BEEP! BEEP! IT'S ME.

"Begin at the beginning,and go on till you come to the end: then stop." (Lewis Carroll, 1832-1896)

Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked."Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat."I don't know," Alice answered."Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."

"So long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation. "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

"All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"

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Name: Beep Beep
Location: Australia

I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe. Like Arthur Dent from "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", if you do not have a Babel Fish in your ear this blog will be completely unintelligible to you and will read something like this: "boggle, google, snoggle, slurp, slurp, dingleberry to the power of 10". Fortunately, those who have had the Babel Fish inserted in their ear, will understood this blog perfectly. If you are familiar with this technology, you will know that the Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation. It excretes energy in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said; or in this case, what was read. The Babel Fish, thanks to scientific research, reverses the problem defined by its namesake in the Tower of Babel, where a deity was supposedly inspired to confuse the human race by making them unable to understand each other.

"DIFFICILE EST SATURAM NON SCRIBERE"

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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

"Don't Want To Be An American Idiot"

Video Transcript: -

Here is one simple piece of evidence which supports the theory of evolution. Protein sequence is produced through the translation of a non-lapping degenerate triplet code.

All code for alanine = GCA, GCT, GCG, GCC

All code for proline = CCA, CCT, CCG, CCC

So these 2 mutations will not effect the protein. And therefore have no effect on the organism.

But there's a complication. Condon bias can effect the rate of translation and therefore have an impact on fitness.

So these mutations are not as neutral as we thought. In humans though, one amino acid is special. Glutamic acid coded by GAA and GAG shows no bias. Therefore switching the codons has no effect on fitness.

So where does all this get us?

The theory of evolution makes a simple prediction. Since mutations occur at a low rate, closely related species should use the same condons for glutamic acid simply because there has not been enough time for divergence.

Intelligent Design/ Creationism make no prediction and therefore not testable and are not science.

So what do we find?

We are going to look at condons for glutamic acid in the alpha and beta chains of hemoglobin. We are going to compare 3 closely related species. 1. human 2. chimp 3. rhesus monkey

In both the hemoglobin alpha and beta chains ALL THE CONDONS MATCH.

Twelve of twelve positions use exactly the same codon in two species closely related to us. The probability of that occuring by chance is 1: 16, 777, 216.

But it didn't occur by chance. Evolution predicts this result. (Since mutations occur at a low rate, closely related species should use the same condons for glutamic acid simply because there has not been enough time for divergence.)

And that is only 2 of the 30,000 genes in our genome. And we only compared 3 species. This is only one of millions of pieces of evidence that supports the theory of evolution. Think about it.

For further information on evolution see:




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Sunday, October 29, 2006

Does Religion Make You A Better Person?




VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

The USA is one of the most religious countries in the world. Does that make it the best country in the world? Is it the most moral country in the world? Logically the most religious country in the world would also be the most moral. Logically the least religious country in the world would also be the most immoral.

How do we determine the morality of a country? Crime rate? Sexual behavior? The least religious large country is Japan. 80% of japanese accept evolution and only 10% believe there is a god. This is out of 100 million people. Japan has one of the lowest crime rates and teen pregnancy rates in the developed world. Next in line as the most moral countries are Norway, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. Approximately 60% of the population of these countries accept evolution as a fact. Fewer than one in three believe in a deity. They have very little teen pregnancy and the homocide rates are approximately 1-2 per 100,000.

How does the USA stack up against these godless countries? Approximately 82% believe in god and 13% accept evolution. The USA is the most religious developed country in the world. It should be the most moral country in the developed world. Is it? It is just the opposite. The USA is the most religious and the most immoral country in the developed world. The USA has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. The USA has the highest homocide rate in the developed world. It is five times greater than these godless countries and 10 times greater than Japan.

The correlation is very clear, the more religious a country is, the more immoral it is. Religion does more harm than good. Religion tends to weaken rather than strengthen people's ability to participate in society. Religion makes it less likely that they will respect social customs and laws. Does religion make you a better person? Religion absolves them of all other responsibilities.

Those who are "born again" have dimished respect for others who do not share their belief. Convinced that only the bible has "the truth", they lose their intellectual curiousity and their ability to reason. Their priority becomes not the world they live in, but themselves.

The more people prioritize themselves rather than those around them, the weaker society becomes. As for sex, religion encourages ignorance rather than responsible behavior. In these godless countries (Japan, Norway, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands) sex education includes contraception reducing the risk of unwated pregnancies.

Such an approach recognizes that young people have the right to make their own choices and helps them make decisions which benefit them and society as a whole. In America, faith-based abstinence programs deny them that right. The results are soaring rates of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.

Abstinence programs rest on the same weak intellectual foundation as creationism and intelligent design. Faith discourages unpredjudiced analysis. Reasoning is subverted to rationalization that supports rather than questions assumptions. The result is a self contained system that mantains an internal logic no matter how absurd. Despite all its fine words, religion has brought in its wake violence, prejudice and sexual disease.

Families that pray together stay together. No! Divorce rates are significantly higher amongst christians than other groups. Approximately 90% of divorces among "born agains" occur after they have been "saved." Atheists and agnostics have a much lower divorce rate than christians.

US Prison Populations:
Believers - 99.791%
Christians - 79.99%
Non-believers (16% of the US population) - only .208% of the prison population.

Does religion make you a better person? No! Does religion make our country better? No! Be a patriotic american. Give up your superstitions
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"Tut, tut, child," said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it." - Lewis Carroll 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'

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Friday, October 27, 2006

One Woman's Rapture Is Another Woman's Hood Ornament



Quotes of a similar type:

  • One man's magic is another man's engineering.
  • One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
  • One man's loss is another man's gain.
  • One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.
  • One man's folly is another man's wife.
  • One man's remorse is another man's reminiscence.
  • One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
  • One man's spam is another man's art.
  • One man's cult is another man's cult. (Haha)
  • One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.
  • One man's treasure is another man's trash.
  • One man's pork is another man's poison.
  • One man's diamond is another man's paving tile.
  • One man's thorn is another man's thistle.
  • One man's prison is another man's castle.


These sayings suggest that everything is just a matter of personal opinion. They suggest that there is no objective reality and that we all just exist in our own separate subjective realities of our own making, and that each opinion on reality has as much validity, credibility, weight and veracity as the next opinion.

Firstly, whether or not each of us have a personal view of the world, does not make each personal view reasonable. So how do we measure, assess, and evaluate information?

Human beings do not individually think the same, process information in the same manner or come to the same conclusions. We don't think the same way because we are all individually products of not only our environments, cultures, education etc, but we are also individuals according to our genetic prescriptors.

Having stated that we are all individuals with individual potentials, how do we assess or test information for veracity? One way to do this, and the most successful way of examining or critically analysing information so far, is through the use of reason. So, how each of us come to conclusions and the steps we use to arrive at those conclusions can be examined and tested according to reason and the laws of logic.

In the case of argument, reason is the ability of the human mind to form and operate on concepts in abstraction. Reason is used in accordance with rationality and logic in order to come to a decision about propositions, ideas, concepts, or beliefs.

Reason is the process of thinking which allows one to differentiate between a logical argument and a flawed argument. For example: If it can be shown that there is a flaw in one of the thought steps, then the conclusion is also likely to be flawed.

If, an individial lives in a world where they believe that everything is possible, it could be argued that they are essentially dooming themselves to a life of stasis, paralysis, and intellectual immobility.

Without the use of reason, everything we can imagine becomes a possibility as there is then no method to test for what is reasonable.

Therefore, if you claim to believe that everything is possible, what is to stop you from believing that if you think of a terrible human-eating monster that it will appear? And if you believed that it is possible for a monster to materialise simply through wishing it, you would try to not think, just in case your thoughts miraculously created said monster on top of your computer monitor.

Many things that humans can imagine, are considered to be highly improbable and are summarily dismissed through the use of reason.

What is also interesting is the notion that the above sayings only offer two choices. The choices of loss or gain, spam or art, treasure or trash, thorn or thistle. This type of thinking encourages people to think in black or white, either this or that, and is an example of the false dichotomy or the false dilema.

Flawed thinking often results in flawed conclusions. Just as flawed beliefs can result in human hood ornaments.

"The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason." - Benjamin Franklin


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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Who Said Which Quotes?

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Who Dislikes Atheists?

"We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out".

Who Is Patriotic?

"What we have to fight for is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the creator."

Who Dislikes Public Education?

"Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction."

Who Hates Liberalism?

"The main plank in the program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute for them the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood."

Who Is In Favour Of A Christian Nation?

"The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine."

Who Is For Family Values?

"It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."

Who Hates Blasphemy?

"Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise."

Who Hates Secularism?

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith."

Who Believes That Might Makes Right?

"Always before God and the world, the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills."

Who Protects Free Enterprise?

"We stand for the maintenance of private property. We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order."

Who Is A Fundamentalist Christian?

"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 of adders."

Who Loves Jesus?

"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."

Who Hates Sin?

"Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it."

Who Is Concerned With Morality?

"Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea."

Who Hates The Left?

"For not only are we ourselves aware of the element of weakness lying in our democrats, pacifists, and centrists; it is recognized even more by foreign countries, which measure the value of a possible alliance with us according to the weight of this burden."

Who Hates Communists?

"We have been engaged in a heroic struggle against the Communist threat to our nation, against the subversion of our culture, the destruction of our art and the corruption of our public morality. We have put an end to atheism and blasphemy."

Who Hates Prostitution?

"Prostitution is a disgrace to humanity, but it cannot be eliminated by moral lectures, pious intentions, etc.; its limitation and final abolition presuppose the elimination of innumerable preconditions."

Who Supports Stay At Home Moms?

"For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home. But what would become of the greater world if there were no one to tend and care for the smaller one? The great world cannot survive if the smaller world is not stable. We do not consider it correct for the women to interfere in the world of the man. We consider it natural if these two worlds remain distinct."

Who Believes Men Are More Intelligent Than Women?

"Love and devotion to a man are the highest virtues in a woman. Intelligence is not very important. My mother was certainly no genius, but she gave a great son to the people."



Click Here For The Answers ~~ Quiz Answers





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To Beep Or Not To Beep




"To beep or not to beep, that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of the outrageous coyote,
Or to run like hell and let him injure himself."

(with apologies to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III, scene i.)

Screw the coyote, he can get take-out.



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Monday, October 23, 2006

Family Planning


Family Planning Quotes:

  • "A birth control pill for men, that's fair. It makes more sense to take the bullets out of the gun than to wear a bulletproof vest." - Unknown
  • "Condoms aren't completely safe. A friend of mine was wearing one and got hit by a bus." ~ Bob Rubin
  • "Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion." ~ Spike Milligan
  • "It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry." ~ H.L. Mencken
  • "Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life." ~ Bertrand Russell



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Saturday, October 21, 2006

Does Your Invisible God Wear Invisible Clothes?

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And now, for your bedtime story, a little fairy story originally from Demark with a philosophical interpretation.

Once upon a time, many years ago, there lived an emperor who was quite an average fairy tale ruler, with one exception: he cared much about his clothes. One day he heard from two tailors named Guido and Luigi Farabutto that they could make the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they said, also had the special capability that it was invisible to anyone who was either stupid or not fit for his position.

Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the cloth, the emperor first sent two of his trusted men to see it. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see the cloth and so praised it. All the townspeople had also heard of the cloth and were interested to learn how stupid their neighbors were.

The emperor then allowed himself to be dressed in the clothes for a procession through town, never admitting that he was too unfit and stupid to see what he was wearing. For he was afraid that the other people would think that he was stupid.Of course, all the townspeople wildly praised the magnificent clothes of the emperor, afraid to admit that they could not see them, until a small child said:

'But he has nothing on!'

This was whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shouting that the emperor had nothing on. The emperor heard it and knew that they were correct, but held his head high and finished the procession.

Most of you will recognize this story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Anderson. The story is a morality play with a cautionary message: -

Just because everyone else believes something is true, doesn't mean it is. Or believing something doesn't make it true.

Many of us clothe ourselves in our beliefs. Those beliefs may be religious, political, cultural or economic. Sometimes these beliefs are loosely based in reason, but more often than not, they are based on something else. Many times they are based on our emotional and psychological desires.

The emperor was motivated to believe that he was wearing wonderful clothes because he didn't want to appear to be stupid or unfit for his station as emperor. So everything that his logical, rational mind told him concerning the non-existence of those clothes, he ignored. He ignored his logical, rational thoughts because he wanted his beliefs to validate and affirm his opinion of himself.

If you have firm beliefs, instead of being like the emperor and continuing on regardless of the absurdity of the belief; ask yourself why you believe what you believe. Most of us believe things because there is a payoff. That means we believe something because we think the belief benefits us in some way. We want the belief to validate us and to affirm our opinion of ourselves or the world we live in.

That is, people hope for an emotional or psychological payoff so that they will feel good about themselves. Unfortunately for the emperor, believing in the existence of something because he didn't want to appear stupid backfired.

The irony is, he didn't save himself from appearing stupid, or from appearing unfit to be emperor; his willingness to believe in an absurdity indicated that he WAS stupid and that he WAS unfit to be emperor.


"A believer is a bird in a cage. A freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing." - Robert Ingersoll



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Friday, October 20, 2006

"Christianity's Flying Circus"


From: - Stardust Musings and Thoughts for the Freethinker



Song by Genesis - Sung by Phil Collins
Lyrics
You see the face on the tv screen
Coming at you every sunday
See that face on the billboard
That man is me
On the cover of the magazine
There's no question why I'm smiling
You buy a piece of paradise
You buy a piece of me
I'll get you everything you wanted
I'll get you everything you need
Don't need to believe in hereafter
Just believe in me
Cos jesus he knows me
And he knows Im right
I've been talking to jesus all my life
Oh yes he knows me
And he knows Im right
And he's been telling me
Everything is alright
I believe in the family
With my ever loving wife beside me
But she don't know about my girlfriend
Or the man I met last night
Do you believe in god
Cos that's what I'm selling
And if you wanna get to heaven
I'll see you right
You won't even have to leave your house
Or get outta your chair
You don't even have to touch that dial
Cos I'm everywhere
And jesus he knows me
And he knows I'm right
I've been talking to jesus all my life
Oh yes he knows me
And he knows I'm right
Well he's been telling me
Everything's gonna be alright
Won't find me practising what I'm preaching
Won't find me making no sacrifice
But I can get you a pocketful of miracles
If you promise to be good, try to be nice
God will take good care of you
Just do as I say, don't do as I do
I'm counting my blessings,
I've found true happiness
Cos I'm getting richer, day by day
You can find me in the phone book,
Just call my toll free number
You can do it anyway you want
Just do it right away
There'll be no doubt in your mind
You'll believe everything I'm saying
If you wanna get closer to him
Get on your knees and start paying
Cos jesus he knows me
And he knows I'm right
I've been talking to jesus all my life
Oh yes he knows me
And he knows I'm right
Well he's been telling me
Everything's gonna be alright, alright
Jesus he knows me
Jesus he knows me, you know...

"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them."-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club television program, January 14, 1991

~*~

And I guess that means that I don't have to be nice to you either.

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