Free Republic

He supposedly raised his voice to the point of yelling at the legislators which I did not pick up on!

If that was it then its B.S. He wasn't yelling at them.

I could not make out what the supposed reason for him being evicted from the hearing was....something like “you are not on the bill, and you are out of order”?

What percentage of Islamic clerics think that Mohammad was a prophet of Allah again?

I can't think of any negative stereotypes about white people, other than we can't dance.

Translation:

I am an idiot who can feed a negative stereotype about how racists most whites are, and as part of my "reasoning" assert there are no negative stereotypes for white people.

The question is whether Martin was the aggressor or the victim. If Martin jumped Zimmerman and pounded his head into the concrete before Zimmerman shot, then it wasn’t murder. If Zimmerman jumped Martin, then Martin started winning and then Zimmerman shot, then it would be some kind of murder man slaughter etc. Now IF Martin was known to be the kind of person who was respectful of others and peaceful by nature, then that would be relevant. But also it is just as relevant if Martin was known to be violent at times and hostile in nature.

There has been a cascade preference toward recognizing same sex marriage for the time being. That preference was fueled by society shifting from picking on homosexuals to feeling sorry for homosexuals to recognizing homosexuals as victims of being picked on to having a core of homosexual activists who are seeking vengeance for being picked on in the past on the institutions that they feel were at the root of their maltreatment.

No where in this, are kids any real issue. Although some effort is made to reassure everyone that they will be fine as traditional marriage is redefined...the past speaks for itself. Marriage has already deteriorated in other ways, and they have not been fine.

Nope not me. Not going, thanks. There might be a peaceful race of tall blue aliens there and we would be invading their planet...and for what? unobatamium? ;-)

Nothing will get you in trouble faster than telling the truth.

Telling a harsh truth for a good reason may get one in trouble. However glorifying snobbery for profit and fun is not revealing any new truth, but just being an a-hole.

... Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer and author...

Uhm, "legendary"?

Saying he “Rescued” those women is an exaggeration at best.

Well opinions are one thing and facts are another. If the facts as I understand them are correct, he noticed a woman screaming for help to escape a house she was locked in, and busted her out. Allowing her to use his phone to call the police which resulted in the other women being busted out. Perhaps you have some special definition of "rescue" that is superior and ought be adopted by others which would exclude the rescue of these women? But until you enlighten me, I will congratulate this hero on his rescue of these women.

Well I don’t think the author was addressing psychological counseling. My own suspicion is that the study of the human mind through a scientific approach is at best marginally useful. Questions which can be well defined and quantified about the mind are too complex to test, and questions that are easy to test are things that we already knew intuitively and give us no additional insight. Still we have many researchers in the field who are well paid and well respected, whose job it is to pretend they are conducting a hard science. I would suspect that some of these have more integrity than others, but the ones that are most richly rewarded with grants and fame are the ones that cook up conclusions that support the ideology and agendas of those in the support system...which is pretty much all left wing in this time of the history of western civilization.

I think psychology is a huge fraud and they suck off the insurance, they are thieves

The article is about social psychological studies which I don't think are funded by insurance, rather by grants from the U.S. government and various foundations. Its about research rather than treating people.

"Of course, in the world of Mountain Dew, every single suspect is black," Watkins wrote.

Translation:

"I am an idiot, and I have trained myself to take such offense at certain things that I am able to project my idiocy onto others. For example I would never stop to think that in ANY police lineup that would ever happen in real life, all the suspects would likely be the same race...whichever fit the description of the witness...but I am too stupid to figure this out." Watkins wrote.

...it's a strong signal that this administration consistently has supported women's access to make her own health care decisions[Debbie Shultz on Obama attending Planned Parenthood]

This seems to be the one very singular way Obama is a big supporter of letting people be responsible for their own health care. Perhaps the unborn baby should be responsible enough to find his or her own accommodations...but wait I forgot, these guys would have a "doctor" kill any such baby that somehow managed to emerge alive.

Well, shucks, I was thinking I would read she simply snapped her fingers and there was a thermal explosion.

I was thinking it must be one of three things: she was either high on drugs, was seriously deluded, or an atheistic believer in the notion there is no god other than ourselves...no wait, I guess that is only two.

bookmark...

CS Lewis on such demented views of "freedom": "I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of Hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man 'wishes' to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free."

As someone considering using that screen shot on my fb page, I wanted to make sure it was completely accurate first. But I am having trouble confirming the party affiliation of Wade Michael Page, and have not tried to confirm the others yet.

Has somebody here confirmed all of these?

Maybe it is billions of years old. Quick measure the relative proportion of sister elements in the closest igneous rock layers. Be sure to pick the right kind of radiometric test for the age range you want.

Appreciate your scripture based rebuttal. Good job.

lol, meant Lance, DOH!

n + 1: Neil Armstrong
n + 2: Chris Christie

The author himself did not argue that FDR’s policies alone were sufficient to make the case that he was prejudiced against Jews. Rather the arguments he made rested heavily on some supposed private statements FDR made. As for myself, as I said before, I would fault FDR on being overtly prejudice if he really was so, but do not know if the author is being fair and accurate in his representation of FDR’s quotes.

If FDR’s response really was motivated by some overt prejudice against Jews, then that is what I would fault him for. But, I had not heard before that FDR had such a prejudice, and I wonder if the author is fair and accurate in his characterization of the private remarks which he uses to build his case. I am not ready to be convinced one way or another on this without more details.

Thus, the main assumption of the Global Warming junk scientists remains a false assumption, or to be charitable, a junk science speculation.

This I already agree with. AGW is no longer a scientific theory, its just false political dogma.

I think there are two known relationships between temperature change and CO2. The primary one is in the opposite cause-effect direction of the one causing the hysteria, i.e. colder ocean water absorbs more CO2 and warmer water releases more CO2.

People need to listen to Coast-To-Coast

When driving in the middle of the night, it can help keep people awake...hehehehe.

Obama’s daughters are NOT being targeted for anything outside of how much the Obama’s are spending tax payer money to spoil them. In contrast, the extensive criticisms of the Bush daughters were about their personnel characters. The hypocrisy is so absurd as to make one wonder about the mental competency of the left to operate as adults in a free society.

They should simply invalidate the interference of all federal courts on the issue, as its a state matter. Prop 8 is part of the Constitution of the State of California, and neither 9th circuit nor the Supreme Court nor any other federal court or agency has any business ruling on it.

lol

...but how does telling each other that, help us stop homosexual marriage and polygamy in America?

Well the first thing one ought do before advancing to activism, is to make sure what you believe is correct and ought be applied, and the second thing you should do is to make sure you know how to articulate it to others.

Now, if you have constructive suggestions for activism, I think they will be welcome, but that was not the subject of this particular discussion so far.

I am not understanding your question in the context of my post...could you clarify it a bit?

Islam, Mormonism, the church of the gay goat lovers, the church of atheism, Catholic, Episcopalian, any and all the same in equality yet with different ideas of what marriage is.

Marriage is a 6000+ year old institution that in all cultures and all peoples up to the present time has always either meant a union between one man and one woman, or between one man and several women in order to produce and raise children.

If some idiot comes up with a new religion that declares the value of pi to be 934.33, then they are simply wrong, even though they claim that they are religious.

No court has ever made any ruling remotely close to that, and since the first income tax authorized under the 16th amendment was progressive, it would be hard to argue that the original intent of the authors of that amendment wasn't to authorize progressive taxation.

Agreed. It would also be very hard to argue that the original intent of the author's of the 14th amendment was to declare that states must recognize same sex unions as marriage.

I hold that sexual orientation is one's own business, but marriage is between a man and a woman, with one historical variant being between a man and several women. That is simply the definition of what it is. That definition has no good reason to be changed, but it does have a bad one. In a free country nothing is stopping people from starting a cultural institution which honors or sanctifies same sex couples, but trying to simply declare that such institutions are marriages is like a small brewery selling its beer under the name Budweiser in order to make it more popular. I say the brewery should sell its beer under its own trademark and let its success or failure be determined by its quality.

wtf?

I'm one of those. From that perspective, the abuses of semantics and logic that go on in these debates is an abject failure of intellectual ethics and reason.

Well on issue of the cosmos it seems it has to be pretty old based on what is known in astrophysics, so I feel in only reasonable to think the universe is likely very old. My understanding is also that it is very big, is expanding very fast, and has expanded since its creation a very long time ago. However, as I understand it, it is not infinitely big...just very very very big. It has some fantastically large yet finite number of particles in it, and that is it. Thus it seems it must not be a closed system, but one that was created somehow a very long time ago. The source of its creation might be something that was not itself created...being self existant....or it might not be. While I have trouble envisioning that something can be self existant in such a way, I find the fact that there must be something that is self existant as inescapable. Thus if whatever created this universe is itself not self existant, there must be an earlier cause of that thing which is. Going back through an infinite chain of transient effects as Hume proposed seemed to me to be a possibile alternative to such a transcendent self existant cause for a while, but that was before I took the time to really run through the concept with mathematical rigor. Ultimately I find that naturalism simply can not be true on grounds put forward by the greater philosophical minds of the ages, and neither do I think it likely that the universe could be young...unless God made it to look young. Thus I feel compelled by the ability God gave me to reason that He indeed is absolutely for real, but that the universe is not all that young as a literal reading of the first Genesis narrative would indicate.

Thus I am in the same camp as you on cosmology.

As far as common origin is concerned, it seems plausible, and I used to think it very likely...but lately I have had that position shaken a bit. I am a layman though, and still learning and trying to form a better opinion on the matter--as a hobby from time to time, not really in a hurry.

As far as abiogenisis is concerned, it does not strike me as plausible.

er...too full of venom...I meant.

She was talking about 3 specific 911 widoes, who formed an anti-Bush protest group and went around trashing AmeriKKKa, much like Louie Farrakan.

Suppose the author is full of venom to make such a rational distinctions.

The articles quote of Coulter:

On the 9/11 widows: "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much."

On all the 9/11 widows? Or was there some context? what was the context?

No violation of marriage. No redefinition of marriage. No parody of marriage. Nothing to do with marriage. Just a two-person legally-recognized agreement. Am I wrong here?

I cannot speak for Catholic orthodoxy, however I do think you present an example of how a "civil union" might be consistant with Christianity. Also we can not be sure what the new pope had said exactly and the context. For example suppose some reporter asked him if it he would at least agree that civil unions recognized by the state would be more palitble to the church than demanding that the church perform gay weddings...and he said something like "Well yes, but..." and then the reporter said "Thank you sir that is all I need for my story".

Publicly he said homosexual marriage was of the devil Privately he said it’s okey dokey The government banished him

The article says he supported the idea of civil unions in private, not gay marriage.

Then I think the proper answer to him is to point that out, and leave it at that. He's presented a flawed argument that starts from an bad premise. Trying to engage his argument by adopting his premise isn't going to help one bit.

Hmmm, well there is more that needs to be said than pointing out his conflation of of ideas, but it might be a place to start. It is not as though the issue of naturalism vs super-naturalism is orthogonal to abiogenisis or common origin. All naturalist cosmologies pretty much have to adopt both, where young earth super-natural cosmologies must reject both. Only people who favor a super-natural cosmologies of an old universe can be approach them without some bias.

The entire debate appears to be an exercise in abusing and misrepresenting both theories as proxies over differences of opinion about something else.

Yeah, it would be nice if people would distinguish between naturalism, abiogensis, common origin on one hand, and young-earth creationism, creationism, and intelligent design on the other...and not conflate them so often.

But the kid in the article does seem to want to conflate everything into the good-progressive-smart-evolution-progress-science-naturalism bucket and the old-fashion-witch-burning-backward-flat-earth-creationist-dummy bucket.

There are plenty of counter parts on the other side of the debate as well. Sigh.

In my view, the scientific questions are not as important as the cosmology and theology, but I will agree that the distinctions should be made about which are meant when talking about them.

You don't get it. Scientists - scholars in general - take great delight in aggressively pointing the perceived shortcomings of colleagues. Remember, funding is limited, and few things give more satisfaction than sending some guy packing because of a flawed approach to some problem. Some people will nit-pick the shit out of you. The upside is, what goes around, comes around...

In such a nasty environment who is safeer than those who loyally back the industrial standard? Consider Michael Mann and his debunked hockey stick...he is still employed and a hero to the AGW crowd. Not because he does good science, but because he B.S's for the politically correct side. Look at those who hid evidence and intimidated publishers in the AGW industry. Is it so different than the Geocentrists who persecuted Galeleo? The term "sophist" has become derogatory term for good reason, while the term "scholar" still holds honor. Scholarly industries have always been in danger of falling into that trap.

You may hate the fact. You may deny the fact. But those outside the industry can sometimes see more clearly than those in it. I don't say it to sound smarter or win an argument, I say it because it is blatantly obvious to those who have looked at the evolution industry from the outside--such as the much despised Ben Stein's documentary demonstrated, those who tow the line are safe. Those who dare to question the line are taken down not because of flaws...but because they are a threat.

But in a peer review environment, you don’t get to choose.

Exactly! The protected paradigm wins!!!!! Yay!!! Bowling balls obey commands and that is all there is to it!

I would argue that it it the right test, and falsifies your hypothesis. In the case of dating it is important to use a metric that has value. For example, if I using a test that provides a value that I know is accurate to within 10 million years, it provides a useful result if the object I'm dating is a billion year old (no Helen Thomas pictures, please); if the tested object is a year old, then the test doesn't tell me much at all.

Well that is what I am doing with my bowling ball. Of course bowling balls obey commands, so I would never use a test that would show otherwise. Likewise, of course the dino bone is too old for C14, so using a C14 test is meaningless.

What you don't seem to understand is that bowling ball command theory is absolute fact. It can not be falsified, because tests that would falsify it are inappropriate.

Whoever controls the terms, controls the debate.

When the debate is dumbed down to sound bites this is true. When the discussion is thoughtful and interested in finding truth, the person making a point should try to define his terms enough for people to recognize what he is saying, but not be required to digress as a means of distracting from his point.

Rather if his point of view is wrong, counter arguments should give a valid reason, rather than try to wrestle with him semantically.

Where can be found the dictionary containing this definition?

Well the are philosophy of naturalism, and the theory of evolution are correlated rather than always concurrent...however the context of his post was the kid the article was about, who has made it clear that his version of evolution is of the dogmatic scientism kind which casually presumes abiogenesis and materialism as unjustified priori. Your nit is a distraction rather than a contribution to serious discussion.

The wind howls but does not speak.

I’m not in the position to evaluate, but those that are believe that result. The main point is that it is important to match the test to the situation.

Suppose I have a theory that bowling balls always do whatever people command them to do. To demonstrate my theory, I match the test of holding the bowling ball in front of me, telling it to fall, and then dropping it. My theory is then validated when the bowling ball falls. A skeptic proposes that I change the test to tell the bowling ball to hover in the air instead of fall. I laugh at the skeptic, and tell them they no nothing of the scientific method. That would be the wrong test for the situation, say I.