Phi for All

This is SO wrong. Because "Truth" with a capital T is actually subjective and varies from person to person, the very thing that science tries so studiously to avoid. The kinds of bias that go into any single person's vision of what Truth is is anathema to science. Science is NOT the quest for Truth, because once you think you've found "The Truth", you stop looking for a better explanation. Science is the quest for a better explanation. Again, science strives to remove what is human and not objective in order to remain free of the taint of error and bias. You may think this strips science of its humanity, but that's what this tool is for. Adding human weakness into science would be like wrapping the head of a hammer in bubble wrap so it doesn't hurt you if you hit your finger. A very human idea, but it ruins the tool for its intended purpose.

Copy that. That's my dinner side for tomorrow night. I'll let you know how it turned out.

We always carve pumpkins for Halloween and roast the seeds. Three pumpkins gives us several hundred seeds, and they're very tasty but it's pretty messy getting them. Personally, the pumpkin itself doesn't thrill me much to eat, since it's flavor usually has to be enhanced by other stuff that's not so good for you. I prefer butternut squash, but there again I tend to need butter on it to make it taste right. I saw some Boston Marrow Squashes this year, very red and even bigger than most pumpkins I've seen.

Stop letting the liars at FOX News fix your lunch.

This sounds like big corporate influence. The same influence that preaches leaving the free market free of regulation and restraints, but also supports subsidies, no-bid contracts and special interest legislation designed to give advantage to one company over the other. Big corporate stood to save a lot of money if Romney got elected, which means favoring all the underhanded yet legal tactics that kept Democrats from the voting machines.

I didn't mean to scare him so bad he blanked his whole opener. I just don't think he realized he was calling for an invasion of a small country with big allies. I was hoping to talk about some of his less aggressive ideas, like how to spruce up the old phosphate mines and make them tourist attractions (maybe some kind of hide and seek theme park for the kids?). An island where Australians send their worst criminals? I'd rather visit the island where the porn industry sends women for sex training. Great minds... . No. You both watch too much reality TV.. Uh-uh. Now that I think about it, I've never seen the two of you in the same room....

Your post #9 mentioned that cinnamon causes arousal in men, then your post #12 mentioned that onions induce sexual desire, John C related that to a side story about melons, which I thought was a clever double entendre, and zapatos was saying that just being awake induces sexual desire in men. The rest of it was a misunderstanding on your part. No psychopaths here, no one ardently supporting melon or pumpkin sex. Let's squash that idea.

Labels that are specific help to define what we mean and where we stand, for our own and other's benefit. What you probably hate are generalizations that are used as labels, like "liberal" and "dropout" and "suburbanite". These are too broad and allow people to assume too much about you.

! Moderator Note Since your assertions here do NOT reflect the reality of the situation, and numerous posters have cited plenty of evidence to refute your assertions, and since you are NOT addressing posts that clearly point to evidence, in your own links, that fails to support your stance, I can only conclude that you're choosing to troll this thread to evoke harsh and unproductive responses. This is against the rules you agreed to when you joined and if you continue you will be suspended or banned. If you have a problem with this modnote, do not further derail the thread by responding to it here. PM another mod or report this post and other staff members will deal with it.

So of course you listen when FOX News does a story on someone who's caught abusing the system, and they of course relate that to the guy on the other side of the country who got caught doing the same thing, and pretty soon they've made it look like an epidemic. You want to know what the real problem is? Most welfare fraud (some studies show 93%) is perpetrated by the vendors who hold government contracts to provide welfare services, not by the welfare recipients themselves. It's the doctors, dentists, child care facilities, shop owners and other private businesses, the ones who are screaming about unfair taxes, that are scamming the system.

This has always been a big part of the problem. Ultra-conservatives make many assumptions that they are the hard-working righteous ones, and everyone they don't know wants something for nothing, has their hands in the pockets of the rich, has wanton unprotected sex and abortions every month, refuses to work, is probably doing something illegal right now, supports evil presidents who lie about killing their ambassadors and are as offal. They refuse to see the huge amount of good because they just know there is some bad out there somewhere.

Amen to that! Too many people jumped on that wagon without checking credentials every time the driver changed. They thought this was finally some representation that differed from the major parties while still being Republican and shifted their identities, which made it difficult to stop defending the crazy as it got even more crazy. The people I know who claimed Tea Party affiliation two years ago just don't want to talk about it now, like survivors of a hostage situation. The religious right are going to be a bit more difficult to dump. They're going to have to ease away without offending a base that seems determined to block all progress and hamstring US development. That's going to hurt us every time we try to compete globally, and since the religious right tends to dismiss what happens in other countries, I see isolationism in our future if the Republicans don't try to remove the most extreme from their leadership.

Another point missed completely, another knee-jerk retort with no substance, another red herring thrown out to avoid the real issue.

Consider this perspective. It had nothing to do with what "party" people are affiliated with. It has to do with facts vs assumptions on a science forum. You had questions, but they were all FOX News "loaded" questions, the type that imply something is wrong without actually stating that something is wrong. The type that makes viewers want to click the link to find out if there really is something wrong. I've done this thousands of times, and not just with FOX News. It's classic profit-based hype masquerading as journalism. "Is our drinking water as safe as officials are telling us?" "The real reason why this German manufacturer won't sell to the US." "Invisibility cloak now a reality, scientists say." And when you frantically click to see "the truth", you find out that yes, our drinking water is indeed as safe as officials are telling us, and that the German manufacturer has discontinued a certain model and won't be selling it to any country anymore, and finally that this "cloak" that you thought made people invisible when you wear it isn't a really piece of clothing at all. And that's exactly what your posts seem to do, rigney. They seemed to interject some kind of inference that President Obama pulled the security detail from Ambassador Stevens or secretly gave the order for the CIA to have him killed under the guise of a false attack on the embassy. When we asked for facts and clicked your links, we got nothing of substance, just suppositions being inserted like suppositories. Even your title sounded like some hokey tabloid sensationalism. So I hope you can see that it wasn't partisan politics that prompted the reactions here, it was your "nothing to do with being factual, only supposition" approach that raised the hackles of the science-minded.

It seems to me that conservatism has always been synonymous with cautious advancement. Caution is usually considered good until it starts to paralyze action. I think the ultra-conservative movement we've seen in the last 50 years is a reaction to the rapid pace of technological progress that's become the hallmark of the industrial era. Computers and global communication have allowed such rapid progress that it seems to many there is no longer any caution being exercised. What they fail to take into consideration is the increased cooperation among ever-increasing numbers of people who lead advancement in all areas. A large number of people think science is running amok and smashing atoms apart without regard to what it could mean to life as we know it. They're afraid of the ever-growing body of knowledge they have failed to keep pace with and assume that the world could end in a puff of unrestrained technological advancement if the brakes of caution and common sense aren't applied heavily. Why wouldn't a university environment seem to lean towards liberal learning and advancement? Isn't the conservative approach often anathema to progress and knowledge, especially the brand of ultra-conservatism that denies the redefined realities we discover from liberal learning?

Things seem so simple in your worldview. Everyone is either left or right, and no amount of conservative leaning on any other topic will make you believe someone who doesn't think Obama is the devil isn't "on the left". You condemn Obama for a mid-level State Department snafu that cost four American lives, but you defend Bush on a national-level terrorist threat that ended up killing 2,752 people, brought down the World Trade Center and caused the costliest war in American history. Even with a great deal of historical hindsight to sharpen your vision, your stance seems to have a great deal of blind, unreasoning hatred behind it that has left you with little foundation for your accusations. OK, sorry, I just thought graphs would be easier for you. Look at the numbers instead. In a statistically significant sample, people who didn't watch the news at all did better answering questions about world events than people who only watch FOX News. No spin, no hype, same questions asked of all groups. Evidence to support that watching only FOX News is worse than nothing at all.

Evidence supports the concept that plain ignorance is better than FOX News-enhanced ignorance. The above ^^^^ is a link to a study. Click it (with your mouse pointer) and it will take you to the article that mentions the study. Read the article. Look at the graphs. Then, I guess, just blow it off like you do the rest of the substance we've presented that doesn't confirm your bias.

Your ignorance is enhanced by not having any facts. You rely on supposition, innuendo and hazy recollection, while everyone else posting to your thread is providing links to actual testimony and articles that provide insight. The only links you've given support the fact that our embassy was at risk, like every embassy we have in areas where violence is a threat. Where you really fail is trying to pin this on the Obama administration when there are at least four other sources that are more culpable, including the Republican House and Ambassador Stevens himself. Evidence supports the concept that plain ignorance is better than FOX News-enhanced ignorance.

Um, guess what? Obama and his crew, like Bush, the CIA, FBI or his cabinet with regard to 9/11/2001, didn't know the embassy had been attacked until it happened. And Bush, the CIA, FBI and his cabinet knew of the possibility of an attack by bin Laden, knew of the possibility of the use of airplanes in that attack, and knew that bin Laden was determined to strike the US, most likely in NYC. In fact, Bush got that intelligence in a memo a month before the attack, and then proceeded to take one of the longest vacations in presidential history. Your FOX is showing. Most of us don't want our ignorance to be as enhanced as yours is.

Well, this is wrong, and it's the fallacy that's at the heart of the abortion controversy. People with well-regulated lives assume everyone else's lives are like that as well, but that's not the reality of it. The context at conception is often very different from the context later on in the pregnancy or after a child is born. Men often skip out on women, or they show their true colors when faced with marriage and children when all they wanted was sex for an evening. Saying the state should raise more responsible people doesn't negate the fact that abortions will always be sought, will always be necessary because life isn't perfect. It's barbaric to expect a woman to raise a child on her own, it's barbaric to risk her health on unsafe illegal abortion and no matter what education or prevention methods are made available, abortion will always need to remain an option. It's insane to keep this chokehold on the idea of "life begins at conception". It doesn't begin there, it's an ongoing and developing process and it's hypocritical to attach some kind of overarching importance to that particular moment just because a sperm was successful at its job. Certainly the state should provide education and make birth control available, but abortion needs to be available as well because without it, we're not protecting the rights of women and we're not respecting the variables of reality.

I agree. Do you think this plays a part in the virginity issue, the trust issue or both? I could see men developing a bit of guilt because of their disproportionate investment. It just seems to me that normal caution (conservatism) can become overblown into an irrational fear (ultra-conservatism). Men often hate to admit their fears and will thus come up with lots of justifications for it, and the greater the fear the more wacky those justifications can become. So the establishment of some kind of moral control through virginity manipulation, denial of sex education and birth control, and anti-abortion laws becomes more bizarre as the fear becomes more extreme.

I think father/daughter dynamics are a whole other matter, but it might tie into the whole protecting-your-children-at-all-cost scenario, living and unborn alike. And it could be that virginity = trust and losing virginity, for women, is a betrayal of trust in the eyes of some men.

Since the age of consent where you live is 16, and you seem to have no restrictions about who a 16 can have sex with as many jurisdictions do, I'd say the problem isn't one of any sex-positive movement. Your jurisdiction has chosen to leave these girls to the mercy of middle-aged men when they could just as easily invoke accepted practices from other countries to keep them from being preyed on. In many countries it's illegal for someone who is either in a position of authority or beyond a certain age difference to engage in sex with even a consenting 16 year-old.

I think the foundation for extreme conservatism is rooted in fear. The more someone is afraid of the consequences of a progressive action, the more they fear that outcome. A lot can happen to erode trust and I think the more extremely conservative the person is, the quicker that erosion is. I also think extreme conservatism isn't a very positive stance when it comes to forgiveness. My experiences have shown me that people who fear betrayal the most are the least likely to ever forgive it. Sometimes that fear of betrayal is so extreme it can cause those people to mistrust even those who've never broken trust with them.

I don't think it's the obsession about virginity as much as the obsession about fidelity and the insecurity about progeny. If a man controls who a woman has sex with, he is assured of who the father of her children is. Being cuckolded seems to be an insult of such magnitude that men will go to ultimate lengths to prevent it. And to risk passing on all you've achieved to another man's children is even worse. Basic trust is such an important concept among humans that trying to do anything remotely sane in its absence causes lots of strange behavior. I think the more conservative a person is, the less they trust the motives of others, even those closest to them.