I think the idea is the scientific method will, over time, after a complete loss of the knowledge gained, come to the same main theories we have today. Religion, on the other hand has little chance to be remotely similar to its present form without humans brute-forcing its tenets and stories. Much like the religion of the Mayans won't spontaneously evolve again without (the science of) archeology.

@bcglorf
you left out that anwar had worked for the CIA and NSC as a consultant,and that in his earlier days as an imam was critical of al qeada and was very pro-american.

look,i am not arguing the fact that anwar did become radicalized,nor am i denying that his shift in attitudes (which was mainly due to americas handling of the iraqi war) had become not only critical,but had gone from condemnation to calls for violence,and praise for violence.

which brings us to the fort hood shooter nidel hasan who was an avid fan of anwar al awlaki,and DID have a correspondence with awlaki.which when examined,was pretty fucking one sided.it was apparent that hasan was attempting to get in the good graces of awlaki who,evidenced by the email correspondence,had no real relationship with hasan.though awlaki did praise hasan,and his violent actions.

so i do not get where 'the emails are closed".just google nidal hasan and anwar al awlaki emails,and you can go read for yourself.

and as for these emails as justification..i really do not see your logic in this respect.

so if someone becomes a huge fan of mine,and emails me constantly because we met ONCE and now they think we are buddies and share common interests (which,maybe we do),and that person perpetrates a violent act.

am i responsible for that act?

and here is where the crux of the discussion REALLY is:
maybe i AM responsible.
maybe i am guilty of inciting violence.
maybe i should be held accountable,because not only did i keep this mans violent intentions to myself,which resulted in death,but then praised his actions afterwards as being the will of god.

there are ALL possibilities,and they are valid questions.
they are legal questions,and maybe there should be a legal accountability.

should the proper pathway to a legal conclusion be:
a.a remotely piloted drone that targets my phone and launches a missile murdering (assasinating0 me,along with innocent by-standers?

or.

b.working with the yemeni government to bring me into a secure facility to be questioned,and possibly charged with inciting violence and prosecuted in an international court of law?

do you see what i'm saying?

the question isn't if anwar al awlaki,as a prominent imam,was vocally against american foreign policy,or that he openly supported violence in the form of terrorism.

the question is:
how do you address that situation,and prosecute the legalities?

because as scahill posited:how do you surrender to a drone?

could anwar al awlaki be guilty of EVERY charge the US accused him of?
quite possibly.
but we will never know because he was assassinated,as was his 16yr old son.

even your counter argument is speculation based on loose affiliations,and tenuous connections.

you will NEVER be able to supply a concrete,and verifiable accounting of anwar al awlaki's guilt,because you CAN'T..he was assassinated.

and THAT is the point.

now let us take this a step further.
let us examine how this can be abused,and watching trump consolidate executive power by surrounding himself with departmental loyalist,loyal only to him,we can begin to see the beginnings of trumps "soft fascism".

now lets take how you made your argument,and supplant a different scenario,but using the same parameters.

do you SEE how easily the drone program could be used to quickly,and efficiently remove opposing political players from the board? dissenting and opposing voices simply painted as violent enemies of the state that were in need of removal,because of the "possibility" that they may one day actually incite or cause violence?

the state can now murder a person for simply what they say,or write but NOT what they actually DO.

anwar al awlaki didn't actually kill anyone,didn't perpetrate any acts of violence.he simply talked about the evils of american empire,the mishandling of the iraq war (which he was originally in support of) and praised those who DID engage in violent acts of terror as doing the work of god.

should he have been held accountable in some fashion?
i think there is case to be made in that regard,but instead of going through proper channels,and adhering to the protocols of international law,he was outright assassinated.

and just how easily this can be abused is incredibly frightening.

again,i understand we approach things from different angles,but you have to see the danger in this practice,and how easily it can be misused to much darker and sinister purposes.

"well,he said nasty things about us and had a lot of friends who were on the terror watch list"

is simply NOT a valid enough excuse to simply murder someone.

there are protocols and legal procedure for a REASON,and anwar al awlaki may certainly have been in breach of international law and therefor possibly SHOULD have been prosecuted under those terms.

but we will NEVER know,because he was killed.
by an american president.
a nobel peace prize winner and constitutional law professor.

anwar al awlaki was an american citizen,his SON was an american citizen,but due to those abominations:MCA of 2006 and the NDAA of 2012.obama had the power and authority to assassinate them both.

where was there right to face their accuser?
habeas corpus..gone...a legal right that dates back to 1205 a.d by the BRITISH..gone.
innocent until proven guilty....gone.
the right to provide evidence in your defense...gone.

all the president has to do..and DID in this case,is deem you an "enemy combatant" and BOOM..dead.

i really hope you reconsider your attitude in this case my friend,because this shit is fascism incarnate,and now trump has his chubby little fingers on the "fire" button.

god help us all......

It's the "people in the west do bad things too" argument in a different format.

That's a bit like saying, my car already has a dent so I don't bother driving carefully anymore. And in Germany's case, I now drive with my eyes closed
EDIT: (and Trump has basically banned driving )

And yes, for NewtBoy that is all a false equivalency. The two issues have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and not even remotely relevant to immigration. (But maybe they could be made relevant, and like you've suggested we'll not only send back the pedo priests back to the Vatican we'll take in a progressive Muslim immigrant, it's win win!).

Yes, I don't really smoke anymore but it's a fascinating plant! Most evolved plant on the planet. I worked on a remote, off-the-grid, non-profit cannabis farm in the Santa Cruz mountains last year, was a total blast. I loved feeding the little babies and watching them grow so quickly.

The technology to load shift is available, but getting it developed and implemented is one of the components that is missing from the overall power strategy in Aus.

Energy companies, like Ergon (Queensland) are actively trying to limit input, with a hard cap of 5kVa input for residential, and sometimes even as little as 3kVa in some more remote areas.

And while technology like liquid vanadium battery cells (long life, expandable by adding extra tanks of liquid electrolyte) exist, they are still prohibitively expensive.

There are plenty of solutions, but little appetite from the companies and governments, and very little knowledge among the end users. So while we're throwing cheap Chinese panels on rooves with gay abandon, I think it's a little early to brag about what a rampaging success Aus solar is because "lots of panels yo!".

Jesus, well that sound they make at the end is terrifying. Probably be great for "riot control."

Step two is presumably to get a hand-grenade's worth of explosives on each one and then be able to remotely assign them individual targets. Maybe just use facial recognition.

I surrender.

*ban
Remote Cell Phone Locator Software
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkkSLC7BNYk

Well it's a good thing we have a world-renowned forgery expert with absolutely no ulterior motives here. Otherwise I might begin to doubt the validity of his methods.

Bob isn't remotely serious.

If he was, he'd at least try to defend his previous statements like:
"Obama is the most dangerous president ever. His ideas are going to drive this country right into the ground."

Is the country right in the ground now? Seems like it's doing okay, (unless you consider a Trump Presidency "the ground"). I'd love to hear you defend your old statements in light of history that proved you wrong, @bobknight33.

Curious do you have anything to refute any of this? Or is it your standard, "its not my view therefore i'm incapable of accepting or even conceiving of anything else."

How you can objectively feel like that process was even remotely democratic would be comical if it weren't going to have such dire consequences.

You knew what was coming from the title so it wasn't a total shock at the end. But for all the production value and emotions, I'm conflicted about their message (I agree mass shootings or really any shootings are horrible).

See that kid over there, the loner that doesn't socialize well? Does he have any hobbies that could conceivably be used as a weapon against others? Bingo, possible mass shooter and candidate for reporting.

I looked all over their website to get a better idea of the exact message(s), but you have to sign up to receive via email any of their guides and I wasn't that dedicated.
I did see mentions of mental health, reducing bullying and the warning signs of violence, but then you hit the store with nail polish. Plus some of their stats don't even remotely add up.
"About 409 deaths occur every year from police intervention. Of these total yearly deaths about 17 of them will be 18 years or younger. This means about one death per day."

Hard to believe it happened 4 years ago though and the topic as a whole needs plenty of attention still.

I kind of had the opposite reaction, although I only watch streams of people playing BF1, didn't actually personally play it. Whereas I have some 150 hours in Overwatch right now.

BF1 and the series in general puts me off since it has so much down time. So much time seems to be spent just looking for someone to shoot or aiming at at a few tiny pixels miles away. Whereas Overwatch has familiar map choke points and if someone flanks you, it's almost certainly your fault for not paying attention.

Also Overwatch just offers so much in variety of play styles. I have a core of maybe 5 heroes I'm good at, but there's at least half the roster I haven't even seriously tried playing. Haven't even tried to get good at Hanzo's bow or Junkrat's remote jumps. BF offers the close quarters, rifle, sniper, vehicle and plane gameplay I've seen too much of already.

I disagree. Police are not supposed to be our masters, we are not supposed to bow and scrape before them in the hopes we don't get sent to the stocks (or worse). Police are simply supposed to enforce the laws that we, as a society, have decided that we all should follow.

The problem is, we have allowed the police to become more than that through our own lack of care and mismanagement. A policeman should have to undergo more rigorous training and background checks, mental and physical, than any other service we provide to ourselves. Instead we pay them about the same as teachers and we let bullies into the system. We also allow people with significant evidence that they should never have positions of authority due to mental issues to become police. We do not rigorously punish the bad cops, nor prevent them from seeking work elsewhere, leading to the same type of thing that led to catholic molesters being shuffled about to molest again.

As far as police fearing others, can we finally say that the number of police fatalities are far less than the the ones inflicted by police? Yes, we have many guns in the USA, but the few times I recall of a police person being killed by one seem to revolve around them experiencing a retaliation style attack when you would least expect it (and not on a call), or when they are alone and on a remote call location. Yet most of these controversial police shootings of suspects seem to happen when they are in a group of officers with weapons drawn, which I would consider far less of a jumpy situation than being alone on a highway. If I am an officer, with multiple other officers nearby, I have weapons on the suspect (taser or otherwise), why am I more worried than if I am alone with a suspect? It simply doesn't make sense.

Finally, referring back to your resisting comment, have we not seen lately that you can still be shot while doing absolutely no resisting? One man was laying on the ground, hands in the air, while telling a mentally ill patient of his not to do anything that would get him shot, and the man on the ground got shot. Here in Austin we had a mentally ill man running naked in the street and he was shot and killed versus being tasered or taken down. The use of force, and the extremity of it, have not been shown to be merited. So if you can be shot and killed for not resisting, or simply not understanding the commands in the short time you are given to do so, what can we do? Should we carry a pair of handcuffs and a taser so we can pre-apply these items and give the cops less to fear?

I've heard this revisionist history BS so many times now I just can't stand it anymore. There was no magical 'gifting' of Palestinian land to invading European Jews. That's a completely baseless self justification for Middle Eastern anti-jewish hate mongering.

Jewish people were a significant percentage of the population in Palestine long before the Nazi's and their ilk started making Europe look unpleasant. They were Palestinians themselves, not invaders. Both Arab and Jewish Palestinians lived side by side in Palestine for a long, long time before the 1940s. Clearly, come the 1940's there was a large influx of Jewish people from Europe. Calling them 'invaders' versus refugees though seems an easy call given the holocaust and Nazi occupation of the whole of Europe. Still, you insist on calling them invaders. I don't have words for how disgusting that is.

So, in the mid 1940's we have a Palestine loaded with Jewish and Arab Palestinians, plus a good number of Jewish refugees. The tensions between those groups escalates into a full on civil war. Not an invasion, but a civil war between Jewish and Arab palestinians where the only group remotely fitting the 'invader' role are holocaust survivor refugees now in a country were there is AGAIN a war against them on the basis of being Jews. I'm not sure I think they are as callously the aggressor. What is more, upon the UN mandating a two state solution to the whole mess, the Jewish Palestinians immediately accepted. The Arab Palestinians though appealed to the Arab league, and many of the leaders within it that stood alongside the Nazi's pontificating solutions to 'the problem'. So now a fledgling independent Jewish state spent it's first day receiving a join declaration of war upon it by all it's neighbouring countries that each out numbered it grossly. I again can't but see the Israeli fighting as defensive. In fact, I must insist it was an existential fight that, should they have lost, would have us discussing the second and even worse holocaust of the European Jews that fled to Palestine.

But I know it's popular today among pseudo intellectual circles to just declare Israel an invasion and occupation by a foreign army of vastly militarily superior super jews. It's a fantasy though, and it's one that was scripted up by hateful racists to justify their hatred. None of that says anything about white-washing Israeli policies in the decades following. If you want to call them invaders from the start though you are speaking a truly horrific set of lies.

Climate science has devolved to scientism. Like a cargo cult it uses methods that share an appearance with it's model, but loses the essence. Science is all about proposing falsifiable tests of a theory, and putting them to the test. As far as I can see climate science has not done this at all, nor does it seem likely to in the near future. None of the current climate models are remotely capable of predicting the decadal scale oscillations that are seen in the Earth's real climate. If they are actually capable of predicting extremely long term trends then we'll have to wait an awfully long time to test that.

I agree that it will be self-correcting, but the process will sow seeds of doubt in all of science. That's ok, doubt is good.

Karl Rove has whiteboards - plural - detailing her health situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqAiRRVLdHc

I've never understood what this gambit is supposed to pay off in. Do whackjobs believe that Democrats will think - 'well, Hillary might not be long for this world, so I'll vote Trump'? Any president is better than a corpse?

Or do they just want to bolster Trump-trooper spirits? Are they afraid the grass roots will lay down their arms if they don't have at least a remote hope of winning?

Bob - you speak for the whackjobs of the world; what do you say?