1. I hate writing lists like this.
2. but only because I'm afraid I don't have enough cool stuff to put on them
3. I swear.. a lot, but I get away with it... in person, because I'm Irish, and in writing, because I'm an eloquent motherfucker
4. When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a space shuttle pilot. My entire room was covered in space posters, until I was eventually convinced this wouldn't happen in my early teens (kinda hard to be a shuttle pilot when you live in a country with no space program or even an airforce).... at which point....
5. I started listening to heavy metal and for years I wanted to be a touring musician. Played in a few bands, even recorded some stuff, but I was never really that good, but I did teach my brother to start playing
6.... who is now waaaay better than I ever was, has a degree in music and releases some of my favourite music.
7. I am by a long way the most level-headed member of my family.
8. I like to think I'm resourceful (read as "watched one too many episodes of macgyver as a kid") and set myself little challenges all the time (like trying to break into my own house)
9. I've been arrested once and spent a night in a cell
10. I love the mountains (snowboarding, mountain biking) but didn't realise this until my late 20s. It's one of my great regrets that I didn't start these things sooner.
11. I'm a 3rd dan (soon to be 4th!) black belt in Aikido, but....
12. I haven't been in a fight since high school.
13. A small immature part of me really wants someone to attack me so I can find out.
14. The rest of me isn't nearly that stupid.
15. I love to cook (especially BBQ), and will happily spend all day preparing a meal for my wife or my friends.
16. I don't have or want kids, but I get on great with them (I suspect they think I roughly as mature as they are).
17. I teach a kids Aikido class.
18. I'm very good at my job, but it's just a means to an end for me. If I never needed to work again, I wouldn't.
19. No-one will read this far.
20. I think people are basically good, but they're also stupid and easily manipulated... this goes for me too.
21. I really want to travel again, but life keeps getting in the way.
22. I'm a total geek.
23. I like to look at everything from all angles, but there are somethings I have no time for (homepathy, racism, homophobia, climate deniers, etc). I don't believe in debating these people.
24. I sometimes wonder if I should put my money where my mouth is and run for public office, but then I remember that that would seriously cut into my snowboarding/mountainbiking/aikido-ing time.
25. I am very tempted to delete this list.

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alcom says...
@kingmob The right-wing conspiracy of convenience says that the data has been adjusted to heighten the urgency and panic and perpetuate their scientific fraud. This is a misunderstanding of flux adjustments that used to be made to climate models in the 90's and early in the 00's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model#Flux_buffering

Recent improvements in modelling equations mean that they no longer rely on flux adjustments, but hearing that they had to made adjustments at all sounds sketch.

Because the "hockey-stick" model was an overshoot based on the peak in 1998, deniers tend to either:

a) Argue that the "warming hiatus" between 1998 and 2013 disproves AGW theory. This fallacy disproved itself in the last 2+ years as global surface and ocean temperatures have exceeded the 1998 record year on year.
or:
b) Attempt to discredit scientists arguing that their own funding depends on the alarming data that they publish. Far-right conservatives continue to demonize scientists as a cabal of billionaires working in concert to sway public opinion. If that was true, then the whole hiatus period sure didn't help their cause, but the graph hasn't moved.

This is sound science, and denialism is collapsing under the weight of its own bullshit. At the time of posting, NOAA said that July 2016 also marked the 15th consecutive warmest month on record for the globe. That is the longest stretch of months in a row that a global temperature record has been set in their dataset.

@kingmob The right-wing conspiracy of convenience says that the data has been adjusted to heighten the urgency and panic and perpetuate their scientific fraud. This is a misunderstanding of flux adjustments that used to be made to climate models in the 90's and early in the 00's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model#Flux_buffering

Recent improvements in modelling equations mean that they no longer rely on flux adjustments, but hearing that they had to made adjustments at all sounds sketch.

Because the "hockey-stick" model was an overshoot based on the peak in 1998, deniers tend to either:

a) Argue that the "warming hiatus" between 1998 and 2013 disproves AGW theory. This fallacy disproved itself in the last 2+ years as global surface and ocean temperatures have exceeded the 1998 record year on year.
or:
b) Attempt to discredit scientists arguing that their own funding depends on the alarming data that they publish. Far-right conservatives continue to demonize scientists as a cabal of billionaires working in concert to sway public opinion. If that was true, then the whole hiatus period sure didn't help their cause, but the graph hasn't moved.

This is sound science, and denialism is collapsing under the weight of its own bullshit. At the time of posting, NOAA said that July 2016 also marked the 15th consecutive warmest month on record for the globe. That is the longest stretch of months in a row that a global temperature record has been set in their dataset.

Tragic.
I kept thinking that this looked like the view of a 'fire change denier' - sort of like a climate change denier, except for us - it is the whole environment - and we can't move.
I guess we are the fish.
:-(

Note that he bets 2010-2020 will be THE hottest decade ever recorded, and not just among the top 10 hottest decades. This is how we know the warming is significant, the more data (ie longer timespan) , the more clear the trend is. Individual years might not be THE warmest, just because they are the latest, but if you measure in decades, this is almost certainly the case. it would be an even more slam-dunk case if you bet with centuries. This is also why deniers sometimes literally use snowballs to prove GW isnt real, because if you go for local weather on a particular day, you can "prove" anything, but the amount of data in your "research" is insignificant.

Cenk WAS a denier of the Armenian genocide and wrote a paper back in his school days in which he put those beliefs to hard paper. Despite him having named his network after a group responsible in said genocide, he is quite adamant that he has changed his opinion and admits younger him was wrong.

I've not looked close enough to say if he's reformed or not, but the entirety of his personality and behaviour today is so jerkish I strongly dislike him regardless of if he's reformed from his 'worse' past.

I dont like cenk for two reasons.

His treatment via completely misrepresentation of Sam Harris is so bad its intellectual dishonesty comparible to and sometimes worse than a fox news talking head.

Secondly, what kind of jerk names his network after co-perpatrators of the armenian genocide? At best a genocide denier.... yuck, no thanks.

@Gratefulmom

People who disagree with science generally don't come out so well in the end--see anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, etc. I'd change my mind about these kindergartens if there were solid science behind them.

And if you look into it, you'll see there is very little good science to support this style of kindergarten (i.e. the sample sizes are small, no case studies or longitudinal studies, studies rely heavily on self-reporting of either parents and children, etc.) whereas there is a lot of well done research that shows the lifelong benefits of "traditional" pre-schooling (i.e. longitudinal studies that show demonstrable effects even after controlling for external factors).

I would love to see a well thought out longitudinal study that compares how the outdoor kindergarteners fair against those from traditional classrooms but unfortunately the only research I could find compared the outdoor kids to kids who had never been to kindergarten at all.

And of course comparing kids who went to any sort of kindergarten to kids who haven't is going to favor the kindergarten kids if you're looking at things like social skills, ability to take direction from adults, etc. (which is exactly what the studies done on the outdoor kindergartens do).

So it's not about disagreeing with you so much as it is not finding any evidence that this style of pre-school is better than going to a traditional preschool that includes a healthy amount of outdoor playtime (at least 1 to 2 hours a day if not more).

That's all I usually ask of meat eaters, is to admit and understand the decision they are making: that they're pleasure is worth the death of a sentient being. And plenty are happy to admit that, and I salute those people. It's those living in a cognitive dissonance fantasy that disturbs me. Again, the great part about being human is our ability to self-reflect and hopefully see ourselves as we truly are.

In response to "my body has been hard-coded to prefer as a food source", if you look at how the body, physiologically, responds to meat vs plants in our diets, you realize very quickly that our bodies were made much more for plants than meat. What we are hard-coded to do is eat shit tons of fats, sweets, and oils. And I don't think you'd argue that those are good for the body despite it being "hard-coded" to want them.

Lastly, the amount of scientific evidence saying that plant-based diets are (far) more healthy than meat-based ones is becoming as voluminous as climate change evidence. The food and pharmaceutical companies are using the same tactics that the tobacco industries used just a few decades ago to cause public confusion when the (not-funded-by-corporations) scientific community was in agreement that tobacco was demonstrably carcinogenic. If you want to make the health/better-for-your-body/don't-fight-nature argument for meat, you better start realizing you're sounding more and more like a climate change denier.

your stance about veganism is very similar to the climate deniers in that you choose to buy into myths and lies as opposed to looking into the facts youself. the documentary i posted considers the issues of local, and so called "small" farms also. they are no more humane or less cruel than so called "factory farming" and are every but as inefficient and environmentally devastating. "factory farming" is a mere symptom and the root cause is the commodification of sentient non-human animals, just as in the past humans used to commodify other human beings of certain races. for example here is an article on the myth of "humane" animal farming: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/factory-farming-alternative-farming/

the fact that climate change is driven in large part but the raising of non-human animals for food is without question a well documented fact. the human population is without a doubt a major factor but above this issue is the fact that it requires MANY times the resources to produce on calorie of flesh, dairy or eggs than it does to produce one calorie of plant based food. are you aware that in the USA, around 80% of crops grown are fed to the 10 billion farmed animals who are murdered every year for food? it has been estimated that 800 million humans could be fed on the crops which are grown for farmed animals alone. these issues are also gone into detail in the documentary.

as far as "tugging on your heart strings" goes, how is having compassion and empathy for anyone who suffers a bad thing? no one would be questioning it if the victims were human children but since they are "only" cows, pigs chickens and fishes (all of whom feel pain just like you or i do, perhaps even more so), suddenly violence against them is considered a matter of personal choice. the bottom line is that if you would not wish to expeience something yourself, it is never moral or ethical to force others to experience it, especially not in the name of a momentary taste sensation.

finally, here is a quote which i think best summarizes the situation:
“Aren’t humans amazing? They kill wildlife – birds, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice and foxes by the million in order to protect their domestic animals and their feed. Then they kill domestic animals by the billion and eat them. This in turn kills people by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative – and fatal – health conditions like heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and cancer. So then humans spend billions of dollars torturing and killing millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, few people recognize the absurdity of humans, who kill so easily and violently, and once a year send out cards praying for “Peace on Earth.”~ David Coates

I wonder, what percentage of the "2%" of "scientists" that were not convinced of anthropomorphic climate change have also changed their positions?
When deniers claim the science isn't settled, can we now tell them they are a decade behind the times because those few they point to as 'the large number of scientists that don't believe in climate change' have all changed their positions or left the scientific field completely?
Not that many here need to be convinced, but we do have a few holdouts....so *promote

That's not even funny, i have a friend that's a furry and she is like totally harassed by the police all the time. Furries are people too! But they don't wanna be people. They wanna be talking animals -- so like direct your hate elsewhere, furry hate denier.

Yeah, I don't know who to blame for this.

Anti-information became a strategy during the early years of the global warming "debate, " which I believe also coincided with "debate" about teaching evolution in public schools in the early 2000s. In both "debates" you had groups of people (climate change deniers/intelligent design) spouting off supposed "facts" that supported their positions, some of which were made up bullshit and others which actual facts but used to draw the wrong conclusions (i.e. logical fallacies). These guys, I'm pretty sure, were drawing their cues from the 9/11 truther conspiracy theory movement, which used similar tactics to try to convince people 9/11 was an inside job.

The Internet DID in fact allow these groups a higher level of coordination in distributing misinformation than previous times. But at the end of the day, we can only blame the uneducated people who read this stuff and accepted it as fact rather than actually try to fact-check anything. They helped create the climate that allows politicians now to blatantly lie and either hope they get away with it or shrug it off when they're called on it.