Any perception of the US medical system being superior to Cuba faded when I read that one of the arguments that the lawyers representing Elian Gonzalez's father made was that, medically speaking, Elian had a much greater chance of surviving to age 10 in Cuba than he did in the United States.

That's... just... humbling.

>> ^chilaxe:
That's not a "prediction," that's what's called a random and baseless guess. Just like a "Nostradamus-like" random lottery winning, there are no underlying laws or wisdoms at work; there's no meaning to this event.

Except that there was. Baseball isn't as much a game of chance as you might suppose. He didn't lay out all the work he did to come to that summation, but he did give some clues. He knew the handedness of the pitcher and the batter, which tends to yield hits going in certain locations. He knew that if it happened, it would be when the batter was a little more relaxed (i.e., not at his first at-bat). In short, he'd observed hundreds of thousands of pitches in the course of a lifetime, and knowing human nature, made what seemed to be a 'random and baseless guess', when in fact, there was a certain order in all that chaos. Clearly some of it was joshing around, and that part was coincidental, but he did call the right player on the right day, having had no foreknowledge of his major league track record. That's pretty impressive.

Anyone know the stats on the number of players who hit a home run during their first game?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this clip is the revelation that the inventor had not watched a television until high school. And now he's designing sound based weapons. Couple that with Philo Farnsworth growing up on a farm without electricity until age 12, and conceiving the fundamental basics of the cathode ray tube at age 14. So what does it say about our desire to put the latest tech in the hands of children as soon as possible. Does it somehow numb them to the possibilities?

When I watched this, I suddenly had a flash of someone explaining the meaning to Beck, at which point he turns and says, "Wait... we had slaves? When was this?"

I for one support our new arachnid overlords.

>> ^RhesusMonk:
Someday I'm going to write a long treatise here about why this song and this story have very little to do with god's grace and being connected through JC. This is about awe and gratitude. Christians believe there is some force that is doling out goodwill and that we are unwitting and undeserving of this goodwill, unless we respond in a Christian way.

I read a great quote recently: "Christian is a wonderful noun, but a terrible adjective." I have to agree. I think the feeling you're describing, the feeling hinted at by Phipps, is transcendental. As Newton emerged from his cabin that day, and heard the dirge rising up from the hold, something in his brain clicked. No doubt, "Unknown" was sold into bondage exactly on schedule, and so the song did not save him in a meaningful way, but unbeknownst to him, that song did have an effect. Newton began to reconsider his role in things, and left the slave trade. He was a vocal proponent of abolition in England. It would be many, many years before he would put pen to paper and write out Amazing Grace (he experienced his conversion moment in 1748, and composed AG between 1760 and 1770) but nevertheless, the wordless song never truly left him. He chose to share its melody with those who'd never set foot on a slave ship, and found that, somehow, the effect was sustained.

Now everything I've just mentioned can be looked at in a non-Christian context, and it would remain true. It should be said, though, that the presence of Christianity and its memes made it easier for Newton to become aware of just how far he'd strayed in his life. Given the number of unrepentant slave captains who called themselves Christians, it does not necessarily follow that Newton's salvation was due to his turn to Christianity, but it certainly helped. And it also helped all the slaves who would have found passage in the hold of his ship, but did not, thanks to his conversion. Again, Christianity didn't do it, but it was a 'hook' upon which Newton could hang this unsettling feeling in his belly.

Kurt Vonnegut notes much the same in a speech he gave at Clowes Hall in 2007. He starts by pointing out that, while Marx said that 'religion was the opium of the lower classes', he should have been taken literally. Opiates were a wonderful class of drug that numbed the pain, and who knew pain better than the working classes? He continues, "The most spiritually splendid phenomenon of my lifetime is how African-American citizens have maintained their dignity and self-respect, despite their having been treated by white Americans, both in and out of government, and simply because of their skin color, as though they were contemptible and loathsome, and even diseased. Their churches have surely helped them to do that. So there's Karl Marx again. There's Jesus again."

I guess the question is, could John Newton have composed Amazing Grace without believing in the Magic Man Who Lives in the Sky? Maybe. Probably. But it certainly helped.

I never though there WAS a question. I mean, the name itself, "WORLD TRADE Center". It's all about anti-globalization. They mind the fact that we remove crude oil from their homelands (which, given their delusions about an Eternal Caliphate, is a big swath of land), and give monstrously corrupt regimes all the cash and military might they want, as long as they keep the situation contained. The region was never stable to begin with, but with the way it was set up, it'll never get better. In their eyes, the WTC was where all those petrodollars were laundered and used to put a respectable business face on the dark deeds of the past. It's why Ward Churchill got into so much trouble by referring to those who worked in the WTC as 'little Eichmanns'-- hey, man, they were only following orders, pushing papers around an office. He wasn't calling them Nazis. Rather, Eichmann was found guilty not of killing anyone, but rather perfecting a system, the consequences of which was the slaughter of millions. This does not justify in any way the actions taken by the hijackers and their masters. The religion they so fervently follow forbids 'collateral damage'. They are hypocrites, and they are delusional. All this came out before, and I can imagine the MSM not really giving a damn about trucking out that bag of loons one more time.

As for 'It's Israel, stupid!" I'm not a fan of atrocities against unarmed civilians. I have no idea what it would take to make that part of the world get along. I do know that, were we to follow the whims of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the entire country AND race would be driven into the sea and drowned. There is no pretense to compromise. Israel is a convenient head to hang their hate. Simple as that. Could Israel chill the crap out a little more? Probably. 34 Americans died on the USS Liberty because Israel got sloppy.

The Palestinians need to realize what the people in Kansas seem incapable of understanding--there are people out there who will deceive you. They will make you believe that they are on your side, and protecting your interests. In truth, they only want to stir up the muck within yourselves, and will often make you act outside of your own self-interest. If we can't solve it among people at relative peace, how do we solve it when both sides have been going at it for decades?

>> ^westy:
I think they are bing over dramatic about it , Its not comparable to cropping a still painting , you can still as a viewer receive a good propotoin of the essence of the film. maby more so than if you had a 15" tv and you tired to watch it in wide screen.
obviously its not as good and is different from the original intended composition of the film but I would argue its not that bad compromise to get a wide screen film onto a tv and looking comparably good.


From time to time, when I'm watching a film in the theater, I become aware that the director / cinematographer has made a conscious effort to screw the pan-and-scan guys, by putting vital information on opposite sides of the screen. This was especially true of Inglorious Basterds. Frankly, I don't blame them. They don't like their composition dictated by the home video market. That being said, it was fascinating to discover that Pixar and Dreamworks both manipulate the position of characters within the shot when making a 'full screen' version.

Back in 2003, when the war in Iraq was imminent, I was working in a high school in Chicago, and several students came to me, telling me that they were staging a walk-out, to protest the war. This being an American high school, I could imagine that quite a few of the 'protesters' were walking out just to get the rest of the day off. They asked me if I supported them. I told them that I supported the Constitution of the United States of America, and those actions taken to create, uphold and defend that document. They took this to mean that I supported them, and headed off to do a little civil disobedience. To their credit, they walked an astonishing distance, from high school to high school, picking up a throng as they walked, a la Boys Town. They ended up downtown, and several of our students were front and center in the pictures taken at the rally.

The next day, several of the students who had organized the walkout discovered that they were given out of school suspensions for their actions. They ran to me, expecting me to howl in righteous indignation, and go to the administration to demand that they not be punished. They were quite surprised when I said, "And...?" I didn't have one jot of sympathy for their plight. Instead, I retrieved a copy of Letters from Birmingham Jail, Common Sense, Civil Disobedience, and several other books of a similar bent. I told them to use the time off wisely, to discover the rich heritage civil disobedience has in our nation. It it is, I think, the expectation of 'getting away with it' that has neutered our protests. The fact that 'free speech zones' exist at all is an affront to the Constitution. I told my students that it was the punishment they received that gave their protest meaning. Accept it willingly, because by accepting it, they were saying, "This inconvenience is nothing compared to the great injustice we stand against. We suffer it willingly, if it means that others might not suffer in the future." They got it, served their time without grousing, and actually learned a little something about being a citizen.

As many people have noted, in trying to debunk some of these lies, those who would try to set the record straight only seem to spread the lies farther afield. As fun as it is to pick on Glenn Beck, Olbermann needs to learn to simply walk away. Look at all the advertisers that have pulled support from Beck's show. All that sweet sweet notoriety has propelled Beck to the top of the crap heap, even beating O'Reilly in key demographics.

My hope is that the O'Reilly ego will take down Beck far more quickly than any of us could imagine.

When I watch this, why am I reminded of Jon Stewart's special comments to the planet earth in 2006? http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-24-2006/happy-earth-day

Starts at 2:00 in.

>> ^quantumushroom:
1) USA is not a democracy.


Correct. It is a constitutional republic.


2) Torture is illegal against American citizens and uniform-wearing soldiers of other nations' armed forces.


Wrong. The Bill of Rights does not differentiate between citizens and non-citizens. It only speaks of 'persons'. It embodies certain essential rights common to all men (and women) regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality. True, it only pertains to actions taken within US borders, and against US citizens outside of the US. However, as signatories to the UN Convention against Torture, we have agreed that agents of the US shall not torture.


3) Terrorists fit neither description of #2, therefore legal protections do not apply no matter how badly the ACLU wants them to. The same legal charade was attempted by leftists during WW2, scrambling to give German saboteurs the protection of the American legal process. It failed and the Germs were rightly executed (people had way more common sense + balls back then).



Funny story about them saboteurs--you must be talking about Operation Pastoreus, which gives us the rich legacy of secret military tribunals. The thing is that we would have known NOTHING about the plan, if not for the fact that its leader, intent on betraying the Nazis from the start, turned himself in to the FBI and told them everything they needed to know (he actually had to travel from NYC to Washington, DC to do this, as the FBI Office in NYC hung up on him, thinking him a crank). For this essential service, the leader who had turned on his own people and spared countless American lives was thrown in a cell with the other seven, and sentenced to die. Hoover, director of the FBI, felt that the stroke of luck that had benefitted them in this case didn't play as well in the media as a tireless army of FBI agents, knocking down doors. The leader had been tried separately, and the military judges had been informed about his vital role in breaking the case, and STILL he was sentenced to die. It was only after the details of the case were released that his sentence was commuted. Instead of being treated as a hero, he and another German 'spy' who had turned on their Nazi masters were deported back to Germany, where they were treated as traitors.

So, you know, try another one.


4) While rich in history, most of the rest of the world is quite lame...unstable, squalid, rife with tribal hatreds going back centuries. Other governments' depths of corruption make the USA's look like a school play about tooth decay. Europe is graying and its traditions and culture dying. It would be better off mummified than Muslimfied.


"To save the village, we had to destroy the village." How well did that mentality work in Vietnam?


5) Obama is a laughingstock to America's sworn enemies and is played like a harp by all manner of sociopathic dictators around the globe. He's made America seem as weak as a legless kitten.


Yawn.



6) The USA will never get proper credit or respect for the good it does in the world (at least, not from American liberals). Part of being The Big Dog is being challenged. When China eventually takes over as Big Dog, the rest of the world will long for the good old days.


You know, this is what's so funny about 'free market' ideologues. Their belief that the free market will right all wrongs seems to falter when the market starts favoring an outcome that's much less favorable to them, whether it be the speaking of Spanish, or the growth of non-Christian faiths, or hegemony under a different overlord. Once that happens, the free market must be ignored, and nations toppled.


7) Peanut-head Eric Holder already tried to raise a legal stink about torture and was rebuked. Navy SEALS are waterboarded as part of their training and only 3 of the terrorists were waterboarded, for the purpose of gaining intel, not torture for torture's sake.


Democracies AND constitutional republics do not believe that torture is permissible, regardless of outcome. The ends do NOT justify the means.



Since torture "doesn't work" the logical alternative is to kill all terrorists/insurgents on the battlefield without mercy. Yet this approach is also poo-pooed.


How is this logical? I know--I shouldn't feed the troll here, but I've got some time on my hands.


9) Liberal logic eats its own tail. Dependent on moral relativism to exist, it cannot by its own definition ever claim a lasting moral high ground.


Capitalism eats its own tail. It begets inequities that yield monopolies, and once we have monopolies, capitalism collapses. Communism eats its own tail. In fact, every ideological concept, when taken to its purest form, contains the seeds of its own destruction. The thing about liberalism is that, unlike conservativism, it is endlessly questioning its own relevance and truthfulness. You would, of course, see this as weakness, but like steel, tempering drives out impurities and leads to a stronger material.

What chills me as I watch the video is Bill Maher's comments about what is to be done with these people. I'm not one to rush to Nazism or any other group that saw a purge as necessary to ensure purity of ideology, but the logical consequence of what he's asking is that we remove from positions of responsibility those people who show such 'mental defects'. An exemplar of the atheistic ideal is Michael Shermer who, in Why People Believe Weird Things, states that any atheist who doesn't embrace Spinoza's Dictum with both hands isn't worth a mote of intellectual salt. Harris and Dawkins both exhibit extreme exasperation at having to prove the same things over and over and over in debate after debate. Their result, thus, is to mock those who could believe such things. Harris goes so far as to accuse more liberal-minded believers of allowing fertile ground for the more dangerous ideologies to take root. When it comes to his arguments about a modern Christian not believing in Zeus or Vishnu, I think he's missing a bigger picture. I don't think a modern Christian would 'believe' in the G-d of the disciples, or the God of Abraham. He might see the clear chain, and assume that he does, but to worship that God was very different from the one he goes to every Sunday (or not). The idea of God has evolved with human culture. At times I fear that the two are inseparable. Had we the capacity to wipe out all religious thought, we would not find ourselves in a Dawkinsian utopia, but in a world oddly devoid of certain stabilizing influences. I do not think we get our moral sense entirely from religion, but it certainly helps.

Put another way--it is often said that over 50% of Americans believe in a 6,000 year old earth. This doesn't trouble me as much as it probably should, but I take great comfort in knowing that if I were to take one of these 50% of Americans to the top of a skyscraper and tell them, "Jump off. The God of Abraham will _totally_ catch you," he'll look at me as if I were insane, ESPECIALLY if I said, "No, seriously. He just told me.*" The great revolution in human culture occurred when we swapped learning things through revelation for learning things through deduction. If something is difficult to deduce, then people will fall back on the 'revealed' which is pretty much anything anecdotal. Put another way, tell someone that there are a billion billion stars in the sky, and he'll believe you. Tell the same person that the paint on a park bench is wet, and he'll have to touch it to be sure. Evolution as a metaconcept is hard to deduce, but people get that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. Why can't they bridge the distance? If I knew the answer to that, then there wouldn't be a distance.

* And yes, it is possible with the right listener and the right speaker to find someone willing to jump...but we don't want them breeding anyways, do we? Evolution cleans up its own messes.

Technically the officer's right. Technically it's a constitutional republic. I don't think the civics lesson went over well with the driver, however.

>> ^KnivesOut:
Love this movie. Guy Ritchie is BACK.
I hope they follow through with a sequel.


I agree 100% Mt very first status update on Facebook was this very line. It's interesting how that 'edge' was always there in the character. Like the protagonist in A History of Violence, he suppressed it for so long, but when he needed it, it came rising up.