Peterkin

That makes you an exceptional student. Unfortunately, most students just want to get the credits, move on, get the diploma, move on, get the job, move on, get the pay, move on, get the promotion, move on ...

The main lesson my daughter took away If they just go on cutting and pasting? Because it can be done without all the expense of building schools and training teachers. The central lesson my daughter took away from that experience had nothing to do with cod depletion or lobster farming - it was" Why bother making an effort, if you get more credit for using somebody else's work?"

To me, the issue was the purpose of a school assignment. It's not that the teacher wants to see pictures of fishing boats and read articles from the National Geographic; it's that the student should learn about Atlantic fisheries. My teachers, back in the Dark Ages, held that I would retain more of the information if I hand-copied the illustrations and rendered the text into my own words. If there was an element of creativity involved, we got extra praise. There was a sense of achievement, too, that was missing from my children's school experience. We've taught children how to cut out pictures by the time they graduate kindergarten. Why waste another 12 or 20 years educating them?

When my daughter was in Grade 12, in the late 1980's, she had a history project. I insisted - in spite of tears and slammed doors - that she draw ever picture and write every word herself. It turned out very well and she got a B. Later, I saw the A papers on the bulletin board in her classroom. Every one had paste-in pictures and articles cut out periodicals. Apparently, the teacher was already less clear on the concept and a lot more flexible in the definition of "original work" than mine had been a few decades before.

And these same teachers will probably punish any students they catch doing it. I suspect these teachers back for an upgrade have busy adult lives and not very much time to work on assignments. At the same time, they may not take the program itself seriously: it's not for their education or qualifications, it's just for the certificate. Unfortunately, shortcuts and 'hacks' already are part of the culture at large, as well as education. It's bound to happen in a highly competitive society, where the accoutrements of excellence - degrees, prizes, grades, the reputation of the school - is more conducive to obtaining a decent wage than competence in some useful field.

My first post was entirely on point. In the second, I my intention was not to hijack; only to respond. But if it's important to adhere strictly to category, I shall do so henceforward. Afterthought: Anatomy, Physiology and Neuroscience could, without too great an effort, include hormone therapies.

What if people don't want to change the way they incline, or feel, or identify themselves? Might it not be less trouble to change the way society reacts to masculine-looking women and a feminine-looking men? If we were just more broadly accepting of other people's appearance, maybe nobody would have to change their bodies or their brains or their orientation...

Of course corrective and reconstructive surgery can change the shape of a pelvis - or any other bone. The ilium can be enlarged with grafts, or reduced by trimming; the flare might even be widened or narrowed. None of that would need any special procedure that's not available now. Cosmetically, it's perfectly feasible, either way, to produce a more desired body shape. All the doctor needs is skill and access to good surgical facilities; all the patient needs is lots of time, money and high tolerance for pain. Functionally, it's more difficult, if not impossible. While it may be possible to enlarge a male pelvis' greater foramen to somewhat resemble a female's, you can't reduce a female's to the proportion of a male one. Also, if you tried to mess around with the shape and configuration of either, you'd run into serious problems with the socket joint for the femur - i.e., might render the patient unable to walk. https://onlinesciencenotes.com/differences-between-male-pelvis-and-female-pelvis/ I'm unclear on how this works. Two sections, one surgery at a time, detaching and re-attaching the sacrum? I would be concerned about the security of that seam afterwards - I mean the spinal column and whole upper body depends on it. Might be concerned with re-establishing adequate blood supply, as well, but maybe they've figured that out. Reconstructive surgery after trauma or cancer damage is difficult enough. Undergoing such a risky procedure just to look more masculine or feminine - only slightly more, since nobody's going to replace their legs and shoulders - would be .... I dunno... crazy? However, there may be hope of doing it better, cheaper. https://all3dp.com/2/3d-printed-bones-projects/ There mains, of course, the attachment of ligaments, tendons and muscles - a very complicated series of challenges, not without risk.

Once you get over the trepidation and the first two failures, both cooking and baking can be very good therapy. As well as making you self-reliant and confident. Any new skill does that, but food preparation is particularly satisfying, both for the social persona and the inner animal.

That depends on what you mean by 'thrive'? If it destroys the ecology that was there before, it's not only wrong, but eventually fatal. Two things: 1. Distinguish types of 'farm animal'. I have no problem with horses kept for riding or pulling; sheep and llamas kept for wool, cows and goats kept for milk, hens or geese for the eggs. (The male offspring would still have to be killed young because of the feed, tending and grazing, as well as the rivalry among them, so they wouldn't have much to thriving time.) I'm not sure old cows and sheep would be very palatable, but I suppose you could eat them once they've had a long and happy life. I do have a problem with animals bred and kept for no other reason than to be killed young, for their flesh: pigs, steers, waterfowl, turkeys. But my aesthetic objection to breeding and raising animals in order to be killed, even if humanely, is the lesser of the problems. 2. Keeping farm animals in conditions that I could describe as "a good life" is a whole lot less economical than factory farming. It's just not commercially feasible in the world as we find it. (I can imagine changes that would make it feasible, including wide-spread permaculture, but the current economic structure does not encourage alternative methods. I think the movement started half a century too late.) The biggest obstacle of all is the sheer number of humans demanding a meat-heavy diet. To meet that demand, you need to produce on a scale that's impossible to sustain through humane and ecologically sound farming practices. If the demand were reduced by 90%, we could manage. (Though there still remains the problem of all those billions of carnivorous pets.) I had not previously made a moral argument. I do have convictions on the matter, and do grapple with compromise. I have not found a way to live in the world without compromises, some of which are uncomfortable.

I appreciate that you said 'minor' problems, but I'd like to address them anyway. Almost everything in modern human life is a long way from 'instinctive'. We spend our formative 18 or so years, learning to control and suppress our instincts, learning to live in high-rise cities, wear neckties and high-heeled shoes, stare at computer screens for a living and go to a dentist with a toothache. Learning to choose and prepare one's food is part of every child's education. I won't go hunting for the statistics, but it seems obvious to me that a diet of fast and manufactured foods causes considerably more medical cost than ignorant vegans. It's meat that requires freezing; meat and dairy that require refrigeration and have limited shelf-life. Other crops can be preserved by the traditional methods: in grain vaults, oil jars, barrels: fruit and soft vegetables are preserved by canning; nuts and pulses, and even fruits can be dried and stored almost indefinitely. Apples, root crops, squash and cabbage last several months if stored properly. That's exactly what people in poor countries do and have done for about 6000 years. Only, in order to keep the storage pigs alive through a winter, you have to preserve the surplus crops in some way. Then you must butcher the pigs as soon as the surplus runs out, and the only way to preserve all that surplus meat would be rendering the fat and smoke-drying the flesh - which people have also been doing long before artificial refrigeration. Chickens are slaughtered at 6-8 weeks. Cattle, between one and two years - except veal and obviously not lamb. The average life expectancy of dairy cows is five years. It's probable that a small family farm with a greater proportion of its investment of money and effort in each animal they keep would extend the useful life of those animals - eg. not eat the chickens that still lay eggs; not eat cows as long as they give milk - but of course, the majority of roosters and bull calves have no function to justify their keep beyond the moment they attain maximum size. Livestock can't be compared in any realistic way to either wild animals, because they have been painstakingly bred to fill our needs, rather than their own, or to pets, which we feed, cherish and protect, but do not slaughter (except the surplus). It's a destiny assigned to them by man. Man giveth, man taketh away - and not usually in the kindest manner.

That happened very early on. Christianity was still a very young and largely unrecognized cult when Constantine took control of it, and the first administrative bodies of the Holy Roman church were given great temporal power and opportunities to accumulate wealth. The inclusion in the christian canonical text of the very materialistic, patriarchal, landowner and caste oriented, as well as severely punitive, OT was no accident in the materialistic and hierarchical Roman Empire. In fact, except for a few heretical sects that later cropped up and were eradicated or at least persecuted by the state-established churches, both catholic and later Protestant, the old testament has continued to exert far greater influence on the laws and mores of christian Europe and its offshoots than any sermons from Jesus. They accept the sacrifice and redemption - not the lesson.

You can say, rather that 'time as we know it' started then - the temporal frame and linear units-elapsed in which measure all the events in our universe.

I don't think it was intended as a thoughtful critique of Christianity in all the world, so much as a personal observation from a new [to himself] perspective on US politics.

True: not all examples of God's use and approval of the death penalty were presented in the OP. One would have to be far more conversant with the bible than mistermack appears to be, and spend a great deal more time than we generally have for forum posts, to present all the examples that support the burden of his opening sentence: I volunteered a few of those examples.

No. It's the same as saying "If God tells me to do it, I have to do it." This makes the death penalty, and holy wars, and stoning for blasphemy not merely permissible but mandatory.

Actually, the same god, in the same book, also commands his people to kill one another for various infractions, as well as to kill other nations for simply getting in their way. And the Catholics of medieval Europe seemed just as confident of receiving God's blessing for their wars of aggression as were the Muslims of Allah's approval for theirs. The Book of Leviticus put a lot of responsibility and power on the priestly caste, and that has certainly continued to the present day. If they say a killing is legal and just, it is.

With half the world's present population (3.8 billion people) professing adherence to one of that same god's religions. Which would suggest that the bronze Age didn't end - it just kept growing. That's a late adjunct to the Abrahamic cults. There is no resurrection in the OT - death is very much the end, and not at all to be desired. The New testament was written during the Roman Empire and is based on a quite different, more sophisticated form of emotional manipulation. While the Jehovah of Moses used direct intimidation to enforce his law, the three-cornered god of Christianity employs a carrot/stick/shaming strategy.

Yes, he did an awful lot of fatal smiting individually, as well as on a genocidal scale. What he did to the Egyptian babies was small potatoes compared to that flood. Not to mention foisting original sin on all of us, because a girl who didn't yet have a concept of good an evil or of deception took the advice of a fellow resident of the garden. It hasn't exactly been a secret these past 1600 years. And he shares human billboard space with guns and Trump. That's what makes me a godless socialist.

Thanks! I didn't know that.

Do you mean : Would 'we' do fine without bees? Maybe. Still assuming that 'we' refers to the human species as a whole, Would we do better without vegans? No better, no worse: they have no significant effect. Would we do better without eating and exploiting other species? All other things being equal, yes. Would we do better if we replaced our present insanely wasteful practices with rational, sustainable food production? Of course. I thought the question posed in the thread was are vegans harmful or helpful to species survival. My answer was an continues to be: Neither.

I think Tylers wants to learn elementary baking, rather than advanced food chemistry. Cookies are an excellent choice for a beginner, btw, exactly because the ingredients are few and the proportions don't vary greatly - typically, 3 flour, 2 fat, 1 sugar. Even I can put an edible cookie together! People who know all about it have written detailed recipes, with pictures and measurements and times and everything you need to get started. It's best not to play around with the quantities until one's had a little experience. One caution: limit the size. If it's a rolled-out dough, the cutting form is your guide, but if it's dropped or balled cookies, beginners tend to make them too big. My first ever batch of Nutella chocolate chip drop cookies are very tasty and crisp, but each one is a meal.

Not a very complex science (butter, sugar, flour, heat) but you probably shouldn't expect to achieve "best ever" on your first try.

What if we did? They got along on their own for 80 million years in their present form; I think they'd do just fine, even if we an our poison chemicals disappeared. Besides, you can keep bees without taking their honey and wax and transport the hives to wherever an orchard or field needs pollinating, or you can let them live wild and pollinate whatever they choose. That's been going on for millions of years, too. And they maintained balance in their ecosystem. They will have to again, once the nuclear winter leaves the field open for new dominant species. It isn't. How does any of this affect the devastation of human food production methods?

What does that matter? 20 years, 200 years.... The process is what we'll be aware of, not the duration. I'd call that another kind of bang - possibly followed by a drawn-out whimper.