Phi for All

Truth serum was my immediate thought as well, but when I looked into it, I found that I had a very Hollywood concept of them (like when bullets strike near the hero and are heard at the same time). Truth drugs are a lot like hypnosis. You can't force a person to do something that is outside their nature. If loyalty to the cause is strong, or if by divulging info to the enemy they will lose their place in heaven, truth serums won't work in most cases.

Artorius drowned. A ship adrift on Life's sea? A boatload of crap?

Don't hold me to this, but I believe it's because many pseudoscientific posts end up using metaphysical arguments to back themselves up, and vice versa. It is not an attempt to group them together intellectually, it just saves time and arguments about where to place certain threads.

For me, this boils down to a question of whether or not we want to win this war by any means possible. If we allow that drugs can be used (which many consider to be a form of torture), how much easier will it be to just give the prisoner the occasional shock from a car battery, just to get them talking? And from there it just keeps escalating. If you have justified in your own mind that since these people are terrorists and our lives mean nothing to them, therefore it's OK to feel the reverse, you have started down a very dark road which will eventually lead you to justify any means to get what you want. Where do you think the terrorists got this doctrine? I couldn't get any of you to torture or kill someone just by telling you that they deserved it. But if I slowly build up a picture in your mind, step by step, that you will be doing a good thing, that your goodness will be triumphing over evil, helping you to overcome all the moral barriers to violence and mayhem you have carefully built up over your lifetime, I might succeed. This is what we have to fight against, allowing our sense of what is right to be eroded a little at a time. Let these prisoners be roughed up a little to get them to talk and soon enough we'll be videotaping their beheadings so we can show their families our system of justice.

This is the ONLY morally defensible stance to take when one succumbs to the need for torture, imo. It acknowledges both the desire for justice and the need for responsibility for one's actions. It is too easy to justify criminal action against those we've labeled as criminals. As Ophiolite has demonstrated here, the moral high ground is the best place from which to defend oneself.

Two hunters, Mad Mardigan and Douglas, went moose hunting every winter without success. Finally, they came up with a foolproof plan. They got a very authentic female moose costume and learned the mating call of a female moose. The plan was to hide in the costume, lure the bull, then come out of the costume and shoot him. They set themselves up on the edge of a clearing, donned their costume and began to give the moose love call. Before long, their call was answered as a bull came crashing out of the forest and into the clearing. When the bull was close enough, Mad Mardigan, who was in the front of the costume, said, "Okay, let's get out and get him." After a moment that seemed like an eternity, Douglas, who was in the back, shouted, "The zipper is stuck! What are we going to do?" Mad Mardigan said, "Well, I'm going to start nibbling grass, but you'd better brace yourself."

Always. Except while showering.

I think a big part of the problem in the US is when the media brings isolated instances together from across the whole country and tries to show some corelation. If they report on three seperate instances of women endangering an unborn child in the same manner, it becomes an epidemic in the public's view and suddenly politicians jump into the spotlight and legislation is called for. I remember several years ago when Susan Smith killed her two boys by putting them in the trunk of the car and pushing it into a lake. Within a week, the media had found two other mothers who had slain their offspring recently (not that hard with a national database and 350 million population), and suddenly people were wondering if gamma rays from outer space were going to drive all mothers insane. As Sayo said, once the decision to have a child is made, abortions almost never happen without good medical reasons. Also, you can't use the argument about killing off a gasoline problem-solving genius because there's an equal chance the child could also be the next Stalin, Kim Il Sung or Pol Pot.

I could be wrong, but I think he wasn't talking about the Romeo & Juliet thing so much as the Falstaff & Juliet thing.

While I personally think that legalization of all hemp products would be a good thing, harder drugs are a vastly different matter. And you have to realize that moderation is one of those subjective phrases it's so easy to throw around, like liberal, normal and moral. From cigarettes to heroin, it's all poison and the amount the body can tolerate varies from person to person. Some people get a buzz off one beer, someone else isn't satisfied until they've polished off a case. One person drops acid once and has a horrible experience, someone else thinks it's the only way to go through life. People who use any poison on a regular basis know that their tolerance builds over time. What used to satisfy you now isn't near enough, and the cycle spirals upward. I'm concerned about this statement: Temporary pleasure is just that, it's fleeting and usually leaves you wanting more. Personally, I try not to look for my pleasure from things or other people. If I'm happy with myself, just about everything and everybody gives me pleasure. And please tell me why you equate pleasure with destroying yourself?

It's too easy to gloss over an entire life with a snap judgement. Thanks, Sandi.

Imo, what's in question here is why you think it's wrong for a same sex couple to raise children. You say it's wrong but you don't really give relevance to that statement. You speak as though a same sex couple will be blatantly having sex in front of their child and I think that's an erroneous fundamental attribute many people burden gay couples with. A hetero couple can could just as easily display such behavior. Displays of affection, however, like kissing and hugging between any parental couple are different and show stability to a child and help them feel safe. I'm not sure what you mean by "It remains a family matter like it should". As a parent with a daughter myself, I know there are certain things my child will not come to me to learn, nor will she go to my wife. I hope she will seek out someone she trusts for this information. Solitude and ignorance in personal matters can only be bad. I'm glad you understand he had NO CHOICE. This is what i meant earlier by playing the cards you're dealt. Some kids in your situation, in an effort to have a "normal" family, would have insisted he remarry immediately no matter who the woman was, possibly insuring a miserable existense for poor dad. Again, you're making assumptions for every daughter based on your personal feelings. I think many young women would prefer the compassion a gay male father(s) would have for them over a woman who felt her daughter was "the accident she couldn't deal with". Btw, imo, you're mom made the biggest mistake a person could ever make, and I'll bet she regrets it with every fiber of her being. SFN has banned many people over the years, but none for expressing honest feelings and opinions in a sincere, courteous manner such as yours.

From the above PBS link: The laboratory that rose from the prairie floor was both wired and weird, a contraption with a roof that rolled back to prevent it from catching fire, and a wooden tower that soared up eighty feet. Above it was a 142-foot metal mast supporting a large copper ball. Inside the strange wooden structure, technicians began to assemble an enormous Tesla coil, specially designed to send powerful electrical impulses into the earth. On the evening of the experiment, each piece of equipment was first carefully checked. Then Tesla alerted his mechanic, Czito, to open the switch for only one second. The secondary coil began to sparkle and crack and an eerie blue corona formed in the air around it. Satisfied with the result, Tesla ordered Czito to close the switch until told to cease. Huge arcs of blue electricity snaked up and down the center coil. Bolts of man-made lightning more than a hundred feet in length shot out from the mast atop the station. Tesla's experiment burned out the dynamo at the El Paso Electric Company and the entire city lost power. The power station manager was livid, and insisted that Tesla pay for and repair the damage. I'm guessing this is what is meant by "improved lightning".

If my ISP had successfully stopped a viral attack, wouldn't they be splashing their name all over the announcement instead of signing with a vague, "Your ISP"? The funny part is that all the adresses they claim the viruses originated from are for real. I know because one of them happened to be from a firm I'm trying to do business with. The guy turned out to be an architect in a different office from the one I contacted, and I was able to get routed from that contact to someone I needed to speak with, so I made lemonade out of THAT lemon. But most of them are completely random and look like this (I've deleted some of the info, ??? in bold): This e-mail contained an infection which could not be repaired. This mail is generated by your mail system automatically for processing reasons only. Please ignore it. Thank you, Your ISP --- The header of the original message is following: --- Received: from adsl-69-210-84-21.dsl.milwwi.ameritech.net[69.210.84.21] (helo=???????.net) by mx.perfora.net with ESMTP (Nemesis), id 0MKvAI-1CrXK92GXM-0002Gq; Thu, 20 Jan 2005 03:05:49 -0500 From: ???????.net To: ???????.net Subject: Mail Delivery (failure ???????.net) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 01:35:58 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/related; type="multipart/alternative"; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_001B_01C0CA80.6B015D10" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal Message-ID: <0MKvAI-1CrXK92GXM-0002Gq@mx.perfora.net> Envelope-To: ???????.net X-SpamScore: 0.952 tests= NO_REAL_NAME MISSING_MIMEOLE

I've always been intrigued by how much of Tesla's work was suppressed. What if he had discovered practically no-cost power and it was squashed by those who wanted to profit? Btw, next time provide a link to your sources so others can share. You weren't plagiarizing since you left in the quotation marks but it's just good form to let everyone know who you're quoting. PBS: Tesla, Master of Lightning Also, I'll let a more knowledgeable Mod decide if the thread should be moved from Relativity or not. Do you have any more good Tesla info?

Be grateful someone told you that.

I'm embroidering that on the black armband I'll be wearing to the inauguration tomorrow.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. These are emails I've been getting, from "MAIL DELIVERY SYSTEM", subject "VIRUS ALERT". I'm wondering if it isn't someone's way of detecting active email addresses or something. My virus protection never alerts me, they come in as normal emails, no attachments. I scan them in Outlook without opening them, see what they are, then delete them.

I didn't claim them as normal. I'm merely trying to point out that normal is subjective, and your idea of normal is bound to clash with that of many others. And when it comes to emotional feelings, if you are attracted to the same sex, then it's not really your choice to force yourself to be attracted to the opposite sex. Try to imagine what it would be like if someone told you you couldn't be attracted to the younger man you mentioned earlier, but you had to be attracted to someone else who just disgusted you, not because they were gross but just because you couldn't imagine being intimate with them. Expect life and others to always be your idea of normal and you'll always be disappointed.

I've been getting a lot of notices lately like this one: This e-mail contained an infection which could not be repaired. This mail is generated by your mail system automatically for processing reasons only. Please ignore it. Thank you, Your ISP Then a bunch of email routing info follows. It always gives me the email address of the person who supposedly sent the email, but I know my ISP wouldn't send a notice with the signature, "Thank you, Your ISP" Is this just some kind of hit to see if I open it or not?

I think expecting everything to be "normal" with your life will lead to: 1. A rude awakening 2. Constant disappointment 3. Rampant boredom Expecting your parents to live up to your expectations of "normal" will also lead to the above, along with bitterness and resentment. How old do you have to be to understand that your parents have to play with the cards they're dealt and must simply make the best of them?

Many years from now, Jakiri, YT2095 and Dave are at Dr. Blike's office for a memory test. Dr. Blike asks Jakiri, "What is three times three?" "274," Jakiri replies. Dr. Blike rolls his eyes and says to YT2095, "It's your turn. What is three times three?" "Tuesday," replies YT2095. Dr. Blike shakes his head sadly and says to Dave, "Okay, your turn. What's three times three?" "Nine," says Dave. "That's great!" says Dr. Blike. "How did you get that?" "Simple," says Dave, "just subtract 274 from Tuesday."

What a beautiful experience! You know, it's easy to say love makes the world go 'round, but I think an even more powerful force is gratitude. Love seems to come naturally to many people, but being grateful for what we've got is something we really have to work at. It sounds as though you've earned the gratitude of the folks at that senior home and also are grateful for the talents you possess.

No, not in that order. Ability is paramount, but when a business is large enough to hire a broad spectrum of workers, they should look at more than just ability if there are multiple qualified applicants.