Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Badbird]

I swear, Bernie Madoff and his actions, although criminal(don't you DARE and be a dipfuck moron and call them greedy) only produced the third largest grand scale ponzi scheme in US history. KKK is the second biggest and number one is that elaborate Vietnam War.

FYP

 

[skeptik]

How about some actual news that's not worthless political doubletalk?

http://gizmodo.com/5704158/

NASA has discovered a new life form—called GFAJ-1—that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth, using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything. Updating live.

NASA is saying that this is "life as we do not know it". The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

In a surprising discovery, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks.

According to Wolfe Simon, they knew that "some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new—building parts of itself out of arsenic." The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth. Like NASA's Ed Weiler says: "The definition of life has just expanded."

Talking at the NASA conference, Wolfe Simon said that the important thing here is that this breaks our ideas on how life can be created and grow, pointing out that scientists will now be looking for new types of organisms and metabolism that not only uses arsenic, but other elements as well. She says that she's working on a few possibilities herself.

NASA's geobiologist Pamela Conrad thinks that the discovery is huge and "phenomenal," comparing it to the Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew finds Horta, a silicon-based alien life form that can't be detected with tricorders because it wasn't carbon-based. It's like saying that we may be looking for new life in the wrong places with the wrong methods. Indeed, NASA tweeted that this discovery "will change how we search for life elsewhere in the Universe."

I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life.

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

This plus the increase in the earlier-figured amount of stars in the universe pretty much changes a lot of people's minds regarding the possibility of life on other planets.

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

Wow, you guys got it all wrong. Everybody knows that life was created on this planet exactly 6000 years ago by Jesus.

 

[Dak]

I thought it was already a given that we shouldn't just be looking for life in the Goldilocks zone.

 

[Valerie]

Shit just got real

http://gizmodo.com/5704158/

 

[Einherjar86]

If people are really interested in the implications of this, I just want to point them toward this book:

 

[Prismatic Sphere]

Oh please. All this does is make you internet geekoids go apeshit all the while it only amounts to them proclaiming that there is an 00000.1% extra chance of extraterrestrial life.

 

[Valerie]

Apparently you haven't seen Bad Boys II.

 

[Einherjar86]

Who would want to?

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1854996,00.html

I was just curious as to what you guys think when you see articles like this ( your initial thoughts ) videos on factory farming and so on. What your thoughts are on animal rights and veganism.

I know most people eat meat and are therefore bias/ignorant but do you ever question what you're actually eating?

How do you justify it?

Most of us just see the food and this immediate perception but the animal seems to be obscured. How does it make you feel when you conceptualize and identify the problem and/or contradiction?

I'm doing an experiment/paper on this subject. I don't want to come off as some wide eyed idealist, just trying to understand what others think.

 

[mutantllama]

I've been a vegetarian for 6 years. I don't exactly remember why I initially became one, but before that I didn't eat much meat anyways. Most if it was at a little league game at a friends house, or with my grandma. So the transition wasn't really hard (plus I grew up with all that hippie crap like tofu, tempeh, etc so I already liked the taste of those). I don't really have much of an opinion/don't really know much about how meat(or dairy for that matter) is processed, and I don't have much interest in it. For the most part I'm pretty quiet about being a vegetarian, and it even shocked my friends once they found out. When I see a piece of bacon(that has to be really the only thing I miss, god damn is that shit good), I see a pigbro. I pretty much live off of dairy foods like eggs, milk, cheese, etc, and I'm sure a lot of that isn't much better then meat.

Not sure if that was much help, but there you go.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

yup, i can't say i would have picked you out as a vegetarian

 

[Badbird]

Since the Obama thread got locked, what going to happen with him and the Republicans taking over the house? I see we are going to have a huge scandal in the making that will make Obama a one term president.

 

[Einherjar86]

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1854996,00.html

I was just curious as to what you guys think when you see articles like this ( your initial thoughts ) videos on factory farming and so on. What your thoughts are on animal rights and veganism.

I know most people eat meat and are therefore bias/ignorant but do you ever question what you're actually eating?

How do you justify it?

Most of us just see the food and this immediate perception but the animal seems to be obscured. How does it make you feel when you conceptualize and identify the problem and/or contradiction?

I'm doing an experiment/paper on this subject. I don't want to come off as some wide eyed idealist, just trying to understand what others think.

Meat as a commodity? Interesting.

I question what I'm eating all the time, but like Žižek says: "They know what they do, and still they are doing it." That's ideology. There isn't any rationality to it. Ideology works because it seems to support something that was already there to begin with.

Interestingly enough, Žižek himself is an avid fan of meat. In his own words, regarding vegetarians: "Degenerates, degenerates; they'll turn into monkeys."

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Meat as a commodity? Interesting.

I question what I'm eating all the time, but like Žižek says: "They know what they do, and still they are doing it." That's ideology. There isn't any rationality to it. Ideology works because it seems to support something that was already there to begin with.

Interestingly enough, Žižek himself is an avid fan of meat. In his own words, regarding vegetarians: "Degenerates, degenerates; they'll turn into monkeys."

Zizek is a smart man but he can be pretentious to a point that his work suffers. Zizek pretends to be himself. a character. a mad man too detached from reality.

 

[Valerie]

Who would want to?

For this ridiculous scene ldo





Here's an interesting blog post from a militant vegan-turned-meat-eater http://voraciouseats.com/2010/11/19/a-vegan-no-more

Warning: it's a long read.

 

[Dak]

Mostly a good read on that blog, until she also blames capitalism and overpopulation, neither one being responsible and the second not even existing. Government subsidizing has created this artificial and unsustainable grain flood.

 

[Der Morgenstern]

Yea, color me surprised on you thinking that overpopulation isn't an issue.

 

[Einherjar86]

Zizek is a smart man but he can be pretentious to a point that his work suffers. Zizek pretends to be himself. a character. a mad man too detached from reality.

That may very well be so.

For me personally though, I don't believe that the pure act of eating other animals (methods of killing or harvesting aside) is evil or wrong in any way. Animals kill each other for sustenance in the wild all the time. I've heard some people make the claim that because of our "advanced" consciousness we should accept a higher level of responsibility; ergo, we know and can anticipate the pain caused upon animals, so they should not be harmed.

I don't buy this argument. If we accept that because we are conscious of the pain/death we might cause then we accept some higher responsibility, then you have to assert a normative claim that harming animals is wrong. This supposes some kind of teleological course of history that men were destined to arise to this level and thus have a predetermined responsibility. If someone denies this (that our heightened consciousness was predetermined, that we're part of a teleological process) then you also have to deny that we have any responsibility at all toward animals. You can see pure nature in action when a flower traps a fly, or a lion drags down a gazelle. I don't feel any sense of shame or guilt from eating meat.