bascule

The operation of the climate system is chaotic and nonlinear. The Earth’s climate system has warmed, and human activities certainly have contributed, but the exact extent and the exact nature of the forcings (including "greenhouse gasses" such as CO2) by which we have affected the climate system is still a matter of serious scientific debate. I think it's safe to say that the effects of cigarette smoking as a climate forcing are negligable and make no statistically significant impact. So, to put it bluntly, no.

This story really touched a nerve with me. For some reason the administration seems very forthcoming to those who hold no official position, your Robert Blake type. Yet official inquiries into information are often flat out denied with no explanation. Secrets are needlessly kept from both the public and government officials, and the administration asks Congress to make decisions in ignorance. That's an absolutely abhorrent idea to me which seems to run directly counter to a free and open democratic process, and instead the information is kept within a small oligarchy who seems to think they should pull all the strings. So, think of this as a case instance of what I would consider a systemic problem: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4132728,00.html

Incorrect. Please see this thread for starters...

I'm sorry, I was trying to avoid a semantic conflict by using the phrase "military spending," but I see I let quite a few "defense spending"s slip through. Call this flawed logic if you wish, but the only conceivable reason I can see us spending as much on our military as the rest of the world combined is because we plan on being in a military conflict with the rest of the world combined. (Yes, obviously we're in a state of war while the rest of the world is not, but I hope you get my drift)

You conveniently glossed over my question: Are you directly challenging the notion that mankind be taxonomically classified as a descendant of the apes? Are we not Homo sapiens? If your answer is yes you will find your theory rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world's biologists. My answer to your question is dependent upon your answer to mine.

There's a few, but we just aren't a point where they're technologically feasible. (Plasma) Fusion will likely get us there one day. If not, self-replicating nanorobots that transform the entire surface of the moon into an enormous photovoltaic array combined with microwave transmitting arrays which beam the power back to Earth could provide a permanent solution. Now imagine what kind of high energy physics you could do if those self-replicating nanorobots could help you build a particle accelerator the circumference of the moon... But yeah, all a dream for now

This idea seems to clash tremendously with the idea of the biological evolution of humans through a (possibly divinely inspired) natural selection process. Are you directly challenging the notion that mankind be taxonomically classified as a descendant of the apes? Are we not Homo sapiens? I would see no scientific evidence contradicting (or supporting) the notion that a deity could leverage a degree of control of natural events in order to shape the course of evolution, which is how I always understood "Intelligent Design" was being advocated. But I don't see how you can throw away such a major part of the scientific theory and still expect it to be taken seriously (excuse me if I'm misinterpreting your theory) I don't think you can begin to reconcile the scientific model with a Biblical one unless you're willing to accept that the creation story in Genesis is at least allegorical... And that would seem a prudent thing to do, considering it's of unknown authorship and likely descended as an oral tradition for generations before being written down. Whatever divine influence there may have been would've been diluted through continuous retelling.

I just hope I never have to hear "It's got a HEMI!" again

I could see military as a percentage of GDP being an interesting statistic. According to: http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php Under Reagan, defense spending increased from 4.9 to 6.2%. (+1.3%) Under GHWB, defense spending decreased to 4.8% (-1.4%) Under Clinton, defense spending decreased to 3.0% (-1.8%) Under GWB (so far), defense spending increased to 3.9% (+0.9%) If we equate Bush's term length with Reagan's, then at this point defense spending under Reagan had increased to 5.9%, or +1.0% DISCLAIMER: This is not an attempt to blame these presidents for the figures associated with the time periods of their terms! Defense spending makes up less than 1% of the GDP of the next highest defense spender, China... we spend 4.25x as much as a percentage of GDP on defense as they do. (GDP data source)

But without the meme of science the people would've lead dramatically different, unscientific lives (or developed the meme of the scientific method for themselves)

Remember folks, it's "The Establishment Clause," not "seperation of Church and state." The latter will have the IDiots ^Fing through the Constitution going "Can you point out where the words 'seperation of church and state' appear in the Constitution?" They also like to pretend that the Constitution doesn't have provisions for this thing called "The Judicial Branch" and therefore the Constitution does not evolve with Supreme Court precedent, so don't bother quoting them Everson v. Ewing... Well crap, can't help myself...

The United States' military expendatures were between $455 and $462 billion in 2004. The lower estimate comes from a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the higher one comes from a newer NATO report. Here's some interesting number crunching on these figures: US defense spending comprises 47% of the world total, and is more than the military spending of the next 32 most powerful nations combined. The next highest nation was China with $67 billion. The US is #1 in military spending per capita at $1,540/person compared to the next highest nation, Israel, at $1,451/person. However, that $1,451/person figure includes $2.16 billion of military aid money the US gave to Israel, without which Israeli military spending per capita drops to $1,107/person. This figure is still higher than the #3 highest military spender per capita, Singapore, at $1,010/person. Military spending accounted for 1/5th of the US's $2.34 trillion budget in 2004. Does this strike anyone else as a tad excessive?

You can... ...teleport properties from particle to particle... ...but the information can only go c... ...and you destroy the state information of the original particle in the process of teleporting it...

She claims they broke into her computer to obtain the information, which would be patently illegal.

Can we add to this list: Six Feet Under Carnivale Deadwood Rome Weeds Trailer Park Boys Arrested Development ?

She alleges her own innocence and that what the RIAA is doing is tantamount to extortion. From the article:

I'm having trouble turning up a source for that quote on Google...

Yet another reason why http://news.google.com is better than TV... you can stop worrying about "agendas" whatever they may be and get the news you're interested in. And yes, obviously liberals dominate the teevee... if this bothers you, I'd fall back on my argument of "TV sucks... stop watching it"

I'll get back to you on that once I can find something... little busy at the moment From my understanding the fixation of speech occured virtually overnight on evolutionary timescales. You're trying to describe the general principle and overlooking that I'm talking about a case instance (did you bother reading the thread topic?). In this case instance, my conjecture is that the rapidity was brought about by the necessity of the trait. I could be wrong! I'll try to substantiate my claims. It also agrees with exactly what I'm saying, but I'm trying to draw attention to what I understand to be a rather short timescale which lucaspa's sources and analysis omitted completely. Again, it could be because I'm wrong. And honestly, is what I'm saying here that hard to comprehend? I feel like I have to keep reexplaining myself because people are misunderstanding me...

You are incorrectly interpreting my statements. That is exactly the point I was trying to make. With tribal warfare, in-group communication is key to survival. From my original post: Speech related traits became genetically fixed at an uncharacteristically fast rate. And from an evolutionary perspective this can be for one of two reasons: Superior speech was a trait that was needed for reproduction (i.e. sex linked) Superior speech was a trait that was needed for survival So, I merely stated my hypothesis for the latter... tribal warfare. I was wondering what evidence there was for either of the above explanations... Were the poor communicators shunned or otherwise sexually unattractive, and if so, wouldn't they simply reproduce among themselves? My conjecture is that in order for speech to become genetically fixed as fast as it did, the poor communicators had to somehow be wiped out by the superior communicators. I think tribal warfare certainly fits that conjecture well. But since I have no evidence of this for my own, I'm basically looking for anything which would support or refute this...

It's not so much that they're idiots as they are infected with a pathogenic meme. For some reason we fairly universally understand that certain pathogenic memes are always bad and declare them illegal (i.e. cults, pyramid schemes) but sadly religion is yet to receive this classification, probably because too many people are infected. And as Tom Tomorrow so brilliantly pointed out, one bad meme leads to another as the primary meme is endangered by a competing symbiotic meme. Science is a meme which has dramatically increased our standard of living and given rise to the "modern world," so most feel they owe science a debt of gratitude. However, there are others that see science as undermining the foundational ideas through which their meme spreads, so the pathogen with which they're infected collectively begins to generate new memes to prevent its own demise. I really wish we could decruft our society and scrape off the remains of millenia of bad thinking. Logic and the scientific method have given us an excellent foundation from which to perform sound thinking and reasoning, but sadly it hasn't yet allowed people to reveal to themselves that they're infected with pathogenic memes which have a detremental effect on society and human behavior. I'd say this is mostly because religion is a meme which has evolved to motivate people to continue its spread through fear of an inescapable and eternal reprisal (i.e. Pascal's Wager) for anyone who "disbelieves," making it not only hard to escape without enduring something of a mental breakdown, but also uses the altruistic tendancies of people "concerned about the souls of the unsaved" as motivation to continue to spread the meme. It's really sad that the meme exploits the good and noble desires of people to selfishly further its own existence, but that's selfish gene theory for you. Yes, religions are excellent memetic replicators; it's just sad they have so many deleterious effects (e.g. 9/11, The Inquisition, The Crusades, ID, etc.)

I think the point is that there are a high number of teleconnections which can shape apects of the evolutionary process and that individual natural selection events occuring in innumerable places worldwide were tending towards a sort of planetwide homeostasis. That's the best definition of the Gaia hypothesis that I can muster. Evidence of this? Ways to test it? I don't know of any offhand, and whatever sort of global homeostasis the system may or may not have been seeking seems to get disturbed pretty often (on a planetary timeline) by disasterous events like supervolcano eruptions... I definitely see this sort of thing in human memetic evolution. Doom and gloom scenarios are memes which seem to have no trouble spreading whatsoever. Humans are, like all animals, fundamentally anticipator/avoiders, and whenever some klaxonesque doomsayer screams end of the world and has some merit to his argument, people will generally take interest, and as more merit is discovered it garners more interest, and so the system will generally trend in directions designed to prevent the annihilation of the human species.

It really pisses me off what Iran and everyone helping them develop nuclear weapons has gotten away with. A.Q. Khan, "father of the Pakistani a-bomb" (and former head of the international nuclear black market), sold them (as well as North Korea and Libya, and possibly Al Qaeda) uranium ultracentrifuge technology which he essentially stole from European companies he was working at. Musharraf is so grateful to him for making Pakistan a nuclear power that he's essentially been pardoned, and any requests by the US or the IAEA to interview him regarding his wheelings and dealings in nuclear technology have been flat out denied by the Pakistani government.

A line item veto is simply irrelevant

Red herring? Why does he need one? And even so, a line item veto is a dangerous tool because it would allow the President to circumvent compromises made in Congress to get a bill to pass. The parts the President wants would go straight into law and the ones he doesn't would be rejected. That's waaay too much power... I don't know why you decided to pull that red herring out of your ass, but obviously what I was saying was if spending in a bill is fiscally irresponsible it should be vetoed and sent back to Congress with a "Send this back to me when you've cut $100 billion out of the spending" or so forth. It's the executive's role to manage the budget. They write it, they approve it, and they spend it...