Thanks, I did not know this! Respect +100


*goes off to look up his bio in local library*

>> ^RadHazG:

Feynman was in fact, an expert safe cracker. He managed to crack almost every safe part of the Manhattan proj. and made a point of trying to bring to the heads attention how vulnerable the safes in fact were to being cracked. Their response? To instead have everyone change the codes and warn everyone about Feynman! Typical. Check out is autobiography. It's one hell of a read.

Feynman was in fact, an expert safe cracker. He managed to crack almost every safe part of the Manhattan proj. and made a point of trying to bring to the heads attention how vulnerable the safes in fact were to being cracked. Their response? To instead have everyone change the codes and warn everyone about Feynman! Typical. Check out is autobiography. It's one hell of a read.

A quote from David Rockefeller's autobiography "Memoirs":

"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will.

If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

For a deeper answer from Hitchens on this question read his autobiography, Hitch22. His original take on religion borrowed from his mother's vehemence against it. As he went off to school though, his mother eventually left his father for a religious nutter, eventually being led to a mutual suicide with the nutter. As though that weren't enough to poison one against religion, the priests of the day wouldn't do the funeral ceremony for his mother as suicide was a sin...

until of course he paid them some money which overcame their qualms...

That all might have a good deal do with the depths of his convictions as well, albeit far less eloquent and objective.

Not many bands could play as tight as any of Zappa's bands. He was a perfectionist. A true genius. His autobiography is well worth reading, great stuff. The sheik yerbouti cover is one his best pictures.

He really is a genuine guy. His books are great. I picked up his first autobiography on a lark and I was very surprised it was very good. I like him.

I read Jackie's autobiography a few years ago and one story still sticks with me. He, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao were all at the Peking Opera school and were forced to balance, standing on their heads, for some sort of infraction. After a while, Jackie looks over and is amazed to find Yuen has fallen asleep, upside down and remaining balanced.

Here some more info copied from it dupe:

"From YT: A great English icon visited an Aussie one when Stephen Fry came to the Sydney Opera House to discuss travel, language, the three W's (Wilde, Waugh and Wodehouse) and everything in between, in a 90 minute talk-fest. The night involved a cracking 45 minute chat by Fry and then a 45 minute Q&A with First Tuesday Book Club's Jennifer Byrne.

A true polymath and the epitome of a Renaissance Man, Stephen Fry is a natural treasure in his native land of England. A writer, presenter, social commentator, satirist, actor and TV personality, Fry's diverse interests and enthusiasms have seen him become one of a small handful of global cultural figures who have a significant presence in every form of media; radio, TV, film, print and online.

Better known for playing the lead in the film Wilde, Fry was Melchett in the Blackadder television series and is the host of the ABC TV quiz show, QI. He also presented the television series Stephen Fry In America, which saw him travelling across all 50 U.S. States in a London cab.

Apart from his work in television, Fry has contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines, and has written four novels and an autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot and appears frequently on BBC Radio.

Fry wields considerable influence through his use of the social networking site Twitter and is frequently asked to promote various charities and causes, often inadvertently causing the host website to crash due to the sheer volume of traffic generated by his large number of followers."

Part 1

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbHUWktyd1E
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs9Lwh0QuTk
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru0mDW4bdlI
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSbwSZVJ3Wk

If you find this interesting, I would highly recommend the book "Codename: Copperhead", the autobiography of Joe Garner - likely the first person to jump out of a plane strapped to a nuclear weapon. He talks in detail about that first jump and other Special Forces exercises with man-portable nukes.

It's become part of the Sift, not unlike Westy's spelling and QuantumMushroom finding a rightist slant that blames leftist forces for everything.


Oh, not EVERYTHING. After all, 98% isn't a 100%.

Liberals' 50 years of dreadful domestic policy
Posted: December 23, 2010

by Larry Elder

For the past 50 years, the Democrats – and many Republicans who should know better – have been wrong about virtually every major domestic policy issue. Let's review some of them:

Taxes

The bipartisan extension of the Bush tax cuts represents the latest triumph over the "soak the rich because trickledown doesn't work" leftists.

President Ronald Reagan sharply reduced the top marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent, doubling the Treasury's tax revenue. President George H.W. Bush raised the income tax rate, as did his successor. But President George W. Bush lowered them to the current 35 percent.

President Barack Obama repeatedly called the current rate unfair, harmful to the country and a reward to those who "didn't need" the cuts and "didn't ask for" them. If true, he and his party ditched their moral obligation to oppose the extension. But they didn't, because none of it is true. Democratic icon John F. Kennedy, who reduced the top marginal rate from more than 90 percent to 70 percent, said, "A rising tide lifts all the boats." He was right – and most of the Democratic Party knows it.


Welfare for the "underclass"

When President Lyndon Johnson launched his "War on Poverty," the poverty rate was trending down. When he offered money and benefits to unmarried women, the rate started flat-lining. Women married the government, allowing men to abandon their moral and financial responsibilities.

The percentage of children born outside of marriage – to young, disproportionately uneducated and disproportionately brown and black women – exploded. In 1996, over the objections of many on the left, welfare was reformed. Time limits were imposed, and women no longer received additional benefits if they had more children. The welfare rolls declined. Ten years later, the New York Times wrote: "When the 1996 law was passed ... liberal advocacy groups ... predicted that it would increase child poverty, hunger and homelessness. The predictions were not fulfilled."

Education

The federal government's increasing involvement with education – what is properly a state and local function – has been costly and ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. Title I, a program begun 45 years ago to close the performance gap between urban and suburban schools, burns through more than $15 billion a year, and the performance gap has widened. The feds spend $80 billion a year on K-12 education, as if money is the answer. States like Utah and Iowa spend much less money per student compared with districts like those in New York City and Washington, D.C., with much better results.

Where parents have choices – where the money follows the student rather than the other way around – the students perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. But the teachers' unions and the Democratic Party continue to resist true competition among public, private and parochial schools.

Gun control

Violent crime occurs disproportionately in urban areas – where Democrats in charge impose the most draconian gun-control laws.

Over the objection of those who warn of a "return to the Wild West," 34 states passed laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Not one state has repealed its law. Professor John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," says: "There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate: As more people obtain permits, there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect, the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent and robberies by over 2 percent."


"Affirmative action"

Race-based preferences have been a disaster for college admissions. Students admitted with lesser credentials are more likely to drop out. Had their credentials matched their schools, they would have been far more likely to graduate and thus enter the job market at a more productive level.

Preferences in government hiring and contracting have led to widespread, costly and morale-draining "reverse discrimination" lawsuits. Where preferences have been put to the ballot, voters – even in liberal states like California – have voted against them.

Minimum-wage hikes

Almost all economists agree that minimum-wage laws contribute to unemployment among the low-skilled – the very group the "compassionate party" claims to care about.

Economist Walter E. Williams, 74, in his new autobiography, "Up from the Projects," describes the many low-skilled jobs he took as a teenager. "By today's standards," he wrote, "my youthful employment opportunities might be seen as extraordinary. That was not the case in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, as I've reported in some of my research, teenage unemployment among blacks was slightly lower than among whites, and black teens were more active in the labor force as well. All of my classmates, friends, and acquaintances who wanted to work found jobs of one sort or another."

Obamacare

This ghastly government-directed scheme will inevitably lead to rationing and lower-quality care – all without "bending the cost curve" down as Obama promised.

Any party can have a bad half-century. Merry Christmas Solstice.

@WKB

True, but when the Columbine school shooting was perpetrated, conservatives were quick to point the finger at Marilyn Manson's lyrics. I'm not saying they were right, and I'm not saying that Fox deserves all of the blame here either.

I do think though, that the people pumping that kind of rhetoric onto the airwaves deserve SOME responsibility for atrocities like this. Allow me to compare the Woodstock of 1970 to the Woodstock of '99 for an example.

-------------------------------------------------------------

>>>>>>The 1970 Woodstock (billed as "3 days of Peace and Music") resulted in reports like this:

"The New York Times covered the prelude to the festival and the move from Wallkill to Bethel.[13] Barnard Collier, who reported from the event for the Times, asserts that he was pressured by on-duty editors at the paper to write a misleadingly negative article about the event. According to Collier, this led to acrimonious discussions and his threat to refuse to write the article until the paper's executive editor, James Reston, agreed to let him write the article as he saw fit. The eventual article dealt with issues of traffic jams and minor lawbreaking, but went on to emphasize cooperation, generosity, and the good nature of the festival goers.

When the festival was over, Collier wrote another article about the exodus of fans from the festival site and the lack of violence at the event. The chief medical officer for the event and several local residents were quoted as praising the festival goers."

--------------------------------------------------------------

>>>>>>The 1999 version of the event (featuring bands like Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock and the Red Hot Chili Peppers who are all, dare I say, a bit angrier [lyrically speaking] than the likes of Arlo Guthrie or Joan Baez) is painted in a much different color:

"Some crowd violence and looting was reported during the Saturday night performance by Limp Bizkit, including a rendition of the song "Break Stuff". Reviewers of the concert criticized Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst as "irresponsible" for encouraging the crowd to destructive behavior.

Violence escalated the next night during the final hours of the concert as Red Hot Chili Peppers performed. A group of peace promoters led by an independent group called Pax had distributed candles to those stopping at their booth during the day, intending them for a candlelight vigil to be held during the Red Hot Chili Peppers' performance of the song "Under the Bridge". During the band's set, the crowd began to light the candles, some also using them to start bonfires. The hundreds of empty plastic water bottles that littered the lawn/dance area were used as fuel for the fire.

After the Red Hot Chili Peppers were finished with their main set, the audience was informed about "a bit of a problem." An audio tower caught fire, and the fire department was called in to extinguish it.

Back onstage for an encore, the Chili Peppers' lead singer Anthony Kiedis remarked how amazing the fires looked from the stage, comparing them to a scene in the film Apocalypse Now.[12] The band proceeded to play "Sir Psycho Sexy", followed by their rendition of Jimi Hendrix's "Fire". Kiedis later stated in his autobiography, Scar Tissue that Jimi Hendrix's sister had asked the Chili Peppers to play "Fire" in honor of Jimi and his performance at the original Woodstock festival, and that they were not playing it to encourage the crowd.

Many large bonfires were burning high before the band left the stage for the last time. Participants danced in circles around the fires. Looking for more fuel, some tore off panels of plywood from the supposedly inviolable security perimeter fence. ATMs were tipped over and broken into, trailers full of merchandise and equipment were forced open and burglarized, and abandoned vendor booths were turned over, and set afire.[13]

MTV, which had been providing live coverage, removed its entire crew. MTV host Kurt Loder described the scene in the July 27, 1999 issue of USA Today:

"It was dangerous to be around. The whole scene was scary. There were just waves of hatred bouncing around the place, (...) It was clear we had to get out of there.... It was like a concentration camp. To get in, you get frisked to make sure you're not bringing in any water or food that would prevent you from buying from their outrageously priced booths. You wallow around in garbage and human waste. There was a palpable mood of anger."

After some time, a large force of New York State Troopers, local police, and various other law enforcement arrived. Most had crowd control gear and proceeded to form a riot-line that flushed the crowd to the northwest, away from the stage located at the eastern end of the airfield. Few of the crowd offered strong resistance and they dispersed quickly back toward the campground and out the main entrance."

>>>>>>See also, this poignant response from a person in the crowd: http://newsroom.mtv.com/2009/08/17/woodstock-legacy/ (crowdmember comments @ 2:20)

----------------------------------------

Now now easy there big fella, before you start telling me about how correlation does not imply causation consider this: an article recently published by the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that:

"Childhood exposure to parental verbal aggression was associated, by itself, with moderate to large effects on measures of dissociation, limbic irritability, depression, and anger-hostility." Furthermore, "Combined exposure to verbal abuse and witnessing of domestic violence was associated with extraordinarily large adverse effects, particularly on dissociation. This finding is consonant with studies that suggest that emotional abuse may be a more important precursor of dissociation than is sexual abuse."
See: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/163/6/993

Maybe not the best example I could have found but I've already spent WAY too much time on this post. The point is, WORDS carry a lot of power. Even if the pundits (right OR left) never came out and said it, the implication of violence was certainly there at times.

I KNOW Fox has lead the charge of fear mongering in the name of ratings but anyone else who subscribed to that level of attack should share some of the blame as well. Again, not saying that they should take all or even a lot of the blame, but they should be responsible for the violent laced rhetoric they spout.

I say STOP THE AD HOMINEM ATTACKS and we'll see less violence against PEOPLE and (hopefully) more enthralling arguments where the IDEAS are being attacked (which I'm all for) :-)

p.s. sry for the huge post but i was on a roll

Liberals' 50 years of dreadful domestic policy
Posted: December 23, 2010

by Larry Elder

For the past 50 years, the Democrats – and many Republicans who should know better – have been wrong about virtually every major domestic policy issue. Let's review some of them:

Taxes

The bipartisan extension of the Bush tax cuts represents the latest triumph over the "soak the rich because trickledown doesn't work" leftists.

President Ronald Reagan sharply reduced the top marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent, doubling the Treasury's tax revenue. President George H.W. Bush raised the income tax rate, as did his successor. But President George W. Bush lowered them to the current 35 percent.

President Barack Obama repeatedly called the current rate unfair, harmful to the country and a reward to those who "didn't need" the cuts and "didn't ask for" them. If true, he and his party ditched their moral obligation to oppose the extension. But they didn't, because none of it is true. Democratic icon John F. Kennedy, who reduced the top marginal rate from more than 90 percent to 70 percent, said, "A rising tide lifts all the boats." He was right – and most of the Democratic Party knows it.


Welfare for the "underclass"

When President Lyndon Johnson launched his "War on Poverty," the poverty rate was trending down. When he offered money and benefits to unmarried women, the rate started flat-lining. Women married the government, allowing men to abandon their moral and financial responsibilities.

The percentage of children born outside of marriage – to young, disproportionately uneducated and disproportionately brown and black women – exploded. In 1996, over the objections of many on the left, welfare was reformed. Time limits were imposed, and women no longer received additional benefits if they had more children. The welfare rolls declined. Ten years later, the New York Times wrote: "When the 1996 law was passed ... liberal advocacy groups ... predicted that it would increase child poverty, hunger and homelessness. The predictions were not fulfilled."

Education

The federal government's increasing involvement with education – what is properly a state and local function – has been costly and ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. Title I, a program begun 45 years ago to close the performance gap between urban and suburban schools, burns through more than $15 billion a year, and the performance gap has widened. The feds spend $80 billion a year on K-12 education, as if money is the answer. States like Utah and Iowa spend much less money per student compared with districts like those in New York City and Washington, D.C., with much better results.

Where parents have choices – where the money follows the student rather than the other way around – the students perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. But the teachers' unions and the Democratic Party continue to resist true competition among public, private and parochial schools.

Gun control

Violent crime occurs disproportionately in urban areas – where Democrats in charge impose the most draconian gun-control laws.

Over the objection of those who warn of a "return to the Wild West," 34 states passed laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Not one state has repealed its law. Professor John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," says: "There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate: As more people obtain permits, there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect, the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent and robberies by over 2 percent."


"Affirmative action"

Race-based preferences have been a disaster for college admissions. Students admitted with lesser credentials are more likely to drop out. Had their credentials matched their schools, they would have been far more likely to graduate and thus enter the job market at a more productive level.

Preferences in government hiring and contracting have led to widespread, costly and morale-draining "reverse discrimination" lawsuits. Where preferences have been put to the ballot, voters – even in liberal states like California – have voted against them.

Minimum-wage hikes

Almost all economists agree that minimum-wage laws contribute to unemployment among the low-skilled – the very group the "compassionate party" claims to care about.

Economist Walter E. Williams, 74, in his new autobiography, "Up from the Projects," describes the many low-skilled jobs he took as a teenager. "By today's standards," he wrote, "my youthful employment opportunities might be seen as extraordinary. That was not the case in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, as I've reported in some of my research, teenage unemployment among blacks was slightly lower than among whites, and black teens were more active in the labor force as well. All of my classmates, friends, and acquaintances who wanted to work found jobs of one sort or another."

Obamacare

This ghastly government-directed scheme will inevitably lead to rationing and lower-quality care – all without "bending the cost curve" down as Obama promised.

Any party can have a bad half-century. Merry Christmas.

Completely agree. I was passively christian until I hit puberty, when my more critical mind caused me to become 'agnostic'. While in that phase, I still had a tiny fear that some deity I didn't understand -that many many people believed in- might still in fact be real and looking to punish me for my thoughts. It was not until I studied the Bible in college, and read the thing cover to cover (OK, so maybe a skipped a beggat or two) that those fears were finally assuaged.

If you've read the whole thing, you'd have to be pretty uncritical, or pretty brainwashed to believe that this stuff was written by a God. It's a fascinating read, full of death, violence, adventure, betrayal, lust, perversion, treachery, and other elements of good story telling; but it is just that, storytelling.

It's obvious that this was written by many different humans. There are so many contradictions and the style of writing varies so much from book to book, passage to passage. It's illogical, nonsensical, and full of really ignorant guesses at cosmology. Also, the protagonist (YHWY) is so random, jealous, ill tempered, genocidal and corrupt. This is not the way an all good, all knowing, all powerful God writes his autobiography. If this God were real, he'd be a complete nutjob.

The story of the Godfather can't be told without involving producer Robert Evans. I recently read his autobiography "The Kid Stays in the Picture". Fun read. He tells the story of how Coppola never forgave him for stealing his thunder on the Godfather. It's now a film as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1bQ6MTzWsM

You misunderstood me. I am not interested in why Hitchens is so against religion--it honestly doesn't matter to me. What interests me is why, despite being such an intelligent person who is claiming to "look for the evidence," he is only willing to look at the evidence that supports his own position. And to be clear, I refer to his position that religion is, in his words, "the main source of hatred in the world." This flies in the face of common sense. Were it true, we would expect predominately religious countries (like Peru or the U.S., for instance)to be hotbeds of hatred. So where's the empirical evidence for this? I certainly haven't heard of any. But that won't stop Hitchens from continuing his rant.

I do want to give Hitchens credit--he makes very pointed cases against certain practices of particular religions. But showing that a particular practice of a particular religion is unethical or immoral is not the same thing as showing that all religions are evil, religious people are stupid, deluded, etc., or the host of other claims that Hitchens (and those like him) makes.

>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^SDGundamX:
Hitchens is a sharp orator, but I can't understand why people think his arguments are either "rational" or "logical." The following author and his Hitchens' own brother pretty much explain more clearly than I ever could why I can't take Hitchens' arguments (or Dawkins' or Harris' for that matter) seriously.
What Christopher Hitchens and the New Atheists Can Learn from Malcom X
Atheism Aside: Peter Hitchens Journey to Faith
I find it ironic that those such as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, in their zeal to exterminate religion, have become such zealots unwilling to admit evidence contrary to their position that they now rival the fundamentalists they profess to be fighting against. The cynical part of me thinks its because they get paid a lot of money to write books and appear on TV acting that way. The more hopeful part of me is that they are just over-enthusiastic and will one day realize that the best way to accomplish your goals is probably not to make an enemy out of everybody who doesn't think the same as you.

Rather than 'guessing' at where Hitchens stance on religion came from you could read his autobiography. He has several very personal reasons for hating religion. He opens talking about his mother, who fell for a guy that was a bit of a cultist which eventually led to the double suicide of his mother and the nutter. Then upon going to bury his mother, the local church was reluctant to perform the funeral services because of the stigma around suicide. He found that money was able to smooth over those 'reservations'.
I'm by no means agreeing with Hitchens position on painting all religion that same shade of black, but he hasn't exactly just adopted that stance for no reason.