People are trying to attach a core set of beliefs to "atheism", but I think that is missing the point.

Imagine the entire world's population as a large group. Take out the Christians, and the Muslims... take out everyone one who has an intentional belief in a religion, a superstition, or anything that isn't observable or testable.

After doing that, there will be people left over. They are not united in any particular belief, they are simply those who do not choose to believe in things that can't be observed. The term "atheist" gets applied to such people by others, and with it comes assumed meanings and associated beliefs. Many self-described atheists have a definite belief that no god(s) can exist, but that is not universal by any means. Others don't care enough to call themselves anything.



On a different note, religion is not the cause of conflict, it's just a fairly common way to distinguish "us" from "them". If it isn't religion then it's race, nationality, class, eye color, accent, immigration status, or any other attribute that can be used to create an obvious difference between two groups. When people are scared or unhappy with their situation then they look for someone to blame, and that can often lead to violence.

On the topic of underwear, I've always thought most of the print patterns on boxers make them look like material left over from clown pants.

I make more than 15k a year but I make it a point to keep my living expenses under $1000 a month and I'm no pauper, so I'm sorry but I have to call bullshit.

In fact, not only can someone live on $1000 a month, someone doing this and making 15k a year would be putting $3000 a year in savings so I'm sorry I just don't buy your argument.

If you wanna make it personal, why don't we compare living budgets and we'll see just why living on $1256 a month is so difficult. Heres mine:

I've included two numbers since I live in a one-bedroom house with my girlfriend. The left is what I would pay if I lived alone, the right is what I pay splitting costs with her (would be the same situation as having a roommate, and if you are that strung up on cash then thats probably the best option for you)

Rent $450 ($225)
*One Bedroom house, in a nice neighborhood, 2 miles from downtown in a city with ~1 million people

Water $30 ($15)

Electricity $50 ($25)
*Electric Heat

Trash $20 ($10)

Internet $40 ($20)
*5mbps Broadband

Cellphone $70 ($70)

Gas $25 ($25)
*150 miles a week, 50 mpg, $3/gallon

Insurance $16 ($16)
*$200 a year

Food $300 ($300)
*$10 a day: bacon ($2/lb) eggs ($1.5/dozen), steak/chicken/pork ($3/lb), fruit ($1/lb) and vegetables ($1/lb)

Total $1001 ($706)

So here I am, someone who makes more than minimum wage, choosing to live on $700 a month. Had I been making $1256 I would still have $550 left over for savings, emergencies, going out, etc. Its not that it can't be done, its that people choose not do it.

Every day I eat bacon and eggs for breakfast and a 16oz new york strip, ribeye, pork lion, or roasted chicken breast with fresh fruits and vegetables for dinner, I have high speed internet, a cellphone, a vehicle, clean water, heat, a front yard, and a roof over my head, and you are telling me this is "unlivable" ?

No...this is unlivable:
http://lboudouani.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/starvation3.jpg

"Scratch all.... you.. want.. I'm still not.. telling you ... how many .... licks it takes.. to get to the center..... of.... -_- zzZZzz zzZZzz zzZZzz

(Guess what I have too much left over Halloween candy of)

Actually, Mr. Obama gets many hard questions asked all the time.

If at all, they emanate from FOX. And his flip, telepromptered responses and Chicago-style bashing of anyone who dares question him aren't what I would call insightful answers.

During any week, he has to figure out, how to solve many of the problems left over from the Republican's failed attempt at governing.

The Bush Excuse Machine expired on Jan 20, 2009. All Obama has done is take the worst of Bush and accelerated it, mainly on spending.

Maybe if Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney weren't dithering around in Iraq and Afghanistan, we chould have had those issues cleared up before last November.

Iraq is a success and only liberal ostriches deny it. Afghanistan? If Obama makes up his mind either way I'll be shocked.

Or stopped dithering around, and solved the economic problems we had and contiune to see. Maybe worked alittle on OUR COUNTRY, and not 'play' rulers of another land (like Iraq).

The Iraqis will soon be on their own. Meanwhile over here, the less government interferes the faster the economy will revive. Obama knows this even as his ideology opposes it.

You want to level serious questions towards Mr. Obama? Fine. Maybe sure you level the same amount of questions (and the intensity) towards the GOP. You can't do it, and everyone knows it.

I can criticize the GOP all day in defense of conservatism/libertarianism, but that's not what we want to hear at liberalsift.

So, what are the serious questions you have, that haven't been answered? You might try listening to the guy, instead of spewing irrelavent rumbish out of your mouth when he talks.

Yeah, that's the same way I feel when liberals bash Rush. They've never heard him except in soundbites from the MSM!

I know alot about Mr. Obama. Unlike you, I do R-E-S-E-A-R-C-H.

How does he plan to tax America into prosperity? If he can "cut fraud and waste" from Medicare to help pay for his socialized medicine scheme, why hasn't he done it already? Why are his college papers on lockdown? Could they be filled with anti-American rhetoric?

Allow me to simplify your Obama studies: he has no idea what he's doing.

Yes, Quantumushroom. His answers will be taken out of context and distorted. Like....what Mr. Beck, Mr. Hannity, Mr. O'Reilly, Mr. Limbaugh, all the 'reporters' and 'journalists' at Fox 'News' does for anything from Democrats (like, Mr. Obama?). Yes, in this interview, he is one person, with one opinion. He's not elected to office, nor does have to be at all accountable to ANYONE. Huge amount of power, plus zero accountability, spells 'abuse of power'.

Actually, Mr. Obama gets many hard questions asked all the time. During any week, he has to figure out, how to solve many of the problems left over from the Republican's failed attempt at governing. Maybe if Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney weren't dithering around in Iraq and Afghanistan, we chould have had those issues cleared up before last November. Or stopped dithering around, and solved the economic problems we had and contiune to see. Maybe worked alittle on OUR COUNTRY, and not 'play' rulers of another land (like Iraq). You want to level serious questions towards Mr. Obama? Fine. Maybe sure you level the same amount of questions (and the intensity) towards the GOP. You can't do it, and everyone knows it.

So, what are the serious questions you have, that haven't been answered? You might try listening to the guy, instead of spewing irrelavent rumbish out of your mouth when he talks. I know alot about Mr. Obama. Unlike you, I do R-E-S-E-A-R-C-H. I look up on the web, in to the library, ask people around me, and even ask my cat (though, he seems to just lick his fur, want food, and a place to sleep...).

Here's a few places to start:

A) What 99% of people us, to start looking up information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrack_Obama

B) What the remaining 1% use to start looking up information: http://conservapedia.com/Barrack_Obama

Its rather amusing to read conservapedia from time to time. Even with Mr. Obama's information. Since, much of it is filled with half truths and out right lies of the facts.

>> ^rychan:
I think May's closing quote is right on. If we could get everyone to view things from this perspective it would change the world.

He shows his bias at the end. Not everyone who went to the moon would see the earth as "left over from the big bang". I don't think it would terribly world changing. Maybe for a few days after everyone landed. That's it.

>> ^eric3579:
Nice pics, but what's up with the smoking? I thought you gave that shit up.

HAHAHA! You caught me. Actually I still have half of the same pack I had all vacation. I haven't smoked one since. I guess it's part of my relaxation mode.

I don't feel like smoking now, so I'm not too worried. If I do have the urge I'm going to finish off my left over treatment of Chantix.

I usually read through these every day:

http://www.dailykos.com/
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://thinkprogress.org/
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

If I have time left over, I dig into these:

http://delong.typepad.com/
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/
http://www.balloon-juice.com/
http://pandagon.net/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

I also like these blogs, but I don't read them on a regular basis:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/
http://www.pollster.com/ (this goes back into my daily-read list once they start doing serious 2010 polling)
http://www.wonkette.com/
http://blog.indecisionforever.com/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/

I also peruse these non-politics sites pretty much every day:

http://www.autoblog.com/
http://www.joystiq.com/
http://kotaku.com/

It almost goes without saying, but I use Google and Wikipedia a lot too.

>> ^HollywoodBob:
Factory farming is a necessary evil, there's too many people for us all to raise our own livestock.

Everything's a necessary evil until you decide to change your priorities. Slavery was a necessary evil, unless you were willing to let cotton prices rise. Owning a car is a necessary evil, unless you decide to move to a city with good public transit. Factory farming is a necessary evil, unless you decide that you don't want to eat these products, or at least are willing to pay more for ones that were treated differently.

It's very possible to decide what impact you'll have on the world. But the path of least resistance in America is a pretty destructive one: strewn with slave labor, oil-fueled war casualties, tortured animals, and toxic emissions. You're free to decide that you don't care about some of those things, but you can't call them necessities. You're free to be angrier about unjust wars or farm subsidies than mangled chicks, but it's not a zero sum game. You can go to war protests and call your congressman about the new farm bill and still have plenty of time left over to not buy chicken and eggs on your way home from work.

The problem isn't that it's too hard to change your diet. The problem is that it's too easy not to think about it at all.

Heres my two cent idea for healthcare:

If I was an insurance company, I wouldn't insure a whole person - I would insure specific diseases and injuries. Just like buying separate flood, fire, or earthquake insurance. Moreso, I would do it based on geographic location, not personal medical histories.

Heres a sample:

Plan A: $100 / year
Diseases with an incidence > 1:100,000
No injuries covered.

Plan B: $200 / year
Diseases with an incidence > 1:50,000
Injuries rated up to serious condition.

Plan C: $400 / year
Diseases with an incidence > 1:10,000
Injuries rated up to critical condition.

Plan D: $800 / year
Diseases with an incidence > 1:1,000
Injures rated up to life threatening.

Plan E: $1000 / year
All inclusive, full coverage of all disease and injury.

Incidence rates for all known diseases would be revised annually, and rates could be adjusted based on either a profit or non-profit paradigm. You know your medical history so you can select the coverage you need to cover whatever rare disease you may have. You can also select a plan based on how healthy you feel and the amount of risk you feel you have for rare disease. This works because for every expensive 1 in 100,000 disease they have to pay out, there's 99,999 people (x $100) who never needed a dime.

The government could do this, or a private company - doesn't matter. All that matters is it is voluntary.

This solves the problem with rare, expensive diseases, like hemophilia, (1 in 10,000) which can require $30,000 in medical supplies a month to treat. With this plan, hemophiliacs are able to get by on a $33 a month plan ($400 a year) while the insurance company makes 9,999 x $400 = $4 million...enough to cover the treatment for that rare 1 in 10,000 individual with a cool $3.5 million left over.

Unfortunately, spoco's example is playing the fiddle a bit. On one hand, I can see a need for public taxes to cover things like premature birth or kids born with major defects and handicaps, or total accidents, or random victims of violence. The reason is because it's something that is relatively rare and that we could all have happen to us with no way to prevent it from happening. But that's not the major cost culprit of public options by a long shot. The big spender is giving 85 year olds life-extending operations so they live to 90. It's giving retired people who decided to live a life without saving unlimited health care financed by some future generation. That's the type of ponzi mentality that turns every country who attempts things like Medicare upside-down fiscally. Our desire for life-extending procedures is infinite, but our productive capacity to finance it is not. Thus we borrow the difference until our national debt has gone from majority 30 year bonds to t-bills, majority domestic financed to foreign financed. Countries like Sweden and Australia and Canada pretend as though they can do it, but suffer huge wait times and have practically nothing left over for national defense. Countries like Britain and America tried to have their cake and eat it, too, and clobbered their economies and currencies.

And we have to remember also that any service in which the customer is spending someone else's money and not their own is going to be of higher cost and far more susceptible to fraud. Trust me, I have witness many older family members get unnecessary procedures and equipment sent to our house that is never used on the medicare bill. And Grandma didn't care because she paid virtually nothing out of her own pocket. Thus the high cost of these procedures is precisely because doctors can just charge the public whatever the hell they want since their patient has no premiums or deductible to pay. Without the fear of loss, the patient won't say no, and if the patient won't say no, then there's nothing holding doctors to a lower price.

There are some really odd Nine Inch Nails parallels with this movie. Around the time of it's release With Teeth was still being called Bleedthrough and the NIN web site had quotes from the Lathe of Heaven (Bale's character works with a lathe in the movie).

With this next one I'm very anti-spoiler when it comes to movies so I don't want to say too much, but originally Bleedthrough would have been more of a concept album, and had themes very similar to the movie's. The last song on With Teeth is an example of a song that probably was left over from the original concept.

Also the main character's name, Trevor Reznik... similar to someone else's.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Only 3 Left of XL and M This is the last 24 hours - after that any left overs will be locked inside the Disney vault forever.

Learn to cook. Or if you already cook, cook more often. If you need motivation watch Robert Rodriguez' '10 minute cooking school' special feature on the "Once upon a Time in Mexico" DVD. and I quote: "Not being able to cook is like not being able to fuck."

For the fundamentals, buy "How to Cook Everything" or "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" by Mark Bittman, it covers the main ingredient groups (grains, meats, fruits, etc), recipe types (soups, breakfasts, pies, etc), and equipment.

I LOVE weekends because I can start they day with something awesome like a quiche or stuffed crepes, start some bread dough, go to a farmers market and supermarket/butcher for fresh ingredients, make a nice salad/sandwich for lunch (left over roast beef and sauerkraut, yum), do some errands (or bake a pie with fresh fruit), and finish the day with a nice oven roast (pork loin or beef rib roast with veggies), fresh bread and wine.