Obama's Undoing

[Bug]

I'm Captain Kirk, BTW.

[video:youtube]

That's really fakey.

Rocks don't bounce.

[Mr. Spock]

 

Abomination.

 

[ivan]

I'm Captain Kirk, BTW.

[video:youtube]

my favor-ite episode! the cage, i think? kirk builds a rudimentary shotgun out of his giant american kock!

 

and spock, seriously brother, you know you could bend that doc bitch beverly crusher over and teach her to love!

[JosephH]

...misinformed blanket assessment of the entire genre is just as worthy of said wariness.

That's what we use blanket assessments for - to bundle like assessments together. Take commentary on 'fairy tales' for instance, we group them as a class based on common attributes for the sake of said commentary. That we then fail to weave wider so that religious constructs fit under that same blanket is admittedly a shortcoming, but then I personally just happen to find all claims of there being more proof for god(s) than Tooth Fairies pretty damn delusional and fear-driven.

[ivan]

i am (a) god

 

my powers are total shit though

[Bug]

...misinformed blanket assessment of the entire genre is just as worthy of said wariness.

That's what we use blanket assessments for - to bundle like assessments together. Take commentary on 'fairy tales' for instance, we group them as a class based on common attributes for the sake of said commentary. That we then fail to weave wider so that religious constructs fit under that same blanket is admittedly a shortcoming, but then I personally just happen to find all claims of there being more proof for god(s) than Tooth Fairies pretty damn delusional and fear-driven.

Fairy tales have more substance than your posts in this thread.

Not that your point could not be defended with science or logic. It's just that it isn't

[Bug]

i am (a) god

 

my powers are total shit though

I hope its good shit.

[JosephH]

Not that your point could not be defended with science or logic. It's just that it isn't

That you think there is any science or logic which supports the existence of god(s) is just the delusion I was speaking of.

[tvashtarkatena]

scientology?

[JosephH]

Exactly. Science [fiction] and [circular] logic, sure.

[Stonehead]

It strikes me that the atheist is devoid of deep feeling not that he doesn’t delight in sensual pleasure but does he experience those sublime feelings that persist beyond the fleeting moment, that are everlasting, feelings which are more characteristic of the religious? And by religious I refer not to the institutional rigidity or legalism so often mistaken for religious affect. Religion by its own definition does not negate the spontaneity or free form of true spirituality.

 

[video:youtube]EM8RlCZP0KQ

 

And feeling and spirituality reaches back to the beginning of humanity. If one is truly cognizant of his cultural history, he cannot make a clean break from the religious heritage encapsulated in modern life despite all the efforts of political movements such as communism which sought to eradicate religious belief rooted in the transcendental only to replace it with the cult of the state. A complete break would mean a severance from the rest of humanity. The true atheist would perhaps be a transhumanist, not only in words but in actual design. Are you a new species?

 

To my mind, the rational atheist potentially presents as much a threat as was posed by the Nazi technocrat. Are we to know that the same atheist who claims to be well-intentioned will not also support government measures perhaps under the guise of alleviating climate change, political measures that eventually lead to coercive population control? Here, the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis seem relevant: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment of men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

 

Again, the words of Justice Brandeis: “The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.”

 

An attack on the freedom of religion is an attack on the foundational virtues of the United States.

 

[glassgowkiss]

An attack on religion is an attack on the foundational virtues of the United States.

Like entering into Iraq and starting a religious war wasn't?

comparing atheism to nazism just shows how utterly stupid you are.

[Stonehead]

An attack on the freedom of religion is an attack on the foundational virtues of the United States.

Like entering into Iraq and starting a religious war wasn't?

comparing atheism to nazism just shows how utterly stupid you are.

 

Not getting laid enough?

 

 

[Stonehead]

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see, ladies and gentlemen," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter." Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

[prole]

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see, ladies and gentlemen," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter." Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

 

Or maybe the students had "eaten" these words before they got dosed by this jackass:

 

Outcry Over Pets in Pet Food

The practice of boiling down euthanized dogs and cats for industrial fat and protein causes an uproar in St. Louis

by Stephanie Simon

 

ST. LOUIS -- It started with footage of Blacky and Scoop, melt-your-heart dogs with no one to claim them, alone at the city pound--and due to be put to death within hours. "No one wants them. Alive, that is," the reporter said.

 

The film then cut to a rendering plant that boils down the city's euthanized dogs, along with dead pigs and cows from local farms and leftover bones, hooves and innards from slaughterhouses. The end products are used to make cosmetics and fertilizer, gelatin and poultry feed, pharmaceuticals and pet food.

 

It was the pet food that got people. The report last month by KMOV-TV's Jamie Allman--headlined "What's Getting Into Your Pets"--suggested that dead dogs and cats from local shelters were ending up in kibble. As proof, Allman aired footage of a tanker truck entering the rendering plant, a truck emblazoned with the motto "Serving the Pet Food Industry."

 

Thousands turned to KMOV's online polls to register their disgust. Scores more called animal control departments to demand an end to the practice. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a cartoon showing a mangled collar poking out of a bowl of dog food. "It was unbelievable, the amount of reaction we got," Allman said.

 

The Millstadt Rendering Co., a small family business that for decades had been taking the region's euthanized animals free, in what the owners thought was a public service, reeled in the face of so much rage. "A disaster for the industry," groaned Clifton Smith, a consultant to the firm. "There's too many people out there who think their pets are like children."

 

Hoping to free themselves from the public-relations fiasco, the rendering plant announced just before Christmas that it would stop accepting euthanized dogs and cats.

 

But the local animal shelters couldn't stop euthanizing. And so in counties and small towns throughout the region, animal carcasses began to pile up.

 

"We were taken flat-footed," said Chris Byrne, an animal control official in St. Louis County.

 

Every solution was pricey. Hauling the animals to the nearest industrial-scale crematory would cost the county more than $57,000 a year. Building a crematory would cost up to $100,000. And there would be the contentious question of where to put it.

 

In the short term, with freezer space limited, the county has been forced to send its dead dogs and cats to a landfill. The city of St. Louis has taken the same route, arranging for a refrigerated trash truck to pick up the carcasses.

 

This makeshift solution has prompted still more concerns. If the landfills are not properly lined, the decaying corpses could leach into ground water. If they're not promptly covered, scavengers can pick off the dead dogs and cats. And, as some have pointed out, chucking Fido in a dump scarcely seems a more dignified end than cooking him in a vat with dead cows.

 

It's a conundrum for animal control officers like Richard Steveson, who has to find a way to dispose of up to 3,500 animals a year in St. Louis. "I like for everything to be done as humanely as possible, even though the animal has already expired," Steveson said. But, given the alternatives, he figures rendering was as good a method as any. He didn't know that the rendered material could end up in pet food, he said. "But even if I had, I don't know what I would have done about it."

 

Lost in all the emotion have been the facts about rendering--and about pet food.

 

Rendering has long been considered one of the most environmentally friendly ways to dispose of animal carcasses, because it recycles them into useful fat and protein. By far the bulk of rendered material comes from slaughterhouses. But some plants also mix in road kill, the trimmings from supermarket delis, dead farm animals and euthanized pets from shelters. Los Angeles city and county shelters send more than 120,000 dead dogs and cats to be rendered in a typical year.

 

Members of The Pet Food Institute, who make 95% of the dog and cat food sold in the United States, use rendered material from livestock in their chow. But they insist there are no ground up pets in their pet food.

 

"It's a matter of good business," spokesman Stephen Payne said. "We've decided that if this is upsetting to people--and it clearly is--we should take extraordinary measures to make sure it never happens."

 

Still, it is not illegal to use rendered material from dogs and cats in pet food. And while no one keeps official figures, there's some evidence it happens.

 

The Food and Drug Administration has found "very, very low levels" of sodium pentobarbital--the chemical used to euthanize animals--in some brands of dog food, said Stephen Sundloff, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. The agency is investigating whether the traces are "of any significance at all," Sundloff said.

 

Overall, experts see little health risk in rendered pets entering the animal (or human) food chain, because the high temperatures used in the process kill most agents of disease.

 

As for the Millstadt Rendering Co., its owners are trying to get back to business as usual.

 

They maintain that the TV report unfairly linked their product to pet food (the tanker truck with the pet industry logo, they say, was headed to a separate rendering plant that handles restaurant grease). Still, they acknowledge they have no idea where their product ends up. It's sold to brokers who sell it to manufacturers. The way they look at it, they don't need to know the details--and the public probably doesn't want to.

 

"We don't have anything to hide," Smith said, "but people really don't want to hear about rendering. It's an ugly thing."

 

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

[Bug]

Not that your point could not be defended with science or logic. It's just that it isn't

That you think there is any science or logic which supports the existence of god(s) is just the delusion I was speaking of.

Stop.

Wait till tomorrow after the alcohol has cleared and you have had your morning coffee. You have started making things up in your confusion.

[tvashtarkatena]

Boy, you are on a roll this week. But Stunhead's still a blithering idiot.

[tvashtarkatena]

 

Ferrocynth

Edited November 22, 2009 by tvashtarkatena

[KaskadskyjKozak]

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see, ladies and gentlemen," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter." Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

 

Or maybe the students had "eaten" these words before they got dosed by this jackass:

 

Outcry Over Pets in Pet Food

The practice of boiling down euthanized dogs and cats for industrial fat and protein causes an uproar in St. Louis

by Stephanie Simon

 

ST. LOUIS -- It started with footage of Blacky and Scoop, melt-your-heart dogs with no one to claim them, alone at the city pound--and due to be put to death within hours. "No one wants them. Alive, that is," the reporter said.

 

The film then cut to a rendering plant that boils down the city's euthanized dogs, along with dead pigs and cows from local farms and leftover bones, hooves and innards from slaughterhouses. The end products are used to make cosmetics and fertilizer, gelatin and poultry feed, pharmaceuticals and pet food.

 

It was the pet food that got people. The report last month by KMOV-TV's Jamie Allman--headlined "What's Getting Into Your Pets"--suggested that dead dogs and cats from local shelters were ending up in kibble. As proof, Allman aired footage of a tanker truck entering the rendering plant, a truck emblazoned with the motto "Serving the Pet Food Industry."

 

Thousands turned to KMOV's online polls to register their disgust. Scores more called animal control departments to demand an end to the practice. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a cartoon showing a mangled collar poking out of a bowl of dog food. "It was unbelievable, the amount of reaction we got," Allman said.

 

The Millstadt Rendering Co., a small family business that for decades had been taking the region's euthanized animals free, in what the owners thought was a public service, reeled in the face of so much rage. "A disaster for the industry," groaned Clifton Smith, a consultant to the firm. "There's too many people out there who think their pets are like children."

 

Hoping to free themselves from the public-relations fiasco, the rendering plant announced just before Christmas that it would stop accepting euthanized dogs and cats.

 

But the local animal shelters couldn't stop euthanizing. And so in counties and small towns throughout the region, animal carcasses began to pile up.

 

"We were taken flat-footed," said Chris Byrne, an animal control official in St. Louis County.

 

Every solution was pricey. Hauling the animals to the nearest industrial-scale crematory would cost the county more than $57,000 a year. Building a crematory would cost up to $100,000. And there would be the contentious question of where to put it.

 

In the short term, with freezer space limited, the county has been forced to send its dead dogs and cats to a landfill. The city of St. Louis has taken the same route, arranging for a refrigerated trash truck to pick up the carcasses.

 

This makeshift solution has prompted still more concerns. If the landfills are not properly lined, the decaying corpses could leach into ground water. If they're not promptly covered, scavengers can pick off the dead dogs and cats. And, as some have pointed out, chucking Fido in a dump scarcely seems a more dignified end than cooking him in a vat with dead cows.

 

It's a conundrum for animal control officers like Richard Steveson, who has to find a way to dispose of up to 3,500 animals a year in St. Louis. "I like for everything to be done as humanely as possible, even though the animal has already expired," Steveson said. But, given the alternatives, he figures rendering was as good a method as any. He didn't know that the rendered material could end up in pet food, he said. "But even if I had, I don't know what I would have done about it."

 

Lost in all the emotion have been the facts about rendering--and about pet food.

 

Rendering has long been considered one of the most environmentally friendly ways to dispose of animal carcasses, because it recycles them into useful fat and protein. By far the bulk of rendered material comes from slaughterhouses. But some plants also mix in road kill, the trimmings from supermarket delis, dead farm animals and euthanized pets from shelters. Los Angeles city and county shelters send more than 120,000 dead dogs and cats to be rendered in a typical year.

 

Members of The Pet Food Institute, who make 95% of the dog and cat food sold in the United States, use rendered material from livestock in their chow. But they insist there are no ground up pets in their pet food.

 

"It's a matter of good business," spokesman Stephen Payne said. "We've decided that if this is upsetting to people--and it clearly is--we should take extraordinary measures to make sure it never happens."

 

Still, it is not illegal to use rendered material from dogs and cats in pet food. And while no one keeps official figures, there's some evidence it happens.

 

The Food and Drug Administration has found "very, very low levels" of sodium pentobarbital--the chemical used to euthanize animals--in some brands of dog food, said Stephen Sundloff, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. The agency is investigating whether the traces are "of any significance at all," Sundloff said.

 

Overall, experts see little health risk in rendered pets entering the animal (or human) food chain, because the high temperatures used in the process kill most agents of disease.

 

As for the Millstadt Rendering Co., its owners are trying to get back to business as usual.

 

They maintain that the TV report unfairly linked their product to pet food (the tanker truck with the pet industry logo, they say, was headed to a separate rendering plant that handles restaurant grease). Still, they acknowledge they have no idea where their product ends up. It's sold to brokers who sell it to manufacturers. The way they look at it, they don't need to know the details--and the public probably doesn't want to.

 

"We don't have anything to hide," Smith said, "but people really don't want to hear about rendering. It's an ugly thing."

 

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

 

could be worse; could be soylent green

[tvashtarkatena]

 

Wattilus

Edited November 22, 2009 by tvashtarkatena

[tvashtarkatena]

 

Ferrocynth . detail

[StevenSeagal]

Hi Stonehead:

 

Based on communist doctrine and history you seem to be making the case that atheism is inseparable from, and inclusive of, an insidious political agenda as well as being merely a (lack of a) belief system. In other words, what I'm hearing is: all communists are atheists, therefore the opposite is inherently true also.

Are you saying that atheism is a political movement?

I long considered myself "agnostic", but the longer I've lived and the more I've read, I've come to realize that I'm much more likely an atheist based on my real experiences and observations. Not that this arbitrary label means I have a new imperative or direction, of course. Part of the reason I was reluctant to admit this is the social stigma that is attached to having no belief, no faith, but I've come to recognize the moral cowardice of such a position. I don’t know any atheists, and there are many more out there than you think, who have an interest in abolishing freedom of religion. Myself included. But “freedom of religion” apparently in your view doesn’t extend to those who choose not to participate in religion at all, sort of like the spacey proclamation I’ve heard before: “it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something…” It would seem from your post as well as my observations almost everywhere that the very expression of atheist views (after all, there is no doctrine guiding and shaping our thoughts on the matter) constitutes by itself an assault on religion, because questioning someone’s faith is considered taboo, we cannot even have the discussion of faith and why we think it is needed. It is considered patently offensive. I don’t have any inherent urge to bash religion but if my view is “the organized religions of our world are utterly false and unnecessary, and all that is good in religion can be found elsewhere”, that’s not considered welcome.

It strikes me that the atheist is devoid of deep feeling not that he doesn’t delight in sensual pleasure but does he experience those sublime feelings that persist beyond the fleeting moment, that are everlasting, feelings which are more characteristic of the religious?

Isn’t the “fleeting moment” all there really is? Clinging to experiences and feelings is to invite illusion into one’s life, allowing thought to make permanent that which is unavoidably impermanent. You speak of this as if it is inherently virtuous. I see it as a potential cause of conflict. And this very statement contains some breathtakingly broad assumptions that don't stand up to fact unless you claim to know all atheists.

And feeling and spirituality reaches back to the beginning of humanity. If one is truly cognizant of his cultural history, he cannot make a clean break from the religious heritage encapsulated in modern life despite all the efforts of political movements such as communism which sought to eradicate religious belief rooted in the transcendental only to replace it with the cult of the state. A complete break would mean a severance from the rest of humanity.

Would it really? There is undeniable heritage in our culture connected to our religious past, but, if one recognizes the virtuosity that religion promotes (do not kill, steal, etc.) as things that can be embraced as moral certainties without the attendant embrace and assertion of things that simply cannot be proven, what then is the imperative of practicing religion? If people choose to continue doing so, fine by me, but I don’t want to be legislated by a particular ideology any more than the religious would want to be legislated according to my lack of ideology. So, freedom of religion is a pretty tricky thing. In fact, so is freedom of speech, perhaps, if we are all so easily offended.

The true atheist would perhaps be a transhumanist, not only in words but in actual design. Are you a new species?

Is this a veiled suggestion that atheists are ‘not human’? Pretty condescending and patronizing, not to mention divisive. Listing famous communist atrocities is not going to bolster your case, either, see above.

 

To my mind, the rational atheist potentially presents as much a threat as was posed by the Nazi technocrat. Are we to know that the same atheist who claims to be well-intentioned will not also support government measures perhaps under the guise of alleviating climate change, political measures that eventually lead to coercive population control? Here, the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis seem relevant: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment of men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Demonizing, condescending, fear mongering, all in one paragraph. Funny, from agnostics to Christians and especially Muslims, believers of other faiths are largely detested, but there is a special hatred reserved for those who have no faith. “Don’t even trust the one’s who seem ‘well intentioned’- they’re the ones with the most evil plans for genocide and world domination.”

 

Again, the words of Justice Brandeis: “The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.”

All good. But is there any possibility that this freedom of religion, the freedom to think, the freedom to question things, has contributed significantly to the general decline in faith in western culture? Is it possible man’s ultimate instinct, his/her intuition is moving us away from faith and more towards things that are directly observable and experienced? Is there any connection and relation to the fact that the Islamic faith is exploding around the world and that that religion and most of it’s cultures from which it emanates are among the most repressed and least free in the world? Why are we surprised that today’s Islamic culture, even that of so called “moderates”, bears a strong resemblance to 14th century Christianity?

 

An attack on the freedom of religion is an attack on the foundational virtues of the United States.

What do you propose, then, to combat this scourge?

Perhaps you could start by denying atheists the right to vote, the right to assembly, and the right to express their views publicly or privately. After all freedom of religion means just that- but you must choose one!

 

 

[tvashtarkatena]

Death to the Christians. For them, it's the lion, and the cross.

[ivan]

it's a love affair

 

mainly jesus

 

and my car

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm4X9yElG9Y

[JosephH]

"They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.”

What they sought was to end the inter-colony religious competition and the intra-colony religious persecutions which were all to common between the various colonial religions. And it is completely self-delusional to think that people who are religious have any more capacity for feelings of any sort than atheists. It's exactly this sort of thinking that at its root is the 'them vs. us' I was speaking of upthread and just the sort of thinking Justice Brandeis was warning about. You are certainly free to be religious, I just happen to find it sad to see so many lives rooted in fear. And bug, please do in kind feel free to trot out any argument at all for god(s) that somehow leaves Tooth Fairies out of the mix.