Doom Shepherd

No government-paid medical treatment for you if you injure yourself (including stroke, heart attack, etc.) on drugs. Nobody but you should have to pay for your inability to cope with reality like a functional human, ya pansy. Also death penalty for DUI or sharing your drugs with your kid, like a number of idiot parents have done. That's my tradeoff for legalization.

If a theory fits "a" fact, or two, it is quite possibly, even probably, wrong. If a theory fits the entirety or the vast, vast majority of a set of interrelated facts, and does not involve impossible things (wizards, magic, honest politicians) it is much more likely to be right. "Theory" is, in fact, the highest level of confirmation that there IS in science, since it stopped generally applying the term "Law" some time ago.

You may believe it. It has, however, no actual basis in reality, (because it's actually not physically possible) and is almost certainly a case of confirmation bias.

At this point, denialism is just sad.

Go back to the list and start reading at #1154. Stop at the end of Revelations (AKA "Jesus II: This time, he kills everybody!") Your patch is extremely buggy.

You got any real evidence the West was "sponsoring" the events in Ukraine, to the extent that The USSR did in those countries (up to and including sending troops and weapons) or is that just the Stolichnaya talking?

It's so cute how Western meddling in Ukraine is unacceptable, but Russian meddling is TOTALLY fine and justified.

Anyway, one of the reasons I've been absent a while is my new hours and commute leave me tired and with less time. Turns out I like my new job, though. Also, my girlfriend has been having mini-strokes. Treating them now, but don't count on my being a regular visitor. So while I'm here, let me rant about that. GODDAMN STROKES.

Depends on what you do with it. Righteous anger, over things like slavery and oppression and abuse and so on, has changed history. Mostly for the better. What you have to keep in mind is that there are different kinds of anger, and that most kinds don't accomplish anything except to make you stupid. So while it's okay to GET angry, you should never ACT when angry. Unless you are Bruce Banner.

Russia's going to take the Crimea (aka, the Sudetenland), with very likely a chunk of East Ukraine for dessert, and the West isn't going to do anything about it, just like they didn't do anything when Russia seized the "Russian" parts of Georgia in 2008 (Abkhazia and South Ossetia, anyone? Anyone? Beuller? Beuller?) Foment unrest in territories where your people have a significant population, step in to "restore order," and never leave. It's not a NEW trick. If the leaders of the US and Europe had a functional cerebral cortex among them, which I personally doubt, they would be secretly hammering out a deal to increase natural gas production in the US and ship it to Europe to offset the increasingly likely Russian embargo that will now come whenever Russia wants to do something like this and anyone objects.

Except NOT REALLY, because most religions have HUGE loopholes in their no-kill laws. Take the religions that follow the Pentateuch (all those that contain the first 5 books of the Bible.) God no sooner gets through tossing down "thou shalt not kill" when he commands the Israelites to move into an already-occupied land and KILL EVERYONE THERE. They all have exceptions for "god told us/ god wants us to / deus lo vult!" http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html has a pretty good compilation of the cruelty and violence-approving passages in all your Abrahamic religions, including Islam and Mormonism.

It's funny because every time you say "we know," I want to correct you and say "no, we actually don't," and every time you say "we don't know" I want to correct you and say "yes, actually, that we DO know." As for the whole "how do we have technology now that we didn't before? thing... we invent stuff. Everything is based on earlier stuff, plus experimentation. Don't fall for the "Cargo Cult" fallacy.

When will humanity finally come together in a spirit of understanding and realize the fundamental truth that you are all equal...ly inferior to me?

That's why we need to invest in asteroid mining and advanced fabrication technology. In a few decades, we'll be able to "print" food from basic materials the way we do with plastic items today.. "Have it your way... At McXerox's!"

And another conumdrum would be: If the being does not interfere in our daily lives, why are humans constantly (especially on Sunday mornings) requesting that it do exactly that? And in fact following (allegedly) its own directives in doing so? It's like "I want you to pray to me to make you well, or defeat your enemies, or grant you prosperity. I'm not actually gonna DO it, but I want you to do it anyway."

If you dislike life so much, why are you still here?

So has anybody heard about the Coober Pedy oil shale find? http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/trillion-shale-oil-find-surrounding-coober-pedy-can-fuel-australia/story-fndo471r-1226560401043 Man, if they're even halfway between the ends of the estimates...

All this fuss because 50-some-odd old people don't want to give the People the same deal as their boss already gave to the corporations. Despite all the rhetoric that corporations WEREN'T supposed to get better deals than people. http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/07/02/white-house-to-delay-obamacares-employer-mandate-until-2015-far-reaching-implications-for-the-private-health-insurance-market/

Finland's borders are Finnish Lines.

Humans have a variety of terms for someone who can help people without sustaining any loss or making any appreciable effort, but won't. None of them are complimentary. *Citation needed Which implies that he just doesn't care, at best. It's like saying "well, yes, I COULD get the same result by either flicking this dust mote, OR drowning a million kittens... get the bucket ready." (That's actually the kind of indifferent God that I might be able to accept, since it fits the state of the universe far more snugly, but it does rather throw the whole "omnibenevolent" thing out the window.) I'm not sure I accept that as an axiom, but for now, as thoughs go, how's this one? Humans can form interpersonal relationships because, on some level, they can comprehend the feelings and actions of the other person. When this does not happen, the relationship always fails. How much LESS likely is it to have a personal relationship with a being that CANNOT be comprehended?

People paint themselves into corners by making their claims hyperbolic. Take "omnipotent." It's a nice buzzword, but what does it MEAN? Well, taken normally, it means you can do anything, even the impossible. If I can even THINK of the idea, an omnipotent being can do it, even if it's impossible. So you run into problems when I say "come up with a way that you can have free will and NOT suffering." Because clearly, the God-claimants say that is impossible. But an omnipotent God can DO the impossible. Which begs the question as to why a God who is both loving AND omnipotent can't be bothered to do the impossible (after already having done it SO many times, according to claims) to the benefit of Its creation? A way out of this is to say that the God has to follow its own rules. But a constrained God is not an omnipotent one, because there are things it can't do.

Just remember that a belief in "God" does not necessarily equate to a belief in the Catholic God, or the Baptist God, or the Mennonite God, or the Methodist God, or the Episcopalian God, or any form of God that most self-identifying "Christians" would be inclined to recognize. A scientist would not say "there is no God" because there are just too many definitions of God to make them all disprovable. A scientist would ask the Believer to DEFINE God, and then observe and experiment to test whether the definition matches reality (it usually doesn't.*) Since believers generally don't want to / can't successfully define God, we reach an impasse, and Occam's Razor implies. *this is mainly because your standard definituions of God are inherently self-contracdictory.

Apparently, everybody in the world wants this to continue. UK voted to do nothing, "No war for (made-up paranoid reaon)" posts are all over Facebook. The US would have no allies in attacking Syria (except France, which might be worse than having no allies). Still, it would be ironically (and disturbingly darkly) amusing if the guy who got elected campaigning aginst "unilateral war" actually started our first ACTUALLY unilateral war of the 21st century.

Yes, just as it would be nice if there hadn't been several strings of home invasions/burglaries in recent memory in my parents' neck of the woods, if the police weren't a half-hour away or more (rural area. What, you think only cities have crime?), and if as a relative of a union leader, she'd never been threatened before. But we live in the real world, not Fantasyland.

If we listened to the public majority, we'd still be a British colony. And have slavery.