The serious stuff. Debates and discussions on politics, religion, etc.
So far, it doesn't look to be a fizzle like their nuke.North Korea launched a rocket Sunday, despite warnings from Japan, South Korea and the United States not to proceed. The rocket, launched at 11:30 a.m. -- 0230 UTC, passed over Japan, with...
Suppose you're a candidate for president or prime minister of your respective country. You have to set out five or six areas that your government will focus on in the course of their time in power. What do you pick? Here's my five (British PM): ...
Do newspapers provide a service that cannot reasonably be replaced by any of the extant substitutions (such as TV news, the internet, etc.)? Can an argument be made for subsidizing the production of local newspapers?
It's a popular idea (I'm not going to use the grossly overused and misused term "meme") that people like me, who wickedly refuse to believe in God, will change their tune PDQ when they find themselves in terrible danger (e.g., in combat, on a plane...
I think the 2nd Amendment was a mistake and that it has caused more harm than good. I don't want guns outlawed, but I also do not think they should ever have been given Constitutional protection. I think they should be treated like any other item...
Talking with an acquaintance the other day and she mentioned that friends of hers just lost a baby boy, minutes after birth, to some condition that I don't remember. I said something like, "How awful for them. I'm so sorry to hear that." She...
I've been reading about Lyndon Johnson recently, mainly through Robert Dalleck's series of biographies and it's struck me just how utterly naive and uninformed the majority of people are about Robert Kennedy's bid for the presidency in 1968. of...
I'll keep it short: Why is God allowing (or causing) my cat to die of cancer? Note: I'm not a religious person. I am in fact an atheist. But this isn't meant as a gotcha. I'm just curious what your thinking is.
Protesters of the G-20 in London today are chanting "Abolish Money". This boggles the mind. No mater what your beef is with the G-20 or the WMF or the World Bank. No one is going to listen to anything you have to say after hearing this chant. This...
I'm sure he was a decent guy (personally), but what's with all this asskissing and deification?
Well! It's as if the world heard our discussion and brought us a real life example of what I feared in our scramble to make assisted suicide legal. Swiss Assisted Suicide center aims to help a perfectly healthy woman die alongside her terminally...
Economic Left/Right: 9.12 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.82 My Graph I'm pretty much the diametric opposite of everyone on this board economically. I'm more Socially Libertarian than I got last time I took this test, when I got positive...
As I understand it, the IWC was set up as a self-regulatory body of the whaling nations. Since then, countries that do not even have a coast line have become members of the body, and a moratorium on commercial whaling was imposed by the body in the...
The Times, reporting, say: MI5 is to be investigated by police about allegations that it was complicit in the interrogation and torture of a Guantánamo Bay detainee. Baroness Scotland of Asthal, QC, the Attorney-General, has asked police to...
A Colorado Springs man who narrates the Bible in Spanish on CDs and works in the Spanish broadcasting department of Focus on the Family appeared in court Monday in Golden on two felony counts of using the Internet to lure a 15-year-old girl for sex,...
ABC put up an article where an attorney says: "We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00," she said. "We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from...
From here: The bill, supported by the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives and Senate, would allow same-sex marriage starting in September. It would make Vermont the third New England state after Massachusetts and Connecticut to...
Are we on the verge of a depression? Opinion seems mixed, though it appears that Eastern Europe is on the verge of implosion, which could take the whole of the EU down with it, and the UK's also in a bad way (BBC news reports were saying that the...
I'm an atheist, I probably score a 6.5 on Richard Dawkins' 1 to 7 scale, with 7 being complete non belief. I was watching Ghost Whisperer yesterday (this is my 0.5% failure) even though I don't believe in the supernatural I do enjoy fiction about...
From here: In a unanimous ruling issued Friday, the court upheld a 2007 Polk County District Court judge's ruling that the law was unconstitutional. If I had picked what state would be next on this list, Iowa would not have been my guess. ...
Last night I watched a local news report on a 26 year old man with an incurable and very painful disease who wants to die. An anti-assisted suicide person was interviewed and her reaction was so strong in feeling that she knew what was best for the...
I'm curious about this. I've read in a few places that the consensus amongst historians was that Jesus did exist. What is the evidence for this? The only evidence that I know of is a reference to "followers of Chrestus" by a Roman historian...
As far as I can tell, this is the mentality of the "anti-PC" person: There are many people who want to censor and sanitize public discourse and entertainment. These people are often in positions of power, whether politically or as media. They...
The G20 Summit of the world's leading economies is taking place in London where on the table will be discussions about the Current Economic climate. The question is will they say one thing at the summit on no protectionism, regulating finance...
A brief discussion about my progress with my depression and "post addiction" therapy with my husband this morning lead him to utter the following decree: "Happiness and contentment are not a way of life. They are moments in a life that cannot...
in 1789, The U.S. House of Representatives held its first full meeting in New York City; Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania was elected the first speaker. on this day It seems fitting that the first meeting of the House of...
this thread is an attempt to examine all eyewitness accounts and their implications and meaning for the way history will view the events of the attack on the WTC on Sept. 11, 2001. This thread in great debates was covering the physics of involved...
There is a lot of frustration out there in the world about the financial sectors, about the ultra-wealthy, about oil money and banking money and haves versus have-nots. A just-released poll says that 75% of Americans know someone who has been...
My view regarding the ethics of such a thing is that as they were extinct already, any life that we gave them, whether it be the crappiest jobs that are hardest to fill, rooting out terrorists from cave systems, or fulfilling vital medical...
http://www.theage.com.au/world/beheader ... -8qok.html This was bound to make headlines, but was there ever a shred of doubt that this man was criminally insane?
In 2007, statistics came out that predicted a sharp uptick in the rate of Alzheimer Disease as baby boomers age. Alzheimer is an expensive disease, requiring dedicated care. Because it complicates treatment for every other illness, the new...
Mods: I was not sure whether you'd want this in GD or CH. I picked CH because it's a current event and political in nature. Please move it elsewhere if I chose incorrectly. I find this interesting: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/03/same.s...
In the UK, we have along held tradition it seems of throwing various items at our politicians to show our disfavour of them. This time round, Peter Mandelson, the Business Secretary aka the Prince of Darkness, was green slimed by a protestor about...
Not looking for an argument, I haven't heard everything about her; however why wasn't her behavior 'Saintly'? The big issue I have with MT is that she became the face of doing good works to help the poor and suffering. Money started to flow in...
The United States of Europe has an interesting ring to it, for one thing, few of the countries even work in the same way as the USA. However, as a political and trading block, if it existed, it would rival any in the world today. On it's own the...
John and Cindy McCain's 24-year-old daughter Meghan went from blogging on the campaign trail to writing for The Daily Beast. She recently decided that she wanted to take on Ann Coulter: I straight up don’t understand this woman or her...
From here: Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday outlined a shift in the enforcement of federal drug laws, saying the administration would effectively end the Bush administration’s frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana. ...
This link on a hitler youth bill (their term, not mine) just passed by the House is on the page linked in this post. Any opinions? I don't quite know which way to swing. It sounds like a good idea, but it could certainly get out of hand. ...
From here: Two-out-of-three Americans (67%) believe that politicians who received campaign contributions from American International Group (AIG) should return the money. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 21%...
From here: Spurred by anger over A.I.G. bonuses, the House voted 328 to 93 to levy a 90 percent tax on any company accepting more than $5 billion in bailout money. Well, while I read that this was a possibility this morning, if you had asked...
The Spanish Civil War saw the axis powers and the USSR square off in a proxy war. Suppose that it never had happened. Would WW2 have turned out differently? Wasn't the Spanish Civil War a test ground for new German tactics? Would the Germans had...
Source. A couple of British tabloid columnists seem to be fanning the flames of Obama hate, specifically in regards to Prime Minister Brown's visit. It wasn't enough of a big deal, they complain. But isn't it a breach of protocol to treat a...
Formalism is the idea that mathematics is just a "symbol manipulation game". No intuition is necessary, you just follow the rules and push syntax around. This was especially popular at the start of the 20th century, and Hilbert was perhaps the...
In recent years, I've seen calls for the canonization of (in order of frequency) Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Pope Benedict XVI recently selected Jeanne Jugan and Father Damien (of Hawaiian leper colony fame)...
“I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed,” Grassley said. “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people...
How will Gordon Brown's record as Chancellor of the Exchequer be judged? On the one hand, he claimed to have ended boom and bust, liberalised city regulations and somehow managed to set us up as being the most exposed of all Western nations to the...
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.. I looked at this inflation calculator http://www.westegg.com/inflation/. A dollar and three cents in 2007 bought what a dollar would buy in 2006. I know this inflation rate isn't stable, in some years its...
As I watch political discourse in this country sink to the level of idiots like Sean Hannity and Randi Rhodes, I ask this question: Why are people so willing to take a side? This isn't a bitch about how there's no real discussion anymore, just...
Where exactly do the established laws of logic come from? Are they innate, or are they in some sense learned, passed down from generation to generation? Why, for instance, do the majority of people not accept that there are true contradictions...
I'm sure he is a decent guy (personally), but what's with all this asskissing and deification? Seems only fair, considering the Reagan thread
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