Imagine having a motor scooter with a five-gallon tank, but the nearest gas
station is six gallons away. You can not fill your tank with trips to the
gas station because you burn more than you can bring back -- it's
impossible for you to cover your overhead (the size of your bankroll and
the price of the gas are irrelevant). You might as well put your scooter up
on blocks because you are "out of gas" -- forever.

CENTRAL BANKERS CAN NOT PRINT ENERGY! If a country must spend more-than-one
unit of energy to produce enough goods and services to buy one unit of
energy, it will be impossible to cover the overhead (e.g., Zimbabwe). At
that point, every country's economic machine is "out of gas" -- money and
common stocks worthless -- forever.

See ENERGETIC LIMITS TO GROWTH, by Jay Hanson, ENERGY Magazine, Spring,
1999; http://www.dieoff.com/page175.htm

"Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police." -- Orwell,
1984

Conan was wrong. It has nothing to do with slaughtering your enemies.

Enjoying a CAO Black Churchill with a Tesseron XO cognac and a Knappogue Castle Irish whiskey, while listening to the spring peepers begin their mating season calls under a full moon.

That is best in life.

100 comedians, 1 very dirty joke!

OK, here's the joke:

A guy goes into a talent agency, says "Hey! I've got a great act!

"Really?" says the agent.

"Really!" says the guy.

"I see great acts all the time. Not interested." says the agent.

"Oh come on!" says the guy.

"Nope. I don't care about it unless I can see it." says the agent.

"You want to see it? Hold on." says the guy.

The guy leaves the office. The agent goes back to reading his paper.

The guy comes back in.

He's got his wife, 2 kids, a dog, a vaccuum cleaner, a chainsaw, and a jar of plutonium.

The agent says "What's this?"

The guy says "I'm gonna show you the act!"

The agent says, "OK, fine. You have 5 minutes. Go."

The guy steps up to the center of the room, and says:

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."

"OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!"

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

at the Giant Eagle on Belmont in Youngstown OH

"I Don't Make Enough Money to Vote Republican"

Bolded words were in red:

Abortion doesn't make you un-pregnant, it makes you the mother of a dead baby!

UG! Gog hate women and soft people! Gog beat on lieburals! Gog strong!

Many, if not all, of the fundamentalist sects believe that the Bible is the whole and complete word of God. It is literally true, and contains everything that is worth knowing about everything. God in a book form.

This is in my opinion anti-spiritualism. Spirituality is the search for answers to the great questions in life: Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? etc. If the questions are already answered, then what's the point? If all the answers have already been discovered, then why even try to go on? There's no more point to life if it's already been drawn out and finished for you.

If the Bible is seriously supposed to be all the answers, and all you have to do is read it and all the answers are laid out, then it is nothing more than a glorified Cliff's Notes. Yuck.

Namely, that if Bush or Cheney actually went and killed people right in front of them, they would brag about how manly an act it was.

------------------------------------------------------------------
To: Stuart Scott
I think this is giving Cheney a lot of "Don't mess with me" credibility.
"It was an accident, see? An accident. Lots of people have accidents. Could happen any time. That's why people need to be careful."
16 posted on 02/14/2006 11:44:56 AM PST by dropandgimme20 (You could fall down the stairs and break your neck. Happens every day.)
< Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies | Report Abuse >
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Thank you, freepers, for proving that my lack of faith in what is laughably called 'humanity' in your case is justified.

My sister is a fundamentalist, but not one of the ones that goes to picket gays and things like that. Nevertheless, she is a fundamentalist, and believes that the Bible is literal truth, and that the statements in it are commandments-no metaphor, no translation errors, ec. Jesus wrote the book down under the command of King James. You know the type.

So, she refuses to read the Catholic Bible. It has several books that the King James version does not. I asked her why, and she said she was afraid of it, because the information in those books missing from the KJV was misleading.

This got me to thinking: all the books in the Bible have different origins. The New Testament books were gleaned out of writings that came from different times and different people. They came from all over the place. There has been a lot of argument as to whether some different books should be included (the Apocrypha comes to mind), or should have been excluded (there's a lot of theologions that say that Revelations should have been left out, because it confuses the message more than clarifies it). With all this going on, how can someone claim to have any kind of accuracy in their beliefs, or any kind of understanding of their relationship with God? How can someone believe that the Bible is inerrant, when they refuse to look at specific books that had just as much of a valid origin as the books they do read?

1) In the 1960's (just 40 years ago) it was common for the average wage-earner to work a blue-collar job and support a family, which included a stay-at-home spouse. Try doing that today.

2) 25 years ago, the average CEO in a major company made a salary on the order of 40-50 times what the average employee did-easily enough to live a life of luxury. Now it's 10 times that, so each CEO equals some 500 average citizens in the economy. This becomes very important when you consider that those 500 people do a lot more driving of the basic economy than the CEO, buying groceries, durable goods, etc.

3) 30 years ago legalization of marijuana was a serious topic of discussion. The subject isn't even discussable now. In that time there hasn't been a great increase in problems with marijuana use, and there have been problems with several other drugs (crack, crystal meth are just 2 examples) that aren't getting addressed.

4) 30 years ago the various civil rights movements were beginning to make progress. Today's society is openly racist and sexist.

We all know these things at DU, and talk about them openly. Still, it is sometimes shocking to reflect that all these changes, this reversal of decency, has happened within most of our lifetimes. A very short period indeed, to try and reverse us all into a new middle ages.

http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentD...

Anyone evr hear of this site? It's like a Publisher's Clearinghouse for Rightwing talking points.

Predictions for 2006
Friday, December 30, 2005

Nancy Pelosi will elope with Osama Bin Laden. They'll divorce months later when she discovers that he is too "Pro America."


Sean Penn will write a new book called "Little Sean and His Friend Abdul." It will be the first pop up book where bits of Abdul get spread all over the room. Of course, it will become a huge hit. Sean will win an Oscar just for his interviews--but will be embarrassed to learn that the academy thought he was "playing retarded."


At a Los Angeles press conference, Ward Churchill will gain new standing in the African-American community after announcing that the NAACP has given him an ID card designating him "Black like Rice." After the press conference, Mr. Churchill is pulled over by the LAPD and given the initiation ceremony.


Al Sharpton will discover Jesus Christ and become a Baptist minister.

I've been puzzling over how Bush can keep the support he has. Why isn't it getting through to so many people exactly what is going on?

The American Badass.

It's the people that bully and throw their weight around, that think that being 'manly' means intimidating and starting fights for fun, and laugh at other people's pains and misery. John Wayne wannabes that have their self-image rolled up in the idea of strutting around and scaring kids. The war was candy for them. They went on and on about how it was about time we had a president the 'did what he needed to do,' rather than be diplomatic. They see the world as a series of King of the Hill games, where their only worth is how many people they can push over.

We can't win people like this over with arguments or logic. They see arguments and logic as weak and 'womanly', because they aren't violent and thoughtless kinds of solutions. How do you argue rationally against someone who is deep-down afraid that they are not a 'real man'?

There's always been a canard about how Americans love their freedom. The latest revelations concerning wiretapping should prove that one false. Americans can't distinguish between freedom and material comfort. We talk about this being a free nation, and then couch it in terms of our standard of living, as if the fact that everyone has a TV and cable makes us free. The people that don't care whether they are being spied on clearly don't care that they no longer have the freedom to not be spied on, yet ironically they are the ones that typically scream about their freedom.

We've become a comfort-seeking nation. We don't think deeply because it's too difficult, we place utmost importance on having the latest or most expensive gadget, and we plug ourselves into the matrix daily for hours on end with the TV. We claim to be informed, but almost no news of the outside world ever makes it into our awareness-most of us can't even name the majority of other countries, let alone who their leaders are or what thier culture is like. Like imperial Rome, we expect the world to suck up to us, and get mad when it doesn't. Meanwhile, we're content to sit back and lap up McDonalds nondigestible fries and buy inferior crap from Wal-Mart.

How can we take America back? The average American doesn't want to go back.

Actually, there's so many disturbing points that they can't all be listed. So here's one of them.

On the show, the woman goes into a rant and starts screaming about how terrible the other family is. One of the points she brings up is that they follow astrology, which she loudly equates to witchcraft and satanism.

Now, I'm not going to critique her opinions-she has the intellectual capacity of a brick IMO. But here's what I find distrubing about this:
according to Matthew chapter 2 there is the famous visit from the three wise men. It is accepted that these men were astrologers, which means the first to experience the Epiphany (other than Mary and Joseph) were astrologers. There's a point to this being mentioned-it was their wisdom and knowledge which led them to find Jesus. In other words, it was the skills with astrology that made it possible for the Magi to validate the newborn Jesus as the king of Jews.

Which means that the nutty woman, or (more likely) her church deny the story of the Epiphany. They are openly preaching heresy.

Am I surprised by this? Yes and no. I've attended fundamentalist churches before, and I know there's some twisted things presented in them. However, they are usually just twisted things. Claiming that astrologers are evil definately includes the Magi, and the point of the story is that they used their skills (which are evil, according to her) to validate that the son of God had been born. This is openly a denial of the Gospel of Matthew.

Can they claim to be Christian, claim that they believe in the literal truth of the bible as the direct word of God, and then deny the Gospel of Matthew? No. IMO this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. There's a lot of fundamentalist churches that corrupt and twist the message of the bible, but this denies it.

I have heard that he didn't, and that the idea of Hell as a punishment for people instead of fallen angels came from the middle ages. But if that's the case, what about Luke 16?
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/luke/luke16...