Moontanman

I see, so right wing is good left wing is bad? We can have right wing organizations but left wing cannot be allowed to exist... yes that sounds about right... This simply has no bearing on this subject and is a highly conflated version of reality... McCarthyism was witch hunt, I am quite sure there were communists present at that time, some were operating openly and under our constitution they should have had that right. McCarthyism ruined the lives and careers of innocent people, they conflated the danger of communism and used the resulting fear for their own political gain. Michele Bachmann is doing the exact same thing, the Muslim Brotherhood has not deep penetrated our government, if she had evidence of that it should have been presented secretly to the justice department not announced on the radio.. I am just as concerened that fundamentalist Christianity has "deeply penetrated" our government, they are doing their best to destroy us from with in, turn our secular government into a theocracy, make religion law, take away the basic rights of anyone who is not following Jesus the way they think he should be followed, they are the clear and present danger and Michele Bachmann is one of them. Crying wolf while she tears down the gates to let the hoards in to destroy us from with in... It's happening at the state level all over the country, my home state just amended the constitution to disenfranchise homosexuals and even male/female couples who are living together... Religion cannot be allowed to become the law of the land no matter how much you love Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, or truly believe the earth is 6,000 years and Noah's Ark actually happened... You don't announce this publicly if you are serious, you don't want to tip your had to the very people you are looking for, she did it for no reason other than political gain, she wanted to spread fear among her constituents so she could garner votes, no other reason... We need religion for a moral authority? Really? Really!? If Islam would allow it's self to gelded then I could tolerate them, Christianity was just as bad as Islam in promoting middle age "morality" before it was gelded by the enlightenment, personally I don't want to see someones head cut off because he insults Islam, it happens in the middle east at the drop of the least doubt that allah is great, no other point of view is allowed under threat of death. Someone who just wants to stop being Muslim is killed, atheists are dead meat if found. Religion needs to die not be allowed to drag civilization back down the rat hole of fundamentalism... Islam did that with the Muslim civilization and they have yet to recover, in fact they are still trying to drag us down as we speak... BTW JohnB, is that video right wing or left wing, I'm not really sure...

I think the number of limbs on vertebrates was set long before there were mammals. John Varley got by this impasse in his Gaen trilogy Titan Wizard and Demon by proposing that his centaurs while chordates were in fact not vertebrates and had a spinal column of cartilage, biological engineering has many possibilities...

John, i am really amazed, I expected quite a bit better from you, the argument here is not if the Muslim brotherhood or who ever is out to get us, I am quite sure there are more groups out to get us than we can both count on our toes and fingers and by unzipping both our flys... The stupid woman claimed they have "deeply penetrated" our government and are taking over from with in, this is the dumbest statement I have heard in quite some time and if it was true Michele Bachmann is a complete dumb ass for making it public before having some evidence of who they are in our government. If it is true, by tipping her hand before knowing who they are, she has made them if anything doubly difficult to find, god what a dumb ass thing to say...

Centaurs would be cool, i want to be a centaur...

but none the less quite accurate...

Actually we can create an analog to something as simple as mosquito, in fact we have robots that whose behaviors is at least as complex. This makes no real sense. I don't see how you can say that the pyramids cannot be explained, that is nonsense...

No one asked you to do that typist...

In my house I do the house work and my wife works, I rather like it...

Hmmm, this has potential, i think I'll introduce it to my awesome wife and see if it works.... dishes is not what i have in mind... dishes I can do with no problem...

i think genetic engineering could be used to eliminate the need for living animals and allow plants to produce fruit that is animal flesh, like breaking open a coconut type shell and having it full of say shrimp or fish or beef. I see no reason it would be impossible... Not if you have fee will...

That is an assertion I would like to see elaborated...

Bragging about being banned many times is a bad sign for sure...

Time is all there is, nothing but time... it sounded good at the time... oh and btw, welcome to the forum, the time of your life i am sure...

http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/1c495e208f03012f2fe200163e41dd5b http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/1b0ab8608f03012f2fe200163e41dd5b http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/562f33b01df3012f2fc700163e41dd5b http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/5e294c708f02012f2fe200163e41dd5b

It would depend greatly on how small the mesh was and how thin the sharp object was, chain mail should stop a knife quite handily, a very fine mesh impregnated with plastic and a layer of kevlar fiber should have some stopping power. Not all shark teeth are triangular but they are not round rods either... Possibly the person being attacked should just shoot the bastard... Just kidding, this is a difficult thing to engineer, there is a need for a needle proof glove in medicine, very difficult to achieve as well... The polycarbonate scales looks like a good direction to go. Polycarbonate scales over a kevlar layer might do both jobs, stopping bullets and sharp objects...

The really sad thing is that conservatives have embraced people like Michele Bachmann, she serves on the house intelligence committee, she gives stupidity a bad name, she couldn't find her ass in the dark with both hands and a flashlight. I am not a died in the wool progressive or anything else, I consistently look at both sides looking for the best ideas but in recent years, decades really, but most definitely in recent years conservatives seem to be embracing the absolute most stupid people they can find, yes I said stupid, not ignorant but stupid, stunningly stupid. Ronald Reagan, who they nearly deify, and who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer to start with, but he was not stupid, he must be spinning at about 10,000 rpm these days, the rumble must be deafening... at least 6.0 on the Richter scale... In an effort to embrace their right wing religious base they have not only allowed stupid to rule the roost they make no effort to even try and lead these people away from stupid, in fact they tout stupid like it is the breath of life. I honestly can't see how anyone with any intelligence what so ever could really vote for such a person but since she believes in Jesus and YEC she must be superior, yes superior, to a rock, no a rock is just a rock, she is willfully dumber than a rock, a rock has no choice...

Again a strawman, I am not arguing any such thing and you know it... No you are making the same tired old argument against progress that has been used since humans could argue, No og, you can't use that rock to make a tool, it's not the one we usually use... Insanity is in the eye of the supposedly sane, your world sounds a lot like 1984... Why is it automatically either or?

That may be your opinion but extinction is extinction.. if the human race wants to send it's genome into the future we will need knowledge, in a million years our descendants among the stars might not be human but at least they will be... To risk that possibility and trade it for slow extinction on this tiny planet is unacceptable to me... You keep saying that unsupported assertion... It will always be so far... Who makes that decision?

Typist, you should really stop grinding that ax, the edge will eventually wear away... There is no way to predict the future out come of any research. We cannot know what scientific discovery will save or doom the human race or even if any of them will, all we can do is keep on truckin'...

You do of course have a point but even religious fundamentalists need followers, why risk killing all of yours? Even religious fundamentalists have a basic understanding of reality and sending all of your followers to allah or jesus is only appealing to a very small fringe... I still say the voice of reason is stronger now than it ever has been and will only get stronger. yes but short of nuking them how to you stop religion? (like that would work) You geld it like the west has done, people like Osama are relics of the past, we need to do something about that small group of people and why they have power. Religious fundamentalists are in all religions, they are a clear and present danger here in the US but the presence of batshitcrazy doesn't mean you need to change the entire human race so it cannot be batshitcrazy. The need for batshitcrazy has to be addressed. No, please show how you can assert that as though it is fact... even a total nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would not be the end of the world and i think they can and do benefit from the knowledge gained in the cold war, no one can win such a battle... they know it and that has tempered their response to their conflict... Only so many people can be brain scientists... And we are even more reasonable now and I think we will continue to improve, there are holdouts on the fringe but these people are fringes... And that's a bad thing why? Do we have to be so reasonable that we cannot have basic disagreements before we can proceed forward with knowledge?

i say go pound sand, are you going to launch a nuclear strike that dooms us both over an insult? Again, a false comparison, verbal barbs against an argument are not personal insults and anyone who would react to such innocent remarks with violence is not likely to be in control of nuclear weapons... Well there are the conservatives... No I disagree, not if it meant his own destruction in a significant way. Nuclear weapons are not child's toys to be used in any confrontation, it took a long time for those in power to realize how serious the idea of MAD was but I really don't see it now... Oh boy a physicist making burgers, how wonderful the very person who might discover a new source of clean energy or a realistic space drive is making burgers while some guys try to change the very nature of humans... sounds like a good reason to nuke the world. So your argument rests on what could have happened but gives no credit for it not happening?

Personal stuff? Yes but these things do not change the very nature of humans and you can if you wish reject them... Again they can be rejected I will admit to this fly in the ointment but the fact they have not done so gives you some hope they do understand the consequences and not as blind to the reality as you or we fear. No one has claimed that we always use reason but even in that case we stared at the abyss and we blinked, we chose not to fight it out with nukes, mainly because even then there was a basic understanding of just how bad it would be for both sides and no clear winner would or could emerge..

Eugenics anyone? No it is not, you are talking about changing the very nature of human beings, that is not philosophical or political and using science to do it smacks of eugenics.. Horse feathers, we are no longer in danger of a massive world wide nuclear strike, you are strawmanning the problem. We require knowledge to change the world more than we need to change the fundamental nature of humans... Again a strawman, that is not the case, the idea that one bomb used would unleash a world wide Holocaust is no longer valid, I see no chance of this happening and the idea that "one side" or another will unleash such a strike for some unknown reason is laughable...

Do you really think that "we" as a society go to war as easily as we did 100 years ago? I grew up during the cold war era, I saw the political TV ads that showed a nuclear weapon explosion as the end result of voting for the "other" guy. Yes we have had some close calls but the idea that we are doomed to use those weapons or that their use would inevitably result in the destruction of our civilization. The very research you deride is more likely to result in the preserving of our civilization than it's destruction. I think we have made vast improvements in our conflict resolution tactics. Perfect? No of course not but I no longer wake up in a sweat with the nuclear sword hanging over my head either... If we are to survive it will take all the knowledge we can muster, suppression of knowledge is far more likely to result in our going out with a whimper than going out with a bang...

"she" not he... No there weren't... that is why McCarthyism is derided to this day... It is not proof that they are under every rock either... I wonder about the watcher, come on JohnB, does being a conservative really mean you have to agree with every batshit crazy conservative that stands up and shouts nonsense? I damn sure do not agree with all progressive ideas and neither does the guy who you seem to deride so much, maybe you should watch a few more TYT reports and see they don't worship and the alter of every liberal idea that comes down the pike....