Yeah, the republicans had nothing to do with the schism in our country.....ROTFLMFAHS!!!!!! Sometimes you really give me a good laugh.
Crime is down. As a cop, you should know that...why am I not surprised you have it backwards?
Nice try with the college level word, but oeuvre means the complete or singular works of a single writer or painter, and has absolutely nothing to do with values or teaching them (unless you're talking about the oeuvre of Aesop, but I seriously doubt you are, even if you know who he was, which I also doubt based on previous comments.)

I mostly use Corel PhotoPaint because it came with CorelDraw suite X5 (they are up to vX7 now). I've always liked Draw better than Illustrator, but not a big fan of PhotoPaint either. I do have Adobe CS5.5 on my work laptop, but I swear anytime I need to do something I think is straightforward, it takes 20 minutes of googling and howtos to get it done.

Gimp is so-so, Pixlr was fun to play with until the annoying ads came. If you have a Wacom tablet (or screen), then Corel Painter is nice. On iPad, the Paper App is really impressive, as is the Dabbler App that comes with nVidia Shield Tablet. Lastly will give a shout-out to Microsoft for Fresh-Paint App on Win8.1 tablets (be careful about your save files though)

Incredibly, I saw road lines just like this (sometimes worse) in Hawaii last week! We decided the painter was drunk AND fighting with the paint truck driver, sometimes the lines just went zig-zag-scribble, sometimes it looked like the bucket was just tossed into the street, sometimes the lines led right off the road, or into the other lane, it was INSANE! (and hilarious)

Thanks When I posted this, I was very surprised to find that there were already two other vids about blind painters.. apparently it's a thing. Who knew?

Not original. Look at speed painters like Dan Dunn or some of the many others.

The industrial age is part of 'economic liberty'.

People were free to make inventions that use coal, or use oil, and were free to market them either as products or services.

That differs from the earlier times/case where folks were obligated to participate only in activities sanctioned by their local lords. Often where they couldn't even travel freely.

Much of the math and chemistry we have comes from centuries worth of largely superfluous [essentially hobbyist at the time] higher education of the privileged classes. (eg. Boyle's/Charles' laws being a foundation of modern internal combustion engines, not used in said form for centuries after written down).

(Note : Which still continues to be the case, what we come up with in a purely theoretical form today, ends up being used in practical application much later. Although maybe it's speeding up. eg. Relativity is used in making GPS work, and that time delta isn't quote as large.)

Once the idea of economic liberty took hold, and people were free to come up with ideas that use the universes natural/physical properties to replace 'manpower', you had the industrial revolution.



The 'honor' part plays a good role too. You can witness this still being an issue today.
You can go to parts of eastern Europe, and talk with people about jobs and respectability.

There are plenty of places where a laborer is scum, and a businessman (eg. owner, who does not himself work, but has people working for him) is highly respected.
In these places, you don't see much work getting done, as a large portion of the typical western service sectors just doesn't exist.
For example, there are ~no house painters. Showing up with paint buckets and overalls would just get you strange stares and mumbles from people around you, and parents would be saying to their kids "See, this is what happens if you don't get good grades".
If you want your house painted, you gotta do it yourself. Few self respecting people are willing to do that job.
In contrast, ask people around the U.S. about who painted their house. Odds are, they hired for it.

The effects on small business are visible too. Lots of shops, the moment the owner can afford to not come in himself, that's exactly what they do.
And on top of that, they take every chance they can get to point out to folks that 'they don't work anymore - people work for them'.

It's a culture where the people responsible for productivity are looked down on, and it has a chilling effect on productivity.

-scheherazade

Spiegel: "According to the SSO report, FISA, the special court responsible for intelligence agency requests, provided the NSA with authorization to monitor "Germany" on March 7, 2013. The case number provided in the ruling is 13-319."

Yet our Federal Prosecution Service still doesn't see any reason to start an investigation into this blatant disregard of German law.

Let me quote the famous German painter Max Liebermann: "I cannot eat as much, as I would like to puke".

Hi A10ANIS,

Could you please address the heart of my argument, that the principle of parsimony (occams razor) states that we should consider the theory of a Creator over the multiverse theory? Thanks.

To address some of your points:

Regarding your "fine tuner" argument; Such is the fine tuning of your "creator" that 98% of all life that has existed, is extinct. Which, apart from being incredibly incompetent and wasteful, points logically to random
selection/evolution.

It also points to a global flood which wiped out nearly all life on Earth around 4400 years ago. The speciation which occurred up until that time was lost, but new species have been created since then. The mass extinctions going on today have everything to do with human development and bad stewardship rather than any design flaw.

Also, your "a painting therefore a painter" point is a non-sequitur for if there were a "fine tuner," there would, by your own argument, have to be a creator of the fine tuner and so an inevitable regression.

We as Christians do not believe in created gods which are a delusion by definition; we believe in an eternal God who was not created. The infinite regression stops at the feet of the eternal God who has always existed. This line of reasoning is a problem not for Christians but for those who believe in the multiverse theory, because whatever the mechanism is which generates all of these Universes would be yet another Goldilocks zone, and so precisely finetuned as to be statistically impossible. You may as well posit a Creator at that point. I mean just ask yourself the same questions; what created the multiverse, what created it, etc.

No, Science has thrown off the shackles of myths and gods. Had they not, our lives would be controlled by theocratic dictators and we would still believe earth was the centre of the universe.

Interesting you would say this considering that in its infancy, pretty much all of the important discoveries were made by professing Christians. It was actually the environment of Christian Europe which nurtured science into what it is today.

Another point is, Christians don't believe in myths; Jesus Christ is not a myth, He is a real person who died for our sins and rose from the dead. He told us about who God is, because He was with God and He is God.

We no longer use the god of the gaps argument. We may never know all the answers but, just because we don't, we no longer lazily, ignorantly, insist that; "Hallelujah, God must have done it."

It is not a God of the gaps argument when the theory has greater explanatory power than what is being proposed. When even apparent fine tuning as been observed, which it has, the principle of parsimony would prefer the theory of a Creator to multiple unobserved universes.

Actually, the number of Planets discovered currently stands at over 700 (and counting) Also, they have identified some which are in fact, like ours, in the "comfort zone." Sadly the closest found so far is 21 light years away which, at approx. 147 trillion miles, is at the moment rather a problem.
Regarding your "fine tuner" argument; Such is the fine tuning of your "creator" that 98% of all life that has existed, is extinct. Which, apart from being incredibly incompetent and wasteful, points logically to random
selection/evolution. Also, your "a painting therefore a painter" point is a non-sequitur for if there were a "fine tuner," there would, by your own argument, have to be a creator of the fine tuner and so an inevitable regression. No, Science has thrown off the shackles of myths and gods. Had they not, our lives would be controlled by theocratic dictators and we would still believe earth was the centre of the universe. We no longer use the god of the gaps argument. We may never know all the answers but, just because we don't, we no longer lazily, ignorantly, insist that; "Hallelujah, God must have done it."

http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/the-paradox-of-multiple-goldilocks-zones-or-did-the-universe-know-we-were-coming

"But today, I can view my second grade teacher's statement from a different point of view. Today, astronomers have identified over 500 planets orbiting other stars, and they are all too close or too far from their mother star. Most of them, we think, cannot support life as we know it. So it is unnecessary to invoke God.

But now, cosmologists are facing this paradox again, but from a cosmic perspective. It turns out that the fundamental parameters of the universe appear to be perfectly "fine-tuned." For example, if the nuclear force were any stronger, the sun would have simply burned out billions of years ago, and if it were any weaker the sun wouldn't have ignited to begin with. The Nuclear Force is tuned Just Right. Similarly, if gravity were any stronger, the Universe would have most likely collapsed in on itself in a big crunch; and if it were any weaker, everything would have simply frozen over in a big freeze. The Gravitational Force is Just Right."

The evidence shows the Universe is not an accident; the observation of fine-tuning leads naturally to the conclusion that there must be a FineTuner, much in the same way that the evidence of a painting leads us to the conclusion that there must be a painter. The favorable circumstances of the laws that allow life to flourish on planet Earth are by design.

Applying the principle of Occams Razor, postulating the existence of multiple unobserved universes to try to account for our favorable circumstances should be ruled out in favor of a theory of a Creator because there are fewer assumptions needed and there is greater explanatory power. Once the existence of even "apparent" fine-tuning has been observed, ruling out the theory of a Creator is illogical and contrary to reason according to the principle of parsimony.

The ability to scientifically detail a painting does not diminish its meaning, nor does it "negate" the painter. What science does show, however, is whether the piece is genuine or fake; that given enough time and investigation, events can be explained. Maybe science will, one day, discover that there is a "meaning," maybe that there is a "creator." And, maybe, they will also discover that "god" is a totally natural phenomenon. Education, searching for the truth, and willingness to accept evidence only when that evidence has been tested, re-tested, then tested again, these are the keys to our future. Science does not say; "We don't know, therefore we believe it was god." Apparently we ate from the tree of knowledge and were cast out. Maybe that was gods undoing or, maybe, it was his intention that we should use that knowledge. That's a lot of maybes, but as time goes on we are getting closer to the "truth." And, whatever that is, I suspect it will surprise us all.

If you look at a painting, you could run experiments to count the number of brush strokes, calculate the dimensions of the frame, determine the chemistry of the pigments, the age of the canvas, and so on. Does that diminish the meaning of the piece? Does that negtate the fact of the painter who painted it? If the answer is no, then neither could our scientific understanding of the Universe prove that there is no meaning to it or there is no Creator behind it.

I will forever be humbled by sign painters who can do this!

Picasso may (by far) be the better painter, but Bob Ross is clearly the better rapper.

Actually, you'd be surprised at how many advertisements use Art instead of Photos, and you just didn't notice. This is very common in the advertising industry. And not just for product, but on movie posters and advertising as well.

As a photo realist painter myself, my stuff is often mistaken for photographs.