Quinn tells an interesting tale which you aren’t likely to get anywhere else.

I’m worried that the RNC is trying to remake Cheney’s public image for a run for president. The writer of the book, Cheney, has been all over the media. He is apparently paid by Murdoch somehow.

But, Murdoch is also funding Hillary. Are we looking at a Clinton/Cheney ‘08 ticket?

I showed a relative(preachers wife) the youtube of Bush giving the world the “finger”. It was the one where he laughs about his one finger salute. She about fainted. It had to change her opinion.

That’s a very cruel thing to do…hilarious, but cruel. I mean, opening someone’s eyes to the REAL world has got to be a shock.

Sounds like Matrix. Did she take the red pill? Did you call her ‘coppertop’? Heh.

Scarecrow, if you change “mean” to “tough”, and accept the fact that a lot of these followers of the Muslim religion are trying to wipe out not just the USA but all of Western Civilization; and when you realized that Americans ARE electing the Leader of the Free World, then yes, I do think that voters are still looking for the candidates that will be the toughest against the Aggressor Muslims. I think a Rudy/Huckabee or a Fred/Rudy ticket or a Rudy/Fred ticket would be great…

You sound like a Tom “Nuke Mecca and Medina” Tancredo manto me. You should check in with him!

Try Bedlam State Memorial Hospital

Hard work and do it yourself is what made this country great! Liberty flows from that very simple idea….

Yeah…didn’t Franklin say “Surely we must hang separately, or we will surely be hung together”?

And all those solitary Calistogas crossing the Great Divide avoiding the well-worn rutted trails of the Mormon and Oregon Trails ended up
fertilizing the wildflowers.

I think the only American to do anything exclusively on his own was the Unibomber!

Generally speaking the conservatives believe that men and women were born evil. The liberals do not share this attitude.

The Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes is better suited to the Republicans than is the GOP’s hypocritical paraise of New Testemant.

Perhaps, but The Leviathan’s view that humans had to be coerced into civilization by laws that were rigidly enforced flies in the face of what we know about non-human Primate Social Organization. Quite simply, Sociality and such features as cooperation and altruism are embedded into the genetic-developmental fabric of most mammals.

Back to theology, the original design flaw became evident once we collectively began to realize our own mortality [the true Eden knowledge, I argue] and faced a classic prisoners’ dilemma. If everyone acted in a selfish way the human race would die out. We needed to figure out something to counteract that. Hence religion.

This is how I try to explain faith to friends. I’m a pre-Nicean Christian myself.

That’s a modification of the Hobbes model of the rise of civilization from “savagery”. But the problem wth it is that it presumes that humans somehow transcended selfishness, which was the “natural state”.

Any Primatologist or Sociobiologist will tell you that unbridled selfishness is absent in ALL social animals…there are a whole grab-bag of unstated contracts, cooperation, recipricol altruism, kin-selection, deferred gratifications, and complex social organizations with different strategic roles.

In fact, it goes back even further…hard to see how “SELF”-ishness somehow meshes with Darwinian selection when parental (particularly maternal) care and sacrifice is essential to getting surviving offspring into the next generation.

Infections Acquired at Massachusetts Hospitals Cost up to $473M Annually, Report Finds
[Aug 10, 2007]

Infections contracted during stays at hospitals in Massachusetts cost between $200 million and $473 million annually, as a result of extended hospital stays and the costs of medications and surgeries, according to a state report released on Wednesday, the Boston Globe reports. The report — compiled from various sources and mandated as a part of health care reform legislation — issued 135 recommendations to prevent the spread of bacteria that causes infections (Smith, Boston Globe, 8/9).

Rayne @ 102

Heh. If you only knew…

Actually, I believe that humans design technology in unconscious tandem with the architecture of the human genome and menome. It’s archetypal, comes out of our deepest recesses that we can’t access directly with our conscious. Earliest computers were more like our most primitive, reptilian brain, able to respond to simple stimuli; later computers were able to do higher processing, evolving not unlike our own brains did.

Religion is part of the human menome, a subset of culture that is replicable and transferable (key criteria for memes), and works to regulate many human functions like reproduction at software level in order to override on-board, wet-wired presets imbedded in the genome. But religion can be highly flawed – ha! minor understatement there – and we often have either patches or complete purges when the software labeled “religion” fails.

Except usually, when the failing religion ends up purging healthy ones. Some religions are a lot like cancer.

Actually, religion is virus-like, as are many memes. A meme can take out a lot of healthy memes in order to take resources for its own perpetuation.

But as one might have noted by reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, viruses have a built-in limiter. They will kill off 90% of its hosts; going beyond that threshhold is suicide. So other religions may always have a niche in the 10% of the community that must necessarily escape the self-destructive tendencies of so-called “successful” religions.