How did you carve that beautiful horse? Start with a block of wood, and cut away anything that doesn't look like a horse. (older than dirt)>> ^Trancecoach:

this is an old joke

You also might have heard that it was an extremely close election, and the balance was tipped by adding several anti-slavery states over the span of several decades once popular sovereignty became the political compromise to determine whether slavery would be legal or not in the new territories. I'm thinking it's a little late to go invade Mexico, carve it up into states that are pro-drug, and join them to the Union by now.

The issue of illegal drugs isn't particularly regional. IE, you won't win a bunch of states if you favor it at the cost of losing some. Prior to the Civil War, strongly opposing slavery would help you win Northern states, at the cost of the southern states. Then, it simply became how to turn a state or two left to win the presidency. If you favor legalizing drugs, there's little assurance you gain any states quite honestly, so it's not a viable campaign strategy.

And note that Lincoln won in 1860, not 1820. He'd never have been elected in 1820.

I don't mean a pro-drug legalization candidate will never win the presidency. I simply mean Obama, even if he did favor legalization of pot or other illegal drugs, knows it would seriously jeopardize his chances of winning. I also think he doesn't consider it a priority even if he did favor it. He's far more focused on the economy and foreign policy.

>> ^messenger:

Lincoln, so I've heard, was elected on a pro-slavery platform.>> ^heropsycho:
Obama, like any another politician, can't do jack unless he's elected. The US is not going to elect someone in favor of legalizing pot. This has nothing to do with what's the right policy.

>> ^entr0py:

>> ^kceaton1:
Utah, used to be the old number one, for insight. BTW, we are also a VERY heavily abstinence leaning state--outside of Salt Lake City, Park City, and Ogden. Some adults I know personally didn't truly know what sex was--fully and all its implications until they were 25 years old, almost seniors in COLLEGE...
Utah. Utah is almost all low to high middle income Caucasian urbanites... It's incredibly homogeneous. But, you could say due to the LDS church's influence this is a special scenario. Yet, in other states religion tends to be one of the highest reasons this subject comes up.
Luckily, my parents taught me early and I had Sex Ed in my health class and knew by 14 the full implications. Utah (our idiotic political carpetbaggers that have carved the state up so they can get these things into the pasture and passed easily due to the higher numbers of their types in office; that are all affiliated with the Tea Party strangely enough--and like Glenn beck...), this year, tried to BAN Sex Ed in its legislature. But the governor was forced to veto the bill due to public outrage (strangely enough, it pissed off a lot of people here). Basically they passed a bill that would have forced abstinence ONLY education even though (I believe) we are number two behind Mississippi.

I'm dubious about that. In fact, here's the first data I came across with a google search. Check out page 15. Utah is way below average and among the lowest in the country for every year they have data, going back to the 80s. In 2005 we were number 45 out of 50 in teen pregnancies.
But then again we're not an abstinence only state. If republicans manage to change that, as they nearly did, I guess we'll have a good case study.


Strange I'll have to check that out. Of course, I'm COMPLETELY basing everything I'm saying off of what a KSL report said pre-veto (of the 2012 Utah legislature's "Abstinence Only" Bill). Perhaps they had their data misconstrued and presented it the wrong way. I'll post the KSL story if I can find it in their history; then look at our information and statistics and then see what they may have possible misread and thought it was us, for some reason--they specifically said the previous cycle year to this study; so I'm confused to.

Thanks for catching that for me @entr0py, I appreciate that sort of thing.

So I admit I may be wrong, sorry if I am! I'll release another, "I'm sorry", later when I have better detail of why I got bad reporting.

>> ^kceaton1:

Utah, used to be the old number one, for insight. BTW, we are also a VERY heavily abstinence leaning state--outside of Salt Lake City, Park City, and Ogden. Some adults I know personally didn't truly know what sex was--fully and all its implications until they were 25 years old, almost seniors in COLLEGE...
Utah. Utah is almost all low to high middle income Caucasian urbanites... It's incredibly homogeneous. But, you could say due to the LDS church's influence this is a special scenario. Yet, in other states religion tends to be one of the highest reasons this subject comes up.
Luckily, my parents taught me early and I had Sex Ed in my health class and knew by 14 the full implications. Utah (our idiotic political carpetbaggers that have carved the state up so they can get these things into the pasture and passed easily due to the higher numbers of their types in office; that are all affiliated with the Tea Party strangely enough--and like Glenn beck...), this year, tried to BAN Sex Ed in its legislature. But the governor was forced to veto the bill due to public outrage (strangely enough, it pissed off a lot of people here). Basically they passed a bill that would have forced abstinence ONLY education even though (I believe) we are number two behind Mississippi.


I'm dubious about that. In fact, here's the first data I came across with a google search. Check out page 15. Utah is way below average and among the lowest in the country for every year they have data, going back to the 80s. In 2005 we were number 45 out of 50 in teen pregnancies.

But then again we're not an abstinence only state. If republicans manage to change that, as they nearly did, I guess we'll have a good case study.

>> ^dag:

I'm all for sex ed, but correlation is not causation - as is quickly skimmed over by Cenk, ethnicity, income etc would play a much larger role than just a few crppy high school health classes.



Utah, used to be the old number one, for insight. BTW, we are also a VERY heavily abstinence leaning state--outside of Salt Lake City, Park City, and Ogden. Some adults I know personally didn't truly know what sex was--fully and all its implications until they were 25 years old, almost seniors in COLLEGE...

Utah. Utah is almost all low to high middle income Caucasian urbanites... It's incredibly homogeneous. But, you could say due to the LDS church's influence this is a special scenario. Yet, in other states religion tends to be one of the highest reasons this subject comes up.

Luckily, my parents taught me early and I had Sex Ed in my health class and knew by 14 the full implications. Utah (our idiotic political carpetbaggers that have carved the state up so they can get these things into the pasture and passed easily due to the higher numbers of their types in office; that are all affiliated with the Tea Party strangely enough--and like Glenn beck...), this year, tried to BAN Sex Ed in its legislature. But the governor was forced to veto the bill due to *public* outrage (strangely enough, it pissed off a lot of people here). Basically they passed a bill that would have forced abstinence ONLY education even though (I believe) we are number two behind Mississippi.

Try, try, and try again.
http://videosift.com/video/Carving-A-Traditional-Wooden-Cup

Your car analogy is accurate, but misleading. If the car were newer, then it would in fact be against patent law to make one on your own. The SCO case is, I believe, patent law, not copyright.

I don't get your argument regarding publishing companies of various kinds trying to make money for themselves and not paying artists much. This is the old "artists deserve more money" argument. Frankly, they don't. And I'm saying that as an artist. If you're an artist and you give someone your art in exchange for whatever percentage, then you've agreed to that amount and you deserve that amount, and no more. The fact is, selling art is hard. It might not seem that way because we see it everywhere, but having art sitting in your house or on your computer and making money off of it is just plain difficult. The easiest route is frequently to let someone else do that for you, and to artists who can't afford a cup of coffee, making some decent cash sounds like a good deal.

Artists who don't want to go that route are free to keep their content and sell it themselves.
>> ^Porksandwich:

I like to try to apply things to real life objects or processes instead of digital.
You can make an exact replica of a 1950s car (legal), but if you copy a PICTURE someone else took of a 1950s car you're in trouble (illegal). Or if you take the picture of a 1950s car (legal), the owner who spent all the time and effort on it is SOL if you just snap a picture of it and make a million bucks----but if it were a painting they painted and you took a picture of it to sell..they'd have you by your balls in court.
It's even confusing in the tangible world, but in general copyright is not used like a club to keep other people from producing things in the tangible world.
In the digital world, copyright is hard to enforce but it's more "chilling effect" is it being used like a club to take down things that might even remotely be related to their copyrights...whether or not it can be demonstrated or proven. Look at SCO over Linux, they have lost but they still have that whole case showing up in court even now...it took YEARS to get it settled and it's back in some form from what I read elsewhere. Youtube is full of examples of it being used to remove content that is not theirs.....they took down the music video MegaUpload guys paid for and put up using DMCA knowing it wasn't theirs because they "had an arrangement with Google/Youtube to be able to do so".
Tangible world of copyright has some sense of "reasonable expectation" when it comes to decisions and such.
Intangible world of copyright has no "reason" applied to it at any stage, it doesn't make sense to anyone. It's abused, the courts even allow it's abuse to go unpunished because THEY do even know WTF is going on with it. It's a crazy mess of finger pointing, denying access to distribution channels people want to be able to get content on (EA and Steam is a great example of this), price fixing (Publishers conspiring with Apple to price fix Ebooks to Apple pricing, Amazon is balking at this as are a lot of people), etc.
Hell the publishers are using copyrights and agreements as ways to lock in authors to prevent them from publishing themselves and are purposefully screwing with digital ebook sites to make it uncertain for non-affiliated authors. And it's not working for them as more and more authors are going self-published, BUT no one steps in and tells them to cut that shit out. The New York Times Bestseller lists won't even put Self-Pubbed author titles on their listing, even if they are best sellers. It's just another aspect of the digital world being treated like it's tangible and slow moving, the publishers are using their clout to try to force people into their "idea" of what it should all be...slow and expensive, with content creators getting less than 15% of the final sale price in most cases.
Corporate establishments should not be dictating policy.... they shouldn't be able to force distribution channels offline (netflix comes to mind, Amazon Kindle titles, etc) by dictating or forcing it to be unreasonably costly/restrictive in comparison to their own services (Hulu, Apple Ebooks, etc). They are forcibly carving a spot for themselves into the contracts and agreements, despite what's best for consumers and content creators and getting additional laws/policy to enforce it.
On the other side of dictating policy, we have corporations pushing to take away restrictive policies when it hurts their profits. And we end up with the housing bubble and economic crisis......
Laws and policy should be written with the people in mind first, society second, anything else, and corporations last. Corporations should be adapting to the will of the people and the laws of the society that reinforce their will, not telling everyone how it's going to be.

I like to try to apply things to real life objects or processes instead of digital.

You can make an exact replica of a 1950s car (legal), but if you copy a PICTURE someone else took of a 1950s car you're in trouble (illegal). Or if you take the picture of a 1950s car (legal), the owner who spent all the time and effort on it is SOL if you just snap a picture of it and make a million bucks----but if it were a painting they painted and you took a picture of it to sell..they'd have you by your balls in court.

It's even confusing in the tangible world, but in general copyright is not used like a club to keep other people from producing things in the tangible world.

In the digital world, copyright is hard to enforce but it's more "chilling effect" is it being used like a club to take down things that might even remotely be related to their copyrights...whether or not it can be demonstrated or proven. Look at SCO over Linux, they have lost but they still have that whole case showing up in court even now...it took YEARS to get it settled and it's back in some form from what I read elsewhere. Youtube is full of examples of it being used to remove content that is not theirs.....they took down the music video MegaUpload guys paid for and put up using DMCA knowing it wasn't theirs because they "had an arrangement with Google/Youtube to be able to do so".

Tangible world of copyright has some sense of "reasonable expectation" when it comes to decisions and such.

Intangible world of copyright has no "reason" applied to it at any stage, it doesn't make sense to anyone. It's abused, the courts even allow it's abuse to go unpunished because THEY do even know WTF is going on with it. It's a crazy mess of finger pointing, denying access to distribution channels people want to be able to get content on (EA and Steam is a great example of this), price fixing (Publishers conspiring with Apple to price fix Ebooks to Apple pricing, Amazon is balking at this as are a lot of people), etc.

Hell the publishers are using copyrights and agreements as ways to lock in authors to prevent them from publishing themselves and are purposefully screwing with digital ebook sites to make it uncertain for non-affiliated authors. And it's not working for them as more and more authors are going self-published, BUT no one steps in and tells them to cut that shit out. The New York Times Bestseller lists won't even put Self-Pubbed author titles on their listing, even if they are best sellers. It's just another aspect of the digital world being treated like it's tangible and slow moving, the publishers are using their clout to try to force people into their "idea" of what it should all be...slow and expensive, with content creators getting less than 15% of the final sale price in most cases.

Corporate establishments should not be dictating policy.... they shouldn't be able to force distribution channels offline (netflix comes to mind, Amazon Kindle titles, etc) by dictating or forcing it to be unreasonably costly/restrictive in comparison to their own services (Hulu, Apple Ebooks, etc). They are forcibly carving a spot for themselves into the contracts and agreements, despite what's best for consumers and content creators and getting additional laws/policy to enforce it.

On the other side of dictating policy, we have corporations pushing to take away restrictive policies when it hurts their profits. And we end up with the housing bubble and economic crisis......

Laws and policy should be written with the people in mind first, society second, anything else, and corporations last. Corporations should be adapting to the will of the people and the laws of the society that reinforce their will, not telling everyone how it's going to be.

Always pointing out problems and hidden agendas. Never any solutions or objective observations.

Like everyone else, I see the world a certain way. It seems like I'm always argumentative and sometimes it's true, but if you're standing on a cliff's edge wearing wings carved from a styrofoam beer cooler and I say, 'I see the wings, but gravity will not go easier on you if you leap' am I "trolling"? Methinks NOT.

Others here said what I said in a different way: wind power is great in the rare places it can be harnessed, but overall the cost is too high for the output.

I can't please everyone, but know that it's nothing personal. My shins get kicked all the time around here. Expand your love to include love-to-hate


>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@quantumushroom
Neither, I just can't stand the fact that you talk out your ass all the time.
Always pointing out problems and hidden agendas. Never any solutions or objective observations.
I'll grant that your puns can be pretty humorous tho.
[when not filled with blind prejudice and hate]

Well, it is partly biological, not solely biological, of course. We agree.

I think we are on the same page. If you go to my profile page and read the conversation between ChaosEngine and me, you can see that I also have concerns about the children and see that I believe strongly in keeping religion out of the laws.

I don't think the indoctrination of children IS a separate issue -- I think it is part and parcel of the passionate energy that some atheists bring to the conversation and I believe strongly it needs to be dealt with -- short of removing the kids from the home or going ahead and sterilizing fundies. You are 100% correct, I think -- education, education, education.

The thing about a perfect world also applies to our conversation.

Fundamentalist religious folks think they have the answer. Fundamentalist atheists think they have the answer. I'm just saying -- carve out your territories and stop trying to invade people's minds. Both of these groups need to stop that. It is a losing game. Create a game where you can win -- [edit] religious fundies stay out of the laws and [edit] rational atheists need to put up the billboards. And the internet! Ah, the lovely internet. Saving grace for many an isolated person.

In reply to this comment by Skeeve:
I think you have dug to the heart of our disagreement.

First, you repeatedly state that religion is biological. I think that is partly accurate, but it's not that simple. I think religion itself is memetic, but the need to believe in something is biological. Religion is a symptom of our evolutionary need to believe/explain what we don't understand.

As for not being able to force evolution, we've been doing that - consciously or unconsciously - for thousands of years. While sterilizing the religious and only allowing atheists to breed might be one solution, I think the proper course is education combined with laws separating religion from the government.

While education doesn't work 100% of the time (as your example points out), it is pretty clear that those with more education have less religion. Nations with better education systems have less religious adherence and individuals with higher educations tend to have less religion. And the key words in those sentences are "less religion"; it doesn't mean less belief, it just re-aims that belief from religion to rational thought/science/etc.

Education is to religion as the scalpel is to the appendix - it removes the evolved, no longer useful, but still dangerous, problem.

With regards to it not being right to tell someone not to take comfort in that which comforts them, I partly agree. If it isn't harming anyone else, then I don't care what someone believes and I'm not going to get in their face about it (if they try to convert me though, they have opened the door and are fair game). But the line is drawn when someone's beliefs harm or pose a threat to the well-being of others. In that case, anyone who opposes equal rights (whether for homosexuals, women, non-religious) are fair game.

The issue I struggle with personally is the indoctrination of children. Having experienced that personally, knowing how that limited me (and harmed me, in some ways) I have difficulty allowing the indoctrination of children to go uncontested. But that's a different problem for another discussion ;


>> ^bareboards2:

We'll have to agree to disagree.
I don't think you can force evolution. It isn't a choice. Not unless you start breeding programs.
Want the biological need for the divine to go away? Sterilize all religious folks. I don't think you can talk folks out of it.
I speak from experience. My brother is a retired Air Force pilot with a Master's degree in aerospace engineering. Grew up in a secular household. His need for structure and the divine led him to the Mormon Church. Talk about goofy beliefs!! Good lord! And he voluntarily turned off his reasoning brain to accept all their nonsense as true. You say religion has "served its purpose." So why did he go there, when he wasn't indoctrinated into it growing up?
Not for me to tell him not to take comfort where he takes comfort.
However, it is for me to tell him to back off on gay marriage and not impose his church's beliefs on others. (And to tell him that when the church's membership starts falling, I guarantee his Prophet will suddenly hear from God that it is okay to be gay now.)

>> ^Skeeve:
I think most atheists would agree with you, that religion has served an evolutionary purpose. I don't have "The God Delusion" with me at the moment, but I'm pretty sure Dawkins acknowledges that as well.
But whether or not it serves an evolutionary purpose or not is irrelevant. The appendix served an evolutionary purpose - then we evolved to do without it. The same goes for the wisdom teeth; most people have them removed because they can cause huge problems, but in a world without dental care they are incredibly important.
Most of us atheists believe it is time, at least in the west, to "evolve" beyond the need for an invisible sky-daddy. We have the opportunity to do with religion what evolution did for the appendix.
Belief in a god is irrational. That's not to say it didn't serve a purpose, as evolution is not bound by the rational, only by phenotypic fitness. But, religion has served its purpose and, like the appendix or the wisdom teeth, it's time it was removed from our lives.
>>

I don't think we like the same kinds of stories, him and I. He paints a very simple idea of the story. Like every story that resonates with us is the 3 little bears. The Homeric tails, while "simple" in terms of a hero's tail, the motivations, situations and characters are so rich and unpredictable at times it kind of ruins the whole talk on stories making little of ourselves. I enjoy this talk, mind you, but it is ironic to me that I think this story is an overly simplistic narrative on...well, the narrative! Les Misérables or The Count of Monte Cristo are rich, dynamic, and full of the complexities of the human tradition. Hell, the Bible is full of twists and turns that one might not expect...They killed the savior in the end, NO WAY! And even more so, the bibles have a very human feel to them in the OT, people fail and don't perform the way "God intended". And it is true that most narratives have some sort of objective guiding them, and the state of real life is much less formally constructed. With that said, though, even though the overall situation of humanity is like orchestrated chaos, they are still trying to carve out the meaningful story for their own life.

Turkey is easy to overcook, and that's why people think it's dry, flavorless, etc. There are a couple things that can be done to avoid it though. First, DON'T stuff the turkey. Seasonings only on the inside, otherwise the cooking is uneven. Also, use a meat thermometer and measure the deepest part of the thigh meat. Once it reaches 165 F, pull it out instantly. (Some argue that it should be once the breast reaches 165, but I haven't tested that yet, so I can't say.) The best is probably to cook it in pieces, pre-cut. Who cares that you don't do the carving in front of everyone, the end result tastes better because you have more control over it.
Anyway, my two cents.

>> ^lucky760:

Sticky sticker quality!
Thanks for the awesome run-down and great photos, minty. All you other winners of the pumpkin carving contest, please post your photos!
It is really neat the way they keep sticking and re-sticking isn't it?
FYI, these particular stickers are not meant to be stuck to your car windows because I think the ink is not meant to withstand the forces of nature. There is a different sticker that is meant for your car windows.


Thanks for the quality! And the thought of the car window stickiness crossed my mind, since these has to be stuck on the outside, but I was thinking just temporarily sticking one there on a sunny dry day! But yay, an actual car window sticker does the job way better

*Sticky sticker *quality!

Thanks for the awesome run-down and great photos, minty. All you other winners of the pumpkin carving contest, please post your photos!

It is really neat the way they keep sticking and re-sticking isn't it?

FYI, these particular stickers are not meant to be stuck to your car windows because I think the ink is not meant to withstand the forces of nature. There is a different sticker that is meant for your car windows.