Scientific understanding can certainly be used to further moral beliefs that a person got from Religion. Science cannot ever give us morals (ought from is fallacy) till we bring some values from some other discipline to science.
There are groups that claim to worship Lucifer. Do some research on certain strains of Gardenarian Wicca, the masonic "Order of the Golden Dawn," Aliester Crowley, etc.
People from these groups may talk with reference about Lucifer. Not 'Satanism' explicitly since Satan and Lucifer were conflated by the early church, but the same notion.
These groups are often gnostic or occult in nature.
There are also some Hatian religions who worship Satan out of spite because of what Christian invaders did to their people. The folks figured "if this people's God has an adversary, we're for him."
While I'm not a big fan of Bush (and while I think this thread is going woefully off topic) why isn't it possible to detect the lowest performing teachers and try to correct the problems that they're having. Detecting high performing teachers may be difficult, but the low performers will have detectable defecits.
Similarly, a person can be 'pro life' without believing that life begins at conception. If a person wants to advocate the belief that life begins at conception they should at least be straightforward in saying that that's what they believe in.
These are just rhetorical tricks designed to misrepresent the issues at hand.
I often wonder if promiscuity is shunned in almost all of oldest civilizations because it comes from an implicit form of survival.
I'm not sure how you're employing the term 'evolution' here.
I think strong cultures tend to dominate weak ones.
But perhaps this issue has as much to do with the creation of families as with STDs. Nations with strong families invest in their children, build technology, and dominate other cultures. There's a long history of Roman heads of household "exposing" (abandoning\killing) kids they thought weren't theirs. And that was their right under the law. Historically, wealthier men have had several women because they could afford to take care of them. This could be both about protecting against STDs and about enforcing paternity. And this was at least tolerated, except by the poorer folk, who lost out because of it.
But consider the second half of that; jealousy may be a factor in cultural attitides as much as anything else.
In another way of looking at it; The notion of 'one man and one woman for this lifetime' is a form of Christian socialism (or alternately a form of jealousy.) No one rich guy gets to hog all the women. The portions of Christianity advocating communalism have been mostly thrown out in modern American culture.
Also consider that the preistesses of some earlier religions were effectively prostitutes. The hindi expression "children of God" does not nessicarily have the same pure connotations that it does to the JudeoChristian world.
While there are ancient descriptions of STDs, they only started being massively lethal with the rise of cities. Syphilus, for instance, was just a minor skin infection till the rise of French cities. Gonnorhea, herpes and similar infections have a long history. It's truly said that 'the sins of the father are passed on to the son to the third generation.' Very often that was true with STDs before antibiotics and possibly with some viral diseases since then (although the body does seem to work hard at breaking the transmission from parent to child.) But the majority of STDs were not more lethal than the other types of bacterial or viral infections a person could get in day to day life.
I think cultures that don't build strong families tend to die out. Disease may be a part of weakening the culture, but there just weren't so many lethal STDs in the ancient world, and non sexually transmitted diseases were more lethal. While antibiotics have played their part in allowing promiscuity, I think it was the development of a birth control pill that really changed our culture and the epidemiological landscape since it separated sex from pregnancy, but not from disease transmission.
I'm surprised that, considering how fast HIV mutates, we don't have more strains capable of slipping into the blood supply. Perhpas this is because just the coat is part of the hypervariable region, and the rest of the virus' genome is more stable. But even so, everyone's being fed the line that the blood supply is clean. I'm skeptical.
Well, until HIV becomes an airborne virus, not catching it in the first place is a pretty good way for 99% of the population to survive the epidemic...
And then try not catching the antibiotic-resistant tuburculosis that's been created by giving antibiotics to people with AIDS, which noone mentions because we don't want people with HIV to be even more ostracized.
Interesting. I don't drink much caffeine, sugar or pop. But then, I can't gain fat if I wanted to (unless I drink alcohol or somthing like that, but I'm sure that will change with age.)
So an alkaline diet tends to help people who have more insulin and perhaps less androgens. It speeds up metabolism?
Ignoring breeder reactors for a moment, nuclear waste is a resource. Currently our supply of helium comes from oil wells (trapped alpha particles from decayed radioactive materials.)
If oil runs out, helium will too. It's non-reactive and so light that our planet's atmosphere can't hold it.
One alternative to this is to get the helium from decaying nuclear waste. I have no clue why people aren't doing this. Are they?
This depends on the cause of arthritis. High vitamin C can be helpful as well, though that raises acidity. If the arthritis is caused by Gout, cherry juice helps if autoimmune problems haven't settled in too much yet.
I've heard a lot of people talking up alkaline diets. I'm curious what the logic behind this is (I'm not disagreeing. I'd guess it has somthing to do on body chemistry.)
For example, it's well known that Amish, Ashkenazi Jews, and other groups suffer from certain genetic maladies far above the average.
Yes, but it's important to note that they don't suffer from more genetic difficulties than other populations. You won't cut your health care costs by excluding the Mennonite bretheren (i.e. Amish.)These populations are homogenous, not defective. Since intensive study always turns up particular defects, there has been some concern about the political consequences of studying a particular population.
Jewish individuals are in a unique position to assist scientists in the understanding of genetic disorders. Due to a long history of marriage within the faith, which extends back thousands of years, the Jewish community has emerged from a limited number of ancestors and has a similar genetic makeup. This allows researchers to more easily perform genetic studies and locate disease-causing genes.
Theoretically, they could get it from nuclear power or from wind power, which is beginning to mature. A machine that runs on gas can only run on gas. A machine that runs on electricity can effectively run on coal, wind, nuclear, or any number of sources produced in a central location and sold across the grid in a market based fashion that helps keep the cost down.
So anything that helps products run on electricity more effectively is a good thing. Of course, Canon's stuff wasn't running on gasoline to begin with
I should include the caveat that my parent comment refers to public schools. I believe this was a private school.
Hence, while a public school might have to prove that its violations are for a higher purpose or stem from its in loco parentis responsibilities, a private school may set limits arbitrarily.
There is no school 'right to suspend students for whatever you like' either.
Loco Parentis applies to what a student does while they are in school, not outside of it.
A school is not a shopping mall, since a school receives regular public funding. If they suspend you, you can appeal to the government. If you disagree with the suspension, you still have a right to a public education elsewhere.
If they were growing their own drugs you would sort of have a point. But their meth/crack/weed money goes to some fairly nasty people (encouragement and power to them), who don't do drug stuff exclusively.
In other words, we have to make pot illegal because if you use pot you give your money to nasty people who would barely be in business if they weren't selling pot.
And we also have to control people's free time, because if we didn't then they wouldn't be doing what we wanted.
Interesting logic.
The only worthwhile justifications that I can find against drugs is that they might physically hurt those other than the user (i.e. fetal alchohol syndrome and second hand smoke in public places), that they diminish a person's judgement to the point where they can't tell right from wrong or control their own actions (loss of touch with reality or overwhelming addiction), or that they make a person incapable of functioning in a democracy (since we fund schools and justify limited socialism in order to make people capable of being proper citizens.)
China's medical industry is notoriously unprofessional. When I went there, people were being proscribed antibiotics for viruses. They were being proscribed antibiotics in doses so small that they would only encourage resistance which is rampant. They were being proscribed massages for viral illnesses. I'm not kidding. China is doing some work with bacteriophage which should be very very promising. It's a pity we're not researching the use of phage for our topical antibiotic purposes. But it would be hard to patent phage since most are naturally occuring.
The thing with China, since it dosen't have IP laws if they did discover somthing they'd have to keep it hush hush or it would be stolen in a heartbeat. literally. Workers, ideas, everything.
It was hard to talk to researchers in China since anyone working on anything
Startup biotech and pharmaceutical companies are notoriously risky investments.
Think of it this way, I can go to a casino and pick out the 20 big winners for the day. Looking only at them, it seems like gambling is a very high-return investment. The truth is, it's not.
The issue is not whether 'big Pharma' is profitable so much as 'the cost of entry to the pharmaceutical biz is so high that it makes for a significant barrier.'
Capitalism works very wel when there is intense competition. Without competition to keep them in line, companies tend to be less efficient and polite than the government. After all, the gov still has to answer to the voters, but a company without competition has to answer to noone at all.
I think more than anything what we need is user feedback on the medical system. People need to discuss their treatments in forums. They need to publicly rate and track particular doctors.
I'd like to see caps on malpractice claims... but only if the doctor compensates their patient immediately after they become aware of the problem. If they delay or try to avoid paying when they know that there's a problem or should reasonably know, they lose the protection. That way doctors would be encouraged to address every medical malpractice issues rather than waiting for inefficient lawsuits to resolve the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Never will He break a law of the universe
What about all them miracles folks talk about?
Science and religion have different epistimologies, different ways of knowing. Religion relies on revelation. Science relies on experiment.
Religion emphasizes faith. Science emphasizes predictive value.
Scientific understanding can certainly be used to further moral beliefs that a person got from Religion. Science cannot ever give us morals (ought from is fallacy) till we bring some values from some other discipline to science.
There are groups that claim to worship Lucifer. Do some research on certain strains of Gardenarian Wicca, the masonic "Order of the Golden Dawn," Aliester Crowley, etc.
People from these groups may talk with reference about Lucifer. Not 'Satanism' explicitly since Satan and Lucifer were conflated by the early church, but the same notion.
These groups are often gnostic or occult in nature.
There are also some Hatian religions who worship Satan out of spite because of what Christian invaders did to their people. The folks figured "if this people's God has an adversary, we're for him."
While I'm not a big fan of Bush (and while I think this thread is going woefully off topic)
why isn't it possible to detect the lowest performing teachers and try to correct the problems that they're having. Detecting high performing teachers may be difficult, but the low performers will have detectable defecits.
"pro abortion" =! equal "pro choice"
Similarly, a person can be 'pro life' without believing that life begins at conception.
If a person wants to advocate the belief that life begins at conception they should at least be straightforward in saying that that's what they believe in.
These are just rhetorical tricks designed to misrepresent the issues at hand.
Pronography and prayer don't go together, they're opposites.
The freedom to view pornography and the freedom to pray are not opposites. They are both types of freedom.
Failure to make a thing illegal does not automatically imply support for the action.
Bollywood has discovered a very effective method of preventing illegal copying of their films.
They make mostly Hindi musicals.
Hollywood bookkeeping is insane. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of films didn't make a profit... on paper.
I often wonder if promiscuity is shunned in almost all of oldest civilizations because it comes from an implicit form of survival.
I'm not sure how you're employing the term 'evolution' here.
I think strong cultures tend to dominate weak ones.
But perhaps this issue has as much to do with the creation of families as with STDs. Nations with strong families invest in their children, build technology, and dominate other cultures. There's a long history of Roman heads of household "exposing" (abandoning\killing) kids they thought weren't theirs. And that was their right under the law. Historically, wealthier men have had several women because they could afford to take care of them. This could be both about protecting against STDs and about enforcing paternity. And this was at least tolerated, except by the poorer folk, who lost out because of it.
But consider the second half of that; jealousy may be a factor in cultural attitides as much as anything else.
In another way of looking at it; The notion of 'one man and one woman for this lifetime' is a form of Christian socialism (or alternately a form of jealousy.) No one rich guy gets to hog all the women. The portions of Christianity advocating communalism have been mostly thrown out in modern American culture.
Also consider that the preistesses of some earlier religions were effectively prostitutes. The hindi expression "children of God" does not nessicarily have the same pure connotations that it does to the JudeoChristian world.
While there are ancient descriptions of STDs, they only started being massively lethal with the rise of cities. Syphilus, for instance, was just a minor skin infection till the rise of French cities. Gonnorhea, herpes and similar infections have a long history. It's truly said that 'the sins of the father are passed on to the son to the third generation.' Very often that was true with STDs before antibiotics and possibly with some viral diseases since then (although the body does seem to work hard at breaking the transmission from parent to child.) But the majority of STDs were not more lethal than the other types of bacterial or viral infections a person could get in day to day life.
I think cultures that don't build strong families tend to die out. Disease may be a part of weakening the culture, but there just weren't so many lethal STDs in the ancient world, and non sexually transmitted diseases were more lethal. While antibiotics have played their part in allowing promiscuity, I think it was the development of a birth control pill that really changed our culture and the epidemiological landscape since it separated sex from pregnancy, but not from disease transmission.
I'm surprised that, considering how fast HIV mutates, we don't have more strains capable of slipping into the blood supply. Perhpas this is because just the coat is part of the hypervariable region, and the rest of the virus' genome is more stable. But even so, everyone's being fed the line that the blood supply is clean. I'm skeptical.
Well, until HIV becomes an airborne virus, not catching it in the first place is a pretty good way for 99% of the population to survive the epidemic...
And then try not catching the antibiotic-resistant tuburculosis that's been created by giving antibiotics to people with AIDS, which noone mentions because we don't want people with HIV to be even more ostracized.
Interesting. I don't drink much caffeine, sugar or pop. But then, I can't gain fat if I wanted to (unless I drink alcohol or somthing like that, but I'm sure that will change with age.)
So an alkaline diet tends to help people who have more insulin and perhaps less androgens. It speeds up metabolism?
Ignoring breeder reactors for a moment, nuclear waste is a resource. Currently our supply of helium comes from oil wells (trapped alpha particles from decayed radioactive materials.)
If oil runs out, helium will too. It's non-reactive and so light that our planet's atmosphere can't hold it.
One alternative to this is to get the helium from decaying nuclear waste. I have no clue why people aren't doing this. Are they?
They've just bought 1000 chairs, and Steve Balmer has been lifting weights! Watch out Eric Schmidt!
This depends on the cause of arthritis. High vitamin C can be helpful as well, though that raises acidity. If the arthritis is caused by Gout, cherry juice helps if autoimmune problems haven't settled in too much yet.
I've heard a lot of people talking up alkaline diets. I'm curious what the logic behind this is (I'm not disagreeing. I'd guess it has somthing to do on body chemistry.)
For example, it's well known that Amish, Ashkenazi Jews, and other groups suffer from certain genetic maladies far above the average.
h tm
Yes, but it's important to note that they don't suffer from more genetic difficulties than other populations. You won't cut your health care costs by excluding the Mennonite bretheren (i.e. Amish.)These populations are homogenous, not defective. Since intensive study always turns up particular defects, there has been some concern about the political consequences of studying a particular population.
Jewish individuals are in a unique position to assist scientists in the understanding of genetic disorders. Due to a long history of marriage within the faith, which extends back thousands of years, the Jewish community has emerged from a limited number of ancestors and has a similar genetic makeup. This allows researchers to more easily perform genetic studies and locate disease-causing genes.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/epigen/ashkenazim.
Theoretically, they could get it from nuclear power or from wind power, which is beginning to mature. A machine that runs on gas can only run on gas. A machine that runs on electricity can effectively run on coal, wind, nuclear, or any number of sources produced in a central location and sold across the grid in a market based fashion that helps keep the cost down.
So anything that helps products run on electricity more effectively is a good thing. Of course, Canon's stuff wasn't running on gasoline to begin with
I haven't been able to access TFA though.
I should include the caveat that my parent comment refers to public schools. I believe this was a private school.
Hence, while a public school might have to prove that its violations are for a higher purpose or stem from its in loco parentis responsibilities, a private school may set limits arbitrarily.
http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_stud.html
There is no school 'right to suspend students for whatever you like' either.
Loco Parentis applies to what a student does while they are in school, not outside of it.
A school is not a shopping mall, since a school receives regular public funding. If they suspend you, you can appeal to the government. If you disagree with the suspension, you still have a right to a public education elsewhere.
The communists who introduced these drugs into the United States knew that. Hence why they exist in our society today.
You mean these communists?
Deterrance only works when people respect the rule of law.
I'd amend this to say 'deterrance only works when the vast majority of people respect others rights or the legitamacy of the system.'
I don't refrain from killing people because it's 'against the law.' I don't do it because it's immoral.
Deterrance can be effective in picking up the stragglers, the one in 500 people who writes bad checks, etc.
Deterrance is much more difficult when used against loose organizations of determined people, though, as opposed to individuals acting on their own.
If they were growing their own drugs you would sort of have a point. But their meth/crack/weed money goes to some fairly nasty people (encouragement and power to them), who don't do drug stuff exclusively.
In other words, we have to make pot illegal because if you use pot you give your money to nasty people who would barely be in business if they weren't selling pot.
And we also have to control people's free time, because if we didn't then they wouldn't be doing what we wanted.
Interesting logic.
The only worthwhile justifications that I can find against drugs is that they might physically hurt those other than the user (i.e. fetal alchohol syndrome and second hand smoke in public places), that they diminish a person's judgement to the point where they can't tell right from wrong or control their own actions (loss of touch with reality or overwhelming addiction), or that they make a person incapable of functioning in a democracy (since we fund schools and justify limited socialism in order to make people capable of being proper citizens.)
This is what I love about Slashdot. You can always find a language geek when you need one.
China's medical industry is notoriously unprofessional. When I went there, people were being proscribed antibiotics for viruses. They were being proscribed antibiotics in doses so small that they would only encourage resistance which is rampant. They were being proscribed massages for viral illnesses. I'm not kidding. China is doing some work with bacteriophage which should be very very promising. It's a pity we're not researching the use of phage for our topical antibiotic purposes. But it would be hard to patent phage since most are naturally occuring.
The thing with China, since it dosen't have IP laws if they did discover somthing they'd have to keep it hush hush or it would be stolen in a heartbeat. literally. Workers, ideas, everything.
It was hard to talk to researchers in China since anyone working on anything
Startup biotech and pharmaceutical companies are notoriously risky investments.
Think of it this way, I can go to a casino and pick out the 20 big winners for the day. Looking only at them, it seems like gambling is a very high-return investment. The truth is, it's not.
The issue is not whether 'big Pharma' is profitable so much as 'the cost of entry to the pharmaceutical biz is so high that it makes for a significant barrier.'
Capitalism works very wel when there is intense competition. Without competition to keep them in line, companies tend to be less efficient and polite than the government. After all, the gov still has to answer to the voters, but a company without competition has to answer to noone at all.
I think more than anything what we need is user feedback on the medical system. People need to discuss their treatments in forums. They need to publicly rate and track particular doctors.
I'd like to see caps on malpractice claims... but only if the doctor compensates their patient immediately after they become aware of the problem. If they delay or try to avoid paying when they know that there's a problem or should reasonably know, they lose the protection. That way doctors would be encouraged to address every medical malpractice issues rather than waiting for inefficient lawsuits to resolve the problem.
Because all cells are children, whether they behave like people or not.