bascule

Preventing people from doing things by going after those who spread the requisite information seems silly.

Emotion is the root of all of your reasons for living? It certainly isn't for mine...

I'm a compatibilist as well (I believe free will can be an inherently deterministic process). However, this proof is a scientifically-derived argument against dualism (i.e. disproof of the soul?)

It's not that it can't be understood per se, but the devil is in the details. If you hope to do anything remotely useful with your knowledge of physics, you will need to understand the underlying math. You can do experiment after experiment until you're old, gray, and eccentric like Tesla did, but if your underlying idea is mathematically infeasible (like wireless power for the whole world), you'd be saving yourself a lot of time trying to figure that out on paper rather than attempting something which is mathematically infeasible empirically only to find out each time that it doesn't work. The equations to show Tesla his idea was impossible existed when Tesla was alive, but sadly Tesla never bothered to do the math and just kept figuring he was on the cusp of a great discovery. He died penniless and alone trying to sell various governments his Death Ray...

Congress was lied to. Are you going to tell me that the Administration which sent both Joseph Wilson and 4-star Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr. to Niger to investigate the forged documents obtained by British intelligence had absolutely no knowledge of these individuals' findings? Do you think the administration had an obligation to pass this information onto Congress, or do you feel that Congress is still culpable even though the centerpiece of the administration's argument for war was not only forged, but it was most certainly known by the Administration to have been forged and this information was specifically withheld from Congress. Who are you quoting in the latter statement? And why are you even bringing this up? Shall we look at your statement you quoted in context? I believe this statement is factually incorrect. The administration must clear all information which Congress receives. The Washington Post article I linked corroborates my claim. When the administration claims that the British have documents saying that Saddam tried to obtain hundreds of tons of uranium yellowcake from Niger and omit the "Oh by the way, we sent both a celebrated diplomat and a four star general to investigate this claim, and they both came back and said it was false" part, I'm sorry, but that is a lie. Do you have any sort of source which can corroborate your claim that Congress is culpible for not obtaining this information themselves? How would they even have known what to ask for, let alone gotten it cleared? You pay lip service to the problem... (by the way, the Iraq/Al Qaeda connection has been shown to be incorrect [source]) ...but then parrot the Administration's spin on the issue, and that's what frustrates me. Congress was intentionally deceived by the Administration. The Administration was caught in a bluff, they lost the wager, but they don't want to pay; they want to shift blame and discredit their opponents. Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame are both victims of a horribly botched cover up/character assassination attempt by the Administration. Given this, it really surprises me that people continue to insist that there was no intentional deception on the part of the administration. I may be jumping to conclusions in that they would only attempt character assassination in order to cover up malice rather than incompetence, but regardless there was malice involved; I think we'll see at least Libby pay, if not the man Cheney himself.

If you continue reading you'll see the "spectacular variety" is subsequently enumerated. Take that for what you will.

http://leahy.senate.gov/issues/environment/anwr.html

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~jas/one/freewill-theorem.html

Here's my quick analysis of the article below: Bush filters the intelligence Congress gets, then blames them for voting for the war! Try to complain about the selective intelligence you received and Bush will accuse you of flip-flopping. And if that doesn't work he'll say questioning the Administration does a great disservice to our men and women in uniform. (sorry Pangloss for juxtaposing this against your parroting of the administration's argument, but the "Congress had access to all the same intelligence as the President" myth just doesn't hold water) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/11/AR2005111101832.html

Vodka and Red Bull is nothing. Ever heard of Sparks? Try drinking a 6 pack in a sitting... bejesus

Yes, "revisionist history" is a euphemism they coined for "people who say we misrepresented the intelligence leading into the Iraq war are liars" in an attempt to cover their own lies about the Iraq war... Excuse me, I should've used "misrepresentations of truth" in lieu of "lies" for you PC types...

I just wish that the fact that the world's largest Christian church (the Catholics) wishes to dispel the Creationism myth would be enough to keep those who don't embrace Creationism from wasting their time supporting it. I consider myself an amateur memetic pathologist and love seeing viral false information definitively put to rest by the likes of Snopes, MythBusters, Penn & Teller: BULLSHIT!, etc. I have no problems with people using strong language against pathological memes, since I believe they need to be stopped (because, among other things, they waste time that could be better invested in spreading symbiotic memes)

As far as I can tell, people trying to assert that a deliberate misinformation campaign was used in order to justify the Iraq War...

A small victory for conservationists? http://ogj.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?Section=ONART&C=GenIn&ARTICLE_ID=241235&p=7

Umm, have you not been keeping up on this whole Joseph Wilson thing? Namely the New York Times article he wrote over two years ago? Ever heard of the Downing Street Memo? These are the things people want answers from the administration about...

Who specifically are you referring to by "the Dems"... Reid? And how specifically are they trying to "re-write history"? Because they originally supported the war (having just received a healthy dose of post-9/11 paranoia), expecting a repeat of Bush Sr's performance and not the lies and deception that marked this administration's march up to war?

I just wonder if the textbook use of epistorophe was Bush's own doing or that of a speechwriter (the latter being much more likely), in which case why was there so much ambiguity in the speech to begin with? Lousy speechwriters? Poor delivery?

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/IraqCoverage/wireStory?id=1303926

I like the Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy better

Sorry about the incongruent dates/info, I was cutting and pasting from another story. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1110_051110_sea_monster.html

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051107/full/051107-11.html

...executing a massively parallel random walk of possible life configurations, sorting out the bad from the good. Yup. Douglas Adams was right; the Earth is just one big computer.

If the 2008 election comes down to Hillary vs. McCain I am so voting Republican

gib, check The New Scientist article that I linked. It's from 2003, and the new one seems like a followup, if anything. I bet the same people are involved.

Apparently you didn't hear that they constructed a mathematical model of the hippocampus in 2003 and began work on the first prosthetic replacements