packsaddle

Quite right, Moggie. I don't know where Stosh gets this stuff sometimes...Wallace wrote nothing of the sort. But thanks, you beat me to it. You have to understand that much of what Stosh presents is from some alternate universe. As for the issue of slavery, the 'three-fifths' compromise came AFTER the revolution. Oops, sorry, I keep forgetting....alternate universe.

"Everything our Founding Fathers created was good for freedom for all people, they put in the US Constitution." I'd like to see you make that claim at a meeting of the NAACP sometime. "....the catch phrase of every tyrant." I just love these absolute statements. Prior to Darwin, there were no tyrants I guess. Heh, heh, and then there's George Bush's "New World Order" speech: : "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objectiveâ€â€a new world orderâ€â€can emerge" http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2217&year=1990&month=9

Basement, I suspect those things would exist in the absence of Wood Badge. I'm not sure the presence of beads is the key to arrogance. Mostly we're just people acting like the monkeys that we are. Anyway, I don't drink coffee and when I approach groups of scouters like the ones you suggest, I always approach as if I am the novice, the newbie, the outsider. Social status can be a fun game to 'mess with'. But it doesn't work if you let 'arrogance' get to you.

What do you mean by 'attract'? Actually, bears will try to stay away from dogs, as demonstrated during numerous bear hunts with dogs. Bears get excited if dogs are around and as a result they might react unpredictably. Moreover, dog food most definitely IS attractive to bears, same as odoriferous human food. A bear conditioned to expect to find food might be attracted if they detect the presence of a dog.

Qwazse, in order for that to work efficiently, it has to be really, really dark chocolate. And even that is no guarantee. In the night, our dog would sneak wife's purse off the table and extract the Hershey Kisses without disturbing the other contents, and carefully extract each from the foil. Next morning we'd find the purse on the floor with a little pile of foils and a really guilty-looking dog. That dog did 'guilty' the best of any I've ever seen. But she was a really sneaky dog and had lots of practice being guilty.

It varies on an individual basis and also depends on what the memory is 'of'.

It was supposed to remain the 'elephant in the room'. Everyone knew all this stuff was going on but we just weren't supposed to discuss it openly in polite society. The Pope? Who cares? Might as well get him along with everyone else. What Snowden did was make everyone have to admit what we all knew was going on anyway. Anyone who has a cell phone or access to email or the internet and who presumes to maintain some modicum of privacy is engaging in a pleasant illusion. Like 'security'. It is and always has been, an illusion. A nice one. One of Snowden's biggest transgressions is that he destroyed illusions.

I'll be happier to try to understand the economics without invoking demons or mythical creatures. The price we pay for drugs is ultimately set by whatever we're willing to pay for them. If the demand went down, the price would follow. Part of the reason for the high demand is that the industry spends about twice as much on marketing than it does on R&D. But on the demand side, because of the various subsidies we get from insurance or such things as Medicare, our personal cost 'seems' to be less...but really, all we're doing is using the shared risk system (whether govt or private) to pay those high costs with others' money (premiums or taxes). The way, KDD, to break this is to eliminate the subsidies. All of them. Let the open market work freely and eventually people will see competition between more-efficient businesses bring the prices down.

I have heard this claim fairly often and although I'm a wholehearted proponent of allowing the free market to work, there is an opposing view to the idea that the USA is "the only one doing significant R&D". http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/08/25/europe-leads-in-pharmaceutical-research/ Your response?

There are only two simple ways to go in all this. We either have individuals making their own decisions and paying their own way with no shared risk, or else we share the risk (and the costs). We long ago made the decision to turn away from the free market approach and when I say 'we' I mean nearly every last one of us. We decided to have employers paying part of the premium. We decided to have HMOs. We decided to form any number of groups who share the risk, which also include Medicare and Medicaid. But WE also decided to exclude anyone who couldn't 'fit in' with the requirements to be part of one of those other groups and 'those' people are the ones that the ACA will bring into the shared risk. I do get what is happening. What is happening is merely a logical extension of what we all decided to do a long time ago and that was NOT to have individuals take individual responsibility and accept the risks and costs for whatever life had for them. So Be It. Anyone who is not ready to relinquish their employer contributions or their Medicare or their VA benefits or whatever other shared risk subsidy they have....tough luck. The real issue is that you like the benefits of shared risk that you receive and you don't want to apply that standard to others who are less fortunate because you don't want to pay more to share those added risks. I DO get it. Again, I advocate for abolition of employer contributions and all subsidized benefits like Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, or any other shared risk approach. Make a fair wage and pay a fair price for medical care IF you can afford it. If not, the market and life will make the correction.

Two words, Eamonn: Cub Scouts. They're the cure for sure. Hey, I'm a poet and don't know it.

Short of invoking space aliens, in order to approach this suggestion objectively, we need a comprehensive list of threads that have disappeared. Which, I hope you recognize is going to be difficult because the task involves enumeration of things that don't exist, at least not anymore. So....I guess we might just as well invoke those space aliens after all....lol.

Yeah, that was me all over that Queen Mother. Sounds kind of creepy, doesn't it, written like that? NJ, I might have mentioned before...I really like your son, from what I read of him. I can see where he gets his sense of humor.

Since when is 'tolerance' the 10th point of the Scout Law? I always thought it was 'brave' (and it's not clear how 'brave' applies in this case, either).

I was wondering where that one went too. All I can say is that, as my cub scouts used to say at the sound of breaking glass...."I didn't do it!".....whatever 'it' was. I'm not even sure a moderator has the ability to delete an entire thread...we CAN move them to different forums and we DO that once in a while. But the one you mention would stay right here. Anyone else have any idea what might have happened?

'The government' is essentially a reflection of what 'we' have chosen it to be. It is 'us'. I agree with your characterization to some extent but I have found it to be true elsewhere as well. As a person who has worked in private industry, federal government, and state government...if I had to make a comparison between government levels, I'd have to say that compared to state government, the federal government is a model of competence and efficiency. But overall, I continue to marvel that somehow it has held together for so long and is still clinging to 'life' as it evolves (or devolves). Private industry also has its share of incompetence but eventually the market corrects for that.

You might want to try that again after you look up the word 'archeology'....and read the article I cited.

Stosh, EagleCat educated you as to what evolution is and you ignored him. The fact that bacteria have evolved in the lab nevertheless IS an example of evolution. I gave you an example of evolving mosquitoes (your original organism) and you ignored that. I'm beginning to wonder...are you Rooster7? Edit to add: Here is another example of observed evolution, not bacteria: Weinberg, J. R., V. R. Starczak and P. Jora. 1992. Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory. Evolution. 46:1214-1220.

Wow, those ARE eagle eyes! Great catch!

Stosh, the reason this thread was hijhacked is because you made an outrageous claim about a field of inquiry for which you have demonstrated not only doubt but also profound ignorance. I and others have responded in attempts to correct your incorrect assertions. Thanks to EagleCat, but I fear your words are in vain. I ask you, Stosh, if you think evolution is merely another faith system (keep in mind that I don't agree with this characterization but you have admitted that it IS your view), then how is it that you think it is correct for you to attack another person's faith system? Would you welcome a similar attack on the fundamental beliefs of your faith?

"Oh, and by the way, the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints is not Christian? What say ye, LDS scouters?" I am not LDS but I asked this question years ago in these forums. Stosh might not have remember the answer but I do. The result was mixed. Some LDS persons consider themselves to be Christian, others don't. The response wasn't large enough to try to calculate what fraction each represented but suffice to say....even LDS members are mixed in their answer to that question.

KDD, "Is it a full moon ?" Must be, I'm howling!

Speaking of which, does it pass the regulations if the boys are 'creative' with the way they put it out?

My pocketknife. A stockman style, honed to perfection.

We don't need isotopes to date some things much farther than 50,000 years back. Annual layers of lake sediment have been found that go back hundreds of thousands of years. Annual layers of ice in ice caps go back hundreds of thousands of years. And when we compare those manually-determined ages to the isotopic dating, there is agreement. Are you really a young-earth creationist? And where, exactly, is it that Merlyn doesn't want to go? What in the world are you referring to?