Your video, Hurt Feelings - Flight of the Concords, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Remember one of the biggest moves in the conservative movement, one of the main reasons why evangelicals support the GOP, was because the government forced desegregation on Bob Jones University. Though evangelicals started down the GOP path before that, it was a huge turning point in getting evangelical church's directly involved with politics and having them tell their members to vote for the GOP and part of why they call Democrats, who are probably doing more along the lines Christ Himself would, Demoncrats. It's when you'll see the 700 Club, TBN and many others start pushing the GOP agenda rather openly.

Study up on Christian Reconstructionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_reconstructionism), dominionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology), and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family:_The_Secret_Fundamentalism_at_the_Heart_of_American_Power). Remember to vet things along the way. You'll start to see how those at the top of the Christian right movement, are moving their masses like a cult to be what it is now... making their members think they are the ones who are most thoughtful and intelligent, while blinding them to any sort of truth. This why they accept "alternative facts" and "truth isn't truth" that truth in the eye of the beholder, and facts don't matter if they contradict what is being preached.

Sure the conservative movement is one of if not the main reason why people leave the faith and are turned off by the faith, but they don't care. Greed is now a good thing, and so long as they get in, they don't care what they make the faith look like to the world. They dig their heels in more and more and behave less and less Christ like, showing less of the love of Christ, and more bigotry and discrimination in concordance with the goals of the movement a the top levels.

As promised, the most promising results when polling google scholar:

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation and Its Correlates in an Australian Twin Sample"

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/J_Bailey2/publication/12572213_Genetics_and_Environmental_Influences_on_Sexual_Orientation_and_Its_Correlates_in_
an_Australian_Twin_Sample/links/0deec518bc0435c0cd000000.pdf

Probably one of the better studies, it breaks down orientation to a scale versus straight binary, though the results are then statistical correlations and my stats classes are too long ago for me to work that back into something resembling my claims above.

"Sexual Orientation in a U.S. National Sample
of Twin and Nontwin Sibling Pairs"
http://ioa126.medsch.wisc.edu/findings/pdfs/47.pdf

19 identical twins in the study with at least one twin with non-hetro orientation, within those 19 pairs, 6 showed concordance. So 6 of 19 identical twins sharing orientation, 13 of 19 not. This supports my statement above that in studies identical twins more often than not don't share homosexual orientation. This study also lists the statistical correlation of this result as 0.68, the previous studies statistical correlation was lower at 0.51(1.0 would be perfect correlation). If I'm reading the statistics remotely right, the above study then is similarly in keeping with my statement.

"Homosexual Orientation in Twins: A Report on 61 Pairs and Three Triplet Sets"
http://hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1993-homosexual-orientation-in-twins.html

Smaller sample size and different polling methodology, specifically sought out respondents of non hetro orientation. Shows a higher correlation, 25 of 38 identical twins being concordant. That's 66% concordance so opposite of my claim that more often than not they are discordant.


Running out of time here to post results. If you keep digging though it's more of the same, identical twins don't come close to showing 100% correlation, highest study of the samples I've pulled is 66%, and it's by far the highest. This is in contrast to race and gender, where you fully expect 100/100 identical twins to match.

Congratulations! Your video, Why You Didn't Want to Fly On The Soviet Concorde-The TU-144, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 45 Badge!

Your video, Why You Didn't Want to Fly On The Soviet Concorde-The TU-144, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 57 Badge!

The reason Switzerland is the safest place in case of a war is not its bunkers and fall out shelters (though, referencing the book "Place de la Concorde Suisse" by McPhee, this video does do a good job explaining Swiss paranoia)

Switzerland is the best place to hide in a war because:

Everyone from oligarchal and totalitarian states hides their assets there. In Swiss banks. And no one has been stupid enough in 200 years to blow up the bank holding their assets.

This is the 2nd video where the author got the Concorde story wrong... It became profitable 8 years into service (1984), largely due to BA raising ticket prices and making it more of a luxury. And the Concorde division remained profitable until the crash in France, when they grounded all Concordes while they investigated the root cause. After they started flying again, people were still wary to buy Concorde tickets, and airlines could get more profit out of 1st class tickets on larger, slower planes. So both BA and AF phased them out ~2003.

Most airliners have wings designed to be used in low transsonic. They can't effectively go faster. They would literally lose lift if they went faster. Their wing shape is made to only delay the onset of shockwaves on top of the wing (flat-ish top), allowing it to safely creep closer to mach1 than otherwise, but not to operate within/past mach1.

Fan/propeller blades themselves are also mach limited.
(They can be designed to be supersonic, but then you end up with something like this... which in hindsight nobody wants : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H)
A subsonic airfoil in a fan/propeller, operating near/at supersonic speed, loses the ability to move/redirect air, due to shockwave disruption of the airflow.

Fans/propellers with subsonic blades that spin at subsonic speeds are effectively speed limited. They lose efficiency above ~500 mph, where they begin to stop generating thrust as they travel faster. Their pitch has to increase higher and higher, until they are no longer much of an airscrew and more of a 'feathered' configuration.

Supersonic jet engines use intake devices (such as shock cones) to decelerate incoming air to subsonic speeds, so the compressor (itself a fan, i.e. a highly multi bladed propeller) can operate on that air to compress it and feed the engine combustion chambers.
Airliners have no intake devices to decelerate incoming air, and they would lose engine compression when entering near mach1 speeds.

Furthermore, their bypass fans (which are glorified propellers) would stop providing thrust.

You would need to design different planes (like the concorde). You can't just throttle up a modern airliner and go faster [than X limit] - like you can in a modern car.

-scheherazade

Place de la Concorde Suisse...John McPhee's book exploring Swiss...paranoia...
---All military age men have an automatic weapon at home; the penalties for using it or even open the ammunition other than military duty are severe
---The bridges and tunnels in to the country are rigged with places for Swiss Army Engineers to stick explosives and drop them all
---Airbases tucked into mountain sides; not nuke proof; but damn hard to get at any other way
etc
etc
etc

"in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. "

Harry Lime; Orson Well's "The Third Man"...

Your video, Why the Concorde Failed, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 7 Badge!

Your video, Americas Forgotten Concordes - Boeing 2707 - Lockheed L-2000, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The Concorde was never really successful though, because Americans wouldn't let it fly through American airspace (well, not farther than NYC, anyhow). They claimed it was because of the noise, but in reality it was just sour grapes at being beaten by the French.

To understand the wording of the second amendment, you have to take into account the history behind it. I'm not sure how familiar you are with American history, but this scholarly article is a great read on the topic, and demonstrates that guns have been kept and regulated (the most important terms of the amendment that often get completely overlooked by guns rights advocates) by Americans for both personal and collective defense since the Colonial period.

It's important to note that the Revolutionary War was literally started at Lexington and Concord when the British government, "Came fer our gunz!" That event informs a great deal of the rhetoric, and it is not at all an exaggeration to say that had the British government successfully disarmed the populace earlier, the Revolution might never have had a chance for success.

Regardless, there are an overwhelming number of legal precedents now that support the notion that the Constitution allows guns to be owned by U.S. citizens for self-defense purposes. That horse has long been out of the barn, so arguing that the constitution does not specifically use the words "self-defense" is a complete waste of time. What is not a waste of time is arguing how far the government (state and federal) can go in "regulating" the sale, carrying, and use of firearms.

Many self professed feminists believe it is about hating men too, but I assume "no true feminist" would ever do that right?

I wasn't trying to wilfully misunderstand you, but rather to pursue my whole contention about any political/social argument:

Individual People and specific arguments over ideologies always.

When the reverse is true and ideology is placed before people or the specific merits of an argument, the result is dehumanising and anti-intellectual (even if by the slimmest margins sometimes).

That's not to say that, where mutual understanding already exists, ideological terms are completely useless. But the moment individuals disagree, those ideological assumptions are going to get in the way of a productive dialogue.

My whole point I guess is that this seems rather anti-humanist if you will pardon the irony of taking an ideological position.
If as a humanist one believes that the optimal way is for everyone to be judged only on the merits of their individual words, deeds and capacity.

Rather than by culture, race, gender or some other involuntary and/or irrelevant factors.

Assuming you agree in principle with that definition of humanism in terms of goals, then what we are arguing here really is collectivism vs individualism.

You are suggesting we can get better results by pushing the "right" version of said ideology and suppressing the "wrong", correct?

I am arguing ultimately that we seem to get better results in the long term, by encouraging free and critical thought and allowing all ideas (no matter how egregious) a fair fight.

This puts me contrary to many tenets of the various feminist ideologies and concordant with others. Sometimes wildly so.

If I want to try to be a good humanist, I have no choice but to try and understand each on their own terms.

When someone describes themselves as a "Feminist", that could mean anything from "kill all men" to "women should have fundamental legal equality".

It seems almost as redundant as racial and cultural epithets, it tells me very little really important about you or how you really think, to know you are Black, or White or Asian or Polish, Spanish etc. etc. It's just another excuse to put an idea above the person in front of you or to not have to think too much about ones own.

i.e. Collectivist thinking.

I think this may represent the very antithesis of intellectual progress.

However I am a Hegelian and I just defined a Thesis-antithesis relationship............ That means the next great breakthrough should lie in the synthesis of the two.......

................

Collective individualism! All we should need is a mass movement of free critical thought and.....bollocks.

It's over people, we have officially peaked as a species! I'm calling it

Cory Doctorow's article, linked here again for context, mentions:

"The vehicle in question, a Lenco Bearcat, costs $258,000 and was widely opposed by the people of Concord, a town of 42,000 which has experienced three murders in the past ten years."