Sayonara

Never underestimate the ability of people to reinterpret religious messages to justify their own personal prejudices.

Am I right in thinking some posts appeared while you were composing that reply?

So very wrong. Pineapples are an . They used those teeth to eat wholesome godly bananas.

They were both whoring their wanton nakedness and strumpet-like lack of biblical morals by frolicking unmarried in front of all those talking animals.

Okay then, "the word creationist as it is used and known on this site, a contextual selector which YT is very much aware of". It's not an assumption. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Well no, it's not stupid per se, it's quite astute if you take it in isolation. But you do have to ignore all the other evidence, such as YT's photos of himself, and the threads where he discusses his partner and progeny.

As you well know Lance, Creationist with a capital "C" has a limited set of meanings. My question to YT is intended to discover the meaning which he attaches to it.

Amazingly (or perhaps not?) there is a Geometry for Dummies. My suggestion would be to start with that, which should give you sufficient grounding in the subject to figure out what "proper" books will suit you next.

CP, the issue under discussion in this thread keeps changing. I asked you some direct questions about this earlier which you failed to reply to. Please clarify your position, because at the moment it seems to be "criticise mismanagement of counter-terrorism budgets". I can see why you would want to discuss this (especially from a US standpoint) and I think it is definitely a topic worthy of exploration but it differs drastically from your OP. It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a rational and meaningful discussion with you when you keep changing tack.

It's never too late to learn.

Maybe you should use the opportunity to spend a great deal more time in your local library.

How does this compute?

Maybe it has been too long since I read the fairytale but I don't recall Adam and Eve ever getting married, the shameless wanton whores.

I don't think people see it as being superior so much as a palatable alternative. It's probably quite comforting to feel that your fate is determined by the various movements of reliable celestial bodies.

But with terrorism this does not work. Terrorism -- as opposed to say floods -- is driven by intent. If you scale back your defences because their effect has been to reduce terrorism to a level which you see as negligible, what you are doing is changing a hard target into a soft target. What do you think happens next?

Scary isn't it? But, if you have the funding and the commitment, there are ways and means of detecting people who may be involved in terrorist activities. Next to that there is not one extremist group on the planet which is not being closely monitored. Skype is a blind spot, but you can't assemble devices over Skype or move people or parts through VoIP so the networks are still vulnerable to being observed. No, we are not getting pissed off because you don't believe in our "religion". Way to risk getting your post reported. People assume you are going to agree with points 1-3 because they are so accepted as fact by all the agencies responsible for monitoring points 1-3, regardless of what country that agency operates from. We don't "assume" that particular terrorist groups can source depleted uranium (for example), we know it, and we expect it, so we plan for it. Personal belief isn't a good argument. Also I have to say that is a bit rich seeing as you just accused everyone else of being "religious". See, what you have done here is you started off talking above about "[the] Taliban or other groups", and now you have moved the goalposts so that we are only talking about the Taliban to the exclusion of anyone else who might be willing and capable. Ignoring the fact of course that the Taliban could quite easily employ whoever they needed. I don't see what this has to do with anything. There is overwhelming evidence that practically anything can be caught getting smuggled to anywhere when you invest more money in having more frequent and better-trained border patrols. I don't think that is true anyway. For example it is quite difficult to smuggle African Elephants into Vatican City. When you say "War on Terrorism" you invoke a special case, meaning the joint military effort between the US, UK, Australia, and so on. This means you are actually discussing the invoice for a war, which does not represent the normal budgetary expenditure of those nations. I find this odd because in your OP you struck off the casualties of terrorism who were in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the basis of there being wars there. Makes me wonder if you even count Iraqis or Afghanistan civilians. Bush and Cheney deliberately muddied the waters on this issue because it is easier to get people to pay extra tax to not get murdered by evil-doers than it is to get them to pay extra tax to send their soldiers off to get killed for really tenuous reasons. On SFN as you can imagine it pays dividends to be able to spot the difference. Anyhow, bitter ranting aside, I think you completely miss a trick here. Research needs always overlap. The research efforts being made on (for example) batch-produced one shot inoculations against ebola, are the very things that you say don't get enough funding. But counter-terrorism is responsible for paying for much of this research. "I can find other things which are expensive" is not a compelling point. I don't think that the war on terror does receive as much money. As before, you are suffering from bad accounting. The war on global warming (if you like) has cost the entire planet far far more, and it will continue to do so as major developing nations try to clean up their acts. Again, you are conflating your original topic of "terrorism" with the War on Terror. These are not really the same thing and if you apply your approach to them both you get two slightly different results. Which are you arguing against? Have you given up arguing for us to ignore all terrorism, which was the thrust of your original post? Yes, and globally we spend a trillionaire's fortune trying to prolong the lives and avoid the killing of most of them. Will it, Professor? WWII caused a global depression because of infrastructure damage and the damage to the working population. Now, it would not take such a war to cause the same effect - you could literally do it from a home computer. How insulated from reality are you exactly? Not everybody considers "what humanity will notice on a long-term global level" as being the threshold for acceptability. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged It's hard to know exactly what CP is arguing for since he conflates different viewpoints and seems to have very vague terms of reference. If he is purely talking from an American standpoint then the disproportionate cost of fighting terrorism should lead him to the conclusion "spending by our government needs to be examined closely", not the wacky place he has landed with: "counter-terrorism is expensive so everyone should just ignore terrorist acts instead" (which somehow turned into "we can afford to lose a city or two without really noticing the effects.") I really think CP is a bit divorced from reality here. I don't know how many times I have heard people telling kids to ignore bullies until they lose interest. Bollocks. Ignoring the bully doesn't rob them of the power to cause damage or inflict pain. If a child ignores a bully, the bully becomes more inventively cruel. What stops them in their tracks is an unexpectedly broken nose.

I thought I had adequately shown that this is insufficient reasoning. The "stick your head in the sand" approach to terrorism only appears to work when you are under threat from nail bombs in pubs, exploding buses, and the like, and it only feels like it is working because you personally are sufficiently insulated from the effects to be able to callously ignore them. Find me an example of a terrorist campaign which ended because the people in the target populace ignored it into submission. We are entering an age in which dirty nukes, plagues, and infrastructure sabotage could be much more easily employed to kill tens of thousands of people and seriously disrupt the economy. Imagine you are responsible (solely or jointly, whichever) for the nation's security. Let's say it's the nation you currently live in to make things simple. You don't invest any money in anti-terrorism, and you tell those lobby groups who complain about this to stick their fingers in their ears and chant "la la la, we can't hear you" at terrorism. Then one day there's a concerted strike on your population within your own borders. Explosions are popping off in city centres across the land, and radioactive anthrax-laden dust is being blown across thousands of acres of residential suburbs. Two million dead in the first three hours. Ten million by the end of the first day. Fifty million casualties after three days, and a collapsed health system. There are no emergency services outside the hot zones. Power, water, and gas are sporadic at best. Education, manufacturing and commerce effectively grind to a halt. Try and imagine your administration surviving that, never mind your economy or your country's spirit. Counter-terrorism is just one of those things that you have to do. A government has a responsibility to protect its citizens, and this is one aspect of that. If people are incredulous as to where all the money goes, it does not just magically vanish. You don't hear about what it gets spent on because it's somewhat counter-productive to publicise details of operational expenses. Counter-terrorism is largely intelligence led, and whenever you have intelligence led activity you basically have a very high demand for large numbers of skilled personnel. And that costs a fortune.

Well yes. Hence "try".

Elas' note to self: Point comes first.

"One or two"? "Near-universally"? I think you have it the wrong way around there.

If you go to the bottom of this page you will see a list of threads which the forum has identified as being closely related to this topic. If those do not answer your questions there is always the search function.

Depends on precisely what "Galactic Alignment" is supposed to mean.

Mercury isn't big enough to significantly impact the light from the sun.

When is Earth not in alignment with the sun?

No, basically.

Because there was nobody with governmental influence at the time who wanted to turn a profit? ** DOES NOT COMPUTE ** By comparing deaths from terrorism to deaths on the highways you are comparing apples and oranges. You don't get to side-step the threat from terrorism by stating that the level of loss is a matter of perception, because we know that if a terrorist organisation under the thrall of a group such as the Taleban gets hold of a weaponised biological agent or a nuclear technology they will use it. While I am loathe to adopt the same position as people like Bush and Cheney I am not stupid enough to ignore that it is only a matter of time before such an attack happens. That is why you attack the source, and that is why it is absolutely nothing like people who can't drive or cross a road safely.