Videos (48) | Sift Talk (9) | Blogs (5) | Comments (181) |
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MEP Tells Off Technocrats in the EU Parliment
Some of those technocrats in Greece seem to be fascists as well.
dystopianfuturetoday (Member Profile)
Whoa, your profile has me tripping! I figured I should leave that comment to you, but I was bored and it seemed too easy
In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
:
In reply to this comment by ghark:
>> ^bobknight33:
dystopianfuturetoday does not know what he is talking about.
Um...
In terms of his comments on Reagan:
"During his first term in office, President Reagan cut the real budget of the Department of Education by 18.6 percent"
http://www.aei.org/papers/economics/fiscal-policy/pr
esident-reagan-champion-budget-cutter/
And as for Ron Paul:
"The Paul plan would also lower the corporate tax rate to 15% from 35%"
Ron Paul also wants to ABOLISH personal income tax and extend all Bush tax cuts.
http://runr
onpaul.com/campaign-trail/ron-paul%E2%80%99s-economic-plan-cut-5-cabinet-agencies-cut-taxes-cut-president%E2%80%99s-pay/
So dystopianfuturetoday's comments seem to be accurate, yours seem to be opinion which you haven't even bothered backing up.
dystopianfuturetoday (Member Profile)
ahh, not like its the first time I am sure.
In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
I stand corrected.
In reply to this comment by BoneRemake:
Hrm, they are wrong.
as so are you
:
In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diss
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=diss
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/diss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIS_%E2%80%93_Danish_Institute_for_St udy_Abroad
In reply to this comment by BoneRemake:
One S in Dis.
dis·re·spect
dystopianfuturetoday (Member Profile)
Hrm, they are wrong.
as so are you
In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diss
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=diss
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/diss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIS_%E2%80%93_Danish_Institute_for_St
udy_Abroad
In reply to this comment by BoneRemake:
One S in Dis.
dis·re·spect
ghark (Member Profile)
In reply to this comment by ghark:
>> ^bobknight33:
dystopianfuturetoday does not know what he is talking about.
Um...
In terms of his comments on Reagan:
"During his first term in office, President Reagan cut the real budget of the Department of Education by 18.6 percent"
http://www.aei.org/papers/economics/fiscal-policy/pr
esident-reagan-champion-budget-cutter/
And as for Ron Paul:
"The Paul plan would also lower the corporate tax rate to 15% from 35%"
Ron Paul also wants to ABOLISH personal income tax and extend all Bush tax cuts.
http://runr
onpaul.com/campaign-trail/ron-paul%E2%80%99s-economic-plan-cut-5-cabinet-agencies-cut-taxes-cut-president%E2%80%99s-pay/
So dystopianfuturetoday's comments seem to be accurate, yours seem to be opinion which you haven't even bothered backing up.
Ron Paul Interview On DeFace The Nation 11/20/11
>> ^bobknight33:
dystopianfuturetoday does not know what he is talking about.
Um...
In terms of his comments on Reagan:
"During his first term in office, President Reagan cut the real budget of the Department of Education by 18.6 percent"
http://www.aei.org/papers/economics/fiscal-policy/president-reagan-champion-budget-cutter/
And as for Ron Paul:
"The Paul plan would also lower the corporate tax rate to 15% from 35%"
Ron Paul also wants to ABOLISH personal income tax and extend all Bush tax cuts.
http://runronpaul.com/campaign-trail/ron-paul%E2%80%99s-economic-plan-cut-5-cabinet-agencies-cut-taxes-cut-president%E2%80%99s-pay/
So dystopianfuturetoday's comments seem to be accurate, yours seem to be opinion which you haven't even bothered backing up.
RSA Animate - The Divided Brain
The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.
No, Dandy-Walker does not contradict everything taught in the video. He has (and others like him have) most of the same brain structures (especially the ones related to consciousness). For the most part, they are missing their cerebellar vermis, which controls and analyzes spatial motion. The parts that have something to do with consciousness are still there, and they are even in pretty much the same place as they would be otherwise.
Even if the parts of their brain were jumbled up a bit, that doesn't mean they couldn't necessarily have consciousness. The body does some amazing things considering some of the biological errors that happen. People can be born with holes in their hearts, or on the wrong side of their body, and have perfectly functioning circulatory systems - that doesn't mean the circulation of their blood is transcendent from their circulatory system.
Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes.
This is a complete cop-out. I can say the same to you. If your god is omniscient, then he knows what you are going to do before you do it. Therefore you don't actually have free will because, no matter what, you are going to do what god always expected you to do.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
Consciousness is consciousness, whether the brain is damaged or undamaged. The key part is having it, and It stems from the soul. The quality of the consciousness is effected by the relative performance of the medium, but if access to information is lost in the physical, it doesn't mean it is gone. It's purely your assumption that it can be destroyed in any way. The access may be lost in the physical, but it still exists in eternity. God knows everything, so He is the ultimate memory storage for our souls.
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.
Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam:
"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”
And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."
You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I believe anything that you're saying?
>> ^Skeeve:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.
RSA Animate - The Divided Brain
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
Consciousness is consciousness, whether the brain is damaged or undamaged. The key part is having it, and It stems from the soul. The quality of the consciousness is effected by the relative performance of the medium, but if access to information is lost in the physical, it doesn't mean it is gone. It's purely your assumption that it can be destroyed in any way. The access may be lost in the physical, but it still exists in eternity. God knows everything, so He is the ultimate memory storage for our souls.
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.
Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam:
"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”
And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."
You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I believe anything that you're saying?
>> ^Skeeve:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.
RSA Animate - The Divided Brain
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.
Religion (and Mormonism) is a Con--Real Time with Bill Maher
I clicked on your comment in the newest appreciated comments section. I could have sworn that it read" Romney was not BORN a moron. Mormon .... moron.... quite the similarity, a coincidence? I think not.
>> ^EMPIRE:
Romney was not BORN a mormon.
http://joedonatelli.com/mitt-romney%E2%80%99s-magic-underwear/10/10/2011/
Sarah Palin Explains Her Decision Not to Run For President
..but but... we DID invade Russia!
NYPD Beats and Maces Protesters, Fox Reporters
The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by Barseps.
The Shining - The Hallway
The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.
"Fiat Money" Explained in 3 minutes
@NetRunner
I never said banks create money from nothing. They are allowed to grant someone money based on their promise to pay it back.
You're making it sound like I'm saying banks can just literally add money to their balance sheets. That is not what I'm saying.
I never said interest collected reduces the money supply. Collecting principle does. When you finish paying back a debt, the bank zeroes out the debt associated with that loan, which removes the money from the system. The interest is left over and that is what increases the money supply.
Banks bother with loans because the promise someone makes when they sign on the dotted line is the only thing of actual value in the entire system: The lender's trust and the borrower's promise. You must have that promise in order to create the money. You don't just add numbers to your balance sheet because you feel like it unless you're trying to commit fraud.
There's a difference between central bank money and commercial bank money. It's the fact that money lent out by one bank can be deposited at another bank, and that bank can make loans based on that deposit, which has not been repaid to the original bank yet. It's called re-lending. So, while each bank is not literally creating money on their balance sheets, the total aggregate interest repaid to the system is constantly increasing the money supply because that interest never existed when the process began.
I haven't been explaining it very well. Look, it's not the individual bank that's creating the $900 from $100 in deposits, it's the system overall...when you add up all the loans created by the initial $100 in Fed deposits. The ratio of publicly held money vs. Fed deposit reserves is what's important.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_multiplier
specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fractional_reserve_lending_varyingrates_100base.jpg
The graph shows it well. The $900 number is an approximation of the actual number, which can be obtained from the geometric series.
You can also read this document produced by the Chicago Fed branch:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Modern_Money_Mechanics/Bank_Deposits%E2%80%94How_They_Expand_or_Contract
Specifically, the part where it says "...Of course, they do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers' transaction accounts. Loans (assets) and deposits (liabilities) both rise by $9,000..."
11 Muslim Students found Guilty in California
>> ^SDGundamX:
I fully support what they did. Disrupting a speech is a perfectly legitimate form of protest and given Israel's continued policies in the Gaza strip it is certainly warranted, in my opinion.
I do not support them trying to get the charges dropped, though. The whole point of civil disobedience is to break the law peacefully and to go to jail for what you believe. If they feel that strongly about the issue they should do whatever jail-time they're given with pride--and be willing to do it again if necessary.
Honestly, I don't see how they even have a case. As this article clearly explains, the Supreme Court has routinely ruled in favor of governments' (both local and federal) right to limit the time, manner, and place of speech so long as there is no infringement on content. Given that the speech-place will probably not be considered a "traditional public forum" (see the article) I don't think they have much of a legal chance of winning.
Related article: Woman tackled and arrested for disrupting Netanyahu's speech in front of U.S. Congress
Food for thought (from the article above):
And after I spoke out, Netanyahu said, you know, “This is what’s possible in a democracy. And you wouldn’t be able to get away with this in other countries like Tunisia.” And I think that is ridiculous and absurd. If this is what democracy looks like, that when you speak out for freedom and justice, you get tackled to the ground, you get physically violated and assaulted, and then you get hauled off to jail, that’s not the kind of democracy that I think I want to live in.
Well if the Supreme Court said so it must be right and completely fair.