So much I want to write here.
I've deleted what I wrote five times - suffice to say... "I have no words"

No word on whether Mitt Romney ever attended the event...

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

Nice links. I like this particular section very much:

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

>> ^Shepppard:

>> ^harpom:
>> ^Shepppard:
>> ^harpom:
>> ^conan:
This is not a piano. It's an electronic keyboard. If it has a plug it is NOT a piano.>> ^harpom:
Excellent, amazing and brilliant. I love how the song translates to the piano so well.
Chop Suey is a hard kick ass song, yet it plays so well on the piano. Sounds like a cross between Mozart and Beethoven.


LOL. Whatever. The instrument is made to sound like a piano. Sad that you have to go through life taking everything so seriously.

Everyone has their pet peeves, mine is calling pieces of music songs (which she actually does). When people are raised with a musical background minor things like that are just little quirks that make us who we are.

See response to conan. Also last time i looked Chop Suey was a song by SOTD.

And when it's played on piano without anyone singing, it has no words. When it has no words, it's not a song.

Again lol. Don't try and tell me when you listened to the song you were not hearing the lyrics in your head.

>> ^harpom:

>> ^Shepppard:
>> ^harpom:
>> ^conan:
This is not a piano. It's an electronic keyboard. If it has a plug it is NOT a piano.>> ^harpom:
Excellent, amazing and brilliant. I love how the song translates to the piano so well.
Chop Suey is a hard kick ass song, yet it plays so well on the piano. Sounds like a cross between Mozart and Beethoven.


LOL. Whatever. The instrument is made to sound like a piano. Sad that you have to go through life taking everything so seriously.

Everyone has their pet peeves, mine is calling pieces of music songs (which she actually does). When people are raised with a musical background minor things like that are just little quirks that make us who we are.

See response to conan. Also last time i looked Chop Suey was a song by SOTD.


And when it's played on piano without anyone singing, it has no words. When it has no words, it's not a song.

Anti-realism is not a term that is conventionally applied to language. You were employing a metaphor. That's fine; that's how all language works. There would be no words, and no dictionary to look them up in, if we didn't use metaphor.

This belief that a word can have only one narrow and arbitrary meaning, which its enforcers have memorised and to which they will allow no opposition, is dangerous and stifling to discourse. It's particularly bizarre in the context of this discussion since I'm sure, if we could be bothered to check, we would find many examples in dictionaries and other scholarly instruments of the term 'fascist' applied much more loosely than I've proposed here. It's often used, legitimately, as a simple synonym for 'bully'.

You'll notice that far from insisting on my own, I allow your meaning, and Webster's and mine all together. I only say that mine is better, being a pruned and perfected incarnation of its relatives. If we didn't prefer our own ideas to those of others there would be no point to independent thought at all.

I think you ought to read my posts more carefully and assume, for the sake of scientific inquiry, that I might be as smart as you are.>> ^Kofi:

Yes, I am calling you a linguistic anti-realist. This fails for although all language is an artificial creation it none the less is functional insofar as it appeals to a common ontology within the cultural paradigm of any given language. In other words, despite the notion that language only represents a idea of an impression and can never actually directly communicate that impression itself, it is reasonable and viable to believe that language, specifically the English language, is adequate to convey a moderately complicated term such as 'fascism'.
I am also implying that you are unable to grasp the necessary condition of assuming a commonality of language appropriate for meaningful communication. It appears that you are aware of it but have failed to admit that you made a mistake for fear of looking silly.
Instead you are insisting on a revisionist interpretation of a political terminologies that failed to fulfil any semblance of general mutual agreement, a necessary condition for cohesive discourse, in a deliberate effort to harness its rhetorical impact.

Jaw drop.... no words...

So you're saying that if it wasn't for religion humans would find some other aspect of human nature to exploit? Not really profound, but it really does make sense. For example, religion is being used as a means to deny gays the same rights the rest of us have. However, when it comes down to it, some people just feel that homosexuality is icky. And you know what? As ignorant as that is, it's just as natural for somebody to be repulsed by certain sexual behaviors as it is to be attracted to some sexual behaviors. As long as people disagree there will be conflict. The problem with religion, though—as our friend Tim Minchin says—it teaches us to externalize blame. What I mean is, religion paints a very binary portrait of the world—of what's right and wrong. It doesn't teach relativity or tolerance. I think it's ok to assume that if we eliminate religion, the basis for that ignorance will lose power. Furthermore, if somebody doesn't agree with something that's ok. And since there is no god, therefore no word of god, our differences are merely individual preference.>> ^peggedbea:

I want to believe that this is the point chris hedge's is attempting to make:
whenever i listen to or read anything from sam harris i feel like he's trying to blame religion for all the evil. but i don't feel like he's naming it correctly. there's a more basic manipulation taking place. religion is simply the chosen mechanism. religion is a tool for social control. faith is a rather benign human characteristic. people WANT to have faith in something. and religion manipulates that desire to control X population. it's not the faith in something mystic and silly that fucks up the world, it's the emotional manipulation employed. but in alternate universe B, maybe the mechanism for social control looks completely different. and there are more than one mechanism for social control happening in this universe. class and race and sex are the most obvious. in harris's effort to vilify one single mechanism, instead of the underlying attribute (you could call it greed?), it often feels like he's creating another kind of tribalism. us vs. them. smart atheists vs. stupid evil religious people. i feel very divisive when i listen to him and his ilk. i'd rather not dislike religious people. i'd rather focus all my bad feelings on the men who manipulate basest desires to control the masses for financial gain. i'd rather hear more about who they are and how to stop them then about how insane religious people are going to destroy all of creation.

Some celestial event. No - no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea.

>> ^KnivesOut:

Seriously, this is totally retarded. There are no words to describe how stupid this is.


There are, 2 to be precise: Fox News

Seriously, this is totally retarded. There are no words to describe how stupid this is.

I am so sorry to hear this. My condolences. There are no words.


>> ^oblio70:

EMTs have known this for years...on another note: Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" works well, too.
Sadly, my 7 yo daughter (who was born with a congenital heart defect, and then had 2 heart transplants) finally succumbed to heart failure at Stanford University, due to complications of rejections resulting in Coronary Heart Disease. She died suddenly just days after Easter, and days before her birthday.

You didn't understand my post, and I can't be bothered to explain something that's not simple to someone who doesn't have any desire to learn. Sorry.

Your post was very simplistic..you propose an argument that we will eventually know everything (or rule god out) because science has explained things people use to think God directly inspired..which is false..science has not ruled out a supernatural causation for natural phenomena..we may know some of the ways but not the means

You then further try to say an infinite universe and a supernatural Creator are somehow logically equivilent ideas because they can both solve a particular problem, which is patently false, but of course this is what intellectually dishonest people do when they conduct their argument through ad homs. I advanced the questions I did as being fundemental to understanding life, which they are, and they are ones science knows nothing about. You go on to say I should "read a book". Well, I think that's a great idea and I recommend you do the same..specfically one on antisocial personality disorder.

Read Dawkins, instead of reading people quote-mining (or "summarizing") him. If you have read Dawkins, you haven't understood anything (at all). No way around that, sorry.

I did read dawkins, specifically his abominable God delusion where the idea is postulated that any appearance of design can be explained away by multiple universes. Of course, no word on where all those multiple universes come from, but that's the fun of science. You can postulate any lunatic theorum and cover it under an avalanche of imaginary "data" based entirely on speculation and conjecture. Then of course any ignoramous will buy it because science said it was true.

It will almost certainly happen in our lifetimes (assuming you're under 50) that people create life starting with inorganic chemicals. Will that change your mind at all? Of course not. How could it, when your belief system wasn't founded on reason to begin with? And, as before, there are already interesting ideas for how the first life could have formed. You may not find them credible (and certainly none has compelling evidence yet), but they're not metaphysical. But even if there was credible ideas it wouldn't matter to you, really, would it? Of course not, just move them goalposts.

They are entirely metaphysical, ie taken on faith. Evolution and abiogenesis are not testable theories. The mechanism of natural selection is not proven, and cannot even begin to account for the complexity of life. These theories have been elevated as some sort of unquestionable absolute that dogmatic materialists (and undoubtably secular humanists) take on faith, while pointing to pseudo-scientific research as science fact. As if somehow the methodology of scientific inquiry was respresentitive of the limits of reality itself. As far as abiogenesis is concerned, what was once a marxist wet dream hasn't moved one inch away from the sad experiments conducted in the 60s when they electrocuted pea soup. The theories it was based on have been entirely falsified. Abiogenesis is dead in the water, literally, and just wishing it was true isn't going to make it happen.

I guess add probability and infinity to the list of things you have no idea about. In short, yes those monkeys would - and we could make detailed predictions about how long it would likely take to get a sonnet, a play, or the entire collection. It would take a very, very long time for that last one obviously, but it would happen. Want to dispute that? Don't tell me about it. Again, I can't be bothered to teach you things you aren't interested in learning. Idiot.

lol, your entire post is just riddled with ad homs and childish conclusions with no supporting evidence. You have failed to prove that you know anything what so ever..extended diatribes and assertions of knowledge a counter-argument does not make. The probability of any of that ever happening in the timeline of the Universe is null and void. The odds of anything as complicated as a cell or dna arising from random mutation is expodentially less. The mechanism is completely unproven. Much like your presumption of superior knowledge.

you want a more detailed treatment of all this related stuff, Dawkins has written books that are easy to understand (very "pop science" level) that go over all this very clearly. At least by reading a couple you'd understand the other side (which you clearly, clearly do not at this point).

But if you don't want to know, just keep getting your stupid information and talking points from wherever the hell you're getting them now and go back under your rock.

read dawkins? He may be a passable biologist, but beyond that, its completely amatuer hour. Now that I know where you are getting your information from, I can understand why you think that using personal attacks is a demonstration of intellect. Have you ever had an original thought in your life? Lets see you flex this intellectual muscle you are bragging about...

>> ^rottenseed:

Chasing Amy??? (Joey Lauren Adams)


Ugh, can't stand her voice. Especially in that movie because she has so many lines.

This chick, on the other hand... I got nothing. No words... should've sent...a... cat.

>> ^Arkaium:

Where are the comments?

Because there are no words to describe the awesomeness of Leonard Nimoy! Just watch!