Thomas Kirby

Large groups of people, even Americans, latch on to reasons to kill large numbers of humans or animals. They will go as far as killing anyone who tries to get them off it, and will definitely abuse anyone who tries to stop them. It is an amazing demonstration of the meaning of the word "dissociation" that anyone can for as much as five minutes hold on to the idea that serial killers are any different from this.

I don't think that the airfoil shape so much creates a partial vacuum above the wing as it smooths the flow of air over the wing. If the top were flat, there would be a partial vacuum and it would be turbulent. The bottom can get away with being flatter because it hits the air head-on but it also benefits from a curve to make airflow smoother. My opinion is that the wing lifts from the bottom like a kite. They actually are saying that anyway, because vacuum doesn't suck or pull. The other side of the wing is pushed.

No, it's not that different. They use the issue of pedophilia as an excuse. It's something that can be express or implied, something to push the undecided around, something just to get a case over the hump, just because something "might" affect a child somehow. Anything that might "sexualize" a child is bad, evil, deserving of nuclear devestation, so it's either pedophilia or like pedophilia, no excuses, no evasions, no rationalizations.

It's "just" one of those things they throw into the mix as a kicker. The first time someone suggested that a man should not have pornography at all because even if he kept it in a safe a kid could possibly catch a glimpse of it, that man should have slapped the speaker's teeth down the hallway. I'm talking about the idea that anyone who thinks that children should have access to information about sex might be a pedophile. I'm also talking about the idea that anyone who would even make it physically possible in any way for a teenager to access such information, he might be a pedophile. Of course I am also talking about anyone using the excuse that explicit literature or films might somehow encourage pedophilia.

I believe that I said that pedophilia is used as an excuse for locking them up. That does not mean that they were locked up on charges of pedophilia. In this case it means that pedophilia is one of the things that was used as an excuse to pass laws against pornography that involves consenting adults. It is also used as an excuse to convict when we know very well that such laws violate human rights.

They always use the excuse that pornography is allegedly harmful to children.

What, you think that what the government did to keep hemp off of American farms is some kind of secret?

There is a rhetorical question that one guy on an informercial used to ask, to give his real-estate scam an appearance of legitimacy: How many properties can you afford to buy when you have a negative cash flow? How many properties can you afford to buy when you have a positive cash flow? The prohibition of marijuana generates a very heavy positive cash flow for the U.S. government. They just make the taxpayers pay it. It also generates a very heavy positive cash flow for the oil industry and the pharmaceutical industry. Now where is your theory that this is too expensive?

All of these issues need to be considered, Dak.

Using the issue of pedophilia for anything else except concern for the children makes it a dominance issue. It is no longer concern for the children. I don't think a lot of the people who make political capital out of this issue care about the children at all, not in any way that is healthy.

Locking up pedophiles may or may not be a conspiracy in itself. Whether or not this is true, it is a criminal conspiracy to use the issue of pedophilia as an excuse to lock up consenting adults for engaging in adult activities such as exchanging photographs of adults having sex.

This conspiracy gains force by using our own traumas against us. Beating a child causes lasting emotional trauma. A lot of us, I think almost all of us have a form of post-traumatic stress from physical and emotional abuse. One of the nastiest features of post-traumatic stress disorder is having to relive the trauma over and over again. This isn't good for the rational thought processes. Reliving the trauma over and over again weakens people, makes them less able to process information well, and compromises the quality of their lives. It leaves them very susceptible to any conman who can offer them anything that can make them feel better. They become a really good market for drugs and religion. It also feels better to be able to put the blame for this on anyone or anything that is available.

We suffer an extra penalty because the same system that makes us relive past trauma also makes us live out future possible trauma over and over again, as I mentioned earlier. Nothing can be just exactly what it is. Someone copping a feel is as good as someone knocking us down, raping us in horrible ways, then cutting and burning us and burying us alive in a shallow grave. Then we live that trauma a thousand times before it ever happens. It never happens to most of us. It doesn't have to. We already suffer for it.

At least the people who sell us drugs just sell us a packet of a substance. The people who sell us religion or psychobabble sell us a mind job. Whatever it is that they are on about, and they usually are on about sex, they will turn us on to that. If we hate our sexuality enough, the story goes, we will gain a measure of spiritual elevation or mental competence or social propriety that will help us with our problems. Even if we don't remember an actual act of sex, someone ****ed us, *****ed us, or some sexual metaphor applies, so we definitely got a ******ing, so it's about sex when someone sadistically paddled us for as long as they were physically able every chance they got or tore up our lives every chance they got. The reason society sets us up for the beatings is to make us susceptible to these kinds of manipulations. Also, after all, if someone hadn't had sex, we wouldn't be in this mess, would we? Then the people who manipulate us have us blame sex and forget about the beatings, the "non-sexual" emotional abuse, and everything else that is not sex. Those of us who weren't forced to have sex with our parents, a neighbor, a relative, a complete stranger, or any adult have to look at our own generative organs for the source of the problem. They are somehow "just wrong." If someone didn't do us, we did ourselves, didn't we? We don't know how or why and wouldn't have done it on purpose, but by God we did it and no one else. Anything in God's creation that put the sexual impulse into us, and the standard time that this happens is around the age of 13, although some research shows much earlier, is criminally suspect, destructive, only good for hanging, burning, vivisecting, and hurting really, really badly.

Then they offer us political posturing and non-solutions like locking people out of hurricane shelters.

This isn't any example of intelligent design. It is just the low cunning and brutality of the school bully, the mind-numbing continual abuse and manipulation.

About 93 million miles in an AU.

I've got WAY too much background to bring in for the ideas that I want to share. There are a lot of essays and books that need to be written.

How do we know that it isn't a sexual preference? Just because we don't want it to be doesn't make it so. Besides, I just said that I thought it was a mental illness. I can't explain why I think so in a thirty second sound bite, especially when my views diverge from the popular views. You got the concise form, and if anything, it was way too concise. There is only so much information that can be packed into less than a thousand words without losing definition.

Just because something is not OK doesn't mean that it's the end of the world either. Were it the end of the world, my world would have ended a long time ago. Perhaps humanity needs to start with understanding how to tell the end of the world from other disasters.

For what it's worth, even if "pedophilia" is nasty, and indeed I have to agree with that, I don't consider it to be a high level threat against children. When we focus on it and make it a political football, we forget all of the other bad things we do to children. We also forget that we manufacture a much more damaging and painful future for them as adults. In my book being a child is pretty pointless if you cannot grow up to be some kind of functional adult. The perpetual child is the one who gets addicted to alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. He is the one who is working fast food at the age of 45. He is the one who gambles away all the money he has and borrows more. He is the one who was literally told by his mother that the reason she beat him up over questions of sex was because she didn't want him to grow up and become like his father or his stepfather.

We already have a situation in which every sexual choice is politically tainted by perceptions of connections with pedophilia. This is just one more way to make people think of any sex as "potentially" harmful or even deadly. It is part of the program to make us think of and fear a painful death when we have sex. As if nature even offered us another alternative unless we legalize voluntary euthanasia. Somehow we even get so messed up in our heads that we think we are dealing with this problem by acting it out in our minds. We die thousands of painful deaths of all sorts of diseases, radiation poisoning, gunshot, automobile accidents, and sometimes even being split in half from behind by something that I don't even want to talk about. Like it isn't bad enough that we will have to experience it once at the end of our lives? Our imaginations are quite powerful. Most of us are able to experience more pain from our imagined painful demise than we will experience when it actually happens. Some of us, don't ask me how I know, even experienced it physically over and over again from simple beatings, prolonged well past the point that hyperventilation precluded any form of coherent brain function.

Of course it does seem to a lot of people as if it is best to deal with any big problem this way. Turn our minds inside out, or someone else's mind inside out, and flay every exposed mental progress until it bleeds or is visibly spitting sparks. Punish without mercy anyone who resists this practice, especially ourselves. If we see positive results, give the punishment and pain the credit. If we see negative results, they are the fault of the bad person who hasn't had enough punishment yet.

Hey, to a lot of people all this stuff seems rational. It seems as rational as forcing people through an artificially prolonged childhood and then hoping that we will have more rational and emotionally stable adults as a result. It is as rational as believing that forcing people to lock up all expressions of emotion is beneficial to them and to society. Sexual feelings are the most powerful. They would have to be to make a woman want someone who smokes, drinks, abuses children, and treats her like dirt. Beating those feelings down beats all emotion down. It also creates an area of confinement where anger builds and burns. Unless someone can convince me that there is another way to accomplish this, I would have to say that this is what inspires a mother to beat her children and injure or kill them.

I don't mind ads that can be ignored. I hate adds that flash, beep, make annoying buzzing sounds, talk to me, or play loud music. Some of these screw up other things that I am doing on this computer because while this computer is very functional, it isn't top of the line and is not highly tolerant of concurrent uses of video and sound codecs or multiple Java windows.

1400 watts per square meter adds up pretty fast. The energy it takes to move materials decreases tremendously if your pipeline is a few years long instead of a few hours long.

Marijuana produces a lot of oil that is usable as diesel fuel. Any farmer anywhere can manufacture their own fuel using very simple equipment. Squeeze the seeds and filter out the solids. That is why the drug-like effects of marijuana are used as an excuse to ban it as a dangerous drug. Oil industry tycoons would absolutely hate to have to work for a living.

All I want from marijuna is its industrial uses. I haven't been able to stand being intoxicated by anything in twenty years anyway. The idea definitely appeals to me that if I had an acreage, I could grow this stuff, harvest the seeds, and use the oil to power my pickup truck, and for home heating in the winter.

Examining the reasons why marijuana is banned and why it is beneficial leads us off topic. Another benefit that I want from the oil, which is not intoxicating, is that it helps the arteries clean themselves. Any light vegetable oil does, but this is the oil that is the best at it. If it worked as well as Jack Herer claimed, it would reduce the income of the medical-industrial complex by billions. Not only would a lot fewer people be treated for heart attacks and strokes, they would also not have to use so many painkillers, beta blockers (mega expensive), or numerous other drugs and treatments that they are driven to by fear of pain and death. Heart attacks are hugely profitable for hospitals and they keep jacking up the price, but all of the accessories to cardiovascular disease are the real money machine.

Why even allow these people to dictate to us which substances we can use, anyway? It's not like they are anything but bullies, and don't let me rave on about that in this thread. Even if they think that I can't make my own decisions, they're not so good at it either, so they might as well leave me alone to go to hell in my own way. I feel like I gain a good measure of physical health by staying away from doctors, a good measure of mental health by staying away from shrinks, and a good measure of spiritual health by staying away from church.

No matter what hosting plan you have, you still need advertising to get people to find the site. You either buy adertising space or you get people to talk about it, or both. There are some things that people can't help talking about. Find one of those and you're in luck.

It seems like, given the vast internal surface area of a dyson sphere, even if the technology did exist to supply artificial gravity to the entire inner surface it would probably take a significant amount of the power generated by the star just to maintain it. If this were the case it would make the entire process pretty pointless, since the only real reason to build a dyson sphere in the first place is to harness the energy of the star within it - there are far easier ways to just get more living space.

When you are talking about millions of millions of square miles of living space, it could become very cost effective if someone could even figure out where to buy the stuff. Artificial gravity would simply be one of the things that we harnessed the power of the star for.

The reason to spin the sphere or ring is to generate artificial gravity. This is so old that it's new again. The enthusiasm for Jerry Pournelle's and Larry Niven's Ringworld stories apparently is well past its natural expiration date.

It was just an offhand thought. I'd just as soon they went back to freon and stopped having the problem, then worked on an insulator that didn't use it until the solved that problem. What about that R-134 stuff?

I don't think there's enough name-calling in this thread.

Sorry, I've already given it my best shot

The original proposal was to dedicate some web space to a list that is in fact name-calling.

i agree. as long as you are not attracted to children. children cannot make decisions for themselves. now, if we're talking about a TEENAGER who has consensual sex with an adult, that's one thing. i'm talking about pedophiles. the ones that rape little children. NO ONE has a right to rape ANYONE. no matter what their sexuality.

I think of pedophiles as mentally ill, not as criminals, and I also do not think that it is pedophilia to have sex with teenagers. I am being honest that sex with teenagers is distasteful to me.

Among other things, the following are inane: Jailing someone on worse than dubious evidence because he might have done something with a child. Jailing someone to punish him for harm that might exist but isn't proven to exist, in other words, enabling the prescription of severe punishments without requiring the prosecutor to prove that the defendant harmed anyone. Jailing someone for possession of pictures because it "creates a market." I also don't agree with jailing someone for meeting with a 14 year old who doesn't exist.

The inane list also includes defining acts as pedophilia that are performed with post-pubescent humans, and defining as child pornography pictures of people who look like adults, who also are not children but are teenagers. It includes putting anyone in the same broad category, that of "sex offender" who didn't even have sex with anyone who was underage. Why should I care or even want to know if someone had sex that was "against nature"? In some states this still lumps oral sex and sodomy between consenting adults with bestiality. Why should any of these people be required to register with the state when they move around and be forced to stay away from children? This is what I mean by using the issue of pedophilia to rope in anyone they can think of and make them targets of abuse. We don't even receive the courtesy that those who didn't do things to children would not suffer punishment as if they did.

Beauty, what I think is just as bad is to force anyone to hate their own sexuality, to punish them for sexuality, to put them down for their honest feelings, to label them as some kind of evil beings for their feelings.

I am painfully aware that the phrase is "cock of the walk." "Caulk of the walk" was a deliberate malapropism. It was a put-down of anyone who thinks of himself as "cock of the walk."

The crack about whether I have access to automatic weapons is revealing about your character. Oh yes, anyone who expresses the fact that he is tired of the BS he is exposed to is automatically going to shoot up a fast food joint. How about the idea that I feel that I have the right to express my frustration with the BS and your crack about automatic weapons is aimed at suppressing the expression of that right? It's especially ironic to read this coming from someone who so ardently supports a war by the US against a very small country. Supporting a war is supporting shooting a number of strangers including noncombatants.

You haven't defeated me in logical debate. You haven't tried logical debate.

I wouldn't be afraid of finding bullies everywhere if there weren't so many everywhere. I'm sorry that you find it necessary to put me down for that. If you didn't, I would think more of your intelligence and character. Also, not very many people are fooled by your fake compassion which you use to be catty. You have just insulted the intelligence of most of the audience.

Pangloss: Your arguments that you are fair and balanced here would carry a lot more weight it you did not dismiss Michael Moore as an extremist nutcase while I perceive him as someone who actually dug up the truth to put in his film. One person will say "These are verifiable facts. Let's go with them no matter where they take us." Another person will say that they aren't facts if they lead us where we don't want to go. I perceive you as the latter type. I also think you've called Cindy Sheehan a liar when you don't know if she lied or not.

You seem to excuse US actions as necessary when if other people did them you would condemn them as war crimes. I think that the basis for your counterarguments is that what is good for the U.S. is good, period.

This is just one more very similar sort of irritant to the whole pile of "this war is good no matter how stupid the reasons why it is good" irritants. I cannot penetrate the hypocrisy or the dissociation anywhere, or the barriers of violence and verbal abuse. The last thing that my fellow Americans want is to be reminded that an unimpaired conscience would not have allowed us to invade Iraq in the first place. Among the people I have seen supporting the war, I have not seen any who didn't find some way to give up some element of their personal integrity to enable that support.

With you, any person who opposes the war in Iraq is automatically inferior, suspect, and probably talks during the movies.

And the next time you want to accuse me of racism, why don't you do the audience the favor of finding something that actually indicates this? If you want to believe that you are accused of racism, find something where I said you and not these rednecks whose puerile antics I have to try to survive? You irritate me by supporting the war the way you do, this is true. I do not think that your methods are much superior to those of the racist rednecks, or even much less overbearing. At least you are not using a drill sergeant voice to conduct ordinary business, physically getting in my face acting like you are the caulk of the walk, physically present to shove me out of your way because I'm a "*****" and you're a "big man" because you "served." Not that I'm all that sure that you wouldn't.

It does happen that I believe that some of the worst consequences of a war like this are what it does to a society. A substantial increase in overbearing idiots who will grow up to be cops who shoot innocent people, among other bad things, is not good for society. Neither is a substantial increase in people who think that they are superior to others and have the right to bully them. Even more not so is an increase in the acceptance of bullying. That's one thing I see war as, a training ground for bullies to prepare them to play with the big boys.

As long as you are able to set the Internet aside when you want to have a life, you are OK. It is a necessary tool which makes it harder to get rid of.

One thing that makes it more credible is the fact that they reference organizations that don't like it when their names are taken in vain. Another is that you can google "Fireproof 88" and find agency reports about the approved uses of this material and the tests that it has passed. One of the agency reports I found is dated 1997.