That would be a wet dream for the NRA.

I think you mean "purchases of"...

My ideals include a society where this sort of thing is much less likely, if not impossible.
That is not politically motivated, that is motivated by compassion for the people and world around me.

If you want to talk bring up the 'gun control bandwagon', now that's political. That is the gun lobby's wet dream cum to sticky fruition. The only thing that sells guns better than picatinny rails and fear of crime/zombies, is fear that someone is going to tell us that we can't play with guns anymore.
Which one of us has been whipped-up into a a blind, frothy, swearing rage here?
Which one of us is a lap dog?

wasnt there a provision for those who sought to utilize public airwaves that they had to have so much "educational" programming in order to gain and/or retain their broadcasting license?

and isnt PBS only 40% tax-payer backed? i forgot where i read that PBS was ran on 60% donations.that the taxpayers filled in the gap/loss which averaged a 60/40 ratio.

either way you slice it,what we are seeing is political hay and nothing more.making the argument that PBS is some socialists wet dream is just bullshit.i wonder if the irony is lost on these people who wish to shut down an institution to replace it with mind-numbing,vapid staleness.creating a zombified drooling public.

or is that the actual intent? to dumb down the american public?

i would like to subscribe to that conspiracy but these retards cant get out of their own way,nevermind concoct such an elaborate scheme such as i am suggesting.

so all for the sake of political whoring we may lose an institution that has brought some of the best and ground-breaking educational programming since the mid 60's.
and the collective IQ of this country drops.
sad...
so very very sad.

sesame street came out the year i was born.i learned how to read before i hit kindergarten because of that show AND it was one of many shows that got my craving to absorb information and learn.

but i guess "future strippers of america" is more important.
bollocks......

Stephen Colbert said it best in a video bit that I'll leave it to you to find, if you care, but I'll paraphrase.

The difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party is that the Tea Party has representation. OWS is a collection of individuals with no representation; individuals acting of their own accord.

Now as far as you saying the Tea Party not being offensive, well... I can look at the last minute of this video and see the list of things that I absolutely can show linked to the Tea Party and I find that extremely offensive and racist and even condoning violence -- close enough without actually pulling the trigger.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
The simple fact is that neolibs want a bad guy to demonize. Neolibs and leftists in general are simple, shallow, and vapid - very much like Sorkin and his on-air wet dream that he calls a 'show'. To these narrow-minded creatures, it is unacceptable to see honest, well-intentioned, reasonable everyday citizens opposing their radical agenda items. The Tea Party as a whole has been inoffensive and has as simple, basic message: cut spending. They aren't racists, or violent. They aren't anything close to the Taliban. But truth and reality don't matter to blinkered neolibs who NEED... who desperately CRAVE a man in a cloak with a twirling moustache to hate

You're simple, vapid, and shallow. Are we having a dialog yet?>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Here's a quick quiz... Two activist groups are accused of being "astroturf". One is the Tea Party - which is accused of being a bought & paid for astroturf campaign of the right. The other is Occupy Wall Street - which is accused of being a bought & paid for astroturf campaign of the left.
Occupy Wall Street is guilty of documented cases of arson, assault, drug use, drug dealing, fraud, murder, public disturbance, rape, sexual assault, sedition, suicide, theft, vandalism, property destruction, bigotry, police harassment, and various other felonies and misdemeanors. The Tea Party is guilty of ZERO documented cases of any crime. Sounds like OWS is far more similar to the Taliban than the Tea Party.
The simple fact is that neolibs want a bad guy to demonize. Neolibs and leftists in general are simple, shallow, and vapid - very much like Sorkin and his on-air wet dream that he calls a 'show'. To these narrow-minded creatures, it is unacceptable to see honest, well-intentioned, reasonable everyday citizens opposing their radical agenda items. The Tea Party as a whole has been inoffensive and has as simple, basic message: cut spending. They aren't racists, or violent. They aren't anything close to the Taliban. But truth and reality don't matter to blinkered neolibs who NEED... who desperately CRAVE a man in a cloak with a twirling moustache to hate...
Can't these 20 million disenfranchised voters just pay 10 bucks or so to go get a photo ID that would allow them to vote?
That's not the point. A large portion of the so-called 'disenfranchised' are illegal aliens who should not be allowed to vote. Voter ID laws prevent illegal aliens from voting. Such a simple, common-sense law cannot be allowed by the liberal left as they'd lose out on literally millions of illegal alien votes. Protesting voter ID laws has nothing to do with "disenfranchisement". It has everything to do with preventing illegal voting activity - which all civilized nations do rigorously. I have to have a voter ID card to vote, and display an ID. It in no way disenfranchises ANYONE except those who shouldn't be voting in the first place. Everyone who should legally be allowed to vote already has all the ID that any ID law requires.

Here's a quick quiz... Two activist groups are accused of being "astroturf". One is the Tea Party - which is accused of being a bought & paid for astroturf campaign of the right. The other is Occupy Wall Street - which is accused of being a bought & paid for astroturf campaign of the left.

Occupy Wall Street is guilty of documented cases of arson, assault, drug use, drug dealing, fraud, murder, public disturbance, rape, sexual assault, sedition, suicide, theft, vandalism, property destruction, bigotry, police harassment, and various other felonies and misdemeanors. The Tea Party is guilty of ZERO documented cases of any crime. Sounds like OWS is far more similar to the Taliban than the Tea Party.

The simple fact is that neolibs want a bad guy to demonize. Neolibs and leftists in general are simple, shallow, and vapid - very much like Sorkin and his on-air wet dream that he calls a 'show'. To these narrow-minded creatures, it is unacceptable to see honest, well-intentioned, reasonable everyday citizens opposing their radical agenda items. The Tea Party as a whole has been inoffensive and has as simple, basic message: cut spending. They aren't racists, or violent. They aren't anything close to the Taliban. But truth and reality don't matter to blinkered neolibs who NEED... who desperately CRAVE a man in a cloak with a twirling moustache to hate...

Can't these 20 million disenfranchised voters just pay 10 bucks or so to go get a photo ID that would allow them to vote?

That's not the point. A large portion of the so-called 'disenfranchised' are illegal aliens who should not be allowed to vote. Voter ID laws prevent illegal aliens from voting. Such a simple, common-sense law cannot be allowed by the liberal left as they'd lose out on literally millions of illegal alien votes. Protesting voter ID laws has nothing to do with "disenfranchisement". It has everything to do with preventing illegal voting activity - which all civilized nations do rigorously. I have to have a voter ID card to vote, and display an ID. It in no way disenfranchises ANYONE except those who shouldn't be voting in the first place. Everyone who should legally be allowed to vote already has all the ID that any ID law requires.

Maybe he can help the new generation stick it to the tories after all. Thatcher would *hate* that.

I think we could be on the verge of some serious stuff going down in britain unless politicians get their heads out of their arses, properly out. Police and prison strikes? Bad idea to give the police a reason to side with the public. What are they gonna do when they've got no provocateurs or kettling, call in the army? Meanwhile london will be burning - the kids know what happens when police don't interfere; FUN!

David cameron is seeing all this in his wet dreams. He's imagining himself as a general sat atop a riot police horse, watching the laborers flee across the fields before him, trampled under-hoof as the police lines charge once again in the name of those who were born to privilege.

You've got no understanding of how an average Briton lives camerface, fuck off and take your posh twat friends with you. 77% of the deficit through cuts (hitting the poor) and 23% through tax (mostly from VAT; again hitting the poor). How can he live with himself?

I used do this all the time. Not at 90kph (my gears don't go high enough), but I've done 70+. Trucks slow down way, way slower than bikes. If you wanna math battle about it, a cyclist's ratio of braking power-to-mass is much higher than any vehicle that's worth drafting. Even if the cyclist bumps the truck (which I have done too at high speed when my brakes failed), it just scares you and slows you down. He'd have to hit with a very high speed difference (not just a high ground speed) for anything bad to happen.

The biggest real risk is debris or pot holes that the cyclist can't see. That's why I've mostly stopped doing this. That truck is a drafter's wet dream though with such a low profile in the back, and I would not be able to pass it up.

Tow truck drivers wet dream. All accidents, all police ordered..police rates.

Hey guys, the roads are bad, let's stand in them and be shocked when people almost run us down right next to where we just crashed. What could go wrong!

It is the job of the government to regulate things that are of great harm to it's citizens. I know this seems like a wet dream in present day America. But. If the government were to take this corrupting, soul-crushing influence out of our politics and bring us back to a state of 'by, of and for the people', they'd be guilty of nothing more than just doing their fucking jobs.

(PRIMAL SCREAM)

ahhhh... that feels better.

I gave up on Clancy when I was 16. I don't remember which book it was but there was a scene at the start where two full grown US military spook types meet in a bar somewhere in SE Asia, Bangkok maybe. They have a 'some damn fool said you were the best' type conversation then start good naturedly sparring with their knives, as you do. He describes the 'whirling, twisting' playfight -- for AGES (with a full on army boner no doubt).

Then he adds that a crowd (of natives) had gathered and were whooping and cheering them on delightedly. When the boys (let's call them JAKE and CLINT) have got it out of their system the crowd disperse, sad the fun is over. Then our heroes get back to planning who the US gov wants them to go and assassinate.

Clancy deals in right wing wet dreams. Interesting that his lot are starting to sell the same bullshit but now against US citizens - OWS. Couldn't play this game though. Pretending to shoot Castro in the head at the start of Black Ops made me feel queasy already. I mean Castro is a royal dick but millions of kids being taught to shoot real people by intellectually and morally questionable GAMES PRODUCERS?

All a bit dark.

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

Exactly - lame iPhone fashionistas abound but that doesn't mean the device isn't a SciFi wet dream for nerds. Hate the iPhoners not the iPhone.>> ^braindonut:

lulz.
Go ahead and have your amazing shit phone and your amazing shit marketplace with amazing shit apps. I'll keep my iPhone.

No, Dandy-Walker does not contradict everything taught in the video. He has (and others like him have) most of the same brain structures (especially the ones related to consciousness). For the most part, they are missing their cerebellar vermis, which controls and analyzes spatial motion. The parts that have something to do with consciousness are still there, and they are even in pretty much the same place as they would be otherwise.

You forgot agenesis of the corpus callosum, which means it is only partially formed or completely absent. Which means that his brain operates much differently than normal (obviously).

Even if the parts of their brain were jumbled up a bit, that doesn't mean they couldn't necessarily have consciousness. The body does some amazing things considering some of the biological errors that happen. People can be born with holes in their hearts, or on the wrong side of their body, and have perfectly functioning circulatory systems - that doesn't mean the circulation of their blood is transcendent from their circulatory system.

I never said he couldn't have consciousness if his brain was jumbled up. I was saying that his brain does not have the structure described in this video. Since we know he was a normal guy able to hold down a job and have proper relationships, it refutes the assertions that it made.

And there is no comparison between consciousness and the brain and the circulatory system and the blood. The blood is physical, consciousness cannot be measured.

This is a complete cop-out. I can say the same to you. If your god is
omniscient, then he knows what you are going to do before you do it.
Therefore you don't actually have free will because, no matter what,
you are going to do what god always expected you to do.

Are you suggesting what I said isn't true? If not, why? And, God knowing what I am going to do next does not limit my free will. I am not being prevented from making any choice, nor am I being forced to make one. Simply because God knows what I am going to do doesn't mean I had to make the choice I did.

>> ^Skeeve:
The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.
No, Dandy-Walker does not contradict everything taught in the video. He has (and others like him have) most of the same brain structures (especially the ones related to consciousness). For the most part, they are missing their cerebellar vermis, which controls and analyzes spatial motion. The parts that have something to do with consciousness are still there, and they are even in pretty much the same place as they would be otherwise.
Even if the parts of their brain were jumbled up a bit, that doesn't mean they couldn't necessarily have consciousness. The body does some amazing things considering some of the biological errors that happen. People can be born with holes in their hearts, or on the wrong side of their body, and have perfectly functioning circulatory systems - that doesn't mean the circulation of their blood is transcendent from their circulatory system.
Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes.
This is a complete cop-out. I can say the same to you. If your god is omniscient, then he knows what you are going to do before you do it. Therefore you don't actually have free will because, no matter what, you are going to do what god always expected you to do.

The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.

No, Dandy-Walker does not contradict everything taught in the video. He has (and others like him have) most of the same brain structures (especially the ones related to consciousness). For the most part, they are missing their cerebellar vermis, which controls and analyzes spatial motion. The parts that have something to do with consciousness are still there, and they are even in pretty much the same place as they would be otherwise.

Even if the parts of their brain were jumbled up a bit, that doesn't mean they couldn't necessarily have consciousness. The body does some amazing things considering some of the biological errors that happen. People can be born with holes in their hearts, or on the wrong side of their body, and have perfectly functioning circulatory systems - that doesn't mean the circulation of their blood is transcendent from their circulatory system.

Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes.

This is a complete cop-out. I can say the same to you. If your god is omniscient, then he knows what you are going to do before you do it. Therefore you don't actually have free will because, no matter what, you are going to do what god always expected you to do.
>> ^shinyblurry:

Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.
If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
Consciousness is consciousness, whether the brain is damaged or undamaged. The key part is having it, and It stems from the soul. The quality of the consciousness is effected by the relative performance of the medium, but if access to information is lost in the physical, it doesn't mean it is gone. It's purely your assumption that it can be destroyed in any way. The access may be lost in the physical, but it still exists in eternity. God knows everything, so He is the ultimate memory storage for our souls.
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.
Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam:
"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”
And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."
You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I believe anything that you're saying?
>> ^Skeeve:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.

Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?

Consciousness is consciousness, whether the brain is damaged or undamaged. The key part is having it, and It stems from the soul. The quality of the consciousness is effected by the relative performance of the medium, but if access to information is lost in the physical, it doesn't mean it is gone. It's purely your assumption that it can be destroyed in any way. The access may be lost in the physical, but it still exists in eternity. God knows everything, so He is the ultimate memory storage for our souls.

As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.

The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.

The point is that his experience contradicts everything which is taught in this video. By all accounts he lived a normal life, with feelings and relationships and struggles, but did not have anything approximating the brain structure described in this video. Clearly you can see much that is being spouted here is just a materialists wet dream. The attempt to approximate all human experience into mechanistic terms.

Let's put it this way..If you believe you're nothing more than material machinery then you don't have free will and you can't even trust your own rationality. You don't have free will because all of your choices are preceeded and caused by unconscious material processes. Here's a quote from Sam:

"For [many people], freedom of will is synonymous with the idea that, with respect to any specific thought or action, one could have thought or acted differently. But to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought, “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever I, in fact, did. Rather than indicate my freedom, this thought is just an epitaph erected to moments past. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, inscrutable to me. To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”

And this is why the last objection is just another way of not facing up to the problem. To say that “my brain” has decided to think or act in a particular way, whether consciously or not, and my freedom consists in this, is to ignore the very reason why people believe in free will in the first place: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."

You can't trust your own rationality because it is based upon on chemical reactions in the brain, a process which evolved from the lower animals and with guarantee of any truth. Here's what darwin said about it:

"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

So, if I am speaking to someone who can't make independent choices, with rationality that came from monkeys, why should I believe anything that you're saying?

>> ^Skeeve:
Shiny, that sounds an awful like the same garbage Deepak Chopra spouts and that Sam Harris addressed in this video.

If consciousness is "entirely transcendent of its wiring" then why can damage to that wiring change/destroy the conciousness?
As for the French civil servant with Dandy-Walker syndrome, let's get some facts straight: firstly, he has a lower than average IQ and secondly, his brain is not a "small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick", it is pushed up against the sides of the skull with an empty cavity in the center.
The fact that he isn't lacking in consciousness isn't what makes it newsworthy either. It was newsworthy because he went so long without it being diagnosed and without having the common problems associated with it. The mortality rate for people with this disorder is high, but it isn't uncommon for a survivor with the disorder to have a normal cognition. The reason that is, is because their brain is misshapen and missing pieces, but those missing pieces tend to be the ones that deal with more basic functions like muscle control as opposed to those parts used for consciousness.
Next time you try to discredit science, point to something we don't know about instead of something that happens to 1 in 25000 live births.
@braindonut, you might find the following links interesting:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy%E2%80%93Walker_syndrome
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dandywalker/dandywalker.htm
>> ^shinyblurry:
Consciousness is entirely transcendent of its wiring, and how an individual processes reality is categorically unique from everyone else. If you let them dice you up into stupid machinery, like some kind of advanced parameciam, it will just make you more automated, not less. You are more than the sum of your parts. Some of these things may be superficially true, on a superficial level, but the patterns of our lives go much, much deeper than this. We're not just rats in a maze, but rather we are spiritual beings that transcend the raw material.
There is a civil servant in Europe with a normal IQ who got a brain scan one day and found out that his brain is just a small slice in the center of his skull about one inch thick. Clearly none of this "science" (and wild conjecture) applies to him. Ignore the psycho babble and discern your own individual nature. You are not your thoughts. That monologue in your head can be turned off, and there can be silence. Search out the patterns of your thinking, the automation of your being, and break the chain.