You're comparing the technological pullback of a centuries-long autocratic dynasty with the short-lived executive (8 years) of the United States. There is a significant difference between the two that might go unnoticed in your commentary. First, there is a thriving market economy that seems now to be the primary pusher of technology in the United States. Because the government withdraws funding does not mean our entire society is suddenly unable to progress. I will admit the government does give a large injection of funds, but that's only because it has a large amount of our income withdrawn by taxes. You see, people in the United States have a lot more control over the economy than they did in Imperial China.
I've been to China. Any notion that the Chinese Government controls all those people is strictly illusory. As soon as the government's eye is not on them, they go on and do whatever it is they need to. And especially during the period in question, there was almost no real contact between the people who ruled from the Forbidden City, and the people who were ruled over. When you contrast that to Bush's stage-managed presidency wherein he has rarely if ever come into contact with someone who was not a carefully screened supporter or piece of harmless hugmeat, the parallels become unpleasant. Furthermore, the kinds of advances that used to take decades now happen in weeks. We are already being left behind by other nations. I've also been to South Korea. Their adoption of technology and modern lifestyle has happened at a seriously breakneck pace. I talked to people who were younger than me (and I'm merely a GenX-er) who had grown up in thatched-roof houses. They now have something like 90% of the country wired for broadband.
The Bush Admin's open hostility to science is no secret. This isn't an isolated incident; it's part of a total trend of deliberately ignoring information which is inconvenient. And to suggest that we could possibly petition this Congress to do something about it is absurd.
Finally, we are reading an article that is obviously skewed in the direction of an environmentalist PAC. Perhaps we should hear both sides of the story---or is the witch hunt too far underway to surrender to reason?
As I've noted already in this thread, we've been getting our news for the last several years from networks who think that fake JonBenet Killer news stories are worth our 24-hour-a-day attention. And if this news story is somehow not factually true I'm sure evidence to that effect will surface, but in the meantime we don't need to balance our news consumption with fiction.
I was here when Carter was president. I don't remember feeling like the government was actively trying to destroy everything that made the country worth living in during that period.
This is getting really old, too. This marks about the sixth time I've seen someone trying to compare Bush's presidency to Carter's. There is NO comparison. Carter was a nauseatingly honest individual who was elected largely in response to the nauseatingly dishonest Nixon administration. He entered the political game playing it straight at a time when the opposition was patently playing it crooked, and inherited (as another poster has mentioned) a terrible situation at a terrible time. What he didn't do was leave a huge mess for future generations to clean up -- most of the situations of Carter's presidency that people didn't like were strictly temporary.
On the other hand, Bush has destroyed a huge budget surplus and left trillions in debt to my kids. His deliberate neglect has more or less wiped one whole American city right off the map. He has ruined America's standing as the leader of the free world with his farrago of lies on Iraq, and he has opened a gaping crack in the Middle East which seems destined to consume innocent lives for decades to come. He has fundamentally damaged the conscience of the nation by actively condoning torture, and actively assaulting our cherished civil liberties -- the one aspect of America that truly makes us American. He has starved the middle class and pushed millions into poverty with his patently worker-unfriendly policies (better known as his "Ownership Society" initiative). He has contributed to the further decline of public education, ensuring that millions can't compete in a modern job market, through his unfunded No Child Left Behind. He has bitterly divided America with his lies and hateful, cynical rhetoric. He has flaunted his authority recklessly and led with all the gravitas of a 21-year old fraternity prankster. In a simple character evaluation of Jimmy Carter versus George W. Bush, there is no question who I'd rather have in charge.
Whose real news report would you like? After their 24x7 extravaganza of the fake JonBenet Killer story, every major media outlet in the country is suspect.
Fundamentalism destroys religion. A reply to your post notes that the children of most fundies think their parents are insane.
The other thing they're doing is setting themselves up for failure. By raising such wild expectations about various fictitious end-times crises and "rewards" for faith, they are either going to go all the way into it and become suicide cults or reach a point of implosion where the failure of the outrageous promises of the leaders will drive people off wholesale.
I think this has been happening in a sort of ebb and flow in religious communities for centuries of human history, which is why we have so many different crazy-ass religions. What is interesting now is that we have a proven and viable secular culture with real and tangible answers to the kind of questions religions presume to answer, and when the current crop of fundy nutbags goes pop, instead of dispersing to other equally zany cults, many of the people abandoned by those meaningless beliefs will find themselves in a world where religion is not necessary and not required. And I think that in many ways we are finally looking at the true end of organized religion as a social force.
Recently while on a trip to Asia, I had the opportunity to visit two countries that demonstrate some fairly wild extremes of religious belief -- China, where the people are so superstitious that even the one-party government is afraid to tear down buildings because of feng shui, and South Korea, where my tour guide informed me that over 50% of the population was atheist. China is a developing country coming out of a very long period of cultural isolation. Korea was jerked out of their isolation by world events 60 or so years ago and has matured as an industrial, democratic society. I think one of the main things conspiring to keep fundamentalism alive in the U.S. has been our isolation, and it is finally and firmly ending, which is why nutbags like George "Macaca" Allen are in the middle of freaking out about immigrants and foreigners.
Which clearly indicates you believe that U.S. Citizens are pushed against their will to work as much as they do, because the CEOs and other corporate bigwigs want to increase the amount in their already overfull pockets. Then you say...
"But please, don't insinuate that just because you're a driven workaholic with nothing better to do that the rest of us would 'prefer' that lifestyle."...which clearly indicates that you are of the opinion that if someone makes a statement about how Americans prefer 2 weeks they must be workaholics.
I'm not sure why you think you've scored a zinger on me. To qualify: I am a US citizen. I have worked in my job for 11 years and have 21 days paid time off. And I fucking like it very much. So much that one of the main reasons that I stay at this job is that I don't want to go back to 2 weeks paid time off, which is what most corporations offer for new employees. You stated that Americans "prefer" a two week vacation. That is the statement of someone who values work above quality of life, and I said so. Somehow you're imagining that you've pointed out a contradiction in my argument by contrasting my position against yours.
It's a well-known phenomenon that when musicians (or anyone, for that matter) get so rich that they don't need anything, all of the reasons they made their music in the first place tend to evaporate and they churn out self-referential imitations of their former works of genius. Very few artists manage to survive their own wild success for very long. Those who do are often marketing-operated drones (see Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones) or simply disappointing and schmaltzy. One of the reasons the Beatles are still immortal, in my opinion, is that they had a short career and quit while they were ahead. They were on the verge of turning into a parody of themselves (and some think they actually did) but they pulled out of it with an amazing final album and got out while the getting was good.
Re:Americans traveling to other countries.
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E-Passport In the Works
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Americans can arrange their vacation vs. work time quite easily. As a nation, though, our cultural habits come down to preferring about 2 weeks per year.
"Prefer?" I prefer quite a bit more time off. I would imagine most people do. The problem is, U.S. corporate behavior is geared toward maximizing profits at the expense of the employees and an imaginary work ethic that drives people into the ground and causes them to change jobs on an average of every two or three years and careers on an average of every 10 or 15 years. You ask, stupidly, who pays for Europeans' 6 weeks holiday -- obviously as a cultural norm the employer shells it out. It's a quality of life issue.
But please, don't insinuate that just because you're a driven workaholic with nothing better to do that the rest of us would 'prefer' that lifestyle. I think, given 6 weeks of guilt-free holiday, most Americans would take it gladly.
His bumbling incompetence contributed to the creation of the first militant Islamic theocracy (Iran)
Obviously he failed as an educator as well. If you had even spent 20 seconds learning anything about Iranian history, you would have discovered that the roots of Iran's issues lie a little further in the past. Try here. Iran had an elected democratic form of government before we decided it wasn't doing what we wanted it to with our oil. Ahem, I meant their oil. Considering that 99.99999999999999999999% of the reason we had an economic crisis in the 1970's stemmed from our overreliance on cheap, imported oil, dumping those long-festering issues on Carter's head have to count as the most disingenious crap I've ever heard.
Doubly so, considering the lengths to which Carter went in his effort to extricate us from a purely idiotic situation where we were funding maniacs who wanted to kill us by buying the oil they made. Oddly enough, the fact that our nation remains in that idiotic situation can be dumped squarely on conservative heads, as those same people have openly conspired to keep us chuffing away at oil like there's no tomorrow, intentionally lowering efficiency and deriding conservation efforts as (as best I can understand it), "wimpy."
At any rate, the damage Bush is doing to our country right now makes anything Carter might have fictionally wrought pale in comparison. Carter took over from six years of bumbling Nixonitude (and it was in Nixon's term that the energy crisis really got its start, remember!) capped off with a completely whorish two or so years of Ford stumbling over furniture. Anyone would have a hell of a time cleaning up after that idiot crew.
Bush, on the other hand, took the fruits of the greatest economic expansion of the last 50 years and squirreled it away on pure self-aggrandizement. Eight trillion dollars in debt, bogus war on phony enemy, no end in sight, a complete wreck of our national credibility . . . you name it, the Feckless Fratboy-In-Chief has done it, and screwed it up but good.
Not very well read, are you? That's OK. People who are understand exactly what the parent poster is saying. If you somehow missed the most important political novel of the 20th century I'm sure you'll have time to pick it up before it's banned.
The issue is not how to protect society from those hell-bent on destroying it. Though through the sheer incompetence of our government "terrorists" have managed one very spectacular success, I find it necessary to repeatedly point out that as a whole society is at approximately the same risk of being "destroyed" by lightning strikes as terrorism, and far more at risk of being destroyed by rather less exciting threats such as flu, weather, and automobile accidents.
So calm down already. You don't need to balance your civil rights against your life, because the risk that you take just walking out the door every day has been grossly exaggerated by hyperventilating, bed-wetting Panic Puppies. Sure, a terrorist might "get you" someday. But he's about 100 places down in line behind several major diseases, automobile accidents, and ordinary everday street crime. Quit giving these people (the terrorists, I mean) power by letting them instill fear in you. They aren't worth it.
The only music executive I've ever met ran a ten-person indie label. For this, he paid himself the princely sum of $25K per year. When people started "discovering" his bands' music on the original Napster and sales dropped, he had to lay off his friends. And with thousands of indie labels out there, my guess is that most "music executives" are a lot more like him than the image you've portrayed to help make people feel okay about pirating music
Oddly, I was unaware that the plural of "anecdote" was "data."
The overwhelming opinion here is that #1, home taping is not killing music (and never did, stretching back into the mists of time), and #2, most artists who are popular enough to get pirated are therefore popular enough to be making money. You state the above as if it's cut-and-dried that Napster (and somehow by association, home taping/cd copying) destroyed your alleged friend's music business, but the fact is we have no idea how he ran his business and could have tanked for any one of a dozen reasons that had nothing to do with free downloads (or, by association home taping/cd copying).
What's really funny is how some people expect their business model to automatically work regardless of the actual functioning of the market.
My co. started getting [company that shall not be named] license agreements in what appear to be lots of 6. Each lot comes in a box 14"x10"x6", give or take (I don't have one in front of me, so I'm guessing). Each box contains three smaller 13-1/2"x9-1/2"x2" boxes, and each of those boxes contains an envelope. Upon ripping the envelope open one finds a sheaf of paper about ten pages thick, and there are exactly two licenses inside all that packaging.
We started getting these boxes last spring, and they show no signs of letting up. We still haven't determined (because the company that shall not be named is in such disarray that we can't find anyone who knows what the hell's going on) whether we're getting the upgrade of approximately 1,500 licenses we ordered, or a refresh of all 12,000 licenses that we own. Either way, it's a fucking lot of boxes, or a motherfucking lot of boxes. Our Administrative Assistants love it when a pallet of these things show up. They open all that packaging up and stuff the paper inside a single box.
All of this data, of course, could have been printed on a single piece of paper.
VM is fine for logical software testing, but if you want a VM machine to perform you are SOL. You are interposing a layer of software emulation between the software and the hardware, and no matter how good it gets it's still an emulator. Also, as far as total cost of ownership you are again SOL. I've been told the actual cost of a Server VMware instance, once software licensing and drive space and everything else are all factored in is as much or more than a real server -- and that's in the server space, where unit costs are in the multi thousands of dollars. In the desktop area, where actual hardware costs are in the multi hundreds of dollars, you can't possibly be saving money to virtualize your environment.
(in my best Gilbert Gottfried voice): Drinkypoo, YER an idiot!
Youth diabetes was basically unheard of in this country before the advent of the food pyramid
That is categorically bullshit. Diabetes is caused in two ways. One of which is overindulgence combined with underexercise. The other is damage to the pancreas. Diabetes has been known of for over 2,000 years, and it is not caused by some sinister fucking food pyramid conspiracy. It may be excaberated by modern living habits. More importantly, SUGAR IS NOT A FUCKING DRUG! You are intentionally misunderstanding the definition of a "drug." "Drugs" are substances not necessary for nutrition which cause chemical changes in the way the human body works. Sugar is a natural nutrient and has been part of the human diet in one form or another since we were human.
Spewing hysterical hyperbole about "sugar" being a "drug" does not advance any anti-sugar argument you may have, and only makes it easier to brand you as little more than a bleating Atkins-diet sheep.
OK, some detailBut if "God exists" were simply an academic question, it would be confined to academia.
It's not an academic question. It's a fundamental assertion regarding the nature of the universe. Theists assert that it was created by God. Non-theists don't. We aren't replacing a logical quantity (GOD) with another quantity. That's something you just don't seem to be able to grasp.
And I think to be a human being, you have to take a position on that, which, incidentally, is why religion has been used so successfully throughout history to control people.
No, I don't. My position is, that being's existence isn't real. I don't have to prove anything. I'm not even asserting anything. I'm simply failing to nod my head in agreement when that fictional being's existence is asserted by someone else. The real world is sitting right there in front of us, and it operates just fine whether you believe in God or not. There are a good number of glurge-y myths, often promulgated by 700-club devotees and others, that assert that atheists live some sort of dark, miserable life and are ruinously unhappy and unsuccessful in life but quite frankly they are a load of bull.
It is a promise that there is morality, redemption, and hope despite a world that allows suffering.
People choose their moral compass first and then twist their beliefs to fit their actions. And, bluntly, suffering is an unfortunate condition but no one's prayer has ever alleviated it in the slightest -- except in their own minds. If you choose to imagine that the Big Sky Fairy will fix things for you, you may be missing out on the opportunity to take action for yourself, and I am pretty sure many people do.
But to live his (or her) life, he has to have some answer. And even if that answer is as simple as despair, it cannot be based entirely on deductive logic, or on scientific facts, because it is going to be subjective, and logic and science are not subjective. It will depend on something akin to faith, or at least on imagination.
I invite you to read the book in my.sig. You can listen to it for free on podiobooks.com if you like. Because that's what it's allllll about.
Democracy frightens the wits out of elitists because of the very notion you've thrown up here: that "uninformed" people will start determining national policy. But who is going to know better what the needs of the populace are: the populace, or a bunch of consultants who attend $1,500-a-plate fundraising dinners?
And really, all that matters in this equation is whether or not the needs of the people are being met by the government which they elect. Hare-brained, trendy political or economic theories mean exactly jack shit to the rest of us.
Current political conditions thrive because the parties play on apathy to drive their oppositions' fans away from the polls. With mandatory voting, everyone would at least have to spend the 20 minutes doing their civic duty and I warrant a good many of them would do their homework accordingly. Along with mandatory voting, let's also have mandatory national holidays on the dates of national elections. Like any other important project in life, if the citizens of a democracy don't bother to invest time in the running of their government they shouldn't expect anything but a sloppy result. Which is what we have.
Just so you know, belief in "god" is a matter of faith, since his existence can neither be proved nor disproved.
It doesn't need to be disproved. As long as it remains unproven, it can be safely dismissed from any real discussion on the subject.
Theists often assume that they can play faith on both sides of the argument but forget that non-theists have asserted nothing. They have simply failed to incorporate a fictitious quantity into their world-view. It is not two sides of the same coin.
Let's break this one down, shall we? The argument you claim you've made (which is actually nothing more than a categorical assertion that something is true), goes like this: as we increase our understanding of DNA encoding, we increase the amount of evidence in favor of an Intelligent Encoder. Is that what you're trying to say? In that case you've got some hidden premises to explain which, I think, brought out in the open would shrivel like bugs on a hibachi grill.
Without being able to view your premises I can only guess at what they are, but I assume they include ideas like "irreducible complexity" which has been violently debunked a number of times now.
Also there's the simple matter of a testable hypothesis, which by the very definition that is given is impossible. In the meantime, real scientific knowledge advances despite all Creationist efforts to prevent it. I find it variously hilarious and very irritating (as I've posted before) that Creationists try to glom onto every new scientific fact before it can get out into the world and cast it as some sort of religious revalation. The problem is, and has been, that if you come up with bogus conclusions and are later trumped by reality, you end up looking just plain stupid.
But that's a choice you make for yourself. Filling in the gaps with God has been the tactic for centuries and we can always look back into the past and see that in those gaps were always more revealing and far more compelling real-world explanations than the unimaginative God-obsessed dullards could ever come up with. Fake knowledge is fake power. Real understanding leads to real illumination. I always prefer the real thing.
Knowledge advances incrementally but our mind is so unprepaired and suspicious to the real answer: We've been created ! In an wonderful way...
I mean, honestly. The creationist tactic of taking plausible-sounding premises and coming up with utter bullshit conclusions is frustrating, amusing, and finally just boring. You've said nothing of actual useful interest here, and it's a good solid bet that 90% of the premises you've put forward are complete garbage anyway. You numbskulls do not now and never will understand what science is actually about. Real knowledge is real power. Fake knowledge will give you the illusion of power, and the moment the sand shifts under your feet you will have nothing except a bunch of people laughing at what jackasses you are.
The real problem is that BOTH sides are offering up simplistic arguements to complex problems. The Cindy Sheehans of the world crying "No WMD" and such are just a fallacious as Santorum is. 1)WMD are found in Iraq, proving that CS is lying or stupid, 2)Santorum is technically correct, but ultimately wrong because they are, as you and I both have indicated they were old and non-functioning.
Were these discarded weapons a threat to us? No. Were they going to be? No. Were they going to come as proof in the form of a "mushroom cloud?" No.
DO NOT accuse me of being childish. I have watched in complete horror as thousands of people have been recklessly sent off to their deaths, and our international reputation as the leader of the free world shredded in a buzzsaw, for what is quite plainly a fraudulent lie. And I have listened as right-wing parrot-heads have arrogantly screamed that those who objected on perfectly logical consistent grounds that there was no reason to dash wildly into this catastrophe were traitors or fools or Saddam-lovers. It is FUCKING INSULTING and when I encounter that kind of shit I have decided I'm not sitting still for that.
In reality, even the Iraqis thought they had WMD, and were expecting to use them in the run-up to the war. When the US invaded, they were just as shocked as the US was that there were no-such-weapons (at least in Iraq).
Do you have an attribution for this? Do you have a source? Do you have any proof whatsoever, because as far as I recall, the initial march to Bagdhad was met with almost no resistance, and certainly nothing in the form of chemical or biological weaponry.
Also, what are you calling me an "idiot" for when you post an entirely off-topic (and largely debunked) claim like this:
The real chemical weapon used on our troops was the sweetener Aspertame (Nutrasweet), which turns into Formaldehyde. I venture to guess that more than 2500 (est. current Iraq US troop casualties) people have died as a result of that. Where is CS on that issue? Hmmm?
Memo: there's as much formaldehyde in a tomato as a can of diet soda. Get a clue. I'm no fan of Monsanto, but learn your facts about just one thing before spouting off like you're some kind of fucking expert.
The problem is, there WERE WMDs and they keep finding them.... old ones, but WMD non-the-less.
No, the problem is, those "old" WMD's are no longer functional and are not part of any active weapons program, so in reality we have still not found the causus belli for which we have spent so much in money and lives. What Santorum is doing is more accurately described as a "desperate stunt" designed to pull out of the catastrophic tailspin in which his and the rest of the Republicans' credibility and poll ratings have fallen into. No logical equivalence between this and anything the out-of-power Democrats have done is possible.
Just because we didn't find the WMDs we were looking for doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Wrong. We weren't just looking for the weapons -- we were looking for an active program of weapon creation. The case for the war didn't just rest on weapons, but on the facilities and personnel in the active process of creating them in sufficient numbers not just to threaten Iraq's neighbors, but to threaten us. Do you not remember the Bio-weapons trailers that Colin Powell shredded his last tissue of credibility against? Never did find those, did we?
No, we were distinctly told that "proof could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" and it was distinctly implied that this mushroom cloud would be arising over US cities. No such capability or plans were discovered in any of the governmental apparatus we unwound in Iraq, and two successive post-war investigators appointed by the Administration both concluded that said plans didn't exist -- exactly as Hans Blix reported before the war and twenty-five hundred US dead, thirty thousand Iraqi dead, and several hundred billion dollars gone. It's not an insignificant error we're talking about here.
I'm zeroing in on this phony equivalence of doubt because it was never confusion or error that took us to war. It was lies. Don't get yourself all confused about what happened.
It is just as likely that homo-sapiens are currenly holding off an Ice Age as they are helping bring in "global warming".
This reminds me of feeble arguments a few years ago that we had temporarily (and quite by accident) balanced the pollutants in our atmosphere so that one effect held off the other.
And actually, no, it's not just as likely.
If we were holding off an ice age, we would be seeing increasing CO2 having little or no effect, quite contrary to our expectations. But what we're really seeing now is very much in line with the expectations that were set twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Anyhow, the answer to your question who will be burning [Fossil Fuels] is this: who ever can get at them for an energy source cheaper than any alternative.
Again, missing the point. We burn fossil fuels as a means of improving our quality of life. At the same time, we're destroying the quality of life of the future. Don't give me some free-market bullshit as a justification for crashing our society.
Let's say there is some "day after tomorrow" or "an inconvenient truth" scenario in our future... and humans are whacked back to Ice-Age times, or "worse"... Do you think the raco-sapiens will give a whit about burning cheap hydrocarbons vs "the environment"?
There most definitely is such a scenario in our future. All we need do is nothing and allow the short-sighted sociopaths who run our businesses to exploit conditions to their maximum extreme and it will happen.
And I give a shit. Short-sighted nihilism disturbs me and as a rule I have this advice for nihilists: destroy yourselves, but leave the rest of us alone.
you really care about saving the planet - it is a lost cause. If you want to save human kind, then you should push for high-tech and space programs and spread people all over, off this doomed rock.
Oddly enough, investing in more efficient energy sources is about the only way that can be done. But there are few current realistic alternatives to the Earth as a place to live. Trust me, I've thought about the topic some. Follow the link in my.sig . . .
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I've been to China. Any notion that the Chinese Government controls all those people is strictly illusory. As soon as the government's eye is not on them, they go on and do whatever it is they need to. And especially during the period in question, there was almost no real contact between the people who ruled from the Forbidden City, and the people who were ruled over. When you contrast that to Bush's stage-managed presidency wherein he has rarely if ever come into contact with someone who was not a carefully screened supporter or piece of harmless hugmeat, the parallels become unpleasant. Furthermore, the kinds of advances that used to take decades now happen in weeks. We are already being left behind by other nations. I've also been to South Korea. Their adoption of technology and modern lifestyle has happened at a seriously breakneck pace. I talked to people who were younger than me (and I'm merely a GenX-er) who had grown up in thatched-roof houses. They now have something like 90% of the country wired for broadband.
The Bush Admin's open hostility to science is no secret. This isn't an isolated incident; it's part of a total trend of deliberately ignoring information which is inconvenient. And to suggest that we could possibly petition this Congress to do something about it is absurd.
Finally, we are reading an article that is obviously skewed in the direction of an environmentalist PAC. Perhaps we should hear both sides of the story---or is the witch hunt too far underway to surrender to reason?
As I've noted already in this thread, we've been getting our news for the last several years from networks who think that fake JonBenet Killer news stories are worth our 24-hour-a-day attention. And if this news story is somehow not factually true I'm sure evidence to that effect will surface, but in the meantime we don't need to balance our news consumption with fiction.
So his father's $250,000-$500,000 stake in a 12 billion dollar company is owning it?
This is getting really old, too. This marks about the sixth time I've seen someone trying to compare Bush's presidency to Carter's. There is NO comparison. Carter was a nauseatingly honest individual who was elected largely in response to the nauseatingly dishonest Nixon administration. He entered the political game playing it straight at a time when the opposition was patently playing it crooked, and inherited (as another poster has mentioned) a terrible situation at a terrible time. What he didn't do was leave a huge mess for future generations to clean up -- most of the situations of Carter's presidency that people didn't like were strictly temporary.
On the other hand, Bush has destroyed a huge budget surplus and left trillions in debt to my kids. His deliberate neglect has more or less wiped one whole American city right off the map. He has ruined America's standing as the leader of the free world with his farrago of lies on Iraq, and he has opened a gaping crack in the Middle East which seems destined to consume innocent lives for decades to come. He has fundamentally damaged the conscience of the nation by actively condoning torture, and actively assaulting our cherished civil liberties -- the one aspect of America that truly makes us American. He has starved the middle class and pushed millions into poverty with his patently worker-unfriendly policies (better known as his "Ownership Society" initiative). He has contributed to the further decline of public education, ensuring that millions can't compete in a modern job market, through his unfunded No Child Left Behind. He has bitterly divided America with his lies and hateful, cynical rhetoric. He has flaunted his authority recklessly and led with all the gravitas of a 21-year old fraternity prankster. In a simple character evaluation of Jimmy Carter versus George W. Bush, there is no question who I'd rather have in charge.
Whose real news report would you like? After their 24x7 extravaganza of the fake JonBenet Killer story, every major media outlet in the country is suspect.
The other thing they're doing is setting themselves up for failure. By raising such wild expectations about various fictitious end-times crises and "rewards" for faith, they are either going to go all the way into it and become suicide cults or reach a point of implosion where the failure of the outrageous promises of the leaders will drive people off wholesale.
I think this has been happening in a sort of ebb and flow in religious communities for centuries of human history, which is why we have so many different crazy-ass religions. What is interesting now is that we have a proven and viable secular culture with real and tangible answers to the kind of questions religions presume to answer, and when the current crop of fundy nutbags goes pop, instead of dispersing to other equally zany cults, many of the people abandoned by those meaningless beliefs will find themselves in a world where religion is not necessary and not required. And I think that in many ways we are finally looking at the true end of organized religion as a social force.
Recently while on a trip to Asia, I had the opportunity to visit two countries that demonstrate some fairly wild extremes of religious belief -- China, where the people are so superstitious that even the one-party government is afraid to tear down buildings because of feng shui, and South Korea, where my tour guide informed me that over 50% of the population was atheist. China is a developing country coming out of a very long period of cultural isolation. Korea was jerked out of their isolation by world events 60 or so years ago and has matured as an industrial, democratic society. I think one of the main things conspiring to keep fundamentalism alive in the U.S. has been our isolation, and it is finally and firmly ending, which is why nutbags like George "Macaca" Allen are in the middle of freaking out about immigrants and foreigners.
Interesting times ahead, at any rate.
"But please, don't insinuate that just because you're a driven workaholic with nothing better to do that the rest of us would 'prefer' that lifestyle." ...which clearly indicates that you are of the opinion that if someone makes a statement about how Americans prefer 2 weeks they must be workaholics.
I'm not sure why you think you've scored a zinger on me. To qualify: I am a US citizen. I have worked in my job for 11 years and have 21 days paid time off. And I fucking like it very much. So much that one of the main reasons that I stay at this job is that I don't want to go back to 2 weeks paid time off, which is what most corporations offer for new employees. You stated that Americans "prefer" a two week vacation. That is the statement of someone who values work above quality of life, and I said so. Somehow you're imagining that you've pointed out a contradiction in my argument by contrasting my position against yours.
It's a well-known phenomenon that when musicians (or anyone, for that matter) get so rich that they don't need anything, all of the reasons they made their music in the first place tend to evaporate and they churn out self-referential imitations of their former works of genius. Very few artists manage to survive their own wild success for very long. Those who do are often marketing-operated drones (see Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones) or simply disappointing and schmaltzy. One of the reasons the Beatles are still immortal, in my opinion, is that they had a short career and quit while they were ahead. They were on the verge of turning into a parody of themselves (and some think they actually did) but they pulled out of it with an amazing final album and got out while the getting was good.
"Prefer?" I prefer quite a bit more time off. I would imagine most people do. The problem is, U.S. corporate behavior is geared toward maximizing profits at the expense of the employees and an imaginary work ethic that drives people into the ground and causes them to change jobs on an average of every two or three years and careers on an average of every 10 or 15 years. You ask, stupidly, who pays for Europeans' 6 weeks holiday -- obviously as a cultural norm the employer shells it out. It's a quality of life issue.
But please, don't insinuate that just because you're a driven workaholic with nothing better to do that the rest of us would 'prefer' that lifestyle. I think, given 6 weeks of guilt-free holiday, most Americans would take it gladly.
Obviously he failed as an educator as well. If you had even spent 20 seconds learning anything about Iranian history, you would have discovered that the roots of Iran's issues lie a little further in the past. Try here. Iran had an elected democratic form of government before we decided it wasn't doing what we wanted it to with our oil. Ahem, I meant their oil. Considering that 99.99999999999999999999% of the reason we had an economic crisis in the 1970's stemmed from our overreliance on cheap, imported oil, dumping those long-festering issues on Carter's head have to count as the most disingenious crap I've ever heard.
Doubly so, considering the lengths to which Carter went in his effort to extricate us from a purely idiotic situation where we were funding maniacs who wanted to kill us by buying the oil they made. Oddly enough, the fact that our nation remains in that idiotic situation can be dumped squarely on conservative heads, as those same people have openly conspired to keep us chuffing away at oil like there's no tomorrow, intentionally lowering efficiency and deriding conservation efforts as (as best I can understand it), "wimpy."
At any rate, the damage Bush is doing to our country right now makes anything Carter might have fictionally wrought pale in comparison. Carter took over from six years of bumbling Nixonitude (and it was in Nixon's term that the energy crisis really got its start, remember!) capped off with a completely whorish two or so years of Ford stumbling over furniture. Anyone would have a hell of a time cleaning up after that idiot crew.
Bush, on the other hand, took the fruits of the greatest economic expansion of the last 50 years and squirreled it away on pure self-aggrandizement. Eight trillion dollars in debt, bogus war on phony enemy, no end in sight, a complete wreck of our national credibility . . . you name it, the Feckless Fratboy-In-Chief has done it, and screwed it up but good.
Not very well read, are you? That's OK. People who are understand exactly what the parent poster is saying. If you somehow missed the most important political novel of the 20th century I'm sure you'll have time to pick it up before it's banned.
So calm down already. You don't need to balance your civil rights against your life, because the risk that you take just walking out the door every day has been grossly exaggerated by hyperventilating, bed-wetting Panic Puppies. Sure, a terrorist might "get you" someday. But he's about 100 places down in line behind several major diseases, automobile accidents, and ordinary everday street crime. Quit giving these people (the terrorists, I mean) power by letting them instill fear in you. They aren't worth it.
Oddly, I was unaware that the plural of "anecdote" was "data."
The overwhelming opinion here is that #1, home taping is not killing music (and never did, stretching back into the mists of time), and #2, most artists who are popular enough to get pirated are therefore popular enough to be making money. You state the above as if it's cut-and-dried that Napster (and somehow by association, home taping/cd copying) destroyed your alleged friend's music business, but the fact is we have no idea how he ran his business and could have tanked for any one of a dozen reasons that had nothing to do with free downloads (or, by association home taping/cd copying).
What's really funny is how some people expect their business model to automatically work regardless of the actual functioning of the market.
We started getting these boxes last spring, and they show no signs of letting up. We still haven't determined (because the company that shall not be named is in such disarray that we can't find anyone who knows what the hell's going on) whether we're getting the upgrade of approximately 1,500 licenses we ordered, or a refresh of all 12,000 licenses that we own. Either way, it's a fucking lot of boxes, or a motherfucking lot of boxes. Our Administrative Assistants love it when a pallet of these things show up. They open all that packaging up and stuff the paper inside a single box.
All of this data, of course, could have been printed on a single piece of paper.
VM is fine for logical software testing, but if you want a VM machine to perform you are SOL. You are interposing a layer of software emulation between the software and the hardware, and no matter how good it gets it's still an emulator. Also, as far as total cost of ownership you are again SOL. I've been told the actual cost of a Server VMware instance, once software licensing and drive space and everything else are all factored in is as much or more than a real server -- and that's in the server space, where unit costs are in the multi thousands of dollars. In the desktop area, where actual hardware costs are in the multi hundreds of dollars, you can't possibly be saving money to virtualize your environment.
Seriously. Other people might use the caps lock key.
Youth diabetes was basically unheard of in this country before the advent of the food pyramid
That is categorically bullshit. Diabetes is caused in two ways. One of which is overindulgence combined with underexercise. The other is damage to the pancreas. Diabetes has been known of for over 2,000 years, and it is not caused by some sinister fucking food pyramid conspiracy. It may be excaberated by modern living habits. More importantly, SUGAR IS NOT A FUCKING DRUG! You are intentionally misunderstanding the definition of a "drug." "Drugs" are substances not necessary for nutrition which cause chemical changes in the way the human body works. Sugar is a natural nutrient and has been part of the human diet in one form or another since we were human.
Spewing hysterical hyperbole about "sugar" being a "drug" does not advance any anti-sugar argument you may have, and only makes it easier to brand you as little more than a bleating Atkins-diet sheep.
Without going into too much detail, you're wrong.
OK, some detailBut if "God exists" were simply an academic question, it would be confined to academia.
It's not an academic question. It's a fundamental assertion regarding the nature of the universe. Theists assert that it was created by God. Non-theists don't. We aren't replacing a logical quantity (GOD) with another quantity. That's something you just don't seem to be able to grasp.
And I think to be a human being, you have to take a position on that, which, incidentally, is why religion has been used so successfully throughout history to control people.
No, I don't. My position is, that being's existence isn't real. I don't have to prove anything. I'm not even asserting anything. I'm simply failing to nod my head in agreement when that fictional being's existence is asserted by someone else. The real world is sitting right there in front of us, and it operates just fine whether you believe in God or not. There are a good number of glurge-y myths, often promulgated by 700-club devotees and others, that assert that atheists live some sort of dark, miserable life and are ruinously unhappy and unsuccessful in life but quite frankly they are a load of bull.
It is a promise that there is morality, redemption, and hope despite a world that allows suffering.
People choose their moral compass first and then twist their beliefs to fit their actions. And, bluntly, suffering is an unfortunate condition but no one's prayer has ever alleviated it in the slightest -- except in their own minds. If you choose to imagine that the Big Sky Fairy will fix things for you, you may be missing out on the opportunity to take action for yourself, and I am pretty sure many people do.
But to live his (or her) life, he has to have some answer. And even if that answer is as simple as despair, it cannot be based entirely on deductive logic, or on scientific facts, because it is going to be subjective, and logic and science are not subjective. It will depend on something akin to faith, or at least on imagination.
I invite you to read the book in my .sig. You can listen to it for free on podiobooks.com if you like. Because that's what it's allllll about.
And really, all that matters in this equation is whether or not the needs of the people are being met by the government which they elect. Hare-brained, trendy political or economic theories mean exactly jack shit to the rest of us.
Current political conditions thrive because the parties play on apathy to drive their oppositions' fans away from the polls. With mandatory voting, everyone would at least have to spend the 20 minutes doing their civic duty and I warrant a good many of them would do their homework accordingly. Along with mandatory voting, let's also have mandatory national holidays on the dates of national elections. Like any other important project in life, if the citizens of a democracy don't bother to invest time in the running of their government they shouldn't expect anything but a sloppy result. Which is what we have.
It doesn't need to be disproved. As long as it remains unproven, it can be safely dismissed from any real discussion on the subject.
Theists often assume that they can play faith on both sides of the argument but forget that non-theists have asserted nothing. They have simply failed to incorporate a fictitious quantity into their world-view. It is not two sides of the same coin.
Without being able to view your premises I can only guess at what they are, but I assume they include ideas like "irreducible complexity" which has been violently debunked a number of times now.
Also there's the simple matter of a testable hypothesis, which by the very definition that is given is impossible. In the meantime, real scientific knowledge advances despite all Creationist efforts to prevent it. I find it variously hilarious and very irritating (as I've posted before) that Creationists try to glom onto every new scientific fact before it can get out into the world and cast it as some sort of religious revalation. The problem is, and has been, that if you come up with bogus conclusions and are later trumped by reality, you end up looking just plain stupid.
But that's a choice you make for yourself. Filling in the gaps with God has been the tactic for centuries and we can always look back into the past and see that in those gaps were always more revealing and far more compelling real-world explanations than the unimaginative God-obsessed dullards could ever come up with. Fake knowledge is fake power. Real understanding leads to real illumination. I always prefer the real thing.
I mean, honestly. The creationist tactic of taking plausible-sounding premises and coming up with utter bullshit conclusions is frustrating, amusing, and finally just boring. You've said nothing of actual useful interest here, and it's a good solid bet that 90% of the premises you've put forward are complete garbage anyway. You numbskulls do not now and never will understand what science is actually about. Real knowledge is real power. Fake knowledge will give you the illusion of power, and the moment the sand shifts under your feet you will have nothing except a bunch of people laughing at what jackasses you are.
Were these discarded weapons a threat to us? No. Were they going to be? No. Were they going to come as proof in the form of a "mushroom cloud?" No.
DO NOT accuse me of being childish. I have watched in complete horror as thousands of people have been recklessly sent off to their deaths, and our international reputation as the leader of the free world shredded in a buzzsaw, for what is quite plainly a fraudulent lie. And I have listened as right-wing parrot-heads have arrogantly screamed that those who objected on perfectly logical consistent grounds that there was no reason to dash wildly into this catastrophe were traitors or fools or Saddam-lovers. It is FUCKING INSULTING and when I encounter that kind of shit I have decided I'm not sitting still for that.
In reality, even the Iraqis thought they had WMD, and were expecting to use them in the run-up to the war. When the US invaded, they were just as shocked as the US was that there were no-such-weapons (at least in Iraq).
Do you have an attribution for this? Do you have a source? Do you have any proof whatsoever, because as far as I recall, the initial march to Bagdhad was met with almost no resistance, and certainly nothing in the form of chemical or biological weaponry.
Also, what are you calling me an "idiot" for when you post an entirely off-topic (and largely debunked) claim like this:
The real chemical weapon used on our troops was the sweetener Aspertame (Nutrasweet), which turns into Formaldehyde. I venture to guess that more than 2500 (est. current Iraq US troop casualties) people have died as a result of that. Where is CS on that issue? Hmmm?
Memo: there's as much formaldehyde in a tomato as a can of diet soda. Get a clue. I'm no fan of Monsanto, but learn your facts about just one thing before spouting off like you're some kind of fucking expert.
If you're too much of a chickenshit to argue the point you only assist me in making mine.
No, the problem is, those "old" WMD's are no longer functional and are not part of any active weapons program, so in reality we have still not found the causus belli for which we have spent so much in money and lives. What Santorum is doing is more accurately described as a "desperate stunt" designed to pull out of the catastrophic tailspin in which his and the rest of the Republicans' credibility and poll ratings have fallen into. No logical equivalence between this and anything the out-of-power Democrats have done is possible.
Just because we didn't find the WMDs we were looking for doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Wrong. We weren't just looking for the weapons -- we were looking for an active program of weapon creation. The case for the war didn't just rest on weapons, but on the facilities and personnel in the active process of creating them in sufficient numbers not just to threaten Iraq's neighbors, but to threaten us. Do you not remember the Bio-weapons trailers that Colin Powell shredded his last tissue of credibility against? Never did find those, did we?
No, we were distinctly told that "proof could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" and it was distinctly implied that this mushroom cloud would be arising over US cities. No such capability or plans were discovered in any of the governmental apparatus we unwound in Iraq, and two successive post-war investigators appointed by the Administration both concluded that said plans didn't exist -- exactly as Hans Blix reported before the war and twenty-five hundred US dead, thirty thousand Iraqi dead, and several hundred billion dollars gone. It's not an insignificant error we're talking about here.
I'm zeroing in on this phony equivalence of doubt because it was never confusion or error that took us to war. It was lies. Don't get yourself all confused about what happened.
This reminds me of feeble arguments a few years ago that we had temporarily (and quite by accident) balanced the pollutants in our atmosphere so that one effect held off the other.
And actually, no, it's not just as likely.
If we were holding off an ice age, we would be seeing increasing CO2 having little or no effect, quite contrary to our expectations. But what we're really seeing now is very much in line with the expectations that were set twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Anyhow, the answer to your question who will be burning [Fossil Fuels] is this: who ever can get at them for an energy source cheaper than any alternative.
Again, missing the point. We burn fossil fuels as a means of improving our quality of life. At the same time, we're destroying the quality of life of the future. Don't give me some free-market bullshit as a justification for crashing our society.
Let's say there is some "day after tomorrow" or "an inconvenient truth" scenario in our future... and humans are whacked back to Ice-Age times, or "worse"... Do you think the raco-sapiens will give a whit about burning cheap hydrocarbons vs "the environment"?
There most definitely is such a scenario in our future. All we need do is nothing and allow the short-sighted sociopaths who run our businesses to exploit conditions to their maximum extreme and it will happen.
And I give a shit. Short-sighted nihilism disturbs me and as a rule I have this advice for nihilists: destroy yourselves, but leave the rest of us alone.
you really care about saving the planet - it is a lost cause. If you want to save human kind, then you should push for high-tech and space programs and spread people all over, off this doomed rock.
Oddly enough, investing in more efficient energy sources is about the only way that can be done. But there are few current realistic alternatives to the Earth as a place to live. Trust me, I've thought about the topic some. Follow the link in my .sig . . .