Thanks for reporting, reverend. Momentary burp. All fixed.

The song is "Learning to Fly" from Momentary Lapse of Reason. Great song and great album, perfect for the vid.

>> ^Doc_M:
It's a shame to see the median income has dropped so low bellow the mean.
I'm guessing it will be even more shocking in a year when we see the 2009 national debt and inflation rate. The rate at which we have been printing money this year makes Al Gore's "hockey stick" look like a tooth pick. Not to mention the other trillions that the new administration and the Dem congress want to dish out.


Not to pick on you, DocM, but your comment (and the fact that it's gotten several upvotes), is a prime example of how I think most conservatives misunderstand the relationship of various aspects of our economy.

First, you make a comment about median incomes dropping so far below the mean. As a liberal/progressive, I think after unemployment, that's one of the largest issues with our economy today.

Second, you say you think that issue will be somehow directly affected by the national debt and inflation rate (with the implication that those two things also have direct correlation to each other).

Third, you blame Democrats, and not the Fed, for the increase in the money supply, and presumably the inflation rate and national debt too.

The charts already on display should dispel all of these assertions, but somehow, they haven't.

If you look at real national debt, you will see that the curve had a brief slope downward during the Clinton years. CPI during that time continued to rise. National Debt and inflation do not have a causal relationship, nor do Democrats and National Debt, if you look at joedirt's chart.

Now, Fed interest rates and inflation rates have a high correlation, though that's not a perfect fit, either. I don't think we have a chart that shows us inflation vs. income disparity, but I'd love to see that, along with top marginal tax rates, and see which has a higher degree of correlation, because I think income disparity has more to do with tax rates than inflation.

Lastly, there is actually a reason why Democrats (and the Fed) are dishing out trillions. Notice how the CPI has a hook downward? That's deflation, and the last time we had that was during the Great Depression. So Ben Bernanke, being a student of Milton Friedman, is pumping out massive amounts of cash to try to prevent a deflationary cycle from taking root. Unfortunately, Fed rates have been at zero for a while now, and it can't get any lower, which brings us to fiscal stimulus, like what Obama got passed.

Now, imstellar subscribes to a theory of economics that essentially says deflation is a good and natural thing. That's fine. I disagree, but at least there are plenty of people smarter than both he and I who take up opposing sides of that debate.

Most conservatives though, have never heard of Austrian Economics, and certainly can't explain why they disagree with most mainstream economists about what to do right now. They're operating on a much simpler philosophy: say anything to encourage people to think everything bad happens because of (Democratic) government.

Lots of people repeat ludicrously nonsensical economic "policy" on that foundation alone, and do things like relentlessly point at the green line in Chart #3 and say "see, our debt is insane!" When the real issue is the size of the gap between the Red and Green lines on that chart, not the height of the Green line itself. Then they mix in inflation, not understanding that inflation actually helps keep our debt under control to some degree, since the dollars we owe are fixed, but the value of the dollars we use to pay off the debt are worth less as time goes on.

They also seem to propose, with just as much vigor, that what government needs to do is slash taxes, without remembering their momentary concern over debt. They also seem to think cutting government spending in a recession will help speed the recovery, not deepen the decline (ditto for letting banks and auto manufacturers collapse spectacularly). They also fail to see that a contracting economy can create a government deficit all on its own, since tax revenues fall as unemployment rises and mean income falls, and dismiss the proposition that government spending to get us out of a recession is likely better for the debt in the long run.

So in the end, we end up fighting about the same tired bromides about the size of government, rather than noticing that income disparity has been growing steadily despite an overwhelmingly conservative swing in our government's policy for the last 30+ years.

But people go on merrily slitting their own economic throats by demonizing Democrats as "big spending liberals" or more recently "socialists", not realizing that we're the ones that want to cut your taxes, and make government serve the people and not just the top 1% of income earners, and make fixing income disparity a top issue.

I'm not really surprised by that, but I'm constantly fascinated at how many knots people have to twist themselves in to defend the Republican party line.

From thesaurus.com:

abbreviate, abbreviated, aphoristic, bare, boiled down, breviloquent, brief, compendiary, compendious, compressed, concise, condensed, curtailed, curtate, cut short, cut to the bone, decreased, decurtate, diminished, epigrammatic, fleeting, in a nutshell, laconic, lessened, little, momentary, not protracted, pithy, pointed, precise, sententious, short and sweet*, shortened, short-lived, short-term, succinct, summarized, summary, terse, undersized, unprolonged, unsustained

So he had a momentary psychosis?

His ending point "choose life" is exactly what an atheist does - disregard any afterlife, and just live.

Ultimately, the decisions that we as individuals, as nations, and as a species make on a day to day basis become matters of philosophical quandary. I sleep so that I'm refreshed for waking. I eat so that I'm nourished for activity. I work for money to maintain a lifestyle. I read this book or partake in this sport or befriend this or that individual, group, or nation because it will purportedly increase or better my (or our) position(s). The decision to go to war--to commit violence--is no different. Yet, one's philosophical perspectives on the meaning of such violence (again, as individuals and as nations) will serve under the constructs that constitute that philosophy. In other words, if we live and die for today -- with no heed to the sustainability of future generations -- then we (as other documented societies have done in the past) will outstrip our resources and secure our inevitable collapse. However, if we see life as a collective endeavor, which includes all the countless generations that preceded, and the countless more to come, such that our momentary role is to serve as custodian to one another, the planet, to life itself, then the manner in which we attack one another may take on a very different attitude, as we realize that no war has ever directly increased our "success" in this endeavor--rather, only the meaning that such "wars" have seemed to offer.

If we gain a larger perspective that sees life as ongoing and continuous, not limited by resources but only by our attachment to life working in a particular fashion, then our manner of going to "war" may be very different, indeed.

^Momentary English fart. Corrected!

Ref #1 - O.K., Sex kinda fades with time. Who knows, it is slightly possible that there will be a momentary flash of desire occur again sometime in the future. Don't let it confuse you. Speaking of "it" (# 5), my mom also used to make sure that I peeled it back when washing it to make sure it was clean. Ref # 6 - Just how often DO you count your underware?. Ref11 - does this mean you have ALL THREE??

The momentary loss of those videos saw Zifnab's rank drop to 10 before going back up to 1.

i'm guessing ben folds never made an official video for this tune?

well, until he does, this one'll do.
laughed at his eye-rolling momentary lapse of lipsynch at 2:01, and of course, the umm... jaundiced diving craft.

I thought Dawkins answer here "hallucination" is , altho its basically right, a bit simplistic, perhaps. Hallucination is what I would call momentary "trips" and not a lifetime in religious delusion. For example, a drug addict, or gambling addict has some pretty screwed up views, they'll justify their addiction to themselves and live in a perpetual state of nonsense, and perhaps they even have occasional hallucinations (ie: a trip on drugs) but to say that their entire problem is "hallucination" is overly simplistic, and not very helpful.

In my view, this man is suffering from addiction, conviction and self-deception, its a complex cocktail of faith-based reasoning that poisons his mind. He has, in short, lost his own ability to reason clearly, and distance himself from his own train of thought. Crucial questions like "What if I'm wrong?" or "Do I really know I'm right?" or "How do I know this?" seems to have escaped him entirely.

... Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-Carl Sagan

>> ^lucky760:
Should all be fixed up now. Sorry for the momentary weirdness.

Thanks. Will check later tonight.

Should all be fixed up now. Sorry for the momentary weirdness.

>> ^dag:
Sorry for the momentary glitch. Siftbot was redecorating his apartment.
Thanks for the acknowledgements that there are problems.

We want to see photographs/videos of Siftbot's pad!!