Crowds are fairly easy to persuade; despots have done it throughout the ages using rhetoric. Young children particularly have a built-in drive to conform and will minic the behaviour of others.

As with all of these things I would like to know exactly what happened (and not what some reporter writes to sell newspapers) before thinking about any hypothesis.

Yes. People should be concerned with their own genitals and leave other people to deal with theirs.

Utter nonsense.


Those titles are simply acknowledgements of an office. Do you also object to "President Smith" or "Judge Andrews"? It reads like you are the belligerent one here.


As I wrote explicitly, this is nothing to do with sexual identity.
It is the opposite of what you claim: circumlocutions prevent clear communication.


So it was someone's choice to be born with ambiguous genitals (for example)?


In my example ('If the driver wants to stop, it should press the brake') 'it' refers to the driver, a living, breathing being, presumably. I think you'll have to go a long way to find common usage of 'it' like that.

What a sorry place that is so obsessed with people's genitals.

[never really hear about earthquakes/volcanoes in Canada...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Canada

Some really big ones

I would be interested in the basis of your opinion and your refutation of the overwhelming evidence in favour of the theory of evolution.


That's like saying "the fact that my DNA closely resembles my brother's does not mean we're related".


We ARE apes. Humans and chimps have evolved differently (because of different environmental pressures) from a common ape ancestor.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_07


You are begging the question by asking 'who'. What evidence do you have that these things were brought into existence by a person? A better question would be 'how did these things come to be?'


I assume you are aware that the Earth's orbit is an ellipse so there is no 'exact measurement' of its distance from the sun? It varies between about 147 and 152 million kilometers. I wouldn't call a variation of 5 million kilometers 'exact'.
The moon's rotational speed has been locked to the time of its orbit around the Earth by tidal forces.


The one factually correct thing you have written.


There are countless creation myths and they appear in all cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths

A basic book on astronomy should give actual answers to most of your questions.

[Over the past 30 days, there have been 96 earthquakes at Mt. Hood, and most of them have been centered on the south side of the mountain. Why this is so alarming is because it was also the south side of Mt. St. Helens that violently exploded back in 1980.]

I cannot see why particular sides of the mountains are of any more alarm than their names both having a capital 'H'.

There are two separate issues: titles and pronouns.

There is a great difference between titles such as 'His Holiness' or 'Her Majesty' which are used to make a few people seem important (whether they are or not) and terms like Mr or Mrs. Even so, they can usually be avoided by using the person's name or job title: Pope Fred and Queen Sandra seem quite respectful and clear.
I have always hated neologisms like Ms. The obvious solution there, if you really must use a title, would have been simply to follow the male interpretations, where Mr is for an adult and Master is for a child, and use Mrs for an adult and Miss for a child, irrespective of marital status.

English does have a problem in the gender-neutral third person pronoun having connotations of lack of humanity: 'it' just doesn't seem appropriate to use for people. 'If the driver wants to stop, it should press the brake' sounds terrible (but not as bad as using 'he or she'). Such cases can be avoided by rephrasing or using the plural ('If drivers want to stop, they should press the brake'). I would be happy if we could come up with a new pronoun that is both pronounceable and not just plain silly. Even though it grates to my ear, perhaps 'they' as a singular is the right answer (just as the singlular 'thee' was replaced by the plural 'you'). Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with a person's sexual identity.

People experience things that they cannot identify or explain. Rather than accept that something is unknown they invent explanations like ghosts or aliens.

A good example is pareidolia, where the mind tends to interpret meaningless images as though they were known things (hence the visions of deities on toast or faces on Mars).

[Doesn't it seem incredible how complex the human body is, what it can do, what we're born to do, what we grow up to do? This is intelligent design of the highest order.]
No. This is one possible result of imperfect reproduction and natural selection.

[This isn't something that started out as a fish in the ocean, come on.]
No, fish came after a very long line of living things.

[Something had to make the fish, or the plankton, or the cells, or whatever was the very first matter.]
The laws of physics are responsible.

[I really think we came from somewhere else, and it wasn't Earth. =)]
That's possible, but all it does is move the question elsewhere. Wherever it came from, life would have had to develop there. Imperfectly self-reproducing molecules exposed to varying environments are all you need to get evolution started.

[Think about something else too. The telephone, the computer, the steamship, the automobile, the rocket ship. How do these masterful inventions come about?]
Very bright people, time, money and enthusiasm are all you need.

[Do we just come up with these ideas]
Yes

[or...have we built them long before?]
So improbable as to warrant the answer no.


[I can point you to a picture of a dispenser that took Greek drachmas circa 4,000 B.C. or so. Or the great Library of Alexandra that burnt to the ground over 2000 years ago, and quite likely contained some of the most valuable documents in history.]
Yes. Ancient people were not all stupid. What is your point?

Your post suggests that living things choose to evolve ("there becomes a need to evolve", "species...trial and error"). The only relevant thing that creatures do is reproduce with small variations. If those variations find themselves in an environment where they improve the creatures' reproductive success they are selected for by that environment and appear with increasing frequency in subsequent generations.

FYI: Whales are mammals, not fish.

[On Friday, a federal judge ruled Arpaio to have been in civil contempt of the court for ignoring the judge’s orders to end racial profiling.]

Seems a clear case of contempt to me, or is this sheriff above the law?

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

Energy is the ability to do work. So you are writing:

"There is a higher ability to do work, as everything is made of the ability to do work. Plenty of lower ability to do work.

God is the bulk of ability to do work, thus is the highest ability to do work. The all."

It's even more meaningless when you see it like that.

You should avoid quote mining. Sagan followed the comment you quoted with:

"I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that might be true. They have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course, I could be wrong."

So I assume you would be even-handed and condemn any American politician who tried to influence the UK public.

You would then have to condemn these two: Obama, who stated that the UK should stay in the EU, and Trump who stated the opposite.

Are you suggesting that a person does not have the right to respond when mentioned by one of your politicians?

Being unable to move while asleep (sleep paralysis) is a natural protection mechanism to prevent you from harming yourself while dreaming.
Sometimes it takes longer than usual to go away while you are waking up and you become aware of it.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sleep-paralysis/Pages/Introduction.aspx

Impressive images.