search results matching tag: Feb

» channel: learn

go advanced with your query
Search took 0.000 seconds

    Videos (255)     Sift Talk (18)     Blogs (9)     Comments (314)   

Letterman: Don't vote Romney unless he does the Late Show

The Video Game Years – 1979 Part 1

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children

shinyblurry says...

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.


An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..

Penn's Obama Rant

Professor Antony Sutton on The Order of Skull & Bones

Santorum: Obama a Snob: He Wants Your Kids to go to College

entr0py says...

And here's Obama's actual quote:

Obama, Feb. 24, 2009: And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option.

Sounds like godless liberal elitism to me. Slow down there Lenin H. Rockefeller

http://factcheck.org/2012/02/college-kills-faith/

"I Will Always Love You" (Live) - Chris Cornell

Hive13 says...

>> ^lucky760:

Chris Cornell sings a beautiful cover of Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" live in San Francisco on Feb 16, 2012.

Strictly speaking, is he covering Whitney Houston or Dolly Parton?


Considering the time frame, I am guessing Whitney, but they are all Dolly technically.

"I Will Always Love You" (Live) - Chris Cornell

PolitiFact: Two wrongs make a Mostly Right

NetRunner says...

@hastix you've got a point, but I think the problem is that if you look at their recent track record, there's a clear double standard.

Obama says something completely, unambiguously true, and they call it half-true because they think he was implying something that, in their opinion, isn't true.

A Republican says something that's not factually true, no matter how you slice the numbers, and they rate it "mostly true" because if you substitute the incorrect word he used with the factually accurate word he should have used, it wouldn't (in their opinion) undermine the opinion he was expressing.

Essentially they've gotten into this weird sort of state where they've stopped rating things based on factual accuracy, and have instead started trying to play referee on whether the arguments of the right or the left are correct in their opinion. Problem is, they're still issuing true/false ratings on specific quoted statements, rather than saying "we agree with the right/left on this one."

Here's the original PolitiFact article on this. The first two paragraphs read:

Liberals may want to argue with Sen. Marco Rubio’s remarks at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

But they don’t have the evidence to argue with this statement: "The majority of Americans are conservatives."

But then when they actually go looking for evidence to support Rubio, they find the evidence "liberals may want" to have:

First, he said a majority of Americans are conservatives. In Gallup’s poll, the number has never crossed the 50 percent threshold. Technically, he would be more accurate if he said a plurality of Americans are conservative.

Second, we should note that while more Americans identify as conservative, that has not redounded to the good fortune of the Republican Party.

More Americans than ever identify as political independents, at 40 percent. Republicans don’t even come in at second -- that would be the Democratic Party, claiming the allegiance of 31 percent of Americans. Republicans get third place, with 27 percent claiming the GOP label.

Oh, so you mean liberals who argue that Rubio is wrong, and that he doesn't speak for a majority of Americans have the facts on their side?

But you still rated that factually incorrect statement "mostly true"? Why?

Former CIA Director Against Drone Strikes

TYT - Glenn Greenwald Vs. Prof. Lessig On Citizens United

messenger says...

You can't cause the electorate to become educated any more than you can cause people to stop being greedy, unless you're talking OWS-style education.>> ^marinara:

Feb 15, 2010 is the date of this video.
IMHO, there's no good way to prevent cash from deciding elections. public campaign financing is a start. but IMHO an educated electorate is more important.

TYT - Glenn Greenwald Vs. Prof. Lessig On Citizens United

marinara says...

Feb 15, 2010 is the date of this video.

IMHO, there's no good way to prevent cash from deciding elections. public campaign financing is a start. but IMHO an educated electorate is more important.

"This is not poker. This is not a game."

quantumushroom says...

Why should we give a sh1t, Kenyan? You've ALREADY jacked taxes to the tune of 21 billion a year.


http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/07/barack-obama/president-barack-obama-says-he-didnt-raise-taxes/


The idea that Obama did not raise taxes is just plain wrong. He signed legislation raising taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products soon after taking office...the law went into effect in 2009. He also signed the health care law, which includes taxes on indoor tanning that went into effect last year (2010).

The new health care law also includes a tax on people who decide not to have health insurance, as an incentive for them to get coverage. The tax phases in gradually, starting in 2014. By 2016, the tax would be $695 per uninsured person up to a maximum of three times that amount, or $2,085.

More significantly, the health care law includes new taxes on the wealthy, starting in 2013. Individuals who make more than $200,000 and couples that make more than $250,000 will see additional Medicare taxes of 0.9 percent. They will also, for the first time, have to pay Medicare taxes on their investment income at a 3.8 percent rate. (Current law is that all workers and employers split a 2.9 percent Medicare tax; the self-employed pay all of it.)

The small percentages may not sound like a lot, but those taxes are expected to generate $210 billion over 10 years, or just over half of all the new revenues the health care law authorizes. Other provisions include new fees on health insurance companies and prescription drug manufacturers, and a new tax on high-cost "Cadillac" health insurance plans.


Moochelle couldn't wait another week to leave for another "family" vacation, so please apologize to the 2500 'working class' bastards who had to shell out $40 each for that.

Mumford & Sons - Ghosts That We Knew

Louis CK Joins George W's Motorcade + Other Stuff



Send this Article to a Friend



Separate multiple emails with a comma (,); limit 5 recipients






Your email has been sent successfully!

Manage this Video in Your Playlists

Beggar's Canyon