bascule

I was referring to the factcheck.org article (as I still have a glimmer of respect for factcheck.org), not the neocon drivel you posted. Please see the context of what you were quoting. I'd rather not. Have fun believing what you do, which is apparently that this guy (and Bush) are telling the truth and that everyone else is lying...

I hit ^F, looked for "Niger" or "Africa," and found nothing. That was a lie. Tenet took the blame for it. I guess that's why they're ignoring it now. However, Joseph Wilson reported directly to the State Department, with some pretty damning evidence that the British documents were forgeries. The fact that the CIA, State Department, and Department of Defense all had information discrediting the Nigerian yellowcake and the fact that this still wound up in the President's State of Union Address means either the administration was grossly incompetent or they lied...

That's some mighty shady politicking... http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/politics/18cnd-mili.html?hp&ex=1132376400&en=521ea30b567c07c3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Oh god, I didn't see this buried before in that enormous pile of BULLSHIT. Why are people so obsessed with finding some way to demonstrate that consciousness is somehow non-deterministic, as if "random" behavior would somehow allow for free will when deterministic behavior does not. I think there's this sort of desperation to find a quantum mechanical link to the operation of consciousness because people think that if there were then you have a doorway to some sort of Absolute Metaphysical Free Will (i.e. a soul) Keep looking folks; you aren't going to find it. In the end you'll have to abandon your foolish Cartesian Dualism and accept that consciousness is an innately materialistic process.

http://tolweb.org has a pretty extensive listing...

http://www.methuselahmouse.org/ They're offering $3,031,600 (collected so far) to the first group who can create an immortal mouse.

I hope that the Semantic Web, in conjunction with things like Semantic MediaWiki, will let that "single place" become highly distributed yet still let you seamlessly access information as if it were part of a single, enormous archive. The Semantic Web is trying to solve a problem our own brains have as far as distributing information among specialists (and thus letting specialists collaborate on problems which impinge upon multiple different specialist disciplines), and that is representing all phenomenological constructions in a way that they all interconnect and can be shared equally among all specialists and used in the formulation of higher level constructions.

Good show. They're working on fixing the problems. MediaWiki (the software underlying WikiPedia) is evolving all the time.

The second diagram is how Dennett's multiple drafts model operates. Information generated by the primary sensor centers in the cortex is passed around in parallel and selectively combined by the cortex to form a more coherent picture (what we experience is the selective recombination of all sensory data within the cortex) Once a processing "mistake" has been discovered (i.e. "That's not a flashlight, it's a fire extinguisher!") the "correct" version will immediately replace the mistaken versions. If you want to read all the experiments used to justify this model please read the An Empirical Theory of Mind section in Daniel Dennett's excellent book Consciousness Explained. I should also note that much of the sensory preprocessing is in serial. These parts of the brain can't make "mistakes" because they're merely applying transforms, not attempting to look for patterns in sensory data.

http://ianrpubs.unl.edu/horticulture/g1437.htm ^^^ there's a pretty definitive paper on the issue of green potatoes

Somehow I stumbled upon http://thefinaltheory.com. This was right as I was getting into quantum/relativity, and so I knew instantly the site was bullshit. It was funny bullshit though, because the guy's comprehension of things like relativity, permanent magnets/Curie point/spontaneously broken symmetries was clearly quite lacking, and he was among the horde of "Science has gotten too goddamn complicated; there should be a common sense explanation for everything that everyone can comprehend!" nutjobs. Anyway, I found the thread debunking him here, decided to participate, and well, there it is...

My brain hurts from the stupidity. We think with our brains. Why do people still try to contradict this simple fact?

I think emotions started their life as an innate releasing mechanism and gradually grew in importance and complexity from there. I'm sure you can expect to find them to a certain degree in at least most mammals...

I call

Well, here's one thing that's flat out wrong, although it could just be out of date: http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but by our best interpretations of GR and the best experimental evidence to date, we're fairly confident that gravity propagates at c. Anything else would allow for a causality violation (e.g. FTL communication using gravity waves)

I've tried to comprehend quantum, relativity, string theory, etc. on a purely conceptual level. Brian Greene does a great job trying to explain string theory to the layman. But it doesn't work. Needs more math.

I think this guy is right up your alley: http://timecube.com http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm Props to that FAQ author for taking the time to debunk BULLSHIT!

Wow, you think both quantum AND relativity are wrong. Awesome! This one is hilarious... http://www.wbabin.net/valev/valev8.htm Care to support that statement? Or any of the statements you make anywhere on that page? That "false" premise has been verified experimentally on countless occasions. Can you point to any kind of experiment that supports your conjecture that the speed of light (in a vacuum) is not constant? I can play this game too, watch: Ed: In case anyone didn't see it from the other thread, this guy is apparently so pervasive a BULLSHIT propagator that someone has put together a FAQ to debunk him: http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm

No. Do you think we can maintain our current level of military involvement indefinitely? Furthermore, the US Senate just voted 79-19 to demand regular reports from the White House on progress towards a phased pullout of troops from Iraq. I guess 79 of our US senators understand the need for a withdrawal timeline...

I love Slate... so poignant and witty... http://www.slate.com/id/2130295?nav=nw This is not true. Two bipartisan panels have examined the question of how the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs turned out so wrong. Both deliberately skirted the issue of why. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence deferred the second part of its probe—dealing with whether officials oversimplified or distorted the conclusions reached by the various intelligence agencies—until after the 2004 election, and its Republican chairman has done little to revive the issue since. Judge Laurence Silberman, who chaired a presidential commission on WMDs, said, when he released the 601-page report last March, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." There's something misleading about Bush's wording on this point, as well: The investigation "found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." The controversy concerns pressure from the White House and the secretary of defense to form the judgments—that is, to make sure the agencies reached specific judgments—not to change them afterward. This is an intriguingly ambiguous statement. What does he mean by "our assessment of Saddam Hussein"? Of the man—his motives, intentions, wishes, fantasies? In which case, he's right. Most of the world's intelligence agencies figured Saddam Hussein would like to have weapons of mass destruction. If he means an assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities, though, he's wrong: Several countries' spy agencies never bought the notion that Saddam had such weapons or the means to produce them in the near future. This, too, is misleading. These resolutions called on Saddam to declare the state of his WMD arsenal and, if he claimed there was no such thing, to produce records documenting its destruction. The resolutions never claimed—or had the intention of claiming—that he had such weapons. Saddam did demonstrably have chemical-weapons facilities when the U.N. Security Council started drafting these resolutions. But, as noted by former weapons inspector David Kay (but unnoted in President Bush's speech), President Bill Clinton's 1998 airstrikes destroyed the last of these facilities. Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry, did utter these words, possibly to his later regret. Still the key phrase is "to use force if necessary." Kerry has since said—as have many other Democrats who voted as he did—that they assumed the president wouldn't use force unless it really was necessary to do so, or unless the intelligence he cited was unambiguous and the threat he envisioned was fairly imminent. This, Bush never did. This is the crucial point: these Democrats did not have "access to the same intelligence." The White House did send Congress a classified National Intelligence Estimate, at nearly 100 pages long, as well as a much shorter executive summary. It could have been (and no doubt was) predicted that very few lawmakers would take the time to read the whole document. The executive summary painted the findings in overly stark terms. And even the NIE did not cite the many dissenting views within the intelligence community. The most thorough legislators, for instance, were not aware until much later of the Energy Department's doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were designed for atomic centrifuges—or of the dissent about "mobile biological weapons labs" from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Intelligence estimates are unwieldy documents, often studded with dissenting footnotes. Legislators and analysts with limited security clearances have often thought they had "access to intelligence," but unless they could see the footnotes, they didn't. For instance, in the late 1950s, many senators thought President Dwight Eisenhower was either a knave or a fool for denying the existence of a "missile gap." U.S. Air Force Intelligence estimates—leaked to the press and supplied to the Air Force's allies on Capitol Hill—indicated that the Soviet Union would have at least 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1962, far more than the U.S. arsenal. What the "missile gap" hawks didn't know—and Eisenhower did—was that the Central Intelligence Agency had recently acquired new evidence indicating that the Soviets couldn't possibly have more than 50 ICBMs by then—fewer than we would. (As it turned out, photoreconnaissance satellites, which were secretly launched in 1960, revealed that even that number was too high; the Soviets had only a couple of dozen ICBMs.) So, yes, nearly everyone thought Saddam was building WMDs, just as everyone back in the late '50s thought Nikita Khrushchev was building hundreds of ICBMs. In Saddam's case, many of us outsiders (I include myself among them) figured he'd had biological and chemical weapons before; producing such weapons isn't rocket science; U.N. inspectors had been booted out of Iraq a few years earlier; why wouldn't he have them now? What we didn't know—and what the Democrats in Congress didn't know either—was that many insiders did have reasons to conclude otherwise. There is also now much reason to believe that top officials—especially Vice President Dick Cheney and the undersecretaries surrounding Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon—worked hard to keep those conclusions trapped inside. President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said today that the arguments over how and why the war began are irrelevant. "We need to put this debate behind us," he said. But the truth is, no debate could be more relevant now. As the war in Iraq enters yet another crucial phase—with elections scheduled next month and Congress finally taking up the issue of whether to send more troops or start pulling them out—we need to know whether the people running the executive branch can be trusted, and the sad truth is that they cannot be.

Science is all a big conspiracy to blind people from TRUTH Yeah huh