I heard TangleThorns is a paid instigator from Russia. Fortunately he doesn't care if there is evidence for assertions, so this should be just as compelling as his musings.

So sorry, but those with real Trump Derangement Syndrome are his supporters (and Trump himself), who are going to find the rest of their lives difficult, having completely abandoned reality and sanity in favor or ridiculous, divisive, self serving lies.

If Trump steals, denies, or cancels the election (the only way he can win) this country won't last 234 weeks.

Before you balk, he's already publicly mused about postponing the election indefinitely and/or tossing out blue state mail in votes completely....but not red states that also went to vote by mail. That's a death knell for the US as a nation.

The state of our union is bankrupt and weak, fading fast in ICU. It won't survive another Trump term. Time to learn Mandarin.

Jaron Lanier is a Computer scientist, composer, visual artist and author. He is considered a founding father of the field of virtual reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

He is certainly NOT mainstream but most definitely NOT a crackpot.

His ideas and musings should be considered.

Makes me think of the guy who videotaped the woman at the Chick-Fil-A drive thru, figuring he would be lauded as a hero for challenging someone who worked for that company. And it backfired and he became unemployed because of his "principles", which was pretty much what he expected of that woman. And then he played the victim. But he brought it on himself, the woman who tweeted about AIDS in Africa is a whole other story.

Now that everyone has the power to self-publish and broadcast just about anything to the entire world I'm seeing the power that it unleashes in others. I posted a comment on an unsolicited news posting in my FB feed, regarding the Pulitzer Prize picture of the black woman holding out her hands to be handcuffed by the police in riot gear. And everyone in the comment section is going predictably teary-eyed and goose pimply over it, with the usual cliches of iconic, defining, inspiring, uplifting, etc.

And I wrote "don't be so easily manipulated, it's stagey and predictable and Kardashians use this shit to sell sugar water." or something like that. My point being that we have gone from prize-winning pictures of the Viet Nam war (e.g.) to the whole process being co-opted by pop culture, like everything and anything else. Of course I got bombarded with claims of racism and people who pitied my soul. And some were musing on whether to try to track down my employer. I deleted my comment, this world has gotten too fucking weird for me.

Stop interrupting my vacuous musings with your "logic" and "facts".

Wow, did not expect this.

Could criticise for being too on the nose but I think being blunt is exactly what we need right now.

Still, sounds like Depeche Mode hired Muse (who are obviously influenced by Depeche Mode) to write a modern song?

Either way, good job. (and excellent pick poolcleaner!)

Yeah that's definitely a big part of the appeal, and I do hope this is a useful invention. Though there are lots of uses for spent grain already. It's a by product, but it seems like more of a commodity than a waste product.

http://modernfarmer.com/2015/08/recycled-brewery-waste/

http://www.craftbeer.com/craft-beer-muses/sustainable-uses-of-spent-grain

Years ago, I was at the grocery store with my boyfriend. He picked up a HUGE chunk of caramel that was meant for melting for toffee apples. It was remarkable, how big and heavy this chunk of candy was.

He mused, as he hefted it in his hand, "You know, you could kill someone with this and eat the evidence."

That was 40 years ago, and whenever I see something lethal in the grocery store, that is my very first thought.

You aren't alone, is what I am saying.

PS The boyfriend went on to become a police officer. Yikes.

@Barbar
i do not know if you are aware,but you actually made my point in regards to justification.specifically your third paragraph.

as for the disagreement in regards to religious texts being inert and neutral.this should not really be an issue and should be plain for all to see.religious texts are amalgamations,musings,stories,philosophies all jammed into a canonized text.they are often hypocritical and contradictory.it is the reader that interprets and injects their own subjective understandings based on their own proclivities.

which then makes religious text a subjective text.so if you are violent,then your interpretations will be violence,which would lead to justifications based on those interpretations.

unless you are using fundamentalism as a fulcrum.which sees religious text as the unerring word of god,which brings a whole new conundrum into focus:contradictory philosophies which are in diametric opposition.which is an impossibility to reconcile,but again brings us to my main point:justification.(by way of mental gymnastics).

and harris does not just smell like apologist BS,he IS an apologist.now this is understandable when seen through the lens of nationalism,but it engages in the same wishful thinking harris accuses many religious people of engaging in.

we WANT to feel we are the good guys.
we WANT to think that what we are doing is for a higher,and more morale purpose.
we WANT to think all this violence and bloodshed is ultimately for a better and more prosperous future for everybody involved.
we WANT to believe that our government is not just destroying and destabilizing whole communities with wanton destruction just so our corporations can have a new market to exploit,or to control the oil fields for BP and chevron to control.

but thats not the reality.
our wants are just wishful thinking and an inability to accept that we cling to these wants to justify horror,destruction and death.

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/the-radically-changing-story-of-the-u-s-airstrike-on-afghan-hospital-from-mistake-to-justification/

so what is OUR justification?
so just like the more moderate and secular muslims who look the other way when faced with horror.we too,look away at the truth of things,because to recognize the reality means to accept responsibility.
we have blood on our hands....all of us.
as do those muslims who also look away.

but the allure of justifications....
to have the ability to turn horror into righteousness.
it is extremely powerful,and we ALL participate.
even sam harris.

I enjoyed it. I don't understand many of the criticisms - it's a film, were we somehow expecting to have our humanity validated by it? A scientifically accurate description of a mission would be boring - they'd almost certainly die in the wormhole.

The science wasn't unreasonable. It was a lot closer to reality than anything in star trek or star wars. Anne Hathaway's character muses on the power of love and suddenly it's a force of the universe? My memory might be flawed, but i don't remember hearing anyone confirm that or discuss it - in fact, the state her "lover" was in was kind of contrary to the opinion she gave and certainty to how she felt. We really do have no idea about black holes, either, so for all we know it could be manipulated by some future technology. The tesseract "library" was an interesting take on time travel/time manipulation.

The only thing that broke my suspension of disbelief was the bit when they said they thought they had years of good readings from the water planet due to time dilation. But that doesn't make any sense, because the number of signal pulses sent from the surface must equal the number of signal pulses received in orbit. My best guess is that the pulses would be elongated and have their wavelength shifted, possibly, but one thing i am certain of is that the total number can't be different.

The problem is, the older you get, the more you know about science, the less faith you have to put in films to give you a mind-bending experience that works on so many levels. None of it is plausible, so why rule it out based on what Hathaway thinks about the nature of love, or anything else?

Good film! And funny video. Someone's got to defend it though!

that wasn't a rant..it was a winding tangent where the point got dropped off on obscurity island.

i was gonna delete it but then decided "ah screw it",lets keep it for entertainment value.

which may be 0.

for the last few years i have been working at a friends local eatery and made about 25 bucks an hour,which is decent in my book.i made a lot more when i worked in miami,boca and lauderdale.

my "living wage" musings were not really directed at you,or anybody for that matter.i have just come across people who have actually become offended when they found out how much i made compared to what they made.

it is the subjectiveness that i find interesting.

of course that may have gotten lost in my meandering commentary.
haha ..i r stoopid.

stay awesome man!

What in the world are you on about? The private sector gets just as many chances as "the government" to f-up and keep moving forward.

Take a look here for some consumer product recalls:
http://www.esopro.com/erp-blog/industry-musings/the-10-most-disastrous-product-recalls-of-all-time

On that list are corporations like Firestone, Tylenol, Graco, Hasbro, Ford and Toyota. Despite their negligence leading to deaths, they seem to be doing just fine. And those corporations killed way more people than NASA ever has.

Is accountability important? Sure, absolutely. In the case of the Apollo mission, the Program Director was fired. I would the same is true for a lot of those product recalls: the highest up person with direct supervision of the project should be fired.

In summary, I don't really see where "the government" gets off easy while the "private sector" is unfairly punished.

Yep, this guy pretty much has the muse with him 24/7

Yeah, it's weird. I had cats that would regularly kill wild birds, yet never touch my domesticated birdies. I think, and I could be wrong, they don't kill it because they sense it's claimed by the owner. Like it's "master's kill, not mine."

That's just something I've mused over, not truth. Like, I love eggs, but having been around farms, I wouldn't simply eat all the eggs out of the coop. That's breaking the chain of command.

I think most cats are just disrespectful to their owners, but any decent cat owner earns the respect of their feline friends. (If you rescue an older cat, there's no guarantee on ever reaching this level of understanding and respect.)

Would you argue that whatever academics say about major world conflicts if they aren't parroting other agreed-upon-by-experts musings could be part of the overall codification of these events in world subconscious and conscious with a view to shaping minds for the next conflict to be orchestrated and implemented? The simple or complex aspects of any sacrificial lump of money and people can always be rendered into the essence of the insanity of the same with a simple and universally-agreed-upon homo-sapient common-sense.
Eveyone thinks 'ol Tom Edison was a goddamn genius and that Chris Columbus wasn't a complete cockbag posing as some ground-breaking explorer as well. What does the tinkerer and and a boat captain have in common? A lot of assholes have written tomes about both of them to deify them. One was an egotistical half-ass and the other a dirty fucking example of a Spaniard working for a cunt whore empire-builder.

ChaosEngine, your lack of any point reads COMPLETELY retarded and it's a not-so-cloaked personal attack at someone much more intellectually honest than yourself.