of anything. It's always a pleasant surprise. However, I'd love to hear why the freedom to abuse drugs is more important than political freedom, the freedom to be equipped for revolution, and the freedom of self-government.
And free lollipops and peace on earth.
No it's not. Read any poll... more closely. The president has a higher approval rating than Congress. A minority support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.
No, I am not. We only have evidence for very recent extraterrestrial temperature changes, which happen to correlate to the insolation upswing that Earth is currently in, according to the ice core data, and other evidence. We also don't have "global" 1000-year temperature trend data for Earth. On that time scale we only have ice cores and tree rings. If you want to extrapolate a global trend from the 1000-year ice core data, then we're in the middle of a significant global cooling. There is tons of tree ring data, but if it's possible to turn that data into a reliable temperature trend, then the theoretical framework for doing so has yet to be invented. I would venture that it be would easier to figure out a way to shoot down a barrage of incoming ICBMs.
There is no scientific basis for most of the assumptions of CO2's supposed role in increasing the greenhouse effect. Venus retains the amount of heat it does because its atmosphere is 90 times more dense than ours, not because it is made out of CO2 rather than than O2 and N2. The ice core data argues strongly against historical CO2 fluctuations having any causal effect on temperature change. Furthermore, the "global warming" data does not show "global" warming, it shows significant warming in mountainous regions of Alaska, Western Canada, and Russia, and no trends elsewhere, consistent with small increases in insolation (which is further confirmed by warming on other planets). There are no localized warming trends around high CO2 sources. The tree-ring data is widely misused (such as is found in the "hockey stick" and other supposed warming graphs. For tree-ring data to reflect temperature, it has to first be corrected for CO2 increases. CO2 increases makes trees grow faster, because it feeds them CO2, not because it makes them warmer. Of the many tree-ring studies I've seen, I can only remember one that even attempted to correct for this. I've read all the significant peer-reviewed research on the subject. I've never found any study that has been able to demonstrate that CO2 actually increases the greenhouse effect. I've seen one study (well conducted, but not published in a peer-reviewed journal) that experimentally showed that it did not. Several years ago, I started with the assumption there was at least some legitimacy to the "global warming via CO2" theory, but there is NONE.
That is a left-wing fantasy. There is no instance of that. And no, on order that political appointees have the final say over federal regulations, is not an instance of it. Objectivity on climate change is not an instance of it.
Sure. The "scientific consensus" is that SDI is unworkable. We send a person to walk around on the moon, but it's impossible to shoot down a missile? Tell me another one. That and Doom-Through-Impending-CO2-Poisoning are examples of people, whether politicians or scientists, trying to gain political advantage through bastardized science.
In what parallel universe is it appropriate for anyone other than elected officials or political appointees to have "final say regarding federal agency regulations???" Anything else would fail to qualify as a democracy. Who the heck is this Union of Concerned Scientists? They don't happened to be named Dr. LeRoga, Dr. Gorael, Dr. Reagol, do they?
Try buying a handgun, in Amsterdam vs the US, or for that matter an assault rifle, and see what your punishment is. The right to bear arms is one of the primary fundamental rights of a free people. The right to smoke pot is an arbitrary and meaningless one, IMO.
There is no argument of "getting a lot for your money" that can justify being essentially forced at gunpoint to buy the thing in the first place. Besides, I have never seen in my life an instance of goods or services bought through the go vernment being more cost effective than goods or services bought directly from the private sector... unless of course the transaction is being subsidized by some other poor sap who is paying part of your cost (at gunpoint).
The cost of medical services in the U.S. has nothing to do with our form of government or tax rates, but is the result of a number of things revolving around insurance, Medicare, and legal liability. If we simply started buying the same services through the government, our costs would skyrocket even more.
The military is a fair chunk of what our taxes pay for. It's nearly the only LEGITIMATE thing our taxes pay for.
The U.S. is the world's oldest continuous constitutional democracy -- one continuous government since the revolution. Do you know how many governments France has had in that time period, or since its revolution? Or Italy? Or Germany? Italy and Germany are perfect examples of what happens in a democracy without the proper checks and balances. The elected these fellas named Mussolini and Hitler, and it caused all sorts of trouble.
Naturally. You also spew out non sequiturs like "unjust war of aggression" and "illegal and unjust war" as if you either had turrets, or were talking about the invasion of Kuwait or Poland.
Absolutely. If the Constitution was followed, and therefore things like welfare and social security could not exist at the federal level, things would be 1000x better. Socialists know that their programs would never succeed in that sort of situation, because every type of socialism ultimately requires some sort of wall to keep people from escaping, and we have no walls between the states.
I think our system works a lot better than the parliamentary systems in Europe. For one thing, we've managed to retain significantly greater freedoms over the years than any European country, and less government intrusion. We have lower taxes than the vast majority of European countries. Our system provides a separation of powers that is not possible under any of the European parliamentary systems that I'm aware of, providing checks on the government that don't exist in Europe.
The larger point is what the founders said in the Federalist Papers: In a direct democracy there is no check on the tyranny of the majority. The purpose of having the people select representatives at fixed intervals is so that the people may govern themselves by their REASON rather than their PASSIONS. This part of it works exactly as it was supposed to. It can be seen in present situation in Iraq. There is no more reason left anywhere to be found on either side of that argument. But all questions of troop deployments fall SOLELY on one man, who is selected at an interval of every 4 years. So no matter how much people whoop and holler, or how much the other two branches of government say it's the wrong thing, they can't interfere; and the decision lies with the person the people selected (back when they were not all worked up about some particular issue) until the appointed time rolls around. This gives our system a certain predictability, stability, and sanity, that most parliamentary systems do not have.
1) Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a "media source". 2) What in hell is an "egalitarian media source" supposed to mean? 3) Wikipedia and YouTube necessarily have whatever biases that are possessed by their respective contributor populations. If the fact that the contributors comprise a larger group than, say the contributors to CNN or Fox News, in no way implies that the average bias expressed in them is less than the bias in expressed in CNN or Fox. On the contrary, there are very limited mechanisms on these "egalitarian sources" to filter out expressions of extreme bias.
You missed a few. The first Democrat, Andrew Jackson, pushed through the Indian Removal Act, invalidated the treaty with the Cherokees, and drove tens of thousands of them out of the U.S., killing thousands. (His nickname "the jackass" is the origin of the the Democratic mascot.) He also started the "spoils" system of removing officials in the Executive branch and replacing them with cronies, claiming it would reduce corruption.
Subsequently, the Democrats fought for decades to keep slavery legal. When their cause seemed the most tenuous, the Democratic Supreme Court declared that blacks weren't people under the Constitution, therefore laws restricting slavery were unconstitutional. After the slavery was finally outlawed by means of war, the Democrats spent many more decades trying to simulate as closely as possible the state of slavery for blacks with Jim Crow laws.
The Democrats are also the only political party in history to attack a human population with nuclear weapons, which it did twice.
Most recently, in Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Supreme Court repeated its former trick of declaring a class of people as "not people" under the Constitution, and mandating that they not be considered human by the states either.
That is a very narrow slice of the money landscape. It speaks nothing of soft money, which is where most of the money flows. Also, it should be kept in mind that we're talking about a social club. Democratic politicians give the impression of wanting to be accepted, loved and validated by Hollywood Elite. Why else would they do such things as inviting Leonardo DiCaprio to testify before Congress on global warming? It's not all about money.
WTF are you saying? Congress hasn't changed the definition of fair use. They have (so far) not done anything significant to restrict the way in which the people of the world (some of whom have organized themselves into corporations, the bastards!) build and use the Internet. It's only the Democrats, like the yahoo in TFA, and those pushing the "net neutrality" propaganda, who want to start laying down the laws of the Internet, as if it belonged to them. But I don't think they have enough of a majority to cause any real harm.
Obviously.
None of those things are better. Moving closer to a more populist system or a direct-democracy will make things worse. To make things better, we should keep the voting method, but abolish political parties, so that no one can vote by party, i.e., by prepackaged ideological system. Rather the people must listen to the individual candidate to understand his beliefs, approach, intelligence, and competence. Instead of two-sided debates with congressmen trying to shoe-horn their beliefs into that of the party leadership, there would be hundred-sided debates, with the real issues being hashed out by the people who had been selected by the people to do so.