yes :)

"human pursuit is neither the pursuit of pleasure nor of power but of meaning. "

Also Naming a child can sometimes stamp a child.

So is it any wonder what an Ethiopian electrical engineer had in mind when he named his son Electron?

faith is very powerful. experience of its power unlocks hidden dimensions of life.

I don't like the name Electron - too negative.

I don't know why---but for some weird reason I was reminded of Biden on Thursday of this week going on and on about "I promise you, President Obama has got a big stick!"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...

Is this another ploy to get the women's vote?

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?...

Here is the general source :

<That's pretty much what I think about you. One of us is wrong.>

Quite correct. You're wrong. Let me put it this way, I can't disprove with 100% certainty that your young earth notion is wrong, but the evidence is that you are. I probably do have blind spot or two, but not in the area of denying evidence-based science.

<PiPi>, with whom I have almost as many disagreements as with you on matters of political philosophy, has the same blind spot as have most of the posters on this site - neither he nor most of the posters here are science-deniers. Faith-based assertions cannot stand up to the withering heat and light of empiricism. If you want to promote young earth creationism, then <provide objective evidence> in support of your notion. You can't validly tear down the evidence of science as being insufficient or unconvincing when firstly, there is a huge mass of it, and secondly, there is none to support your counter-notion let alone to invalidate the scientific evidence.

If you want to believe in something contrary to the evidence, that is entirely your prerogative. Personally there are things for which there is no evidence in which I do believe, but I don't believe in stuff which clearly runs contrary to the massive bulk of evidence. That would be irrational.

<And you know this, how?>

This question, which I asked of you - <and which you have not yet answered> - you've flung back at me?

All right, I'll answer that, but note that you didn't answer that question yourself. You simply asserted it as your understanding.

It's my understanding based on my research, which of course is derived from secondary and tertiary sources written by people who did the actual work in uncovering the evidence. I'd like to claim I was there but let's look at the <fact> that humans arrived in Australia 40,000 years or more ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehis...).

Back then, glaciation meant sea levels were lower than they are today by 100 or more metres and there was a land bridge connecting present day Australia with New Guinea and Tasmania, but none of these places were ever connected by land to Eurasia from which place modern humans must have arrived. The last connection the Australian continent (including Tasmania and New Guinea) had with other continents was with Antarctica 45 million years ago, hence it's characteristic fauna and flora whose evolution diverged from that of Antarctica and the rest of Gondwana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwana) since that historic sundering.

These people - modern humans - had to have arrived by sea, probably across the Wallace Line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallac...) unless they were able to walk across the water, or swim across, or fly across. So we have to conclude they came over on boats. It wasn't an ocean crossing feat equivalent to the mind boggling feats of the Polynesians a few thousand years ago, as the lower sea levels at the time meant they "only" had to cross about 90 kilometres of sea, but it was impressive nonetheless.

Actual evidence (ie: remains) of boats don't really appear in the historical narrative of the species until about 30,000 years later (the oldest boat found is 10,000 years old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesse_...), although it seems clear that Crete had to have been reached by boat even before the aborigines hit Australia. One estimate is that Crete was first populated 130,000 years ago: http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/n...

All this stuff is easy to glean from readily available sources such as Wikipedia. I can if you like provide you with a raft of other online sources, let alone a shipload of other sources.

Sounds like conjecture to me:

<The authors cite research which claims that many future criminals were aborted rather than born, lowering the population of crooks. (Most abortions are among the poor, more of the poor turn to crime, etc.)>

This is more about crapping on the poor than about crime prevention. The notion of "future criminals", especially when defined as a product of socio-economic stratification, is a dud at best and offensive and probably racist (more people of "colour" are poor, relatively speaking) BS.

The issue here, if indeed there is one other than shallow partisan propaganda, is that poverty prevention or alleviation will reduce blue collar crime rate. White collar crime, especially high level criminality at the corporate level, is still under-prosecuted. How many banksters have been arrested since the GFC started?

Note that this does not include corporate income that any of these 55 M might have owed as a result of creating successful businesses.>

This is a joke, right?

Who would pay for education for all those kids? We can't educate the ones we have now.

Who would pay for for health care for all those kids? We can't afford care for the ones we have now.

Maybe though if we cut taxes more for the top 1% enough extra money would flow in/trickle down to fund it all.

<and laid down in sedimentary levels> And what does *this* mean?