This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy-world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed — as one Republican congressman put it — that it was “the greatest hoax in human history”, and all the world’s climatologists were “liars”. The American media then presents itself as an umpire between “the rival sides”, as if they both had evidence behind them.
But, remember, protesting against an unjust war that has cost $3 Trillion and tens of thousands of lives is Un-American, left-wing, liberal nutbaggery…
…and protesting against giving poor people the right to basic healthcare and the regular working American the OPTION of having said healthcare is your patriotic, Christian duty! (Jesus would never have just GIVEN AWAY is magical healing powers. look it up! Its in da Bible!)
Seriously: if anyone out there actually has a GOOD, TRUE reason why the public option healthcare (or healthcare reform in general) is bad, i’d sure like to hear it. ALL of the objections i’ve heard so far have been based on lies, propaganda and ignorance (sorta like all of the defenses of religion i’ve ever heard, come to think of it…).
What truly strikes me funny are things like old people railing against government run healthcare… as they use Medicare.
Or, this gem from Craig T. Nelson and Glenn “Crazy Eyes” Beck. yes, he actually says, with a straight face, “I’ve been on welfare and food stamps…did anyone help me out? No. They gave me hope, they gave me encouragement and they gave me a vision.” … and free money from the tax payers, by way of the government (welfare) and free food, paid for by taxpayers (food stamps). But no.. no one helped you out, man. You did it on your own.
THIS is the manifestation of delusion, ignorance and Double-Think that is required to be a ‘conservative’ in America today. This level of ..insanity? dishonesty?… has reached farcical levels. Poe’s Law has become strong enough to bend the fabric of our civilization… When satire is indistinguishable from reality, where do you go from there? What can you do? There is no reason and no sense to what is going on any more.
Dear fat, sloppy-drunk, bug-eyed blond at the bar,
Thank you for the compliments on my appearance. Yes, I do actually kinda realize that i’m more attractive than the other scuzzy barfly dudes in here. No, i will not be calling you. I took your offered phone number only to be polite. I’ve already deleted it out of my phone. I’m at this bar, on a Monday night, not to drink and cruise for cheap sex (as is customary, i understand), but to support a friend having a very bad day. Sorry.
SO… im thinking about getting a new car. I love my 3000GT, i do, but its to the point where fixing everything that needs to be fixed on it would cost more than the car is worth. If money were no object, i’d rather just fix it up and keep it (it IS my dream car, after all), but i need something reliable and more comfortable.
I know that i want a sporty coupe of some kind, preferably V6, but a turbo 4 cyl would work. No FiTs or Yaris’ or Scion Xc or Xb. I AM a heterosexual male.
Here are my current hopefuls:
The Hyundai Tiburon. Its smallish, sharp looking, modern and certianly affordable. Getting the GT model gets me a manual V6 and not much tacked on to the price.
Next, we have another Hyundai, the Genesis Coupe. A bit more robust (and pricier) than the Tiburon, but its also MORE car. I actually sat in one on the lot, and really liked how it felt.
The Scion tC is also in the range and style that im looking for. This car is readily available, affordable and standard. Nothing very exciting about this car, honestly. I sat in one on the lot and felt a little ‘cheap’ and ‘plastic-y’ to me. A solid choice, but it lacks the pizazz and uniqueness that im also looking for. Click for Pic
Others I’m considering:
The Mazda3
Its a sedan, and therefore much less appealing to me, especially considering its a 4 cyl.
The Dodge Challanger. Im sorry, but this car is fucking sweet. it also starts at $22,000. My only real issue with it? Its Automatic transmission ONLY, until you get to the very expensive SRT8 model, and even then it costs MORE to have a manual put in.
Mitsubishi Lancer… Yes, its 4 door, but it that Rally Sport kind of car i like so much. plus, affordable.
So, i hope i’v made clear what sort of car im looking for. one really hasnt jumped out at me as being ‘the one’ just yet. my search for a new coupe continues.
so… HOW far away are we, really, from having androids?
The more and more i look, i see that all of the different components (locomotion, manual dexterity, face recognition, mapping, visual, facial and verbal communication and even life-like skin and reactions, both physical and ‘psychological’) are advancing rapidly; all we need is for someone to find a way to fit them all together in a cohesive, holistic whole. If we have a robot that has a realistic and expressive face, can speak to us like a person and react to our words and facial expressions, can walk, run and move about like a human, can manipulate everyday objects with the same, if not greater, manual dexterity than us and have the social heuristics, conversation trees and vast stores of knowledge (Wolfram/Wiki), what else is left? Besides some mechanical limitations such as weight, power source, machine-noise and pure computing power to run and correlate all of the sub-systems, how far away are we REALLY from having humanoid robots, androids, in our daily lives?
It’s not so much, I guess, the visage of obese, over-fifty, white men angrily wrecking even the tattered remnants of the democratic process in this country that is most disturbing. We’ve seen that before.
I think it’s the willful ignorance translated into incoherent, and in fact ironically self-defeating, rage that I find most discouraging. Can we really live in a country populated by so many fools, people who can so readily, proudly and belligerently be made into tools of their own destruction? Can the greatest political, economic, cultural and military power on the world’s stage possibly be so incredibly backward at its core?
Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana.
As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all the other monkeys with cold water. After a while another monkey makes the attempt with same result, all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put the cold water away. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.
Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.
After replacing all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not?
Because as far as they know that is the way it has always been done around here.
Im more than a little transcendentally connected to the FFRF; my mother went to highschool with one of its founders and its homebase is not far from my family’s home town of Talladega (pronounced “talluh-digga” by its natives).
As i read the article, a smirk crossed my face as i got to this bit:
On June 25th, the FFRF’s first Alabama billboard – “Imagine No Religion” with a stained-glass border – appeared on Interstate 20 between Birmingham and Talladega, facing west. It would greet many of the people coming to Lake Hypatia. The first advertising company the FFRF hired backed out, but they found another.
“heh”, i thought, “i bet my ignorant, racist, bible-thumping brethren have seen that billboard!”
How right i was…
A letter to the editor in the Talladega paper, The Daily Home, indicated that the authors, Opal and Preston Stone, were offended by the sign, by a story about the sign, and by “self-called ‘Free Thinkers.’” “We, personally, would like to be FREE from those who have done all that they can do to suppress and denigrate our right to look forward to meeting our maker, when he is ready to call us home.”
My grandmother, who used to be a manager of the Daily Home, decided to voice her opposition to sanity, just as she has done so before, in the comments of my own blog. She learned that i was an atheist from reading my blog… and then decided to troll, threaten and flame me. here. and here. (she’s ‘cricket’… my supposed conscience)
This is leaving out the half a dozen or so e-mails that she sent me telling me how mean, arrogant, hateful and wrong a person i am for not believing as she does.
This sort of thing is exactly why i do not have anything to do with my mother’s side of the family.
The funny thing to me, is, my mother (her daughter) is no christian herself… she read the Bible when i was a young teen and she quickly decided that such an awful, murdering, misogynistic entity such as Yahweh could not be an ‘all-loving’, all-powerful deity and CERTAINLY wasn’t one she would want to worship. Even she saw through the gaping holes in the Bible and declared it “a desert cult that somehow grew out of control”.
Here is a beautifully succinct version of my issue with the Adam and Eve myth..
Before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve either knew that disobeying God was evil or they didn’t.
If they didn’t, then they can’t be blamed for disobeying him.
If they did, then they already possessed the knowledge that God had forbidden.
Either way, God could not justly banish them from Eden.
Once the silliness of “Original Sin” is shown to be utterly untenable and self-refuting, thus the need for Jesus and his ‘sacrifice’ becomes meaningless and unnecessary, even in the context of the very same mythos.
Epicycles, basically, are little orbits made by objects in a larger orbit, as theorized by Ptolemy.
With enough epicycles, not only can the basic, yet still complex, orbits of the planets be explained (however incorrectly), extremely complex patterns can arise.
Apparently, Homer and Ptolemy had more in common than we thought.
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