Wall Street Journal
NASA to Launch Its Most Ambitious Mars Rover Yet
Amid international space race, the $2.7 billion effort will seek signs of ancient life on the Red Planet
By Robert Lee Hotz
July 29, 2020
NASA is poised to launch its most ambitious robotic rover to Mars on Thursday, opening the next phase of exploration on the Red Planet.
The $2.70 billion National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission will seek signs of ancient life on Mars that can be packaged and, for the first time, returned to Earth. It will test ways to extract oxygen from the Martian air for future colonists and try out an experimental helicopter drone that could become the first craft to fly on another planet.
If all goes as planned, the NASA effort will be the third Mars mission of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates independently launched maiden voyages to Mars earlier this month. Europe and Russia are set to follow with a joint Mars mission in 2022.
“A lot of countries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way and not just talking about it, but backing it up with budgets,” said NASA Administrator James Bridenstine. “We look forward to seeing what they are able to discover.”
NASA Planetary Science Division Director Lori Glaze said, “China’s sending their first lander to Mars. We’re all going to be watching that very, very carefully. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We know how challenging it is.”
NASA expects to launch its Mars Perseverance rover on Thursday from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It is the same launchpad from which in the 1970s the space agency launched its Viking probes, the first of eight NASA spacecraft to land successfully on Mars so far.
The two-hour launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT. If weather or technical problems force a delay, the agency has until Aug. 15 to try again. If unable to launch by mid-August, the agency will have to wait more than two years for Earth and Mars to align again, storing the spacecraft at a cost of about $500 million, agency officials said.
“We are champing at the bit to take this nuclear-powered dune buggy to Mars,” said Tory Bruno, chief executive of United Launch Alliance, which makes the mission’s Atlas V launch vehicle.
If all goes well, the Perseverance rover is scheduled to land Feb. 18 at Jezero Crater, a 3.8 billion-year-old formation that once held a large lake and still bears traces of a fan-shaped river delta, NASA scientists said. Orbital images suggest it is rich in clay and minerals that might contain signs of microscopic life-forms from billions of years ago—if any existed.
“If life was going to start somewhere, this is a place that you would think you would be able to find it,” said astrobiologist Luther Beegle at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He is the principal investigator for the rover’s Sherloc scanner, which will use spectrometers, a laser and a camera to search for traces of life.
The robotic rover is designed to scoop up promising samples, load them into several dozen sterile tubes and cache them for eventual return to Earth, where they can be analyzed more thoroughly. Missions to collect those samples are planned for some time around 2028 or later, NASA officials said.
“The burden of proof for finding life on another planet is extremely high,” said mission project scientist Ken Farley at the California Institute of Technology. “We would like to get as many samples home as we can.”
The 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex all-terrain self-guided vehicle NASA has ever built, with 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments wired together with 3 miles of cables, according to JPL Deputy Project Manager Jennifer Trosper. It can move about 220 yards a day at a top speed of one-tenth of a mile an hour—slowly to minimize the possibility of damage to the vehicle, but three times faster than any other rover on the planet.
Agency engineers hope to use its cameras to take high-definition video of the rover’s plummet to the planet’s surface in February—the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet. The rover also has two microphones to record and relay sounds for the first time, from the whoosh of its huge parachute unfurling to the crunch of its wheels rolling across Martian soil and the zap of its laser vaporizing rocks for chemical analysis.
“It is the first time we have taken this human sense to Mars,” said Deputy Project Manager Matthew Wallace at JPL. “We are hoping we will get some great audio.”
Once the craft is settled safely on Mars, NASA mission engineers will order it to unpack one of its most innovative experiments: a 4-pound helicopter drone. The drone will attempt several test flights, starting about six weeks after the landing. If successful, it will be the first time any vehicle has flown on another world.
“It is a little spacecraft in itself,” said Mimi Aung, project manager for the Ingenuity helicopter. “This is like a Wright Brothers test flight, but on another planet.”
Friday, July 31, 2020
I wrote this for a stupid fucking asshole who wants to throw out two centuries of scientific progress so he can have his Magic Man fantasy world. The stupidity in Idiot America is overwhelming.
David, biologists call your anti-science Christian Creationist Discovery Institute "Crackpot Central". You will never learn anything from dishonest crackpots. Nobody cares. You can have your "everything is magic" fantasy world. We don't need know-nothing science deniers like you.
I will forgive Biden for being a moron if he selects this brilliant person for the Vice-President job.
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| Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser Susan Rice poses for a portrait at her home in Washington in September. |
For Susan Rice, diplomacy began at home — at age 7
Dec. 6, 2019
Scholars and journalists pounce on the memoirs of senior government officials, especially those written soon after departure from high office, in search of juicy revelations and new insights about how the policy sausage got made. More often than not, we are disappointed. Amid the relitigated debates and the overly detailed recounting of episodes that are either already defined by history or too recent to judge, scoops are rare.
Some veterans of the Obama administration — Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power, to name the authors of two recent memoirs — came to the exercise as writers, with at least the expectation of some literary flair. Hillary Clinton, no surprise, published a cautious book during the campaign about her four years as Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Robert Gates vented his frustration, as defense secretary, with a craven Congress and a president he felt lacked his passion for the troops.
What I enjoy about these books is less their recounting of high-level debates and bureaucratic infighting than the window into lives beyond the closed doors of power. Who are they when they leave the office at night?
Susan Rice’s contribution to the genre, “Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For,” is the tale of a black child of privilege, raised in the overwhelmingly white world of official Washington by accomplished parents in a troubled marriage, who rose fast in the foreign policy ranks while learning to claim and celebrate her race and juggle her own marriage and motherhood without asserting special dispensation.
Rice, who served eight years in the Obama administration, first as ambassador to the United Nations and then as national security adviser, is widely known as smart, sharp-tongued and relentless. She cops freely to her reputation, delivered in a warning from a mentor early in her career, as “too hard-charging and hardheaded,” someone who tends to “quell dissent and stifle contrary advice.” As with many women in high places, the B-word is not unfamiliar to her.
Nor is the N-word, first directed at Rice by a beloved high school basketball coach she played for as a student at Washington’s prestigious National Cathedral School. “Reflexively and immediately, I replied, ‘F--- you,’ ” she reports, before going on to praise the coach’s skills and regretting her departure for another job two years later.
For someone who has covered Rice, and interviewed her a number of times over the years, that and other elements of her life story explain a lot.
Beginning at age 7, Rice reports, she took it upon herself to serve as peacemaker in her parents’ deteriorating relationship. As their combat escalated, her father, Emmett Rice, a descendant of slaves, who was scarred by decades of discrimination in his native South but ultimately became a governor of the Federal Reserve, “hired a private investigator to spy on my mother.” Her mother, Lois Rice, the New England-bred, Ivy League-educated daughter of Jamaican immigrants who long served as a senior official in the organization that runs the College Board, “clandestinely installed recording devices in our house to entrap my father.” With young Susan as confidante, Lois frequently threatened suicide.
“They really didn’t like each other and maybe rarely had,” she says of her parents. As their mutual abuse moved from verbal to physical, and even divorce did not keep them from the attack, “I learned how to compartmentalize conflict, protect myself emotionally and psychically, and bounce back from adversity,” she writes.
Rice delves into the major policy issues she dealt with during four years as U.N. ambassador, although her account mainly chronicles her own actions and says little about contributions from other members of the administration. She places most in the success column. U.S. leadership, she writes, was reestablished at a U.N. Security Council still smarting over George Bush’s Iraq War. North Korean sanctions were won. Initial lines of dialogue with Iran were established.
Among the less-happy outcomes Rice describes, South Sudan, a place of particular interest to her from her youthful days as an Africa specialist, became a new country, then sadly unraveled. In 2011, the United States and its allies bombed Libya to prevent a mass slaughter by Moammar Gaddafi of his political opponents in the eastern part of the country, a mission that “initially . . . seemed a triumph of good over evil.” But while “the U.S. intervened for the right reasons,” she writes, the result echoed the disaster of an earlier American intervention in Somalia: “We made fewer mistakes and paid a far lesser price for our success protecting civilians in Libya than we did in Somalia. And yet what we left behind is not dissimilar — a fractured state without an effective central government, continued factional fighting, a lingering terrorist threat, and a source of insecurity in the region.”
Part of the extended fallout from the failure “to try hard enough and early enough to win the peace” in Libya was the 2012 killing by extremists of four U.S. officials, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, in Benghazi. Rice devotes a chapter to the repercussions of her TV talk show appearances on the Sunday after the attack, when her first-draft report of what happened later became evidence in the Republican case against Obama and made her a punching bag for the right. But she sheds little new light on a story that was subsequently investigated and heavily covered, and about which she has since often spoken and written.
Similarly, she provides few surprises about her time as national security adviser, including the decisions she opposed, such as Obama’s refusal to take military action after a chemical weapons attack in Syria; her overall respect and affection for him; and her frustration at his often cold-blooded intellectualizing about life-and-death choices. She applauds the opening to Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal, and adds some details to the known universe of how the administration responded to the rise of the Islamic State and initial reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Interspersed among these dutiful brussels sprouts, however, are gossipy descriptions of important people, along with stories of sisterhood, occasional insecurity, raucous dance parties among bureaucrats and an uncomfortable encounter with pre-presidential Donald Trump. There are lessons on pumping breast milk on an official trip to Africa while your infant is thousands of miles away, conducting a long-distance marriage, relating to a grown son whose politics and ideology are 180 degrees from your own, and enduring the loss of parents. Real-life stuff.
Tough Love
My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For
By Susan Rice
Simon & Schuster. 531 pp. $30
This was of course Idiot America.
260 children and staff got virus after camp where kids didn’t have to wear masks, report says
A new report suggests children of all ages may be susceptible to coronavirus infections and may also spread it to others — a finding likely to intensify an already fraught discussion about the risks of sending children back to school this fall.
The report, released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, details an outbreak at a sleep-away camp in Georgia last month in which 260 children and staff — more than three-quarters of those tested — contracted the virus less than a week after spending time together in close quarters. The children had a median age of 12.
The camp had required all campers and staff to provide documentation they had tested negative for the virus before coming. Staff were required to wear masks, but children were not.
Read more here.
The death penalty isn't enough for these stupid fucking Muslim assholes. I suggest spray their eyes with mace, and then hang them from a rope.
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I'm adding this to my list of favorite quotes. Someone explains why most Americans are so fucking stupid.
Many of them have been given compelling evidence multiple times on this forum. But they still peddle their lies and claim there is nothing to support evolution.
Their lie that the Bible is Absolute Truth!!! is more important to them than reality is. They will continue to claim they want to hear evidence, that there is no evidence - - and totally ignore the evidence available right in front of them.
-- Simon T
Their lie that the Bible is Absolute Truth!!! is more important to them than reality is. They will continue to claim they want to hear evidence, that there is no evidence - - and totally ignore the evidence available right in front of them.
-- Simon T
I found some more Idiot America stupid.
"Man is made in the image of God and is therefore not an animal."
The politicians who attack Amazon, Google, and Apple are stupid fucking assholes.
Wall Street Journal
OPINION
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Big Tech’s Antitrust Paradox
The legal test for antitrust is consumer benefit, not size.
By the Editorial Board
July 29, 2020
Everyone seems to hate America’s giant tech companies these days—except the hundreds of millions of people who use their products. Amid the new political and antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech, this not-so-small matter of consumer benefit should be the legal and policy watchword.
Wednesday’s House hearing with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google showed the bipartisan hostility to America’s most successful companies. Democrats say they’re too big, powerful and examples of non-union capitalist success. Republicans dislike them because the companies and their employees lean left politically and in some cases (Google, Twitter ) are thought to use algorithms to punish conservative content.
“Our founders would not bow before a king,” declared Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline, setting the tone for the afternoon inquisition. “Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.” He added that the Big Four’s dominance is “killing the small businesses, manufacturing and overall dynamism that are the engines of the American economy.”
His evidence is weaker than his rhetoric. There may be specific cases in which a giant abuses market power, such as Google in online advertising. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are investigating the giants and may bring cases this year. But as the hearing showed, the companies have plenty of evidence to use in their defense.
Start with the reality that all four face ferocious competition, often from each other. Amazon is supposedly an unbeatable leviathan in retail. But the company has only about a 1% share of the overall global retail business and less than 4% in the U.S. Walmart is bigger and its online business is growing fast. In cloud computing services, Amazon faces competition from Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and more. Apple’s iTunes must contend with Spotify and Amazon Prime.
Progressive groups such as the NAACP and Common Sense Media claim that the failure of the current advertising boycott to change Facebook’s speech policies shows that the social-media site is a monopoly. But it proves the opposite. Businesses can avoid Facebook because they have other online places to reach consumers—including Amazon and Google.
Facebook is losing users to Snap and TikTok, especially among the young. Facebook tried to introduce a TikTok-like feature in 2018, known as Lasso, but it didn’t rope enough users. Facebook is attacked for buying Instagram but it invested heavily to make the photo-sharing site easy-to-use. There’s no way to know if Instagram could have become a competitor to Facebook had it remained independent. It might have become the Yahoo of search—an also-ran.
Amazon has prospered in part by becoming a marketplace for small business, not by excluding it. Some 1.7 million small and medium-sized businesses sell via Amazon, and the company says more than 200,000 had more than $100,000 in sales in 2019. Amazon eclipsed eBay as a leading small-business web venue because entrepreneurs thought it served them better. Amazon was also a lifeline for many businesses that were forced to shut their storefronts in the pandemic.
The American giants also operate in a global economy with emerging competitors, especially from China. Breaking up U.S. tech companies would be a gift to ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, among others. Alibaba wants to elbow into Amazon’s data cloud business in Europe. Politicians who are fretting about China’s drive for global economic dominance should think twice before dismantling the U.S. firms that invest heavily in artificial intelligence and can compete world-wide.
Politicians talk about antitrust law as if it’s a finely tuned instrument, but it can easily backfire. A classic example is the way Amazon cajoled Barack Obama’s antitrust officials to bring a case against Apple for trying to compete in e-books. Justice won its case after the Supreme Court declined to take Apple’s appeal, but the result has been to make Amazon’s e-book dominance more secure.
Trust-busters target a market at a particular moment in time, though the digital marketplace is ever-changing. They targeted IBM’s mainframe dominance even as desktop PCs were on the verge of putting more computer power in the hands of individuals. They targeted Microsoft’s browser advantage on the desktop even as Google was creating new competition in search and Apple in devices.
In a democracy, any accumulation of wealth and power will get political scrutiny, and the tech giants are taking their turn in the dock. There are genuine concerns about political bias, the harm to journalism and democracy by Google’s use of content without compensation, and perhaps barriers to entry.
But the market usually does the best job of countering monopolies. Too often government intervention reinforces monopolies. Antitrust law since the work of Robert Bork and Yale Brozen in the 1970s has rightly focused not on size but consumer harm. The burden is on the critics of Big Tech to prove genuine damage, and then propose solutions that don’t do more harm than good.
OPINION
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Big Tech’s Antitrust Paradox
The legal test for antitrust is consumer benefit, not size.
By the Editorial Board
July 29, 2020
Everyone seems to hate America’s giant tech companies these days—except the hundreds of millions of people who use their products. Amid the new political and antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech, this not-so-small matter of consumer benefit should be the legal and policy watchword.
Wednesday’s House hearing with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google showed the bipartisan hostility to America’s most successful companies. Democrats say they’re too big, powerful and examples of non-union capitalist success. Republicans dislike them because the companies and their employees lean left politically and in some cases (Google, Twitter ) are thought to use algorithms to punish conservative content.
“Our founders would not bow before a king,” declared Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline, setting the tone for the afternoon inquisition. “Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.” He added that the Big Four’s dominance is “killing the small businesses, manufacturing and overall dynamism that are the engines of the American economy.”
His evidence is weaker than his rhetoric. There may be specific cases in which a giant abuses market power, such as Google in online advertising. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are investigating the giants and may bring cases this year. But as the hearing showed, the companies have plenty of evidence to use in their defense.
Start with the reality that all four face ferocious competition, often from each other. Amazon is supposedly an unbeatable leviathan in retail. But the company has only about a 1% share of the overall global retail business and less than 4% in the U.S. Walmart is bigger and its online business is growing fast. In cloud computing services, Amazon faces competition from Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and more. Apple’s iTunes must contend with Spotify and Amazon Prime.
Progressive groups such as the NAACP and Common Sense Media claim that the failure of the current advertising boycott to change Facebook’s speech policies shows that the social-media site is a monopoly. But it proves the opposite. Businesses can avoid Facebook because they have other online places to reach consumers—including Amazon and Google.
Facebook is losing users to Snap and TikTok, especially among the young. Facebook tried to introduce a TikTok-like feature in 2018, known as Lasso, but it didn’t rope enough users. Facebook is attacked for buying Instagram but it invested heavily to make the photo-sharing site easy-to-use. There’s no way to know if Instagram could have become a competitor to Facebook had it remained independent. It might have become the Yahoo of search—an also-ran.
Amazon has prospered in part by becoming a marketplace for small business, not by excluding it. Some 1.7 million small and medium-sized businesses sell via Amazon, and the company says more than 200,000 had more than $100,000 in sales in 2019. Amazon eclipsed eBay as a leading small-business web venue because entrepreneurs thought it served them better. Amazon was also a lifeline for many businesses that were forced to shut their storefronts in the pandemic.
The American giants also operate in a global economy with emerging competitors, especially from China. Breaking up U.S. tech companies would be a gift to ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, among others. Alibaba wants to elbow into Amazon’s data cloud business in Europe. Politicians who are fretting about China’s drive for global economic dominance should think twice before dismantling the U.S. firms that invest heavily in artificial intelligence and can compete world-wide.
Politicians talk about antitrust law as if it’s a finely tuned instrument, but it can easily backfire. A classic example is the way Amazon cajoled Barack Obama’s antitrust officials to bring a case against Apple for trying to compete in e-books. Justice won its case after the Supreme Court declined to take Apple’s appeal, but the result has been to make Amazon’s e-book dominance more secure.
Trust-busters target a market at a particular moment in time, though the digital marketplace is ever-changing. They targeted IBM’s mainframe dominance even as desktop PCs were on the verge of putting more computer power in the hands of individuals. They targeted Microsoft’s browser advantage on the desktop even as Google was creating new competition in search and Apple in devices.
In a democracy, any accumulation of wealth and power will get political scrutiny, and the tech giants are taking their turn in the dock. There are genuine concerns about political bias, the harm to journalism and democracy by Google’s use of content without compensation, and perhaps barriers to entry.
But the market usually does the best job of countering monopolies. Too often government intervention reinforces monopolies. Antitrust law since the work of Robert Bork and Yale Brozen in the 1970s has rightly focused not on size but consumer harm. The burden is on the critics of Big Tech to prove genuine damage, and then propose solutions that don’t do more harm than good.
Thursday, July 30, 2020
I wrote this comment for the stupid fucking Christian assholes at the Wall Street Journal.
religious education = religious brainwashing. It's child abuse.
UPDATE:
A fucktard got my comment deleted. What's the fucking problem, Wall Street Journal?
UPDATE:
A fucktard got my comment deleted. What's the fucking problem, Wall Street Journal?
The Christian fucktards of Idiot America have everything figured out. All they have to do is obey the bullshit invented by ancient morons who were making stuff up.
"Well, God does have the final say of who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell and he determines that when we enter the judgment seat. But I know I'm going to Heaven because I have the faith in God and I have the faith that Jesus died and rose again to bear the consequences of our sins and I have a relationship with God."
8 years ago on September 27, 2012, I wrote lots of stuff about magical creationism and theistic evolution. Both fantasies are wrong, not to mention stupid. I suggest click the link.
Incredibly stupid people who deny the established truth of evolution
https://darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com/2012/09/incredibly-stupid-people-who-deny.html
https://darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com/2012/09/incredibly-stupid-people-who-deny.html
I answered a ridiculous question.
A cowardly fucktard wrote this: "Anyone else hope there actually is an afterlife? I hate the thought of not existing for eternity."
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
A magical 2nd life is impossible and that's a good thing. I would not want to live in a universe where magic is real. Only cowards want a 2nd life. They can't grow up and face facts.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Roughly seven-in-ten (72%) Americans say they believe in heaven — defined as a place “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study.
This means 72% of Americans are cowardly morons. Reality makes them cry.
The problem is these assholes for Jeebus brainwash children with their cowardly bullshit, so the stupidity never ends.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
A magical 2nd life is impossible and that's a good thing. I would not want to live in a universe where magic is real. Only cowards want a 2nd life. They can't grow up and face facts.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Roughly seven-in-ten (72%) Americans say they believe in heaven — defined as a place “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study.
This means 72% of Americans are cowardly morons. Reality makes them cry.
The problem is these assholes for Jeebus brainwash children with their cowardly bullshit, so the stupidity never ends.
New York Times article about America's fucked up economy. This is not my problem. My income is very safe and I will never have to work again. Some Americans are in big trouble. They could become homeless and they might have problems buying food.
| BREAKING NEWS |
U.S. economic output fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter, the biggest drop on record. That translates to a 32.9 percent annual rate of decline. |
| Thursday, July 30, 2020 8:35 AM EST |
The collapse was unprecedented in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which occurred before the advent of modern economic statistics.
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| Read the latest |
Someone wrote something about magical creationism.
In all the time that the discipline of "creationism" has existed, it has given mankind nothing. No new discoveries, no new technology, nothing whatsoever.
-- Jeff
-- Jeff
I asked a question about Idiot America's creationist assholes. There was a very interesting answer.
Christian creationists will waste the rest of their pathetic lives being completely wrong about everything. They are wrong about evolution. They are wrong about Jeebus. They don't know what reality is. And there is no cure. Do you feel sorry for them?
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
I honestly don't feel sorry for them.
I do feel sorry for their kids though - because their parents are idiots.
I was sitting in a Sunday school class one time (I'm atheist, but my wife is Christian) when some young-earth creationists tried to hijack the conversation. A lady had asked about her son, who was interested in dinosaurs, and what she should tell him.
The sheer amount of misinformation and disinformation that followed was stunning. The YEC's proceeded to misrepresent science (quickly showing that they had no idea what they were talking about), and attempted to repeat the nonsense they had read (or more likely heard third or fourth hand) from creationist websites.
I was quiet for a while, but then a guy started in on 'Carbon Dating isn't accurate', and I had heard enough. 'What about Uranium–lead dating?' I asked. The guy (who had obviously never heard of Uranium-lead dating) was silent for a minute, and when he started to respond, I asked 'Or Samarium–neodymium? Or how about Potassium–argon dating?'
He stuttered a few times, but another guy came to his rescue by screaming 'we didn't come from monkeys', and was ready to throw down. I let him know that nobody has ever claimed 'we come from monkeys', but that we share a common ancestor with the great ape family.
It pretty much shut down the discussion (the YEC's were mad AF), but afterwards I had several other people from the class come up and thank me. Apparently they were tired of listening to nonsense from these guys too.
-- River Euphrates
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
I honestly don't feel sorry for them.
I do feel sorry for their kids though - because their parents are idiots.
I was sitting in a Sunday school class one time (I'm atheist, but my wife is Christian) when some young-earth creationists tried to hijack the conversation. A lady had asked about her son, who was interested in dinosaurs, and what she should tell him.
The sheer amount of misinformation and disinformation that followed was stunning. The YEC's proceeded to misrepresent science (quickly showing that they had no idea what they were talking about), and attempted to repeat the nonsense they had read (or more likely heard third or fourth hand) from creationist websites.
I was quiet for a while, but then a guy started in on 'Carbon Dating isn't accurate', and I had heard enough. 'What about Uranium–lead dating?' I asked. The guy (who had obviously never heard of Uranium-lead dating) was silent for a minute, and when he started to respond, I asked 'Or Samarium–neodymium? Or how about Potassium–argon dating?'
He stuttered a few times, but another guy came to his rescue by screaming 'we didn't come from monkeys', and was ready to throw down. I let him know that nobody has ever claimed 'we come from monkeys', but that we share a common ancestor with the great ape family.
It pretty much shut down the discussion (the YEC's were mad AF), but afterwards I had several other people from the class come up and thank me. Apparently they were tired of listening to nonsense from these guys too.
-- River Euphrates
It's going to take more than 6 months to get there.
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A fucktard from fucktard Texas.
Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who has frequently refused to wear a mask, has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Just when I thought Christians could not be more fucking retarded than they are now, I found this insane bullshit.
"Do you ever heard for instance about the holy communion turning into bleeding substance and tests revealing that it is a blood of a person from the time of Jesus?"
Google Translate is my friend.
This is from a Lichess.com profile. My opponent lives in Spain.
Con blancas e4. Con negras, depende.
With white e4. With black, it depends.
His profile
My profile
The chess game we played, I had the White pieces: https://lichess.org/UfaNuaPi/white
The endgame was interesting.
I studied Spanish in high school but I was too lazy to understand it. Fortunately, we have Google Translate these days.
Con blancas e4. Con negras, depende.
With white e4. With black, it depends.
His profile
My profile
The chess game we played, I had the White pieces: https://lichess.org/UfaNuaPi/white
The endgame was interesting.
I studied Spanish in high school but I was too lazy to understand it. Fortunately, we have Google Translate these days.
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Idiot America is winning. We are thinning the herd better than any other country.
New York Times
There has been an average of about 1,000 deaths per day in the past week alone, and daily death counts are rising in 23 states and Puerto Rico. The U.S. death toll is the highest of any country in the world, by far.
There has been an average of about 1,000 deaths per day in the past week alone, and daily death counts are rising in 23 states and Puerto Rico. The U.S. death toll is the highest of any country in the world, by far.
The Washington Post - Coronavirus Updates: America's ‘canary in the coal mine’
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