Water. They were too big to fit on Noah's Ark and they were so wicked they ate meat on Fridays. So, they had to perish with the rest of the wicked.

The meteor thing was just a ruse to keep keep the controversy alive.

-Kerry O.

Yeah, but don't tell the monkeyboy scientists Russell's views were my doing. See, I used the Infinite Improbability Drive and the lightspeed breakaway factor to go back in time to attempt to derail modern science. Almost worked, too! I nearly had Russell and his followers believing that m=E/square root of the speed of _darkness_. That gravity sucks darkness, giving the appearance of light. And that the monkeyboy conciousness is the most powerful force in the Universe. It can do anything. Do. Be. Do be Do Be Do.

Alas, that Einstein fellow just ruined everything with math.

So.

I came up with another, more nefarious plan. It's called simply, "The Internet."

And I think it's got a shot, too. It spreads misinformation at the speed of light!


-Kerry Omega

So Moe, if you had a daughter, you wouldn't mind it if your buddies called her a bytch or a slut to your face?

It's funny-- the Republicans represent themselves as the Party of God, yet we saw again this week that some Republican men just can't seem to control their lusts and new cases of adultery arise from their ranks all the time. And now I see we have someone on the thread judging women in politics only by their looks?


-Kerry O.

Oh please. You're constantly smuggling New Age wishful thinking into this group while damning science with faint praise and snide little remarks/emoticons.

Now you're resorting to ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares to oppose you and using word lawyering to misrepresent points. I merely was pointing out the fallacy and double standards in your 'points' using logic and facts, and it appears you don't like that.

That's fine. But the post you just made above was CLEARLY out of line-- it's always intellectually dishonest to attempt to paint your opponent as delusional to win an argument or to try to silence them-- especially when you claim you aren't even interested in the argument.

If you're so sure I'm not talking to you or about you, then might I suggest a new strategy? DON"T LISTEN. Stop trying to get the last word-- it's not all that it's cracked up to be if you're sure about yourself.


-Kerry O.

Interesting. For all the wailing and chest-thumping our right wing friends make about Political Correctness, you'd think they'd be falling all over themselves to defend Ed Schultz's right to be Politically INCORRECT.

I don't watch or listen to political commentary on the radio or watch it on tee vee. I don't need to, neither side presents anything new of real value and I can think for myself fine, thankyewverymuch.

But sometimes the hypocrisy can be pretty entertaining.






-Kerry O.

Interesting. For all the wailing and chest-thumping our right wing friends make about Political Correctness, you'd think they'd be falling all over themselves to defend Ed Schultz's right to be Politically INCORRECT.

I don't watch or listen to political commentary on the radio or watch it on tee vee. I don't need to, neither side presents anything new of real value and I can think for myself fine, thankyewverymuch.

But sometimes the hypocrisy can be pretty entertaining.






-Kerry O.

That is wise. ;)


I have not attacked your precious beliefs about "science" so you don't need to take such a defensive posture.





Sticks and stones.

I guess I'm old school Internet-- people used to present interesting, little-known facts like the existence of HeLa cells in posts to support their arguments and give people references where they could read and learn more about them. Now, it seems all we have left in the arena of ideas is American Idol popularity contests.

Oh well.


-Kerry O.

So maybe people who believe in the paranormal should not set the bar higher for science than they set it for the paranormal. You just acknowledeges that 'there is so much we don't know'. Maybe believers in the paranormal need to stop scoffing at science via double standards of proof and results. (Check the back posts for the LOL emoticons).

I'd wager that science knows a LOT more about aging and can back it up with evidence than believers in the paranoral/supernatural can for their cause. Just because science cannot yet confer immortality doesn't mean that it's 'in the dark' about aging.

Conversely, the paranormal always seems to grow best in the dark-- like mushrooms-- away from the bright light shed on it by the skeptics.

I posted some scientific facts about aging. Will you do the same with some subject about the supernatural/paranormal?


-Kerry O.

Your previous post seemed like an indictment of science's alleged unreliability to produce instant, all-encompassing answers to tough problems and/or its inferiority to those 'powers of the mind'.

Maybe I take science a little bit more seriously than most because so much of my career depends on it, and it quite literally saved my life and made it worth living again.

Further, IMHO science has caught and convicted more dangerous criminals than ESP ever has. Using the same logic you used in that previous post, couldn't it be said that if psychics are so effective, there'd be no crime because criminals would know they'd always get caught and that the police would never be 'in the dark' as you said science was on the topic of aging?

-Kerry O.

Well, I suppose we could always throw modern science under the bus, go back to living in caves, worship the sun, and teach everyone to be psychics. That way they'd know when they were going to die and how. It would sure make retirement and estate planning a lot easier.

Maybe the Cappuchean monks were on to something when they posted an inscription reading "As you are now, we once were. As we are now, you will someday become' above their bone crypt?


-Kerry O.

Sure they have-- there's still lots more work to be done, but the short version of why we age is because of replication errors when the DNA in our cells is transcribed during cellular reproduction. That's why clones don't live long longer lives than their donors-- the clone is a copy of a pre-existing defect.

And there's a lot more to sentient human life than simple skin cells. If you research HeLa cells, those seemingly immortal cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks of which scientists have cultured some 20 tons of over the last 60 years, you'll find that the same thing that makes these cancer cells immortal is the same mechanism in reverse that causes aging. Designer rats can be bred with the cellular mechanism that causes very premature aging by suppressing telomerase activation.

So, it's not like scientists are in the dark about what causes aging.


-Kerry O.

Wny on God's green earth would they do that?? There's much more political capital to be had by letting the wolves exact their dues from Edwards' political carcass.

Myself, an Independent, I've always thought about Edwards the way many conservatives are beginning to feel about Newt Gingrich-- that he was a phony who talked a lot of talk while enriching himself from the agenda and values he so conveniently expoused when the cameras were on. And then didn't make good upon when the cameras were off.

If this had been Gingrich, we'd be hearing the 'M' word-- "He made some Mistakes, but....". Nothing like a little word lawyering to keep politics interesting.

-Kerry O.

The Romans didn't 'see' the Visigoths coming over the hill for them, either, yet history tells us how that worked out.

Before the neurodocs at Johns Hopkins fixed it, one Sunday about 7 years ago my congenital arterial defect started leaking an increasing amount of blood into my brain. When the brain/blood barrier is broken, one of the symptoms can be partial blindness. In my case, it was the very first manifestations that something was really wrong. From having been warned about it from practitioners I had during the previous occurrence, I knew that denial was not an option-- in some cases like mine, it gets you very dead. I got ready to go the ER well before the worst of it hit, and because I wasn't in denial about it, I survived it. I had medtechs working on me in an ambulance when my heart went nuts and my breathing stopped for a bit.

Had I been born in the Dark Ages, when faith trumped science, I would probably have been dead before my 35th birthday.


-Kerry O.

Well, maybe that explains why so many people still haven't experienced yesterday's Rapture. :)

And it's usually NOT a matter of skeptics not being able to see something, it's the lack of evidence provided by those who claim they _can_ see something that most other people can't.

Hallucination and delusion are the other side of the willful blindness coin.

Or, from the Wikipedia article on philosopher Sir Karl Popper about falsification and scientific theory:




-Kerry O.

Just like "If God is omnipotent, how come everything he makes dies?" :)


Or, if "faith can move mountains", why are do people who need to move mountains come to science for bulldozers and high explosives when holy books are so cheap?


-Kerry O.

Can God make a rock so big that even he can't pick it up?


-Kerry O.

I think you need to read the Federalist Papers, which were penned anonymously by the same guys who wrote the Constitution. One theme that permeates those papers is the obligation of a republic to protect the rights of an unpopular minority against what the authors often refer to as the 'violence and mischief' of the majority.

In other words, the majority can't vote to suspend the rights of the minority on prejudice alone. There are certain 'cards' that are always off the table.

Knowing how you feel about organized religions from reading your posts elsewhere on Mingle 2, allow me to pose this question: What would you do if a fascist Christian majority in this country decided to do exactly what you propose above-- use their superior numbers to put a cross or the fish on the flag of United States of America? Would you openly rebel by any means necessary to such an abrogation of the Constitution, up to and including burning said flag in protest?

Someone once said something to the effect that all that separates saints from sinners is the absence of adequate temptation.


-Kerry O.

... or one could, as one of the Supreme Court justices who wrote the majority opinion for the cases that repealed statutes forbidding flag burning suggested and wave YOUR flag while he burns HIS.

Burning can't destroy that which was never there, and waving your flag while he burns his is a profound demonstration of just that fact. Just as you can't UNINVENT genius by burning the books that contains it, you can't destroy the genius of the underlying Constitutional principles by burning a mere icon.

The same can't be said of those would-be dictators who, by wrapping themselves in the flag while they pillage personal freedoms, attempt to cloak the mischief of their lust for power in a cheap veneer of patriotism. It plays well with the sycophants, but in the end, the result is the always the same-- as with Joeseph McCarthy, NOT where the country needs to go.

-Kerry O.

I guess you'd have to ask Sarah Palin about that. From where I'm standing, Trump made a lot of noise, like he was The Bomb, and then went out without as much as a whimper after he lost his bluff with the President and folded like a cheap suit. At least Mitchell and Palin were in the game-- Trump has been a perennial gadfly.


-Kerry O.

Since we're on the subject of 'That Q Word', I hear Donald Trump has become available...I can almost see it now-- "Envoy Apprentice", the new MSNBC/Universal/Comcast reality series.


-Kerry O.