How can I take your bet? Since we are proposing the odds are 4-1 in your favor, how about I take you up at only 2-1 (heck I would even do even money)? Name your stakes.
The fertilizer plant in West, Texas was built BEFORE the development around it. It was very successful and brought people to the town. The residential housing and schools were built around the fertilizer plant, not the other way around.
Homes and schools being built in an industrial area where large amounts of explosive petrochemicals were stored and handled. Really? I take it that the fact that this confirms the absence of sane zoning laws is completely lost on you.
The West Intermediate (Middle school) was just 1000 feet from the plant. I guess those school kids had it coming...
I hope I don't get Eiched here for not supporting gay marriage, because I think it is the stupidest debate in recent history. Get government out of the marriage business entirely, end all legal designation of a religious rite, and be done with it.
...
This is one of the most astonishing turns in right-wing thinking (using the term loosely) - attempting to extract themselves from the tar pit of principle-free support for denying equal rights by pivoting and declaiming that the legal institution of marriage be abolished.
Religions do have religious marriage ceremonies they like to perform, and the state grants religious practitioners the authority to act as legal officiators and witnesses to the formation of this contract (same as judges and sea captains), but marriage is just that - a legal contract with deep and vast ramifications throughout society. The idea that marriage is properly only a "religious rite" with no legal consequences is just stunning in its lunacy and denial of basic facts.
Far from being something remotely "conservative", this sudden inspiration to abandon a core set of laws as old as Western secular civilization, is the most extreme, radical proposal I think I have ever heard presented with a straight face. And note that there is no real justification offered for such a bizarre proposal - it just sort of pops up at the end of a disclaimer that "I'm not opposed to gay marriage, but...".
No, the main reason why there were violent gangs making money selling alcohol during prohibition is that nobody respected the law enough to follow it. It's a similar situation here where a ton of self centered people are more interestedin smoking pot than in respecting the law.
The blame for the narco-gangs rests solely on the people who buy illegal drugs, and it will stop as soon as people stop giving them money. Focusing on your preferred solution is just plain dishonest. Especially given that there are genuine drawbacks to having pot easily available.
Interesting. So the real problem with Prohibition was not that it was a bad law, but that Americans were bad people, self-centered law breakers who should have respected this fine piece of legislation.
Come on, I refuse to believe that these entities are actively working to put more people in prison for no good reason.
Then you know nothing about the California "three strikes law" which was written by the prison guard union, and passed through an aggressive ad campaign that the union funded which invariably and exclusively used the stock phrase "violent criminal" to give the voter the impression that these were the only people being locked up for the rest of their lives.
But the law only required the first two "strikes" be "serious", not violent, crime and the third strike could be virtually any thing at all (given prosecutor's ability to upgrade almost any charge to a felony of some kind). "Serious" crimes included simple robbery, and since it has long been a practice for poor, lower class defendants to plead guilty to questionable charges to get light sentences - large numbers of defendants found that old pleas (some quite ancient) suddenly made them "three strikes" fodder for any offense. In fact a large majority of "three strikes" convictions are for minor crimes.
The EU law (not passed) referenced in the article you link to is a good example of IP rent-seeking, corporations trying to suppress competition to their patented products by writing laws and getting legislators to pass them.
The best way to get the gist of the proposed EU law, is to read the FAQ the law proponents wrote to defend it. Critics hardly need to add much to the "defense" to show how damning it is.
Basically it states that no commercial operation (unless small enough to be a "micro-enterprise") can sell any seed that is not "registered" under the law, which costs something like 3000 Euros per seed variety to do. Wild seed, natural seed, heirloom varieties, newly bred or selected varieties by seed savers - all banned from sale unless "registered".
Of course it claims this is a Very Good Thing and amazingly claims that it will "grant more responsibility and flexibility to businesses dealing in plant
reproductive material" and will "cut red tape and costs by making the rules more flexible and efficient across the EU".
Except for the EULA printed on their packets this is very similar to what the very well established Seed Savers Exchange has been doing for decades.
For reference the actual operative text of the EULA is:
"By opening this packet, you pledge that you will not restrict others’ use of these seeds and their derivatives by patents, licenses, or any other means. You pledge that if you transfer these seeds or their derivatives you will acknowledge the source of these seeds and accompany your transfer with this pledge."
It is the actual work of the seed savers group - saving, reproducing, distributing seed - that is preserving these varieties for future generations. Imposing this transfer clause seems to make these OSSI varieties less likely to be redistributed, so it may actually have a negative effect on their propagation. I don't see that having someone taking an heirloom variety and developing a patented variety from it is impeding seed saving and exchanging.
Heirloom varieties are under threat - the number of them in circulation is dropping, and strains are being lost since they do need to be periodically "grown out" to preserve the seed stock. But it is not being caused by heirloom varieties being patented - it is because commercially produced seed is being used by most gardeners for very real conveniences they provide.
Okay - you think Google is evil. I'm less happy with Google than I was in years past, but I'm still willing to argue that assessment.
Which entity would you choose to replace Google today?
Wrong question. What should a socially responsible megacorp that has overwhelming dominance in the primary communication system of the 21st Century do when confronted by a corrupt political process? Just quietly do business-as-usual, supporting the corrupt process, further entrenching it?
Google cannot avoid engaging with the pay-to-play system, but should it actively support it, or use its wealth, power, influence and access to challenge and expose it?
Voters have negligible power to make any change in the iron triangle of bought politicians, mouth-piece "think tanks", and corporations eager to buy legislation and elite "opinion".
This blog extolling Dutch road design innovation is nonetheless quite dismissive of the "glowing paint" idea, and mentions the use of glass bead retroreflectors (as in the UK) as a much better idea. It makes a good case.
A snow covered road is unsafe to drive on for the general public (no 4-wheel drive and no snow tires/chains) - so removing the snow is generally a very high priority (plows and salt). The times when snow is covering the strip will be rare.
We knew the "Don't Be Evil" motto was an ideal that could not withstand the rigors of the modern international marketplace. But how large a portion of "evil" is Google now comfortable with?
(Oh, and for you global warming nuts out there: please forgive me for examining this intellectually.)
We "nuts" will forgive you when you do decide to examine this intellectually.
Your current offering fails to even attempt this.
You start with "I may be a bit ignorant on the subject" and then go on to show that indeed, you truly are. To address this "intellectually" you need to actually be willing to do a little hard work - read real research summaries and become familiar with why the objections you pull off the top of your head make you look foolish (hint: they actually are foolish).
Ah, the awesome combination of towering hatred and towering ignorance!
No, the all-powerful hippies are not holding corporate cowering helplessly in their thrall.
Do you know how many actual, real nuclear power plant projects in the U.S. have been halted by environmentalist opposition? None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. It is impressive in fact how completely all attempts to halt nuclear power plants through protest failed.
But weren't all those nuclear power projects abandoned at the end of the 1970s halted by those d*mned "extreme environmentalists"? Nope. It was lack of electrical demand - those plants were planned under the idea that the rapid growth in electricity consumption of 1950s and 60s would continue forever.
The high capital costs of nuclear power plants make them unattractive investments compared to coal and natural gas plants. Only government subsidies (or a carbon tax) could make them cost competitive. It is good old profit-maximizing capitalism that has been holding nuclear power back.
There are in fact nuclear power plants starting construction right now - Units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georiga. The plants project might have started a couple of years sooner - but what was holding it back was were the federal subsidies demanded by the private companies. At the start of this years the final i's were dotted on those subsidies ($6.5 billion in loan guarantees) and the plants are going forward.
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream. Small amount of wind power is good, sure. But it is fated to be a small portion.
Are you just making this stuff up? This is a complete nonsense.
It's a lot cheaper to get iron by melting a car engine block - no matter how rusted - than smelting it from iron ore.
Right you are. If you have fireclay (deposits are found all over the U.S. and the world) then you can make cupola and crucible furnaces that remelt steel. Any sort of fuel can be used in a crucible furnace. And these furnaces are readily constructed on a small scale, but can be scaled to very large units too. There are hundreds of billions of tons of steel lying around.
This presumes you have access to magnets. That's...not a given, since you need iron working. Iron working is actually hard to bootstrap - it's why the bronze age preceded it.
Umm... why would we need to bootstrap "iron working" again? There are hundreds of billions of tons of high quality refined steel (compared to the iron of ages past) laying around to be remelted and reworked. Do you believe it will all evaporate?
The "cake" referred to in "let them eat cake" quote means the crust at the bottom of a cauldron.
Citation?
"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" refers to brioche, a rich sweet bread, sort of like a cake. Not said by Marie Antoinette though, it was attributed to an unnamed "great princess" by Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, but Marie Antoinette would have been too young to be this princess.
If 'custodial engineers' were to drop everything and become programmers, who'd do the dirty work that they do?
Nobody is talking about re-training people that are usefully employed. They are talking about re-training people whose jobs are disappearing. Robotics is advancing very rapidly. Jobs for unskilled people have been disappearing for decades, but the past is nothing compared to the avalanche of disappearing jobs that may soon be coming. History shows that, in the long term, economies adjust and everyone benefits from productivity improvements. But the short term transition can be brutal.
...
It is essential that we keep the timelines straight on how jobs are lost, and then eventually regained in a true Industrial Revolution. We are currently in what should be called the Cybernetic Revolution, the only true successor to the original IR in terms of its effects on employment.
In the original IR there were rapid losses of employment (starting in textiles) as factories went up starting around 1780. Optimists, who prate about how 'the IR really wasn't so bad' argue that by 1840 the average wage had risen to finally exceed pre-levels. As with today, talking about average wages hides the extent of poverty with a society, but more importantly it ignores the fact that the gap between 1780 and 1840 is sixty years, and other more systematic analyses pretty much keep this same gap for the employment picture turn-around, though shifting the dates of both start and end forward slightly. This means the typical worker rendered a pauper in mid-life by the start of the IR never benefited, their children never benefited, their grand-children rarely benefited, it was only their great-grand-children that found ready work at good wages!
The promise that eventually the economy will adapt and replace the lost jobs is one that won't be seen for a few generations. We need to have policies in place now, as the jobs vanish, to keep the workers and their families from ending up in poverty, and these policies will need to be maintained and updated for several decades to come.
It is notable that a quick perusal of conservative policy sites (National Review, etc.) for suggestions on how to deal with this problem of inevitable long-term unemployment find by far the most common is to suggest that job salaries be subsidized by the government to create employment. The really aren't any other alternatives that might conceivably work - only government spending to stimulate the economy can step in. (But how taxes should be raised to finance this is never discussed.).
Perhaps published earlier, but I had never heard of this. To those of us intrigued by topology and algorithms (and a bit of whimsy) this article is absolutely delightful. I'll have to pull out one of my ties and try some of these out.
...There isn't even evidence that he actually existed...
Only if you create a novel, idosyncratic definition of "evidence" that does not apply to most of the rest of ancient history. And you grossly overestimate how "abundant" surviving Roman records actually are.
The absence of any physical contemporary artifacts bearing the name "Jesus" is no surprise.
Did you know that before 1961 we did not have a single physical artifact attesting to the existence of Pontius Pilate, even though he was the Roman 'ruler' of Judea for ten years? A single inscribed stone turned up in that year, and remains the sole contemporary physical evidence of his existence. It would be an extraordinary surprise to find any similar physical evidence of Jesus, lack of such is what would be normally expected.
There are several non-Christian sources that refer to Jesus and which modern critical scholarship indicates were not later interpolations by Christian scribes: Tactitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Josephus (no, it is not regarded as an "obvious forgery"), and Mara Bar Serapion. Most ancient historical figures (who were not rulers) are known only from references in later accounts.
There is written record of the church creating the mythology surrounding the name Jesus that they use today (The First Council of Nicaea), but that's about it.
You are showing that you really, really don't know what you are talking about. We have a substantial number of early Christian/Gnostic documents from the 2nd century AD (not later copies) that document accounts of Jesus going back many decades. The earliest is from around 120 AD, only about 90 years after the death of Jesus. The Gnostic manuscripts are particularly valuable since they represent a branch of the Jesus tradition that was ultimately rejected by the Church, they are not dependent on the "official" texts.
...The evidence that Republicans have compassion is easy to find, look at their donations to charity....
And if you do look at these "donations to charity" stats you see that a presumed "Republican charitable superiority" is entirely due to counting all contributions to churches as "charity", and thus the higher percentage of Republicans being church-goers makes them automatically more "charitable".
The thing is counting all church contributions as "charity" is a function of U.S. tax law, which gives a large tax payer subsidy to religion. It is not a function of giving money to your own church actually being intrinsically charitable.
While church goers are easily convinced this is the case, that they are veritable saints for giving money to their church, the fact is that nearly all of the money is being spent on themselves in running what is in essence a religious social club. The money goes to paying for the church facilities they use, the church personnel that minister to their perceived needs, and services that they themselves consume (childcare, religious educational programs, etc.). If you look at the balance sheet of a typical church, only a small fraction (usually less than 10%, often much less than this) is spent on helping other people, the normal notion of what "charity" actually means.
Don't believe me? If you go to a church check its annual budget, nearly all churches make these available. You can also do an experiment by Googling and checking church budgets at random.
Also look at this survey and analysis of church budgets, done by a major inter-denominational organization. If we go down the average column item by item, the only items that might actually be charity to others are the "Programs Expenses" which total 14% on average, and the only sub-items that are clearly charitable are the two "benevolence" line items which together total a whopping 3% of the budget. Most of the other items are simply programs consumed by church members and their families.
It is an odd form of charity that is spent on one's own self.
Slashdot Mirror
How can I take your bet? Since we are proposing the odds are 4-1 in your favor, how about I take you up at only 2-1 (heck I would even do even money)? Name your stakes.
The fertilizer plant in West, Texas was built BEFORE the development around it. It was very successful and brought people to the town. The residential housing and schools were built around the fertilizer plant, not the other way around.
Homes and schools being built in an industrial area where large amounts of explosive petrochemicals were stored and handled. Really? I take it that the fact that this confirms the absence of sane zoning laws is completely lost on you.
The West Intermediate (Middle school) was just 1000 feet from the plant. I guess those school kids had it coming...
...
I hope I don't get Eiched here for not supporting gay marriage, because I think it is the stupidest debate in recent history. Get government out of the marriage business entirely, end all legal designation of a religious rite, and be done with it.
...
This is one of the most astonishing turns in right-wing thinking (using the term loosely) - attempting to extract themselves from the tar pit of principle-free support for denying equal rights by pivoting and declaiming that the legal institution of marriage be abolished.
Religions do have religious marriage ceremonies they like to perform, and the state grants religious practitioners the authority to act as legal officiators and witnesses to the formation of this contract (same as judges and sea captains), but marriage is just that - a legal contract with deep and vast ramifications throughout society. The idea that marriage is properly only a "religious rite" with no legal consequences is just stunning in its lunacy and denial of basic facts.
Far from being something remotely "conservative", this sudden inspiration to abandon a core set of laws as old as Western secular civilization, is the most extreme, radical proposal I think I have ever heard presented with a straight face. And note that there is no real justification offered for such a bizarre proposal - it just sort of pops up at the end of a disclaimer that "I'm not opposed to gay marriage, but...".
No, the main reason why there were violent gangs making money selling alcohol during prohibition is that nobody respected the law enough to follow it. It's a similar situation here where a ton of self centered people are more interestedin smoking pot than in respecting the law.
The blame for the narco-gangs rests solely on the people who buy illegal drugs, and it will stop as soon as people stop giving them money. Focusing on your preferred solution is just plain dishonest. Especially given that there are genuine drawbacks to having pot easily available.
Interesting. So the real problem with Prohibition was not that it was a bad law, but that Americans were bad people, self-centered law breakers who should have respected this fine piece of legislation.
Good to know.
Come on, I refuse to believe that these entities are actively working to put more people in prison for no good reason.
Then you know nothing about the California "three strikes law" which was written by the prison guard union, and passed through an aggressive ad campaign that the union funded which invariably and exclusively used the stock phrase "violent criminal" to give the voter the impression that these were the only people being locked up for the rest of their lives.
But the law only required the first two "strikes" be "serious", not violent, crime and the third strike could be virtually any thing at all (given prosecutor's ability to upgrade almost any charge to a felony of some kind). "Serious" crimes included simple robbery, and since it has long been a practice for poor, lower class defendants to plead guilty to questionable charges to get light sentences - large numbers of defendants found that old pleas (some quite ancient) suddenly made them "three strikes" fodder for any offense. In fact a large majority of "three strikes" convictions are for minor crimes.
The EU law (not passed) referenced in the article you link to is a good example of IP rent-seeking, corporations trying to suppress competition to their patented products by writing laws and getting legislators to pass them.
The best way to get the gist of the proposed EU law, is to read the FAQ the law proponents wrote to defend it. Critics hardly need to add much to the "defense" to show how damning it is.
Basically it states that no commercial operation (unless small enough to be a "micro-enterprise") can sell any seed that is not "registered" under the law, which costs something like 3000 Euros per seed variety to do. Wild seed, natural seed, heirloom varieties, newly bred or selected varieties by seed savers - all banned from sale unless "registered".
Of course it claims this is a Very Good Thing and amazingly claims that it will "grant more responsibility and flexibility to businesses dealing in plant reproductive material" and will "cut red tape and costs by making the rules more flexible and efficient across the EU".
Except for the EULA printed on their packets this is very similar to what the very well established Seed Savers Exchange has been doing for decades.
For reference the actual operative text of the EULA is:
"By opening this packet, you pledge that you will not restrict others’ use of these seeds and their derivatives by patents, licenses, or any other means. You pledge that if you transfer these seeds or their derivatives you will acknowledge the source of these seeds and accompany your transfer with this pledge."
It is the actual work of the seed savers group - saving, reproducing, distributing seed - that is preserving these varieties for future generations. Imposing this transfer clause seems to make these OSSI varieties less likely to be redistributed, so it may actually have a negative effect on their propagation. I don't see that having someone taking an heirloom variety and developing a patented variety from it is impeding seed saving and exchanging.
Heirloom varieties are under threat - the number of them in circulation is dropping, and strains are being lost since they do need to be periodically "grown out" to preserve the seed stock. But it is not being caused by heirloom varieties being patented - it is because commercially produced seed is being used by most gardeners for very real conveniences they provide.
Okay - you think Google is evil. I'm less happy with Google than I was in years past, but I'm still willing to argue that assessment.
Which entity would you choose to replace Google today?
Wrong question. What should a socially responsible megacorp that has overwhelming dominance in the primary communication system of the 21st Century do when confronted by a corrupt political process? Just quietly do business-as-usual, supporting the corrupt process, further entrenching it?
Google cannot avoid engaging with the pay-to-play system, but should it actively support it, or use its wealth, power, influence and access to challenge and expose it?
Voters have negligible power to make any change in the iron triangle of bought politicians, mouth-piece "think tanks", and corporations eager to buy legislation and elite "opinion".
This blog extolling Dutch road design innovation is nonetheless quite dismissive of the "glowing paint" idea, and mentions the use of glass bead retroreflectors (as in the UK) as a much better idea. It makes a good case.
A snow covered road is unsafe to drive on for the general public (no 4-wheel drive and no snow tires/chains) - so removing the snow is generally a very high priority (plows and salt). The times when snow is covering the strip will be rare.
This is a Poe's Law post if every there was one.
Is this guy serious or being over-the-top satirical?
We knew the "Don't Be Evil" motto was an ideal that could not withstand the rigors of the modern international marketplace. But how large a portion of "evil" is Google now comfortable with?
...
(Oh, and for you global warming nuts out there: please forgive me for examining this intellectually.)
We "nuts" will forgive you when you do decide to examine this intellectually.
Your current offering fails to even attempt this.
You start with "I may be a bit ignorant on the subject" and then go on to show that indeed, you truly are. To address this "intellectually" you need to actually be willing to do a little hard work - read real research summaries and become familiar with why the objections you pull off the top of your head make you look foolish (hint: they actually are foolish).
Ah, the awesome combination of towering hatred and towering ignorance!
No, the all-powerful hippies are not holding corporate cowering helplessly in their thrall.
Do you know how many actual, real nuclear power plant projects in the U.S. have been halted by environmentalist opposition? None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. It is impressive in fact how completely all attempts to halt nuclear power plants through protest failed.
But weren't all those nuclear power projects abandoned at the end of the 1970s halted by those d*mned "extreme environmentalists"? Nope. It was lack of electrical demand - those plants were planned under the idea that the rapid growth in electricity consumption of 1950s and 60s would continue forever.
The high capital costs of nuclear power plants make them unattractive investments compared to coal and natural gas plants. Only government subsidies (or a carbon tax) could make them cost competitive. It is good old profit-maximizing capitalism that has been holding nuclear power back.
There are in fact nuclear power plants starting construction right now - Units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georiga. The plants project might have started a couple of years sooner - but what was holding it back was were the federal subsidies demanded by the private companies. At the start of this years the final i's were dotted on those subsidies ($6.5 billion in loan guarantees) and the plants are going forward.
We can only power about 10% of the US with wind before we are disrupting the jet stream. Small amount of wind power is good, sure. But it is fated to be a small portion.
Are you just making this stuff up? This is a complete nonsense.
Points well made. Thanks.
It's a lot cheaper to get iron by melting a car engine block - no matter how rusted - than smelting it from iron ore.
Right you are. If you have fireclay (deposits are found all over the U.S. and the world) then you can make cupola and crucible furnaces that remelt steel. Any sort of fuel can be used in a crucible furnace. And these furnaces are readily constructed on a small scale, but can be scaled to very large units too. There are hundreds of billions of tons of steel lying around.
This AC is a seriously disturbed individual.
This presumes you have access to magnets. That's...not a given, since you need iron working. Iron working is actually hard to bootstrap - it's why the bronze age preceded it.
Umm... why would we need to bootstrap "iron working" again? There are hundreds of billions of tons of high quality refined steel (compared to the iron of ages past) laying around to be remelted and reworked. Do you believe it will all evaporate?
But where are the articles on Pleonasm?
The "cake" referred to in "let them eat cake" quote means the crust at the bottom of a cauldron.
Citation?
"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" refers to brioche, a rich sweet bread, sort of like a cake. Not said by Marie Antoinette though, it was attributed to an unnamed "great princess" by Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, but Marie Antoinette would have been too young to be this princess.
If 'custodial engineers' were to drop everything and become programmers, who'd do the dirty work that they do?
Nobody is talking about re-training people that are usefully employed. They are talking about re-training people whose jobs are disappearing. Robotics is advancing very rapidly. Jobs for unskilled people have been disappearing for decades, but the past is nothing compared to the avalanche of disappearing jobs that may soon be coming. History shows that, in the long term, economies adjust and everyone benefits from productivity improvements. But the short term transition can be brutal.
...
It is essential that we keep the timelines straight on how jobs are lost, and then eventually regained in a true Industrial Revolution. We are currently in what should be called the Cybernetic Revolution, the only true successor to the original IR in terms of its effects on employment.
In the original IR there were rapid losses of employment (starting in textiles) as factories went up starting around 1780. Optimists, who prate about how 'the IR really wasn't so bad' argue that by 1840 the average wage had risen to finally exceed pre-levels. As with today, talking about average wages hides the extent of poverty with a society, but more importantly it ignores the fact that the gap between 1780 and 1840 is sixty years, and other more systematic analyses pretty much keep this same gap for the employment picture turn-around, though shifting the dates of both start and end forward slightly. This means the typical worker rendered a pauper in mid-life by the start of the IR never benefited, their children never benefited, their grand-children rarely benefited, it was only their great-grand-children that found ready work at good wages!
The promise that eventually the economy will adapt and replace the lost jobs is one that won't be seen for a few generations. We need to have policies in place now, as the jobs vanish, to keep the workers and their families from ending up in poverty, and these policies will need to be maintained and updated for several decades to come.
It is notable that a quick perusal of conservative policy sites (National Review, etc.) for suggestions on how to deal with this problem of inevitable long-term unemployment find by far the most common is to suggest that job salaries be subsidized by the government to create employment. The really aren't any other alternatives that might conceivably work - only government spending to stimulate the economy can step in. (But how taxes should be raised to finance this is never discussed.).
Perhaps published earlier, but I had never heard of this. To those of us intrigued by topology and algorithms (and a bit of whimsy) this article is absolutely delightful. I'll have to pull out one of my ties and try some of these out.
...There isn't even evidence that he actually existed...
Only if you create a novel, idosyncratic definition of "evidence" that does not apply to most of the rest of ancient history. And you grossly overestimate how "abundant" surviving Roman records actually are.
The absence of any physical contemporary artifacts bearing the name "Jesus" is no surprise.
Did you know that before 1961 we did not have a single physical artifact attesting to the existence of Pontius Pilate, even though he was the Roman 'ruler' of Judea for ten years? A single inscribed stone turned up in that year, and remains the sole contemporary physical evidence of his existence. It would be an extraordinary surprise to find any similar physical evidence of Jesus, lack of such is what would be normally expected.
There are several non-Christian sources that refer to Jesus and which modern critical scholarship indicates were not later interpolations by Christian scribes: Tactitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Josephus (no, it is not regarded as an "obvious forgery"), and Mara Bar Serapion. Most ancient historical figures (who were not rulers) are known only from references in later accounts.
There is written record of the church creating the mythology surrounding the name Jesus that they use today (The First Council of Nicaea), but that's about it.
You are showing that you really, really don't know what you are talking about. We have a substantial number of early Christian/Gnostic documents from the 2nd century AD (not later copies) that document accounts of Jesus going back many decades. The earliest is from around 120 AD, only about 90 years after the death of Jesus. The Gnostic manuscripts are particularly valuable since they represent a branch of the Jesus tradition that was ultimately rejected by the Church, they are not dependent on the "official" texts.
...The evidence that Republicans have compassion is easy to find, look at their donations to charity....
And if you do look at these "donations to charity" stats you see that a presumed "Republican charitable superiority" is entirely due to counting all contributions to churches as "charity", and thus the higher percentage of Republicans being church-goers makes them automatically more "charitable".
The thing is counting all church contributions as "charity" is a function of U.S. tax law, which gives a large tax payer subsidy to religion. It is not a function of giving money to your own church actually being intrinsically charitable.
While church goers are easily convinced this is the case, that they are veritable saints for giving money to their church, the fact is that nearly all of the money is being spent on themselves in running what is in essence a religious social club. The money goes to paying for the church facilities they use, the church personnel that minister to their perceived needs, and services that they themselves consume (childcare, religious educational programs, etc.). If you look at the balance sheet of a typical church, only a small fraction (usually less than 10%, often much less than this) is spent on helping other people, the normal notion of what "charity" actually means.
Don't believe me? If you go to a church check its annual budget, nearly all churches make these available. You can also do an experiment by Googling and checking church budgets at random.
Also look at this survey and analysis of church budgets, done by a major inter-denominational organization. If we go down the average column item by item, the only items that might actually be charity to others are the "Programs Expenses" which total 14% on average, and the only sub-items that are clearly charitable are the two "benevolence" line items which together total a whopping 3% of the budget. Most of the other items are simply programs consumed by church members and their families.
It is an odd form of charity that is spent on one's own self.