An Indian casino gives something and then asks for it to be returned?
Isnt there a term for someone that does that sort of thing?

Oh, yea. There is:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Indian%20Giver

Science gets people to fly to the moon.
Religion gets people to fly jets into skyscrapers.

>> ^Crosswords:
I'm convinced the people who are still convinced Obama isn't a natural citizen are equivalent to Flat Earthers.


When the “Earth is Flat and Only 6000 Years Old” crowd blathers on, what they demonstrate is how badly they don’t understand basic science. The Birfers however show they have a real hard time with telling the truth. Every bit of their “evidence” has shown to be a lie. The birth certificate provided is not a forgery as they maintain, no African relatives made a claim that Obama was born in Kenya, his college has not released documents showing he got a scholarship for foreigners, there never was a travel ban for Americans going to Pakistan at the time Obama visited that country. Obama has not spent million of dollars defending his case. The reason why every time they go to court their cases are tossed out is the same reason why the Creationists cant get published in a legit scientific journal. They have no proof.

BTW - Anyone that has ever placed an obituary, birth or wedding announcement in a paper knows that you simply cant call up the local paper and give them the announcement. The papers have to verify it with the vital statistic people.
The Birfers are nothing more than sore losers. They see that the rest of America is rejecting them, their leaders and their values, and its driving them crazy. So crazy in fact that they will believe any lie that is told to them, as long as it satisfies their self induced victim mentality.

>> ^quantumushroom:


The burden of proof in this matter is on Team Obama.


Incorrect. Obama is the defendant; the people that have brought challenges to his citizenship are the plaintiff. In a court of law, the burden of proof always falls on the plaintiff. In every case brought before a court, the platiffs have failed to meet the burden of proof.

Wait, Bill O is whining about “media corruption”?
Hey, Bill. Ive got three words for you:

Paris Business Review

>> ^quantumushroom:


No gay marriage advocates have proved there's "no difference" between the sexes. It is odd that despite never providing any proof of this claim, you still repeat it.
There is no proof that President Obama was born in Kenya, and certainly no proof he is a communist.
Only in Lunatic Fringeland does graduating from Princeton summa cum laude mean you’re a dumbass. I guess then notable conservative Princeton graduates like Samuel Alito, Donald Rumsfeld, David Petraeus, James Baker, Frank Carlucci, George Shultz, John Foster Dulles, Meg Whitman, Malcolm and Steve Forbes, George F. Will and John Stossel must be even bigger dumbasses. Yet Sarah Palin, who needed six years and four different schools just to earn a bachelor's degree and John McCain was fifth from the bottom in his class rank, they are brilliant. NOT!
It is interesting how you so often whine about the lies told by the “liberal MSM”, yet when the rightwingnuts and regressive media tell lies, you gobble it up like they are serving you filet mignon.

Doesn’t it bother you that you are being played for a chump?

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Nationalized Health Care as described by Obama's so-called 'plan' has very little to do with providing health care and EVERTHING to do with creating a huge, wasteful government boondoggle that has the power to regulate anything and everything you do in the interest of 'national health'.
Under government plans like Canada's & the UK's, patients are regularly denied service for routine medical care. The waiting line for common medical issues is as long as 12 months. Anyone that thinks that 'more' people will be getting health care under Obamacare has a hole in thier head. There will probably be over 100 million who don't get coverage under Obamacare... It'll just be hidden in waiting lines and bureaucracy 'denied coverage'.
Such a crock.


Newsflash: The plan the president has put forward is NOTHING like what Canada or the UK have, so the comparison is not valid. Also, I don’t understand where the 100 million who cant get insurance comes from as that’s almost twice the number of people that currently don’t have health insurance. In other words, for the 100 million number to be correct, almost 50 million people would have to drop the coverage they already have. It sounds like someone (**cough insurance industry shills cough**) have been giving you numbers that don’t add up.

Zeppelins are so cool

Man, talk about making a mountain out of a molehill. Can you imagine the outrage if it was discovered he was plying teenage boys with booze and doing the nasty chat with them?

Oh, wait. Apparently that’s not a big deal.

I know, imagine if he was caught with a prostitute while wearing a diaper.

Oh, um. Never mind. Seems that kind of thing is cool after all.

Okay, how’s this. Its not like he took off for five days, didn’t tell anyone where he went so he could fly down to South America to be with his mistress. That would be political suicide, right?

>> ^jerryku:
.


Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about here, as much of it seems to bear nothing even close to what I wrote. Maybe you didn’t read my post, or perhaps I didn’t make my self clear. Let me try again. The idea that democracy and science don’t work well together is simply not born out by the existing facts. If democracy and science don’t work well together, then how do we account for the disproportionate number of patents awarded to scientists working in democratic societies, the overwhelming number of advances in science made in the last hundred plus years by Americans and/or people living here under a democratic system? You don’t see how science and democracies are compatible? Fine. I’m just pointing out that there is no evidence for this claim, if anything there is a wealth of proof showing the opposite.

I listed the “intellectuals/scientists of the past” simply to point out that these egghead elites have done great work and done tremendous good in raising America’s prestige the world over.

As far as “intellectuals/scientists of the past who would be pretty upset about modern day America's current situation.” Unless you are in possession of a flux capacitor, assigning the thoughts on present day situations to people that have long been dead and were the product of a far different time and environment is a foolish endeavor. (I will concede however that Thomas Jefferson would most likely be mortified to learn that thanks to science, and a science he helped pioneer, future generations uncovered his little secret regarding Sally Hemmings) I’m sure that some of the founding fathers did not want to give political power to the common man. But I suspect they may have been the same people that had no issue with owning slaves, or treating women as second class citizens, so what they thought then bears little relevance to what we have now.

As far as your claim that so many scientists were communists, your post listed only two. How does two translate to “so many” in a vocation that has millions the world over? Additionally, as the Communist Manifesto was published only 150 years ago, and men have been practicing science for centuries, the idea that “so many scientists of the past supported Communism” is to put it kindly, a little hard to swallow. Considering how much scientists and researchers depend on the free market system to fund their work, I would hazard to guess they would be more interested in living under that system than not.

In regards to “There's nothing about democracy that requires free speech, and free speech does not require democracy.” I really have no clue as to how this relates to anything I posted, or where you felt such a statement fit in to the overall argument.

>> ^quantumushroom:


Scientists are human, fallible, biased, cliquish, etc. Like everyone else with a job, they also have to deal with politics.
I have a job and I don’t have to deal with politics. I come in, do what is expected, and every two weeks they cut me a check. No politics, no drama. Although, I have noticed over the years very often people that are not good at their jobs blame “politics” for all their woes.

When money speaks, the truth keeps silent,

If that was true, and considering the deep pockets of big tobacco, then the health risks associated with smoking would have never seen the light of day.

and there are infinite ways to distort raw data,

Until another scientist comes along, discovers the distortion and blows the whole deal. Scientific frauds are very hard to pull off, and when a fraud is discovered, its always discovered by another scientist.

There's more junk science than real science being reported by the media charlatans.

And how’s that the scientists fault? They don’t have a say in what the talking heads report.

Lots of scary bullshit that never comes to pass, and the taxpayers always get stuck with the bill

Yea. Reagan’s SDI program comes to mind.

for the next round of tyrannical laws which do nothing except expand the size of government.

The size of the government expanded at an astronomical rate under Bush and the Republican controlled congress, a president and congress that was also somewhat less than enthused about science. If one wants an example of conservatives ignoring science while interjecting themselves in the private life of citizens, look no further than the Terri Schivo debacle.

I can think of no examples where scientists have bowed to political pressures, out side of instances like when they had to build a working a-bomb, or get a man on the moon. I can however instantly cite Copernicus and Galileo as examples of where scientists have stood their ground against political pressures.

>> ^jerryku:
I'm not surprised that so few are Republican (Einstein was a Communist, and many of Oppenheimer's relatives were, too), but I wonder how many today are Libertarian-types, since so many identify as independents?
And how many are pro-democracy? I would argue that science and democracy don't really work together well. For one thing, scientists are very smart, while the majority of the human race is probably embarrassingly foolish in their eyes. So are scientists (elite eggheads) really in favor of having the unwashed masses rule the world? I gotta wonder.
A scientist libertarian party guy makes sense to me though. Free market stuff is like a form of social darwinism. Survival of the fittest. Evolution. Science. Brutal, cold, efficient, and without any silly Bible or Quran to teach hippie whatever egalitarian "love your neighbor" principles that are in there.
A scientist fascist makes sense to me, too.
I guess a scientist Communist (which was VERY popular in the past) actually makes the least amount of sense to me. The only part that makes sense is the tenet of Communism that opposes faith in God. If high #s of scientists are not religious, then I can see the appeal of Communism. But all the other aspects of Communism, which is really based on the idea of majority rule ("The People!"), seems to go against what scientists would favor. Then again, I guess convincing the world that there was no afterlife after a nuclear world-destroying war.. would be the most important thing to do for the time being. Kinda like an Ozzymandias from The Watchmen type thing.




Maybe scientists are elite egg heads, but you know who else were also elite eggheads? Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Thomas Edison, Dr. Salk, Neil Armstrong. It was American eggheads that led the way to map the human genome. Nearly everyone on tonight’s shuttle launch is a science/math geek, and all but two are American. I for one am proud that my country has produced so many eggheads.

Science has done very well under democracy, and amazingly well under American democracy. In our brief history, American scientists (or at least scientists that came to and did their best work while in America [i.e. Nikola Tesla, Alexander Bell, Wernher von Braun]) have given the world the greatest number of advances in science, medicine and technology of the modern era. It makes totally sense; a free society, where ideas and information can be easily exchanged, coupled with a healthy amount of capital from the private sector to fund research is the best environment for scientific advances.

Just because a person is not religious does not mean they would automatically find communism attractive. If everyone that didn’t believe in a god were also a communist, communism would be a lot more successful than it is. I would venture to say that a disbelief in a god is more likely to happen in the above-mentioned free and open societies as opposed to one where everyone are told what to think. Communism (at least as in the form of China, Cuba, North Korea and the USSR) is not a “majority rule” government, but one where a small, self appointed, insular group at the very top controls everything. Majority rule is, however, a tenet of democracy.

“I’m sorry I’m not a cancer survivor” WTF?!?! Could this woman be any more callous, any more heartless? This attitude is exactly why the Regressives are being treated as outcasts.
Bandes displays all the traits of what conservatives do when confronted with inconvenient facts: interrupt and talk over your opponent, lie or just make stuff up and holler. Her stupidity is breathtaking. Does she and other conservatives not realize that by lowering the number of people that are uninsured hurts their argument? If the number is as low as they say it is, then the cost of providing health coverage for them just got remarkably lower.

Why is this a shock? Government is the tit at which these government science shills suck.


I don’t know if you realize this or not, but the vast majority of scientists in this country work for big corporations, such as chemical companies, pharmaceuticals and the oil industry, entities that are not know for having a liberal bias. The number of scientist that depend on the government for their funding is very small and is made up overwhelmingly of those working for military contractors.

Scientists are only interested in facts, and we all know facts have a well known liberal bias.