"This stuff just does not happen"

Wake up. Spend 2 minutes looking for reports by the Toronto Star, CBC and the Globe and Mail and you'll realize it does. An issue in Canada is that if you wish to protect yourself, and use a gun, chances are better that the victim will suffer the wrath of Canadian justice.

Have a look -

Man stabbed to death exiting shower during home invasion, Toronto police say - The Globe and Mail, Published Friday, Apr. 26 2013, 8:32 AM EDT


Police seek 3 suspects after home invasion in Oakville - The Canadian Press, June 9th, 2013

Tot duct-taped to pole during home invasion, Brian Kelly, Sault Star, May 17, 2013

Toronto family terrorized by brutal home invasion - CBC, Feb 26



... and my favourite...

Why can't Canadians defend themselves in their own homes? - Abubakir Kasim, Nov 6, 2012

It happens in Canada dude. Take a look around.

Maher is quickly falling into the trap of many 'New Atheists' and turning towards a strong denouncement of Islam (http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/dawkins_harris_hitchens_new_atheists_flirt_with_islamophobia/).

The end of that article is particularly telling after having read the whole thread of comments here:

"Proving that a religion — any religion — is evil, though, is just as pointless and impossible an endeavor as trying to prove that God does or doesn’t exist. Neither has been accomplished yet. And neither will."

One thing that has been hinted at here but not overtly said is that there is a dominant, violent ideology which certainly rivals if not trumps the posited "evil" Islam in terms of casualties and suffering. Who builds the drones and the bombs and the fighter jets that rain fire from the skies? Who manufactures the small arms and ammunition that fuel countless civil wars across the globe? For me the answer is clear: oligarchical, capitalist states. Let's put them (and by them, I mean complicitly us) under the microscope for their acts instead of undertaking the Sisyphean task of proving that one religion is more evil than another.

True but the Atheist also holds the "belief" that there is not GOD. So which belief is more correct? For me to get into a biblical debate with you and the atheist sift community would be pointless. It's like the saying you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. So this makes me search the web for other ways to argue the point. Here is 1 of them.

Mathematically speaking evolution falls flat on it face..
Lifted from site: http://www.freewebs.com/proofofgod/whataretheodds.htm



Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing number 1 is 1 to 10.
Your chance of drawing 1 & 2 in succession is 1 in 100.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2 & 3 in succession would be one in a thousand.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3 & 4 in succession would be one in 10,000.

And so on, until your chance of drawing from number 1 to number 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion. The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

Sir Fred Hoyle similarly dismisses the notion that life could have started by random processes:

Imagine a blindfolded person trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. The chance against achieving perfect colour matching is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. These odds are roughly the same as those against just one of our body's 200,000 proteins having evolved randomly, by chance.

Now, just imagine, if life as we know it had come into existence by a stroke of chance, how much time would it have taken? To quote the biophysicist, Frank Allen:

Proteins are the essential constituents of all living cells, and they consist of the five elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur, with possibly 40,000 atoms in the ponderous molecule. As there are 92 chemical elements in nature, all distributed at random, the chance that these five elements may come together to form the molecule, the quantity of matter that must be continually shaken up, and the length of time necessary to finish the task, can all be calculated. A Swiss mathematician, Charles Eugene Guye, has made the computation and finds that the odds against such an occurrence are 10^160, that is 10 multiplied by itself 160 times, a number far too large to be expressed in words. The amount of matter to be shaken together to produce a single molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than the whole universe. For it to occur on the earth alone would require many, almost endless billions (10^243) of years.

Proteins are made from long chains called amino-acids. The way those are put together matters enormously. If in the wrong way, they will not sustain life and may be poisons. Professor J.B. Leathes (England) has calculated that the links in the chain of quite a simple protein could be put together in millions of ways (10^48). It is impossible for all these chances to have coincided to build one molecule of protein.

But proteins, as chemicals, are without life. It is only when the mysterious life comes into them that they live. Only the infinite mind of God could have foreseen that such a molecule could be the abode of life, could have constructed it, and made it live.

Science, in attempt to calculate the age of the whole universe, has placed the figure at 50 billion years. Even such a prolonged duration is too short for the necessary proteinous molecule to have come into existence in a random fashion. When one applies the laws of chance to the probability of an event occurring in nature, such as the formation of a single protein molecule from the elements, even if we allow three billion years for the age of the Earth or more, there isn't enough time for the event to occur.

There are several ways in which the age of the Earth may be calculated from the point in time which at which it solidified. The best of all these methods is based on the physical changes in radioactive elements. Because of the steady emission or decay of their electric particles, they are gradually transformed into radio-inactive elements, the transformation of uranium into lead being of special interest to us. It has been established that this rate of transformation remains constant irrespective of extremely high temperatures or intense pressures. In this way we can calculate for how long the process of uranium disintegration has been at work beneath any given rock by examining the lead formed from it. And since uranium has existed beneath the layers of rock on the Earth's surface right from the time of its solidification, we can calculate from its disintegration rate the exact point in time the rock solidified.

In his book, Human Destiny, Le Comte Du nuoy has made an excellent, detailed analysis of this problem:

It is impossible because of the tremendous complexity of the question to lay down the basis for a calculation which would enable one to establish the probability of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth.

The volume of the substance necessary for such a probability to take place is beyond all imagination. It would that of a sphere with a radius so great that light would take 10^82 years to cover this distance. The volume is incomparably greater than that of the whole universe including the farthest galaxies, whose light takes only 2x10^6 (two million) years to reach us. In brief, we would have to imagine a volume more than one sextillion, sextillion, sextillion times greater than the Einsteinian universe.

The probability for a single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance and normal thermic agitation remains practically nill. Indeed, if we suppose 500 trillion shakings per second (5x10^14), which corresponds to the order of magnitude of light frequency (wave lengths comprised between 0.4 and 0.8 microns), we find that the time needed to form, on an average, one such molecule (degree of dissymmetry 0.9) in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial globe (Earth) is about 10^243 billions of years (1 followed by 243 zeros)

But we must not forget that the Earth has only existed for two billion years and that life appeared about one billion years ago, as soon as the Earth had cooled.

Life itself is not even in question but merely one of the substances which constitute living beings. Now, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. We would need much greater figures to "explain" the appearance of a series of similar molecules, the improbability increasing considerably, as we have seen for each new molecule (compound probability), and for each series of identical throws.

If the probability of appearance of a living cell could be expressed mathematically the previous figures would seem negligible. The problem was deliberately simplified in order to increase the probabilities.

Events which, even when we admit very numerous experiments, reactions or shakings per second, need an almost-infinitely longer time than the estimated duration of the Earth in order to have one chance, on an average to manifest themselves can, it would seem, be considered as impossible in the human sense.

It is totally impossible to account scientifically for all phenomena pertaining to life, its development and progressive evolution, and that, unless the foundations of modern science are overthrown, they are unexplainable.

We are faced by a hiatus in our knowledge. There is a gap between living and non-living matter which we have not been able to bridge.

The laws of chance cannot take into account or explain the fact that the properties of a cell are born out of the coordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous coordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Rare fluctuations do not explain qualitative facts; they only enable us to conceive that they are not impossible qualitatively.

Evolution is mathematically impossible

It would be impossible for chance to produce enough beneficial mutations—and just the right ones—to accomplish anything worthwhile.

"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10^50. Such a number, if written out, would read 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000."
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10^50 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence."
I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong (1984), p. 205.

Your video, Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig presenting a Golden Globe, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 78 Badge!

A *promote to celebrate the golden globe!

Sample: lamentations, lamentations, lamentations worldwide

Watch out (repeated)

LB: In the beginning men and women had an obligation to their children
Lateef: Then there was a real and true necessity in need for building
LB: There was still the discipline and will proliferate the lineage
Lat: Matters of the spirit, mind, and body taken serious
LB: But the way that we became what we became
Somebody please explain
Lat: Well we could tell you if you're curious
Those that reign got the masses in chains
And their minds enslaved
Both: And that's the part that makes me furious

Watch out (repeated)

Both: Cos they're definitely aint no info readily avai'
Lable to the general A (?) people so let me know x2

Lat: It's easily this multimedia crews that feed you to the neediest
It's the greediest trying to cheat us out of our God given right
LB: To a quality education minimal opportunities available
Limited occupations we are not given a choice
Lat: Or given a voice within a political system pimped and gangsta'd out
Wherein the people are the victim sheep being lead about
LB: While the followers and the patrons of any faith outside the mainstream
Are being raided, falsely painted as endangering the way things work
Lat: And the way things are remain
LB: I can't believe that things aint worse
Lat: When all the wicked seeds we've sown have grown
LB: And poisoned all the Earth
Lat: It serves us right
LB: Can't really act surprised when the harvest has no worth
Lat: The curse that's lurking round the corner
Both: Is the product of our work

Watch out (repeated)

Right now
LB: The holy war's growing opposing forces polling of the origins
Of which have been historically been ignored
Right now
Lat: Our foreign policy is mallets of democracy
Upholding an aristocracy of secret terrorist cells
Right now
LB: The global poverty that we accept so commonly
Turns people into property one step away from hell
Right now
Lat: Healthcare battles bioengineering for the worldwide scare
Of the plague the we're fearing
Right now
LB: They got the right to put our lives under surveillance
Right now
Lat: They got the right to lock us up we don't obey them
Right now
LB: Modern education don't prepare the youth
Right now
Right now
Both: Do what you gotta do
Right now
LB: There's people shooting at people that's throwing stones
Right now
Lat: There's a movement of people across the globe
Right now
Both: Right now is where we're at
What goes around comes around
Time for action before the last trumpet sounds

Ricky Gervais Prepares for Third Golden Globes has been added as a related post - related requested by grinter.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Ricky-Gervais-Prepares-for-Third-Golden-Globes

>> ^Murgy:

That's what I heard, too. In spades.


>> ^hpqp:
Interesting, but phenomenally anti-democratic. Then again, the US political system is phenomenally anti-democratic already... was that the point being made?

The way I saw it, he was pointing out that the U.S. seems to feel the need to run other countries as it is, so wouldn't it only be fair to allow them to elect "their own" government? I think much of his point may have been muddled by his tongue-in-cheek joke suggesting that instead of the entirety of the globe voting, everyone but America votes being crammed in to too short a time frame.
Though there might have been some seriousness, or at least an element of poetic justice, to the idea in that it would give the American people an idea of what it is like when a government that you had no part in bringing into power starts making drastic decisions that affect both you and your country.
But again, that's just what I saw.

>> ^hpqp:

Interesting, but phenomenally anti-democratic. Then again, the US political system is phenomenally anti-democratic already... was that the point being made?


The way I saw it, he was pointing out that the U.S. seems to feel the need to run other countries as it is, so wouldn't it only be fair to allow them to elect "their own" government? I think much of his point may have been muddled by his tongue-in-cheek joke suggesting that instead of the entirety of the globe voting, everyone but America votes being crammed in to too short a time frame.

Though there might have been some seriousness, or at least an element of poetic justice, to the idea in that it would give the American people an idea of what it is like when a government that you had no part in bringing into power starts making drastic decisions that affect both you and your country.

But again, that's just what I saw.

IMDB rating 7.3! I liked it!

Laughed at quote from Ty Burr of Boston Globe though...

"Watching Prometheus is like opening a deluxe gift box from Tiffany's to find a mug from the dollar store."

>> ^joedirt:
It isn't science or new or even interesting. It's been done and proven. USAF did exactly this in 1960. This just added a few hundred feet to their altitude.


A few hundred feet? Try an extra 30000.

>> ^kymbos:

To me, it's like those hotwheels loop-de-loop videos, except less visually arresting. Even with those you can get some 'Science!' out of it, but it's still a marketing activity.

Less visually interesting? Are you on crack? Look at that view. I would kill for the opportunity to do something like this.

I don't really believe there's an awful lot of science going on, but that's fine, it's not really about science.

Personally, if this is how Red Bull want to spend their marketing dollars, I say good on them. They sponsor a lot of cool and interesting stuff around the globe. I'm still not buying their product, but it's a lot better than being told that red bull gives you wings.

This means in practice that USA is allowed "legally" to kill this guy, no question asked. It's just atrocity that US thinks they can use their internal laws all over the globe, like it's de facto international law..

The day Assange is extradited/killed i'll turn to enemy of the state. It ends any support of a nation that thinks it can do whatever it wants and starts my active resistance to bring down that government.. And i'm western white middle class pacifist but there's only so much crap i will take.

She is also a poet. I'm not kidding.

Our Future
The globe is sadly groaning with debt, poverty and strife
And billions now are pleading to enjoy a better life
Their hope lies with resources buried deep within the earth
And the enterprise and capital which give each project worth
Is our future threatened with massive debts run up by political hacks
Who dig themselves out by unleashing rampant tax
The end result is sending Australian investment, growth and jobs offshore
This type of direction is harmful to our core
Some envious unthinking people have been conned
To think prosperity is created by waving a magic wand
Through such unfortunate ignorance, too much abuse is hurled
Against miners, workers and related industries who strive to build the world
Develop North Australia, embrace multiculturalism and welcome short term foreign workers to our shores
To benefit from the export of our minerals and ores
The world's poor need our resources: do not leave them to their fate
Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government, before it is too late

>> ^PancakeMaster:

So the land development, building and fueling/mining of a nuclear power plant is free of emissions? What about waste disposal and decommissioning? Bremnet speaks the truth, albeit in a markedly sarcastic way. Car emissions come from energy production. Electric cars simply have their energy production out-sourced. Things become interesting at a local level with electric transport because you can potentially choose how your energy is produced. But you'd better believe that coal and oil is still powering all things electric in the majority of households, including recharging batteries.
I am a huge proponent of nuclear power, though I really wish LFTR's would come into production especially considering it's organic safety features and relative fuel abundance.
Since we're on the subject of electric cars, don't forget that the production of batteries and electric motors is very expensive. I'm not necessarily talking about monetary costs, but rather cost in resources and energy. Again, I support the development and usage of electric vehicles but dare not ignore their true cost.
>It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits.
You have so much more power to control your resource usage than the government. Don't rely on them for a solution. You can choose what you eat (agriculture is a huge resource spender), how you travel (walk or take public transport), what and why you buy (industry is another big spender), and your home resource usage. Don't pass the buck and blindly empower the government when it's our responsibility.
Now if only the planet was run on pancake power. Then, surely, I would be the true master of Earth.
edit
BTW, great video and awesome car. Would love to give it a go (as with all Audi Rx cars
>> ^bcglorf:
Well, nuclear is there to make electricity and vehicles emission free. If the greens hadn't worked so hard to ensure that nuclear power was stopped the 41% for electricity and whatever chunk of transportation is vehicles would all be gone.
But fine, is you wanna be sarcastic how about you chime in with a better solution. You hear plenty of chicken little's running around crying it's time to panic. You hear plenty of talk about reducing our emissions. You don't hear nearly so much about how to do that. It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits. Without nuclear power for electricity production and switching large parts of transportation over to electricity, what is left? Are we just to stop using transportation and electricity all together I suppose?
>> ^bremnet:
Yes, so true. Just look at all of the countries signing up for new nuclear power plants. Oh, and of course, those who generate their electricity today with that peskily cheaper natural gas from shale gas will likely just shut that down. Forgot to ask, how do we generate the electricity to charge our batteries? If you say anything that involves rubbing balloons in ones hair, well that's just too clever! Let's see - in 2009, 41% of global CO2 emissions were from the generation of electricity and heat, and only 23% for transport per the IEA report (that's all transport - cars, trucks, buses, seagoing vessels, trains, planes) so let's call your 30% a rounding error. By 2015, it is estimated that the total CO2 emissions from seagoing vessels will surpass that for all land based automobiles, so can we get a video of an electric cargo ship instead of this car? Pretty sure they have those, right? If we have electric vehicles, and have to generate more electricity ummm... (head explodes). Top marks for enthusiasm, but I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you back for another year to re-teach math and energy balance.




But just how much can you realistically reduce your emissions by through changed behaviour? I doubt even 50% is realistic. Now, how about getting our entire society to do the same, are people gonna voluntarily give up everything they need to drop 50%? Not a chance.

If electric cars can be improved enough to be desirable over gas, then a switch over to nuclear for electricity production can drop emissions nearly 50%. More importantly, it happens by consumers buying something new because they simply want to, and government/corporations making money off selling nuclear energy to run everyone's new cars.

Short of putting guns to peoples heads and telling them what they can and can not eat, how far they are allowed to travel in a year, and enforcing that across the globe, emissions ARE NOT going to be lowered. Electric cars and nuclear power are the only viable options out there and they are either ready now(nuclear) or will be very, very soon(electric cars).