You are really digging your own hole deeper. It is exactly this attitude that makes people dislike vegans. We are, by base nature, predators. We reside at the top of our food chain, barring accident or stupidity, because we are superior to the creatures that would (and do) eat us if they are given a chance.

If you choose to give up your birthright won through millenniums of evolution to be an apex predator, that is your option. Those of us that are comfortable with our predatory natures will still be chowing down on the food that we like. Sorry if it hits you in the feels.

Well, at least if it turned out the other way, they would have had the camera for evidence.

Of course, most things won't eat us unless they are starving or have grown accustomed to us; we smell bad.

The tiger doesn't care if you believe in him, or even if you manage to convince me he isn't there; he'll still eat us both.

Uh, I think I said in another thread about cat attachment behavior:
If we were smaller, they'd eat us.

Apparently, I'm wrong.
Maybe, they're just going to eat us as we are.

OK, let's try this:
If we were smaller, they'd eat us.
The core brain of a cat just don't care.
There just isn't that attachment that cat, well, not owners; more like co-habitants, think there is.
IMHO.

If we were smaller, they'd eat us.

Stick together, you said.

It couldn't possibly eat us BOTH, you said.

Well now look at us!

Aaaaaaaaaaaa!

Aaaaaaaaaaaa!

I really, really, REALLY wish this would happen in real life. Even if they're here to eat us.

@Unaccommodated

Humans are no longer a part of the competitive 'survive and procreate' gene-war that is the natural world, or at least we're in the process of struggling our way out of that tangle. Very soon, our evolution will be defined by wholly non-naturalistic parameters.

We are not starving. Nothing is going to eat us. Our decisions are not made purely by instinctual drives. Of course it's usually accurate to say that we're still subject to the laws of physics and their emergent systems; it ought to be obvious contextually that's not the nature I'm suggesting we have surpassed.

Your appeals to natural law are inapplicable to human endeavour.

At the most fundamental level of our existence, more fundamental even than physical law, we are individual consciousnesses possessing a general intelligence - inherited, admittedly, from an evolutionary heritage that is no longer relevant; from which we should always strive to divorce ourselves.

Marriage is ultimately whatever we want it to be. One thing I do not want it to be is a state-driven instrument of social conformity.

I read the wiki article you posted, it says the opposite of what you suggest. That pre-1980, they had no ability to generate policy...they just gathered information. Do you have a link to something that talks about the freemarkety nature in the 80s?, because that link doesn't have it. Unless you are just talking about Regan doing free market stuff on the whole affecting education somehow indirectly, but the link clearly says he made it a federal government responsibility to create educational policy in the 80s. In that, I don't know that your argument fully answers @Grimm's claim that educational stardards have gone down since federal policy making has been done. We aren't talking about free markets here, even at the state level. We are talking about who makes better policies affecting children's education; federal or state. It has also been of my opinion that for important things, eggs in one basket methodologies are dangerous. Best to have a billion little educational experiments boiling around the country, cooking up information that the rest of them can turn around and use. Waiting for a federal mandate to adopt a policy can be rather tedious.

I have some friends that are educators, I will have to ask them how they feel about this. It is easy for us to have an opinion based on raw idealism of our core beliefs, but I would be interested to see what certain teachers have to say. I met a real interesting person at my friends bachelor party. He came from a union state, and moved down here to Texas, we have teachers unions and things, but they aren't as powerful as the north. He experienced a complete change in himself. He found that his own involvement in his union happened in such a way where he basically held the kids education hostage over wages. He said that is was basically the accepted role of teachers to risk children's education over pay. I am not talking about just normal pay, but he was making 50k as a grade school teacher in the early 90s. Not suggesting this is normal, but it is something we don't copy here in Texas. As for his own mind, he knows he would never teach in that area of the country again, and would never suggest anyone move their that values their children's education.

What would be interesting to me is if the absence of the DOE would break down some of the red tape and allow schools to "get creative" with programs a federal political body might not want to take a risk on. Education is to important to fail on, and applying "to big to fail" kind of logic to a failing system of education is to much politics to play for me. Empower teachers and schools, and try to avoid paying as many non-educators as possible would be one way to improve things I would wager. What aspect of the DOE do you think is successful that we need to keep exactly? I mean, I can tell you I don't like that the DOD is so huge and powerful, but I know nuclear subs and aircraft carriers can't operate themselves. What necessarily component of the DOE do you see as necessarily, beyond just talking point of either party line stance of it? I mean, the Department of Energy's main goal was to get us off foreign oil, like a long time ago, that is pretty failed as much as the DOE. Different approach needed, or a massive rethinking of the current one. You don't usually get massive rethinking nationally of any coherent nature, which is why I think a local strategy might be a good way to go here. Perhaps then, you could have that initial part of the DOE before it became the DOE of providing information to schools about what works from other schools kick in again.

This kind of talk of "Ron Paul addresses none of this" about something that isn't related exactly isn't really fair. It is like trying to talk about income tax issues and saying changing them doesn't address the issue of the military war machine...well of course not, it is a different issue. Did you see that recent Greewald video where he talks about the founders did think that massive inequality was not only permissible, but the idea...just as long as the rules were the same for everyone? What I mean to say is that there does need to be a measure of fairness, but that fairness needs to be the same for everyone, rich and poor. I still say the real problem lay in the government creating the monster first and the monster is now eating us. If legislators simply refused to accept the legitimacy of corporate entities and instead say that only individuals can deal on the behalf of themselves with the govenrment(the elimination of the corporate charter as it refers to its relationship to the government) things could get better in a day. But since the good ol USA thinks that non-people entities are people, well, I don't see much hope for restoration. Money is the new government, rule of law is dead. I liked the recent Greenwald input on this. Rant over Sorry, this is just kind of stream of consciousness here, didn't plan out an actual goal or endpoint of my ideas....just a huge, burdensome wall of text

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

The first incarnation of the department of education was actually created in 1876. Was our educational system unfucked before 1876? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education
1980 was a pivotal year, but it had nothing to do with the department of education. 1980 was the year that Reagan ushered in a large number of 'free market' reforms: Privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for those at the top, austerity for those at the bottom... basically the Milton Friedman Shock Doctrine as described in Naomi Klein's excellent book.
We've since seen the rise of the corporate state and a deterioration of the public sector. These market principles have seen our jobs exported to 3rd world slaves (and then asked us to compete with those slaves), have given the green light to mass pollution and global warming, have allowed big business to use our military as middle east mercenaries and have redistributed vast amounts of wealthy to a tiny fraction of the population (not to mention numerous scandals (Enron, Exxon, BofA, Countrywide, Halliburton, Blackwater, Savings and Loans, Mortgages, etc..)
Ron Paul addresses none of this. He has no solutions for jobs or inequality outside of his faith in invisible hands and invisible deities. He doesn't even seem aware that there is a problem. I don't think he's lying when he pretentiously states that his partisan political views are the very definition of liberty. I just think he is another out of touch conservative millionaire with a mind easily manipulated by self serving dogma (be it religious political or economic).

>>^Patton:
you can eat us and jerk off to him!

This is the album where Patton finally comes out. apparently.

To quote Red Dwarf: "It will either eat us, fight us.... or hump us!"

yah, i also noticed how the cow reacted to her scream.
The human scream is a very agressive sound and we scream when we are afraid as a reflex to scare off things that could for example eat us.

"Defeat it," said McCain.

He learned never to pass up a chance to make a good sound bite.

Evil as a concept is pretty subjective. We'd consider space aliens who came to earth and started eating us to be evil, but we don't consider ourselve evil for eating other animals.

It's nice to see these clips from that "debate" but the thought of questioning a candidates religious or spiritual views kind of turns my stomach. It smacks of pandering. It's framing our politics in a religious way, and I find that distracting.

Objectivity is not something highly valued among religious nuts.

Eww. This proves spiders would eat us too, if we were small enough or the spiders big enough!