I've never found anything mystical about psychedelic drugs, including DMT. As I see it, they just throw a wrench into the works of your brain and thus your perception of consciousness. It can be very interesting and enlightening, particularly as a visceral lesson in how subjective 'reality' is, but it isn't in any way mystical to me.

There should be two types of cars:
- Those decked out with all kinds of techno-wizardry.
and..
- Those you can fix any part of with a wrench, welder, and a screwdriver.

Both have their place.
..also, can we get less intrusive motion graphics please?

Thanks a gazillion mate! I have most certainly seen Nil By Mouth. Pretty much the most gut-wrenching thing I've ever watched. Kathy Burke deserved an Oscar. Doesn't it hold the record for the most uses of "cunt"?

I said "cronyism aside" to explain the pure theory. Of course cronyism throws a wrench into the system. And cronyism is a function of government-granted privileges. As long as you have the monopoly we call government, you will have cronyism. Plain and simple. The most potent way to "slant the playing field" is through the use of government: a powerful and widely accepted tool of legalized aggression and coercion.

In fact, that's one of the main 'uses' of government regulation: to ensure that others cannot "catch up." The minimum wage laws are an example (contrary to the rhetoric surrounding the issue). So is taxation. And currency inflation used to pay for the bailouts. The list goes on and on.

Sociopaths win when they can use government to prevent competition. And make no mistake, the government itself is rife with sociopaths. (One might say that it's a prerequisite!)

(BTW, what exactly do the sociopaths "win?" To my mind, any "wealth" they have was not "won" at all, but was stolen by force, using the government as a mechanism of income redistribution. Without this tool, they'd have no choice but to offer actual goods/services that others want to pay for, if they want any wealth.)

.....
(And just as I was about to post this, I found this!) You think it's harder for poor folks to climb the income ladder now than it was 20 or 40 years ago? You're wrong, say the folks at the Equality of Opportunity project. (Let me note that these are NOT "right wingers." Saez is the darling of many progressives because of some his earlier work on inequality.) "The authors of this study measured the ability of children born in different income strata from 1971 to 1993 to move into different income groups. For example, it found that a child born in 1971 in the bottom 20% of household earners had an 8.4% chance of eventually making it into the top 20% of earners by his or her 20s or 30s. The chances of a child born in 1986 making a similar ascent was 9.0%."

Ok firstly for ChaosEngine, your paraphrased quote of statements which voiced a sentiment I have had since engaging in conversation with seekers about the existence of 'God or no God': The same mechanism of filtering the words you read through your own belief system is a time-honored technique of the most fundamentalist of back-assward Christians and theologians who read the words of the Bible and fit them conveniently into their limited world view filtered through a similar limited and linear, perception of existence.

(*edit-I now realize that you did not in fact, paraphrase my statement rather, bcglorf's , but the sentiment remains true)

My statement was (and yes Dannym3142, that was NOT supposed to be a question mark, edited with the appropriate period): "I have a legitimate beef with rabid supporters of any particular ideology or philosophy when the shit becomes tiresome and repetitious when tinctured with rage and anger and intolerance."

Your paraphrase of sentiment ChaosEngine, "evangelical atheists are as bad as fundamentalists," then followed by "bollocks" (bullshit), is indicative to me of the rage and anger I attributed to the average atheist's consternation with these 'stupid', 'backwards', 'hillbillies' etc.,(who are too dumb or dense to wrap their heads around the very idea that an omnipresent uni-being does not exist, yadda yadda yadda.) Further, the example used 'When was the last time atheists shot a young girl for wanting to go to school?' to justify your position is reminiscent of any Southern Baptist preacher using similar extreme examples of the human condition to support their own arguments for the infallibility of their 'god'. The words used connote a similar intolerance and ignorance of that which is wholly metagnostic or, 'the unknowable' and I regard the mechanism as the selfsame dynamic.

"So, sorry if I'm not going to sit down and STFU about it." Good. It means you are on the path to enlightenment and intend to continue to seek truths which satisfy the gnawing curiosity that ALL humans are frought with in our tenure here on Earth. Keep at it.

dannym3142: (sorry for the question mark, it confused me as well when reading it again) I used Crowley and Planck's observations as an exercise in tossing a non-linear curve-ball into the circle-jerk of those whose search for absolute truth and the nature of the universe, of matter/non-matter, seemingly ended when they decided that it's a no-brainer as to whether or not faith has a place in the argument for or against the existence of a supreme being. Faith can't be argued either, we all need it to perform the simplest of our daily monkey-tasks.

Yes-I was chastising VooDooV for the blanket of down-votes to my comments because I sense his rage and anger at my input on threads similar, and recognize in atheists the same robotic mechanism they accuse Christians of which litter blog after blog when God is mentioned, by the ever-incrasing rabid anti-god fan-boys who attack with guns blazing at the very mention of that which is unable to be understood when approaching it from linear patterns of thought. That, and I refuse ever-again be ganged-up on on this site by a few well-be-nots who have it out for me because they can't understand what the fuck I am trying to communicate. I let my guard down in the past and it cost me over a year in SIFTJAIL (to all you fucking wannabe cops here present and future, suck my balls!)

Your fight is not with God but with the exponentially-increasing non-linearity of the world we inhabit, and the chaotic desire to process the information coming into the grid with time-honored methods of argument. IMLTHO this doesn't work.

All the seemingly trollish statements I make on similar threads are made with a view to wrenching another way of thinking out of the stubborn adherents to any one pattern or direction of mental process.

It can't be argued that a realm of universes exist outside of our own limited perceptive apparatus and all argument ends there for myself for the sake of my own insanity.

That's what I was thinking... After taking enough of these calls, the callees may have to become the callers.

Heart-wrenching stuff.

There used to be a magician at Knott's Berry Farm that demonstrated this trick pretty close to the audience and then explained that he had trained for years to create the pathway through his body for the sword to pass through.

The arm is particularly easy because of how the muscles are arranged around the bone. It passes right below the biceps. Not much going on in this particular, dare I say "easy" to pull off location of bloodless stabbiness.
I don't know if the Knott's magician is still there or not, but it was a "magic" show that explained the science behind older, more simplistic tricks like this.

Also included were lots of different types of electricity stunts (static electricity, powering light bulbs through people, etc.), which have fallen to the wayside with magicians because most people nowadays understand electricity and it's not as gut wrenching as this scar tissue build up dealio.

I upvoted for Ricky's reactions and David'd ridiculous goading, but the trick itself is le sigh.

The magician at Knott's had a fairly visible scar on both sides of his arm, as he likely performed the trick A LOT. Serious needle mark action. lol. Blaine probably rarely performs this trick and perhaps used other material, like make up, latex or some such material, glue, creams, etc.

This video has been declared a duplicate by the original submitter; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by bareboards2.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Vegetas-heart-wrenching-tribute-to-Whitney

*dupeof=videosift.com/video/Vegetas-heart-wrenching-tribute-to-Whitney

@Norsuelefantti -- you must be having a very bad day if a silly failed dupe fucks up your entire life, complete with sad face emoticon!

Here. Now your life is happy again.

Won't let you dupe this yourself, since you are the original poster.

But I can do it!

Here's some more votes for your posting....

*isdupe=videosift.com/video/Vegetas-heart-wrenching-tribute-to-Whitney

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Vegetas-heart-wrenching-tribute-to-Whitney

*dupeof=videosift.com/video/Vegetas-heart-wrenching-tribute-to-Whitney

*promote

Allah Akbar, my balls.

Much rather live on a planet with folks who have less of their collective heads shoved up each others asses.

I like Israel for her policy of continually keeping nuclear power out of the hands of neanderthals.
I get a warm fuzzy every time they use their air force to wrench nuclear facilities out of the hands of any developmentally-disabled children....

Fletch pretty much said everything i wanted to say. Possibly the stupidest thing that has come out of gun lobbies is the parking lot sales where guns just disappear from the system. And no amount of "militia" rhetorics make any sense; if government wants you, they'll get you. They do have stealth bombers ffs. Your AR-15 won't even make a scratch on that tank running your house flat. In order for personal weapons to be a viable counter balance to military forces is when you are some where along ratios of 1/10, not 1/10000. You make a lot more damage under oppression with a wrench, wire cutter or blowtorch in the dead of night than what armed confrontation with superior force will achieve.