I can see exciting new lymphomas on the horizon.

You know, with the spaceman going into the black hole, his feet would start to become more red and disappear, then slowly creep up his body, becoming more red then disappearing as it goes up, he's gotta go over the event horizon bit by bit.

I'm sure a similar laundry list of accomplishments far and wide could be made about any president. America will be feeling the positive effects of the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act and proposal for a new refuge for wild mustangs for years to come.

Mind you, this the best Obama can do with 90% of the media unjournalists taking his side, never vetting him, never asking hard questions or questioning policy...

Where it counts, this President doesn't cut it. And why is there still no budget? It can't be because of the Republican minority in Congress.

Hey, I could be wrong, and the mob will decide in November that government dependency and not working are now more rewarding than the opposite.


As for why the current problems persist:

"The endless proliferation of anti-business interventions by government, and the sight of more of the same coming over the horizon from Barack Obama's appointees in the federal bureaucracies, creates the one thing that has long stifled economic activity in countries around the world -- uncertainty about what the rules of the game are, and the unpredictability of how specifically those rules will continue to change in a hostile political environment." --T. Sowell









>> ^KnivesOut:

Yeah, what has Obama done anyway aside from put up with all this ridiculous nonsense?>> ^quantumushroom:
Don't y'all wish you could simply point to Obama's successful record instead of resorting to this?
Higher taxes and demonizing the rich (who pay the lion's share of income taxes while the bottom 50% pay nothing) haven't worked.
Massive government spending hasn't worked.
Weak, indecisive leadership in dealing with our enemies (and allies!) hasn't worked.
The only reason there aren't riots over Obamacare is the new taxes are on a delayed fuse.
Obes doesn't deserve a second term, and didn't deserve a first term (neither did McLame, but the lesser of two evils...)

In case anybody cares, a list of songs\sound bytes used, indexed by time:

0:00 - Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams
0:05 - Yolanda Be Cool Feat DCUP - We No Speak Americano
0:13 - Outhere Brothers - I Wanna Fuck You In the Ass
0:16 - John Williams - Cantina Band
0:23 - Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go - Cinema (Skrillex Remix)
0:28 - Tiny Tim - Living in the Sunlight, Loving in the Moonlight
0:40 - Nigel Thornberry (I'll Do This, With My Hands)
0:43 - A Day To Remember - Mr. Highway's Thinking About The End
0:50 - Garbage - Cherry Lips
0:58 - Skrillex - First of the Year (Equinox)
1:06 - Chip tha Ripper - S.L.A.B. Freestyle
1:11 - Haddaway - What is Love
1:19 - Super Mario World - Ending Theme
1:24 - Lost Horizon - Highlander (The One)
1:30 - R. Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly
1:33 - Moldova - Sunstroke Project & Olia Tira
1:40 - Dragonforce - Through the Fire and Flames
1:47 - Gunther - Ding Dong Song
1:57 - El Mudo - Chacarron Macarron
2:06 - DMX - Where Da Hood At
2:12 - Orgazmo Theme Song (Now You're A Man)
2:21 - Trey Parker - America (Fuck Yeah)
2:31 - Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
2:35 - Eminem - Just Lose It
2:42 - Scatman John - Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)
2:48 - Garbage - Cherry Lips
2:54 - Paul Engemann - Push it To the Limit
3:06 - Harry Belafonte - Jump in the Line
3:11 - 50 Cent - In Da Club
3:17 - Scatman John - Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)
3:21 - Lionel Richie - Hello

Didn't think I'd hear some Lost Horizon in there, good stuff.

Also it reminds me of AMV Hell.

There has always been "a lot of frightening shit on the horizon", no matter what decade you lived in. For every person that looks back at the 1950s as idyllic and calm there is somebody who was convinced their life would end that year in a nuclear war. Same goes for any other time period. Myself, I was convinced at the time that there would be nuclear war when the Soviets shot down that Korean passenger jet in September 1983. And now it's been pretty much forgotten.

I've been affected by the economic downturn over the past 10 years, just like everyone I know. And I don't have a warm fuzzy feeling about the future of the economy either. But as someone said, there never was the "good old days", things have always been changing and in turmoil in some respect. I take all the fearful predictions with a grain of salt. >> ^Jinx:

idk, I think there is a certain amount of truth in this. I mean ok, I don't think we'll be seeing blood running in the streets but idk, there is a lot of frightening shit on the horizon and I do wonder how well we'll adapt and how much growing pains will be involved.

idk, I think there is a certain amount of truth in this. I mean ok, I don't think we'll be seeing blood running in the streets but idk, there is a lot of frightening shit on the horizon and I do wonder how well we'll adapt and how much growing pains will be involved.

"Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased".
Joe Klein

Looks like ol' Joe may need to expand his horizons ... It's obviously NOT just for Americans anymore =oD

to be fair, he also refuses to sail over the horizon for safety reasons. wouldn't want to get stranded among the turtles.

The slime mold has expanded the routes horizons =oD

Ayn Rand's Influence on Alan Greenspan
In The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan describes the influence that Ayn Rand had on his intellectual development.

Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life. It hadn't taken long for us to have a meeting of the minds -- mostly my mind meeting hers -- and in the fifties and early sixties I became a regular at the weekly gatherings at her apartment. She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value. In that regard, our values were congruent -- we agreed on the importance of mathematics and intellectual rigor.

But she had gone far beyond that, thinking more broadly than I had ever dared. She was a devoted Aristotelian -- the central idea being that there exists an objective reality that is separate from consciousness and capable of being known. Thus she called her philosophy objectivism. And she applied key tenets of Aristotelian ethics -- namely, that individuals have innate nobility and that the highest duty of every individual is to flourish by realizing that potential. Exploring ideas with her was a remarkable course in logic and epistemology. I was able to keep up with her most of the time.

Rand's Collective became my first social circle outside the university and the economics profession. I engaged in the all-night debates and wrote spirited commentary for her newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte drawn to a whole new set of ideas. Like any new convert, I tended to frame the concepts in their starkest, simplest terms. Most everyone sees the simple outline of an idea before complexity and qualification set in. If we didn't, there would be nothing to qualify, nothing to learn. It was only as contradictions inherent in my new notions began to emerge that the fervor receded.

One contradiction I found particularly enlightening. According to objectivist precepts, taxation was immoral because it allowed for government appropriation of private property by force. Yet if taxation was wrong, how could you reliably finance the essential functions of government, including the protection of individuals' rights through police power? The Randian answer, that those who rationally saw the need for government would contribute voluntarily, was inadequate. People have free will; suppose they refused?

I still found the broader philosophy of unfettered market competition compelling, as I do to this day, but I reluctantly began to realize that if there were qualifications to my intellectual edifice, I couldn't argue that others should readily accept it. [...]

Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her. All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented. I was a talented technician, but that was all. My logical positivism had discounted history and literature -- if you'd asked me whether Chaucer was worth reading, I'd have said, "Don't bother." Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I'd learned. I began to study how societies form and how cultures behave, and to realize that economics and forecasting depend on such knowledge -- different cultures grow and create material wealth in profoundly different ways. All of this started for me with Ayn Rand. She introduced me to a vast realm from which I'd shut myself off.

From The Age of Turbulence, pp. 51-53. Omissions from the text are shown with bracketed ellipses. All other punctuation and spelling is from the original.

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/turbulence.html

I am also eagerly awaiting the New Horizons fly-by of Pluto in July 2015.
I hope I make it.

I was driving on a country highway around midnight through flat snow-covered fields when a transformer blew a couple miles away. The entire sky, from horizon to horizon, turned from black to bright, pulsing electric blue for several seconds. My buddy and I both screamed "WHAT THE F***!?!" in perfect unison at the top of our lungs. One of those things you'll never forget.

>> ^zombieater:

I like the idea of this survey, but the description mixes two different topics. The theory of natural selection and evolution have nothing to do with the origins of life on earth (the prevalent scientific theory belongs to abiogenesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis). I believe this may be what gwiz touched on, in that numbers 2 and 4 also refer to evolution.
Perhaps we could ask a survey that asks about the origin of life on earth? Selections could include:
1) Creationism
2) Deism (Clockwork Universe Theory)
3) Abiogenesis
4) Panspermia Hypothesis
The Gallup poll to which you refer did not focus on the origins of life, rather how life has changed (or not changed) in our recent biological history. I doubt you meant that aliens have changed life since it first began, which is why I believe two different ideas are mixed here.


Your right, I did mix it up a bit. I tried to even it out a bit in a quick edit maybe 10 minutes afterwards when I fully re-read it (and the realization that it was slanted hit me; I also tried to make the religious stances sound more equalized--hard to do without evidence...). But, really I had it up for too long so I just left it be; or at the least I thought it was too long. I figured everyone would gather what there was to choose from and what I meant whether I made some mistakes or not. Even in my description of Evolution I made sure to make people realize that Darwin's old natural selection isn't the "exact" primer for everything in biology although a strong one. We've found much to our surprise that stranger things are going on in the lands of "Evolution" and natural selection, survival of the fittest, and other old adages taught in school as the MOST of the only things driving Evolution for the most part may be a little off--not completely--just that the window to our knowledge IS NOT closed and our horizons are broader than once thought thanks to modern scientists re-tooling their devices and machines to once again have a more thorough and "re-tooling" our look at Evolution for a harder "inside look" as well. It's more like an onion now with layers that peel off; each time you peel off one there's another ready to be peeled off... (I'll make sure I didn't get that confused in the poll, somewhere...)

As for choices two and four... I was also concerned that they both had Evolution (especially choice four as I listed it DIRECTLY, even though technically an Alien intelligence is bound to believe, perhaps, in fourteen different reasons for their existence and ours as well...so I may have "jumped the shark" so to say on that one altogether) as a primary tool in them as well as it really didn't differentiate them that much from straight up Evolution (and it did in fact make Evolution seem like the clear choice in many respects, unless you are a STOUT believer of the other two--no case was made for them). Your selection of choices certainly would have worked as well (though to be honest I think many would need to go to Wikipedia before they picked it ), but I did want to try to remain close to the Gallup Poll (as you discussed later) and you're correct in that I should have stayed away from the Evolution subject on those and focused on what their key beliefs, politics (if any), key ideas, and as I said earlier perhaps to even make a case for them--as much could be made. (That goes for @gwiz665s comment too as well, as you said; his comment noted the same discrepancy...) These are things to make sure I do on my next poll; but, I think everyone can make it through this one OK for now.

C'est la vie.

PS- My shift keys are broken and it's DRIVING me nuts. If it seems like I'm randomly not capitalizing letters that should be, that's why! Good thing I'm proof-reading right now or I would have had 10 or so just in this post alone!

Looks like @kceaton1's getting serious.

You may not speak out but i've decided to. If anyone is concerned about the seemingly unfair statements i make about shinyblurry then my comment section can show the proof. I have engaged him in discussion a number of times of science/theism, and the results are poor. He doesn't offer you the same respect he expects you to give him, i find him egotistical and obnoxious and completely uninterested in serious discussion. Read my discussions with him if you don't believe that - there's proof which is the test of any theory as we all know.

People like shinyblurry don't even realise that their zealotism drives people away from the religion.

Let me make a statement regarding the big bang theory. Firstly, all scientific theories are put in place to explain the facts. A theory takes everything we know, balls it up into a bunch of connections, and offers us a way of understanding that phenomenon. The big bang theory is not "complete", that is why it's still an active field of study. There are so many scientists right now trying to improve on theories that it's hard to even imagine.

You read a web page like that - almost entirely signed by scientists from the US and mostly "independent researchers"? And suddenly you think you know about the big bang. And in it one person suggests the idea that rigidly adhering to old forms is harmful to scientific advancement, but you take it to mean something else as far as i can tell - shame on you.

The big bang predicts the initial distribution of elements that we see reflected in the universe today - mostly hydrogen, a bit of helium and trace other elements. It actually predicts using only PROVEN SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES (that are testable to anyone on earth) what time and at what temperature different particles were able to form. From that, it predicts what chemical composition the universe has, and finds that it's in agreement. Do you even realise the significance of that? I don't think you do, your brain has been trained by religion to look for things like that and see only design. And that's also why you can't understand scientific theories. You really need to open your mind to how other people think, blurry, and i mean that with kindness.

Do you really think the big bang is so far away from the truth, in your ignorance? Have you looked at it in the kind of depth you need to to understand it? If not, i kindly ask that you stop spouting rubbish in the same way i don't go about trashing your unfounded, ungrounded theories every time you mention theism.

i didn't intend to speak out on @kceaton1's behalf, but i'm pretty sick of blurry canvassing for converts with misinformation myself. His links and statements provide nothing of substance to the argument. It doesn't matter what religion kceaton is, as a theist yourself i'm surprised you act cocky about another's choice of religion. Doesn't your religious claptrap say something like do unto other as you would have them do unto you? In my opinion under your own religion you will be going to hell for being so manipulative and insulting to others.

>> ^kceaton1:

>> ^shinyblurry:
That's quite a rant, Kceaton. Unfortunately, you cannot use the light travel time problem to falsify YEC. The SBB model also has a light travel time problem, specifically the horizon problem. Check out what some scientists published in New Scientist Magazine:
http://www.cosmologystatement.org/
I'm sorry you were indoctrinated into the Mormon church. My heart goes out to you, but you've thrown away the baby with the bathwater. It isn't too difficult to falsify the Mormon God, but neither does that make atheism the natural conclusion.
>> ^kceaton1

One:
I've known about this study since day one, does it surprise me, hahahahahaha. I think most people are morons. NO IT DOESN'T! I think we have one of the worst educations systems in the world, you may think your belief driven gospel knowledge may keep you safe, flying up there in the sky, BUT I'll take a damned engineer EVERYDAY over your damned God!
Two:
About my past. This is the THIRD time you've said this same thing. This is borderline abuse, FUCK YOU! Get off your high horse your are not an immortal moral high judge sent here to Earth to tell us what was a wrong or "sorrowful" mistake. I'm sorry, I'm being really damned aggressive right now, but I'm tired of your cockeyed charades and your imperative to make sure every Mormon that is or ever was KNOWS how "sorry" you are for them.
---
I'm tired of the targeted trolling!
That also means I will never qualify your "horizon" crap with a response, because it doesn't deserve one. I know this came off rude so sorry for that, on the other hand it was suppose too.