Hmm, so Stewart and Wilmore seem to be saying that the U.S. couldn't have ended slavery in the same way that New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and all of the other Northern states did (not to mention the British empire, the Spanish empire, the French, the Danes, the Dutch, the Swedes, and many many others during the nineteenth century), namely, peacefully. (For reference, see Jim Powell's Greatest Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery; and Joanne Pope Melish's Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860).

Rather, Stewart and Wilmore seem to be saying that 750,000 dead Americans (and even more than double that number maimed for life), to say nothing of the total destruction of the voluntary union of the founders, was in fact the only way to end slavery. Southerners (only six percent of whom actually owned slaves) were, according to Stewart and Wilmore, "willing to die to preserve slavery" and so, therefore, the Great Oz (er, I mean, The Great Abe) did what was necessary...

So says this renowned historical sage, Jon Stewart, and his cast of clowns...

I have seen this, not out in the middle of nowhere, but through an office window in Waltham, Massachusetts. The hunter was a mother fox with three kits, and she seemed to come up with a mouse more often than not. Wish I could remember which direction she jumped in ...

http://www.realufos.net/2013/05/ufo-quincy-massachusetts-faa-and-mayor.html

http://www.sott.net/article/261674-Mystery-aircraft-frightens-Quincy-Massachusetts-residents

http://www.kcra.com/news/mysterious-aircraft-puzzles-quincy-mass-residents/-/11797728/20099200/-/5bjrwx/-/index.html

and then

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/05/mystery_smell_irks_quincy_neighborhood

along with

http://now.msn.com/mysterious-foot-discovered-by-boys-in-quincy-massachusetts


So a picture is now forming.
Quincy has crossed over in to The Twilight Zone.
Dun dun duuuuuuuuuun

Food for thought...

Wellesley, Massachusetts is a high-class neighborhood so it may come as no big surprise to hear something like this (a speech that is meant to be profound or philosophical in some way). However, it should be obvious to anyone who has seen (or read?) Fight Club that you are never special.

Also of note, Wellesley is also home to some of the most dumbest residence in the state of Massachusetts. Each week (or rather, each Friday), a local radio station would read some of the more retarded entries from the Wellesley Police Blotter. Some are more crazier than others and some are just flat out stupid. I cannot say for certain if this is frequent... as some of the entries that are read out are quite old.

>> ^artician:

Wonderful idea, except I live in Massachusetts, where it's illegal to have a license plate frame.


Seriously? I've never heard of that before, why on earth would you not be allowed to have a frame for your license plate?

Wonderful idea, except I live in Massachusetts, where it's illegal to have a license plate frame.

Love the lady. I'm just worried about the strategy. I feel like she'd be well served to highlight their economic differences, not just their social differences. Massachusetts has a fairly sizable Catholic population. It's risky is all.

Anyway, my mom has been very active in her campaign. She's running call centers and even taking her retired, suburban self into low income Boston neighborhoods to register voters. They wanted her to appear in a commercial, but she turned them down on that one. She says she's doing it because she knows I can't be as active anymore. I'm quite proud.

Tired of that $2.6 Million Program that Teaches Chinese Prostitutes to Drink?

by John Ransom


Liberty is about a lot of things; it’s a deep topic. But at its core liberty can be summed up in one simple and reciprocal concept. That concept is respect.

You know the 2010 last election was about many things, but it was mostly about respect.

It was about starting to restore the respect that people have in government, by getting the government to restore the respect that they show to you…by taking liberty seriously.

If you are like me, you think that many of our elected officials from both the right and the left truly believe that what they think of you is much more important than what you think of them.

If you’re like me you’re tired of a trillion dollars in so-called stimulus spending that went to mob-connected asphalt contractors rather than the pockets of working families who own businesses and pay taxes and do all the working and dreaming in this country.

If you’re like me, you’re tired of a $2.6 million program that teaches Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly while unemployment soars across the country.

If you’re like me, you're tired of an arrogant federal government which pays out $47 billion in fraudulent claims in Medicare every year while they lecture the rest of us about healthcare economics.

If you are like me, you’re tired of the US Postal service wasting $30 million on a program that pays 1100 employees to do nothing. Yes, today, the US Post Office sat 1100 employees in empty rooms, as they do every day, and literally paid them to do nothing. They can’t play cards; they can’t watch TV, in fact they can’t do anything at all. To the tune of $30 million per year.


Yet this very same federal government comes to us now and proposes to manage our healthcare, our retirement, the education of our children, the auto industry, the oil industry, pharmaceuticals, the mortgage industry and lectures the American people that they are under-regulated.

If you’re a middle American like me, from the grassroots, I bet you know someone who owns their own business; if you’re like me you probably know someone who has paid employees of that business on time every week, but hasn’t been able to pay themselves a dime. Yet these very same people who provide half the new jobs in our economy, who have lost money over the last few years, still owe the government tens of thousands of dollars in taxes every year. People wonder where our jobs have gone? They’ve been crushed by a system that doesn’t honor job creation; by a system that doesn’t honor liberty; a system that gives no respect.

And if you are like most of the voters I speak to, you are tired of insiders from Washington and Wall Street on both sides of the aisle, and their wasteful spending schemes that don’t even propose to solve the very issues facing Main Street and working families.

Let’s suppose global warming is real; I don’t think it is, but let’s say it's so for the sake of argument. Show me please how the Renewable Electricity Standard-- which will cost American families $1800 per year-- please show me how it’s going to lower the earth’s temperature. They can’t because the Renewable Electricity Standard wasn’t created to combat global warming and it won’t lower the earth’s temperature.

Ok, so let’s suppose the issue is carbon emission; that carbon is really bad and we have to get it out of our atmosphere. Show me please how the Renewable Electricity Standard is going to reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere. They can’t. It wasn’t designed to do that and it won’t do that.

The government doesn't write legislation with solutions in mind, but rather with power and control of your very lives. And it is inside of your lives where you will wrestle back that control.

I’m often reminded that it’s with readers just like you where many of the seminal events of our country happened. It’s in rooms just like you’re in right now that a small group of patriots in Massachusetts planned the Boston Tea Party; it’s in groups just like you are a part of today that was born the Mayflower Compact; it’s in the free association of our citizens, for the common good and with common respect, that the greatness and goodness of our country will always be found.

And as long as people like you, freely associate for the common good and meet in respect, our country will always remain both great and good.

But ordinary people are paying attention, actually reading the Constitution; people are actually asking questions about the 10th Amendment, asking: What kind of power does Washington really have over us?

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people who have been awakened to that yet, that’s why readers like you are so important. Each individual reading this is so incredibly important because the job you have this year as a citizen has never, ever, ever been more important. The 2012 election is going to determine what it’s like to live in this country for a long time. It’s going to be people just like you, having conversation just like this, in rooms across America that are going to make a difference.

This is the chance to turn the tide. The chance we have today is to bury that last vestiges of big government in our country; to reclaim our liberty from a new deal and replace it with a true deal.

I’ve been very fortunate because over the last half dozen years I’ve been able to travel all around the country working with grassroots activists just like you. I understand, I think, better than elected officials, what makes the grassroots so special. It's you and your ability to communicate.

We have all these new tools available for citizens to communicate that just a few years ago we didn’t have. A few years ago readers wouldn’t have been as energized and as informed because we didn’t have the ability to communicate as we do now. We have been so fractured and fragmented all around the country and around the nation that we feel like we can’t do anything, that Washington is so big and out of touch that we can’t do anything.

In fact, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Now is the time we really do have the opportunity. For the first time in our history ordinary citizens have the ability to communicate with one another over the heads of the media in publications like Townhall. We are networked on social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter that expose us to thousands of people for free.

But when I was growing up there were three TV stations and two newspapers in every town that decided what the news was. There were probably a dozen people in any town that picked our news for us.

Those days are over.

This election isn’t about voting for the next person standing in a long line of elites who will rule over us; it’s about what kind of country we want to be in the future.

It’s about preserving the American dream right here right now. Because when they mess with our liberty, they really mess with our ability to dream.

I believe that the ability to dream is worth handing down to our kids.

I believe that it’s our dreams that makes us the most dynamic country in the world.

It’s the dream that brings jobs and prosperity to the US.

It’s a dream that treats promises like they really matter.

And it’s the dreams that are the promise of America.

Because when politicians treat the promises they campaign on like they matter, when they are held accountable to those pledges-- by us-- we will restore the respect they owe us.

"Whether practice for the real world, focused sparring, or simply horny as fuck, we can't tell Dan just what's on these cat's mind's today this afternoon, here at the Kitteh Dojo, here in beautiful Worstchtcher, Massachusetts."....

I really don't understand why you bother. Shiny has proven time and time again that he's either incapable of understanding anything outside of his magic book, or he's nothing but a troll. I vote for the second, but the net effect is the same. You're wasting your time.>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^shinyblurry:
"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]
You love this quote, don't you? I searched for it on google and fuck me if the first page or two isn't almost all you regurgitating this at every opportunity.
Now, here's the thing. You haven't read this book. Because if you had, you would have seen the next line.
"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. Thankfully, the evidence is overwhelming. I don't just mean evidence that life evolved (which is way beyond reasonable doubt, creationists notwithstanding), but that it evolved by natural selection."
But hey, let's ignore that bit. Let's live in shinys fantasy delusional that there isn't an almost overwhelming preponderance of data backing up evolution. Pinker would still be right. Why? Because there are no valid competing scientific theories. Literally. That's it. It's the only game in town. No-one has come even remotely close to explaining the diversity of life on this planet without evolution.
Intelligent design is not a theory. It fails almost every criteria.
So seriously, enough with the bullshit.

>> ^shinyblurry:

"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]

You love this quote, don't you? I searched for it on google and fuck me if the first page or two isn't almost all you regurgitating this at every opportunity.

Now, here's the thing. You haven't read this book. Because if you had, you would have seen the next line.

"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. Thankfully, the evidence is overwhelming. I don't just mean evidence that life evolved (which is way beyond reasonable doubt, creationists notwithstanding), but that it evolved by natural selection."

But hey, let's ignore that bit. Let's live in shinys fantasy delusional that there isn't an almost overwhelming preponderance of data backing up evolution. Pinker would still be right. Why? Because there are no valid competing scientific theories. Literally. That's it. It's the only game in town. No-one has come even remotely close to explaining the diversity of life on this planet without evolution.

Intelligent design is not a theory. It fails almost every criteria.

So seriously, enough with the bullshit.

@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..

Massachusetts wanted it, they got it.

The American people didn't want the AHA, but got it anyway.

Big difference between what a state can do for themselves, and what is forced on the entire country. BTW, there are hundreds of exceptions now for the AHA, including for unions and our legislators, because they don't want it. Why can some opt out, and not others?

no one has really hammered Romney about the Massachusetts health care plan and how he can pass that, yet be against the AHA.

The cognitive dissonance on the right is that large that they won't see the hypocrisy so I just don't see that line of attack convincing a whole heck of a lot of people

The first thing we should do is decide, in the wake of these tragedies, what we should be talking about instead providing a knee jerk reaction.

I would have said the discussion should center around mental-health and the need for it. On that, both men have spoken, Obama through the Affordable Care Act, and Romney through the Massachusetts Health Reform Act.

BUT, in the case of the Colorado shooting, James Holmes' psychiatrist went to local authorities with concerns about this mentally unstable person. Michael Page, responsible for the most recent Wisconsin shooting, was already being watched by authorities.

The question I propose is: Why were these men who should have been monitored closer able to develop and execute elaborate plans to massacre innocent people if the authorities already knew about them?

I'll leave it at that with this final comment: an overstaffed, underworked police force was not a problem in either instance. And funding or defunding local municipalities through the raising or lowering of taxes is something both candidates have spoken on frequently.