The damn machine looks like it's programed to torment kitty. It Make's a terrible racket while it sounds as if it's tumbling the portion it's going to dispense. Then, while still churning the kibbles, it begins to squawk in a Pokemonesque voice while STILL forgoing kitty's meal-time!!

(edit) Ohhhhhh wait.....I just watched it again....It's the neurotic cat not the cleverly-designed dispenser that's fucked up!!

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..

@shinyblurry said
It's quite a racket they have going, where the evidence is interpreted by the conclusion. Last time I checked that wasn't science.

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that it was a bit of an assumption to say that decay was constant, lets just linger with that idea for a second. We see some decay happen, and we assume its contant backwards in time. well what would be the alternative? Well, a non-constant decay, of course. The problem is just that we have no information, that is, no evidence, that the rate of decay has ever, or even can, change. Worse still, since there is no evidence, we cant say how the rate has changed. Is it decaying slower and slower, (which would imply a younger universe) or faster and faster (which would imply an even older universe) or does it fluctuate wildly? There is of course no way to tell, except to concede that there is no evidence for any of these three scenarios. According you Young Earth Creationists, the earth is something like 6-12000 years old, which would mean a MASSIVE, impossibly weird and complicated, and seemingly undetectable deceleration in the rate of decay of all known elements. Worse still, in order for the math to work out, all the different elements would decelerate at different rates, for some, again, inexplicable reason. And again, without this being detected by todays best scientists.

Are these the worst scientists then?

http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/decay-detector-gives-solar-flare-alert/

You should be careful not to let yourself become blinded by conventional wisdom. Why shouldn't you suspect that decay rates could change? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.


Talk about making assumptions, about having faith All in order to make a magic book remain magic.

Oh well.

It doesn't sound like you read my comment. I changed my mind, not in spite of the evidence, but because of it. I was perfectly fine with being a theistic evolutionist.


But of course, thats just be beginning, because it just so happens that the assumption we made (that the rate of decay is constant) lines up pretty damn nicely with other known facts about the universe, like how big it is, what stars are made of, how massive they are how long they have burned, how the whole universe is expanding, how tectonic plates move, how animals evolved,

Yes, you're right, it lines up just fine with all of the other giant assumptions that have been made about how the Universe was formed, because they are all predicated on the basal assumption of deep time, and conversely, they are all used to support that assumption of deep time. It's quite a racket they have going, where the evidence is interpreted by the conclusion. Last time I checked that wasn't science.

how fossils were buried by Satan to fool us all laid down in order over the eons, genetic diversity and the relationships and relatedness of all living things.

Do you know the geologic column doesn't actually exist in reality? It doesn't sound like you do, if you think it's all laid down in a neat little order like you see in the text book. The truth is, the geologic column is entirely theoretical. You don't find it anywhere on Earth. What you do find is various layers here and there, and what they assume is that layer a is the same as layer b if they find the same fossils in them. The depths you see in the various layers of the column does not reflect reality. You can find Cambrian fossils 10 feet down in some areas, so if you went by physical depth, you can say in some instances Cambrian was planted last and not first. The amount of circular reasoning employed to describe the geologic column is astounding.

Another question is, do you understand flood geology? Please read what we actually believe before you criticize it:

http://creationwiki.org/Flood_geology


It all pans out pretty fucking nicely to an emerging picture of a universe thats 13.72 billion years old, and an earth that is about 4.6 billion years old.

But I guess all these aligning scientific facts make the baby jesus sad and must be ignored, or at least made out by believers to be "based on faith" (The very thing that, by definition, underpins the entire worldview of a believer!) So that they can dismiss it because its just faith. Oh the irony, it burns.

As I said to someone else, if you're already committed to materialist explanations, it doesn't sound like a big leap. To someone who isn't so committed, it is a bigger leap than it might appear to you. I was willing to reinterpret my understanding of Gods word for what science had to say, and still am, but not for a mountain of circumstantial evidence and a just-so story to tie it all together.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan

@braschlosan Thank you for sharing despite the emotional difficulty. The US system is indeed completely F'd up, I agree. I am speaking from the prospect of someone living in Switzerland, where prison life is quite comfortable and you have to do something really, really bad (e.g. rape will get you a few months, letting someone rape your girlfriend and then trying to get him to pay you for it will get you no punishment at all) to ever set foot there (most criminals get a fine that hardly any of them ever pay). I am all for rehabilitation, believe me, and it goes without saying that prisoners should be treated humanely. What I am saying is it should not only be reeducation, it should also be punishment. Just as one deprives one's kid from TV, games and or going out for a while as punishment for bad behaviour, while still encouraging them to be better.
Here in Switz you are encouraged to do apprenticeships in jail that are the equivalent of those everyone else does for a wide variety of professions; you can even work a job outside of prison if you are not considered dangerous (for the record, a man who stabbed another man + got a 14yo girl drunk to rape her was allowed this in his meagre 1 year sentence; just to show how lenient things are here).

I guess the misunderstanding is that my opinion is based on seeing Norway as far more similar to Switzerland than to the States. I have raged elsewhere on the Sift about how terrible the US prison system is, i.e. basically a dehumanizing slave market, but that is not what I am criticising here. I am simply saying that those who commit crimes (taking drugs or growing pot is not a crime imo btw, and here you hardly even get fined for it) should pay there dues to society while learning to be a productive/participating member thereof, instead of having society put them up in a luxury hotel at the expense of people who, despite their needs (yes, poor people exist in Europe too) refuse to take the easy way out, or give in to their baser impulses.

There is a political aspect to it too: when the taxpaying public continually reads about criminals getting off with little or no punishment, or being put in comfortable jails a few weeks before being let off to continue their thieving/raping/racketeering/etc, they tend to be more attracted to the conservative extremists. It particularly does not help that Travel People, Maghrebins, Africans and Eastern Europeans are over-represented in these areas, which fuels the xenophobic agenda of right-wing parties.

Okay, enough ranting from me. I am sorry if I upset you @braschlosan, I think it is mostly because of the misunderstanding concerning our different points of reference.

The dog has a discerning ear ... I'd be howling too if I was subjected to that discordant racket =o/

>> ^Boise_Lib:

I got to 1:48 where he said, "Liberals say tax the rich and that will do it."
Umm...I don't remember ANYONE saying that that is enough. It's not.
Cut military spending DRASTICALLY!! AND tax the rich and corporations.
To be fair @surfingyt doesn't say if he thinks this is true, he (she?) just posted a video.
@GenjiKilpatrick -- No, he hasn't stopped his "self-help" racket.
He's helping himself to a big ol' bag of PAC money.
Downvote.


I agree that cutting military spending is an area that does need to be addressed quite seriously, not sure what it is now, but last i heard it was more than 2 Trillion a year (correct me if wrong).
If the military is still contracting out to those $$companies that suck up the funding and do stupid wasteful stuff like buying/building new trucks instead of repairing few-month old trucks because they make a bigger profit, then that needs to stop immediately.. military's should not be privatized like that.

In saying that I also think it's unwise to take out all the government armed forces funding as a country still needs to defend itself for it's citizens security, especially if they've pissed off a bunch of other nations. But the extent of the funding the US engages in is well past an obsessive degree and needs to be pulled into line.

Large corporations being taxed at low rates and in a lot of cases not even being audited for tax evasion (as TYT mentioned recently) is disgusting when the poor get smashed by taxes and audits.

I got to 1:48 where he said, "Liberals say tax the rich and that will do it."

Umm...I don't remember ANYONE saying that that is enough. It's not.

Cut military spending DRASTICALLY!! AND tax the rich and corporations.

To be fair @surfingyt doesn't say if he thinks this is true, he (she?) just posted a video.

@GenjiKilpatrick -- No, he hasn't stopped his "self-help" racket.
He's helping himself to a big ol' bag of PAC money.

Downvote.

Hah, did he finally get tired of running his self-help racket?

I noticed he mentioned that the US borrows 40 cent of every dollar.

Yet "Stop Borrowing Money" isn't the first suggestion for reducing the deficit and national debt.

[I wonder who they're borrowing that money from. Hint: Rhymes with Wankers]

There's no government agency dedicated to ensuring food card funds go to those who actually need help, which makes the whole racket a mostly-liberal slush fund for vote-buying.

Morality still applies to the poor. Breeding for a check is a disgrace. Making welfare a lifestyle is theft.

Snarky responses miss the point. One of the next bubbles on the horizon is the education bubble. Obama's takeover of the student loan racket has in essence created an environment of government subsidized college. That's bad. It is artificially inflating the cost of higher education to the point where even community colleges are overpriced.

Couple that with the widespread fact that colleges at all levels are underperforming and highly questionable in value. The ROI of a college education is plummeting to the point where an Associate's degree is worthless. A Bachelor's is rapidly reaching a point where its value is dubious at best - especially in the Arts & Humanities. The only Bachelor's really worth anything is a BS.

So why tell thousands of kids to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a year or two in college when it is overpriced and gives them no return? Just to say they did? A lot of them would be happier and get a better 'education' just by getting a job, or going to a technical school, interning, or some other option than just droning up and marching through college like a good little worker bee.

@NetRunner

Who is the best candidate? How do we fix this broken political system?

How do we get: Timothy Geithner out of the Treasury? Lloyd Blankfein on trial for the biggest white collar racket in history? Troops recalled from quagmires of death boredom and despair?

You got any solutions, bro?

Or just more fallacious arguments?

There are friendly, professional officers that count on people being ignorant of their rights. Police have no legal obligation to tell the truth, either.

I've seen a video where Stossel or somebody is sitting with an officer and testing a breathalyzer. The needle comes up "low" or negative, the officer taps the glass twice and the fking needle JUMPS to "intoxicated" levels.

Even if DUIs arrests hadn't warped from vague "protecting society" platitudes to an unexamined racket like Drug Prohibition, rights are rights, at all times, including late at night.

What's amazing is the number of sifters who are against police using racial profiling to "make the city safer" who approve of this racket.

Bill Gates - and all the ProgLibDytes on the forum - entirely miss the point.

You could take every single member of the top 5% of the United States and immediately confiscate 100% of all their wealth, income, assets, property, and leave them penniless paupers in the gutter. It would not so much as balance the Federal Government's budget for one QUARTER, let alone a whole fiscal year. The problem is not that taxes on the rich are too 'low' (they certainly aren't). The problem is that government spends too much money on crap that government has no business spending so much as one thin dime on (IE all the social programs). Government has over-promised on too many things to too many groups for far too long. They foot a bill too long for their purse and can't pay it - no matter how much it taxes the rich, corporations, or anyone else.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett's secretary (also rich), Hollywood, and all the other rich idiots with their crocodile tears about not being taxed enough... Every single one of these hypocrites has the address of the National Treasury, and can write out checks giving every penny they earn to the government. They can fire thier accountants tomorrow and not use all the exemptions they fight so hard to maximize. They don't need thier taxes raised. They could pay higher taxes this very instant under current law.

So why don't they? Simple. They know government is a terrible place to put money.

Gates is dumping money into private philanthropical efforts - which shows that he hasn't completely lost his wits (even though he's talking like a total moron in this clip). No one believes that giving the government more money is a good idea. The US government is one of the most wasteful, and least efficient organizations on the planet. Bill Gates knows this. So it isn't hard for him to figure out that "the nation" would be better served dumping his money in an incinerator rather than pay the Feds more tax money.

So what's with these hypocritical screeds that rich sleazeballs like Buffett? The answer is also quite simple. They are doing nothing more than mouthing platitudes specifically to assuage all you ProgLibDyte peons with your class warfare pitchforks.

It is quite amusintg, really, just how easily and thoroughly people on the left like the Sift are duped. All Gates has to do is go on a show here, or a show there, and say a few of the correct leftist catchphrases. Then suddenly all the lemmings are literally knocking each other over to be the first in line to start french kissing Gates or Buffett's duodenum.

See - that's what's so funny. You ProgLibDytes don't care that Gates is laughing his way to the bank, and that he will NEVER pay a cent more in taxes than he has to. Oh no. That doesn't matter. All that matters to all you agenda slaves is that he blathers the right sound bite at you. Then your ideological addictions get thier nice little junkie fix, and you're putty in his hands, laughing at you because he knoew (A) he isn't going to pay more taxes and (B) all he has to do is keep shunting a few bucks at the right leftist radicals and he will have political protection payola shielding him for life. And all he needs too keep the racket going is a bunch of you simpletons brainlessly following your left-wing marching orders so he has a permanent audience to sing to. How's it feel knowing you're the intellectual equivalent of Bill Gates' used condom?