Thomas Kirby

Succinct: People who hate "child molesters" hate them for the wrong reasons. These reasons include bigotry, paranoia, their own self-hatred, hatred of the developing sexuality of their children, and love of violence. They try to use the right reasons to excuse this hatred, but not well enough to really fool anyone except themselves. They love to go "over the top" with this hatred to excuse some not very selective violence. They preserve the hatred by pushing away any rational discussion of the actual issues. They mistake this hatred for proper intellectual functioning. They bully people and mistake that for "civilized" behavior. They also very often cause much more damage than does the usual run of sexual molestation. They exacerbate what little damage the "molestation" does. I take it that you believe that these rock-throwing sessions that you approve of are better? (Last Edit) It is almost sickening to me to realize that the advocates of sex with children sound so much more rational than their opponents. The opponents seem to have come into their existence by a process of replacing rational and caring people with irrational, bullying people. I can tell this by the way they act and talk. It's not some subtle mind-reading thing. It is as blatant as an elephant dump on the church steps.

Bettina, I still think you're a lot more normal than your critics, if you don't mind my saying.

Senexa, I just wanted to say thank you. I think that I will go and get some peanut butter tonight or tomorrow. Seriously.

That I have to agree with. When the attitudes go sub rosa, they are often more intractable and harder to deal with, too.

I can either spend fifteen minutes making sarcastic remarks or I can spend many unpaid hours attempting to unravel the bad logic and irrational thinking in that essay. This way I got to say what I wanted to say in less time than it takes to boil a pot of rice, and with a lot less stress. When I was a kid I once interrupted a rock-throwing. My "friends" taught me some harsh lessons about that. That is why I make a point of interrupting rock-throwings.

Oh, I'm convinced. These things are utterly convincing: Criticisms backed by bigotry and ignorance. Violence against anyone who holds an opposing opinion. Violence against the "victims" used to make them "fess up." The generally violent and bigoted nature of so many "adults." Death threats and pointing of guns are really, really convincing. The people who do that know so very much about sexuality and the human mind. Those guns and knives and freely swinging fists show that they must be professional thinkers. No, sex is really bad for anyone who is under the age of 21. Much better is living under the iron control of humanoids who like to play games to get to deploy violence and poisonous chemicals against children. I never knew how good I had it! A lover's kiss held no joy that could compare to that of walking on eggshells around an angry alcoholic or around an even more violent co-dependent. How could I ever have chafed against anyone who thought it was right to seriously injure someone over a difference of opinion? Sex was a horrid way to escape from such a wonderful life, especially since I was usually alone when I used that escape, me and a few pictures. It wasn't people beating me that made me feel bad. It was those god-awful pictures. Women with their clothes off! Only faggots would get off on those! God made me badly or I would not have wanted to look. Drugs and beatings were the only way to correct my very obvious psychosis. How could I have been so blind? The unnatural hormone testosterone clouded my vision. I was testosterone-poisoned, estrogen-deprived, and mentally twisted. I used to get angry at being beaten, instead of righteously angry against the demons of sex and vaginas and photography and rational thought. Now I'm better, I think. At least I'm beginning to hate all of those, especially rational thought. As an adult I'm even allowed to hate Satan instead of myself because I can tell the difference. Sum dey I wil becum as sain and rashunul and as good a spieler as they r.

There's the pot calling the kettle black.

A lot of women simply aren't taught the sciences, which IQ tests favor.

Pangloss, I'm pretty sure that this time the evidence for both conspiracy and competency is going to overwhelm even your rhetoric, your spin, and your ability to label people as liberals. A lot of the country already knew better than all this, considering that about ten percent of the population has experienced hurricanes repeatedly. A lot of people know that shouting orders at people does not give them cash for gasoline to get out of the county or a reliable car. What no one knew was that the government would twiddle its collective thumbs for so long. We didn't know that the government, even a Bush government, would even think to turn back humanitarian aid and supplies, literally barricading roads to prevent needed aid from coming in. Your pants are around your ankles this time, Pangloss. All you can do is pull them up and fasten your belt with as much dignity as you can muster. That's not much, but it's all you've got.

Well, there are several marks of a hoax on that page, like the golden Oscar as one of the awards, but this kind of hoax is going to make people feel really used. Most likely the "horrible photoshop" is because the maker of this hoax actually made up paper labels and cut them by hand.

We now have a laptop that will be comfortable working with the entire human genome at once.

You're right, Bettina. Also, this thread isn't about me. I just thought it could help a lot of people.

The scorn is for people who have made space travel the way it is now. The last shuttle disaster occured more than 35 years after the first moon landing. You think it was unavoidable for all those reasons which add up to lack of preparedness. You are the one who used "institutional blindness" as an excuse. What was it that you were thinking could have been learned that would have prevented the disaster if someone had made the right slide show? And what is missing in our technology if the shuttle can't match orbits with the space station when it needs to? How it can be excusable to not be prepared for obvious problems is beyond me. "Institutional blindness" is another word for incompetence. So is "we just didn't bring the right equipment." It's a very basic kind of incompetence.

Yes, of course, "institutional blindness" is a much better excuse. I'm all better now.

No one's fault but Mother Nature's, except that we know that these storms happen once in a while and she gave us fifty years to prepare.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert "Static" means pretty much the same thing as "stationary." Gravity doesn't have to move to attract energy or matter. It changes the way that other things move. Changes in gravity move at the speed of light, at least according to current theory, so gravity waves propagate at the speed of light. A gravity wave is a sort of wave that is generated when a mass moves. It takes a very large mass moving suddenly to create a gravity waves that can be detected. This is because gravity is an extremely weak force at any great distance. If a large mass suddenly appeared out of nowhere, its gravity would propagate at the speed of light. We are talking about a hypothetical, non-real-world situation. Eight minutes later its gravitation would be felt as far away from the sun, and so on. Most masses have existed, even if not all in the same place, for billions of years, so their influence is felt for billions of light years, although that influence is extremely minute. Anywhere within that distance, that influence is already there.

I object to moving this thread to a ghetto where it will be labelled, in the minds of many, as nonsense. It has not degenerated into endless arguments about whether empathy is due to an actual sharing of energy or some sort of pheremone/biological/imaginary phenomenon. There is a real psychological phenomenon here that is worth discussion. Its implications are important. My own life has been plagued with people who have misused my empathic abilities. They have pulled something from me by getting me into emotional situations then torturing me. This may even be called a sort of "negative empathy." They get pleasure from someone else's pain. It's like a drug. Some call it a form of vampirism. They achieve this by chucking someone's conscious mental processes down an emotional black hole, the kind that Bettina was talking about. Maybe all they get is that they get off on it, but it works pretty much the same. One goes up, one goes down. A lot of us who suffer from this are willing to do anything to ease the pain. People literally think that there is something wrong with me because I recognize that people use this to take advantage of me, and I tell them what I think of it. They go so far as to accuse me of being criminally insane, a liar, paranoid, or they use more colloquial terms that everyone is familiar with. These are universally the people who have been causing me problems. Everyone here may have noticed that I have been treading very lightly here because I don't want to swamp this thread with that noise. This thread is worthwhile and it's going somewhere. For the most part it does better without my help.

Gravitation is regarded as a static state of a given region of space. It is a change in that state caused by the motion of matter that travels at the speed of light.

If you ever decide that you need to separate tin and lead, you might look at some kind of electrolytic method with a precise voltage control and tin chloride for the electrolyte. There is more to it than that, but that might some time be worth doing and enjoyable. I never had a chance to weigh in, but I am completely against the lead-free circuit board movement. Lead-free for water pipes I am all for, but until the time that we have lead-free alloys that are at least as sturdy as the original solder, we should use the old stuff. That's another issue, I suppose.

Solder is anywhere from 50 to 63 percent lead. Even 99 percent pure is better than 37 percent. That white gel thing actually sounds like a chance at getting pure tin out of the mix if it comes out clean. Won't it dissolve in hydrochloric acid? That thirty grams of tin for $5.99 sounds like a bargain for 99.99 percent pure.

Most of Meade's 6 inch and larger telescopes are under a thousand dollars: Meade

Have you looked for pieces at a local hobby shop? Some arts and crafts and hobby supply shops in the US sell small sheets of tin. I realize that you are in the UK, but I will bet that you can find some there.

People who are in authority often have the tendency to keep everyone underneath them operating at a lower mental level than they do. What is the use in hiring aeronautic experts if you intend to overrule their advice that no vehicle can safely re-enter the atmosphere with a hole in the leading edge of a wing? Or if you intend to land the damn thing without examining the wing, as if this were some kind of intelligent thing to do, when a huge chunk of foam hit it at 500 mph? Impact like that is like a cannonball, and it doesn't take a fancy degree to know that, or it shouldn't. The shuttle was destroyed by sheer stupidity. It is almost like throwing that stupidity in our faces, too, telling us that they had video of that piece of foam hitting the wing, then telling us that they decided to take that chance.

People who can make clear statements can do so even with a ballpoint pen. Those who can't have to compensate for their inadequacies. Don't let it happen to you, Pangloss.