Word of Advice:

If I ever catch any of ya’z using…..or even in close proximity of the chemical compound GHB = http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ghb/ghb.shtml ……I’ll crack your fuckin head.

This is your first and only warning.

Aristotle said that to learn to do something new, first, you pretend.

Then at some point, pretense becomes expertise.

However, the anxiety that ensues………is………..no sm:)ling matter.

The communications revolution of the past century has thrown into our face the fact that people have very different ways of understanding the world and different sets of values. We know this because magazines show us pictures of them, and on TV they’re busy either behaving in their quaint ways or yelling at us. This new awareness of the diversity of our world has helped exacerbate our culture’s depressing relativism.

Y’all know the relativist argument: Other people have views they hold as strongly as you hold yours. Those views are incompatible with yours. Thus, a sense of certainty is insufficient to guarantee truth. Therefore, we can’t trust certainty. Therefore, we have no way to decide whose views are right.

Good things come from this relativism, including a willingness to listen to others and maybe even a little humility. (That was, at least, until the Bush Doctrine declared humility to be unpatriotic.) But relativism contradicts a tenet of knowledge: To believe something is to believe that it’s true. Relativism wants to keep sneaking in a qualifier — “Of course, I might be dead wrong” — that seems to destroy the possibility of knowledge.

Worse, relativism can sap action: Since all sincerely held beliefs are equally valid, why go to any pains to defend yours?

There’s just something wrong with relativism.

When I was a college-age lad and all was tinted rosy (or, more accurately, was swirling slightly if you looked at it carefully), I tried to dodge the relativism two-step by going beneath it: All the different values held in the world are only held because the holders are alive. Life is therefore an ultimate value underneath the pitter-patter of relative values.

Thus, I became a pacifist.

But there was something wrong with my reasoning. For one thing, it means there’s nothing worth dying for, which seems implausible. For another, just because life is a condition of having values doesn’t mean that life is itself a value. This line of thought contributed to my ditching pacifism in favor of a less-principled preference for life over death, loving over killing, chicken over bloody cow muscles. I mean, call me crazy, but that’s what I believe.

And the problem of relativism remains. Its premises seem true. Its conclusion seems true and salutary. But it literally goes against everything we believe by telling us that we have no right to believe any of it. There’s something wrong with this setup.

I think the Internet is showing us what’s wrong relativism.

Relativism works by pointing to the most extreme differences: “On the Isle of Kerflooey, natives worship pickpockets and think that nipples are the seat of intelligence.” There is an assumption — not a logical part of the argument but part of its appeal — that cultures live apart from one another, developing wildly different ideas and values. Further, the metaphysical picture relativism paints depicts knowledge as an internal state: The Civilized Person and the Untutored Native look at the same scene but have different images in their heads (or nipples). Neither has privileged access to the truth, or at least neither can reliably know that they have privileged access. So we’re all stuck in our silos of knowledge.

That picture explains why relativism is not just frustrating but depressing. It’s an isolationist’s view of the world.

But now we have a world that’s snapping itself together through talk and writing and conversation. In this world, relativism is much less important and appealing. You don’t have to sit alone and try to undercut your every belief in the name of a humble relativism. Instead, you can put your knowledge out into the world where it can talk with others who hold contrary views. Rather than being silos, we are conversations that — as conversations do — continuously and eternally negotiate agreement while iterating on difference.

Relativism flourishes when we’re each sitting in our corners, imagining contrary positions that would make us look foolish. Relativism is irrelevant when we are actually talking with others who disagree with us. But when all you have to do is click on a few links to actually engage with those other people with their contrary views, relativism looks masturbatory. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. [hee-hee]

Relativism simplifies the world. It renders all views equal. The Internet complicates the world. All the world’s beliefs are in play as conversation engages us in the mutual quest of trying to find what’s right and wrong, what’s better and worse, what we can agree about and what we’d better leave alone.

In a connected world, relativism is just a way of giving up.

Myth: Deadbeat Dads are common – most men don’t pay their child support.

Truth: Somewhere between 80 and 100% of men who are employed pay all their ordered child support, depending on who you ask. Even mothers (some who are clearly biased against honest reporting in this area) report that 80% of fathers who are employed pay all that they owe. One must ask, of course, how you can expect a man who doesn’t have an income to pay child support.

The huge majority of men who do not pay their child support are either (1) unemployed, (2) in prison, or (3) dead – literally. It is impossible, of course, to collect child support from any of these men, as they are unable to pay. Florida discovered this when they spent more than $4 million and collected a paltry sum of a couple of hundred thousand – proof positive that you can’t enforce payment in the event that the obligor simply doesn’t have the money – or isn’t even breathing.

This myth that “deadbeat dads are common” is the fruit of often-cited Census data on child support compliance – data that is fatally flawed. The Census Bureau asked only custodial parents if they were paid in full and on time, and never cross-checked any of their information – nor did they ask the non-custodial parent! Needless to say, asking the recipient alone is akin to asking the fox to guard the henhouse. (Source: US Census Bureau)

Myth: Men make up the bulk of domestic abusers and thus all allegations of domestic violence against them are credible.

Truth: WOMEN are in fact about in line with men as domestic abusers. The percentage is not very different – 45 to 55% according to the most incredible and recent studies in both the US and Australia – but it is a fact. Further, controlling for the severity of violence (ie: hit with hand, used weapon, threw object, etc) women still out-abuse men by a small percentage. Yet virtually all domestic violence “programs” and laws suggest – if not outright state – that women simply don’t perpetrate any domestic violence.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

Myth: Children are most often physically and sexually abused by their fathers.

Truth: Children are most likely to be physically abused by their mothers, and are more than twice as likely to be killed by their mothers than their biological fathers. They are most likely to be abused sexually by their stepfathers or mother’s boyfriends – men who were invited into their home by their mothers! We could eliminate the majority of sexual abuse of children by refusing to allow a child to reside in his mother’s home if she has a live-in lover or remarries.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

However, unlike many “pressure groups” I do not advocate separating kids from their biological parents under any circumstance unless it can be proven that they are in actual danger of harm.

Myth: Most men abandon their children following divorce and want nothing to do with them.

Truth: Even if you ask mothers how often this happens, only 12 percent attempt to claim that their ex-husbands voluntarily refuse to visit and spend time with their children. If you ask fathers, only three percent claim that they voluntarily miss time they should have with their children. In fact, a quarter of mothers admit they interfere with or deny entirely the children’s father’s access to their kids!

The truth is that according to a study done by Sanford Braver, PhD (Arizona State University) only one in six fathers get the custodial arrangements they wanted. A study done by Stanford University in the late 1980s showed the same thing – close to 70% of fathers wanted either joint or sole physical custody.

Statistically speaking, fathers don’t abandon their children – they are forced out following divorce by the mothers of those children, usually without justification or legally-relevant cause.

Myth: Women’s standards of living drop precipitously after divorce, while men’s rise enormously.

Truth: The source of this myth is a book entitled The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America, written by Lenore Weitzman, PhD, in 1985. This work has been thoroughly discredited – not only were there simple mathematical errors in her calculations but her methodology was fatally flawed. Yet it took her eleven years to publicly admit to these mistakes – an event that finally occurred in 1996 in American Sociological Review. The problem with this is that a huge number of states – virtually all – have upwardly revised their child support guidelines by using and citing this work – a work which was and is an admitted fraud! I say fraud because there is documented proof that she was made aware of the problems with this study fully seven years before she admitted to the errors, taking them from the realm of “mistake” into “deliberate deception”. Where is the compensation – the refund – for all the fathers who have been massively overbilled – in some cases by more than twice what they should have been assessed – in child support as a direct consequence of this fraudulent “study”, and when will these laws and “guidelines” be overturned now that the truth is known? The silence from feminists on this point – faced with irrefutable proof of the flaws in this work – the very people who pushed for these guideline increases – has been deafening.

Indeed, even today we see people cite this book as “proof” that child support awards are too infrequently collected and too small to begin with. Not one major media outlet has paraded the truth about this “study” – that is, was, and is patently incorrect both in its methodology and simple command of mathematics.

Myth: Men are the ones who initiate most divorces and want to leave the marriage – usually because of an extramarital involvement.

Truth: Women initiate between 65% and 80% of all divorces over the objections of their husbands. Further, among causes for divorce an affair ranks sixth and any sort of abuse – whether alcohol, violence, or drug-related – doesn’t show up until the eleventh cause. When a wife divorces her husband for reasons such as a “gradual growing apart” or “serious differences in lifestyle” (the top two reasons!) and takes the kids with her, her ex-husband truly has been disenfranchised – and left powerless.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

Myth: Child Support is for the children and has to be spent on their health, well-being and care.

Truth: Not one state in the US requires recipients of child support to actually prove that the amounts received are 1) necessary to meet the children’s needs or 2) are actually spent on the children. A number of states, in fact, actually document in their laws that part of the purpose of child support is to protect the standard of living of the custodial parent – almost always the mother – which would have existed had the divorce not taken place. If child support were actually for the children then a payer would be able to demand documentation that 1) the amount paid was actually necessary for the children’s needs, and 2) was actually spent exclusively on the children.

In fact, one may reasonably wonder just what “child support” is really for, especially in the case where parents have joint physical custody. In most states, including Illinois, the presence of Joint Custody has very little, if any, impact on the award of child support [???!!!???] – even though such practices appear to fly in the face of the statutes as written in many of these situations.

http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsUS.shtml
http://www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/sb95_16.pdf
http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/chldsupp.html
http://www.gocrc.com/research/spcrc97.html
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20050509.shtml
http://ancpr.org/indexevidence.html

[these links are only the tip of the iceberg]

Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation With LSD in Historical Perspective.

Come on Baby, LIGHT MY FIRE

PLANET-DISSOLVING DUST CLOUD IS HEADED TOWARD EARTH!

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Scared-stiff astronomers have detected a mysterious mass they’ve dubbed a “chaos cloud” that dissolves everything in its path, including comets, asteroids, planets and entire stars — and it’s headed directly toward Earth!

Discovered April 6 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the swirling, 10 million-mile- wide cosmic dust cloud has been likened to an “acid nebula” and is hurtling toward us at close to the speed of light — making its estimated time of arrival 9:15 a.m. EDT on June 1, 2014.

“The good news is that this finding confirms several cutting- edge ideas in theoretical physics,” announced Dr. Albert Sherwinski, a Cambridge based astrophysicist with close ties to NASA.

“The bad news is that the total annihilation of our solar system is imminent.”

Experts believe the chaos cloud is composed of particles spawned near the event horizon of a black hole (a form of what’s called Hawking Radiation) that have been distorted by mangled information spewed from the hole.

“A super-massive black hole lies about 28,000 light-years from Earth at the center of our galaxy,” explained Dr. Sherwinski.

“Last year the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking revised his theory of black holes — which previously held that nothing could escape the hole’s powerful gravitational field. He demonstrated that information about objects that have been sucked in can be emitted in mangled form.

“It now appears that mangled information can distort matter.

“Just imagine our galaxy the Milky Way as a beautiful, handwritten letter.

“Now imagine pouring a glass of water on the paper and watching the words dissolve as the stain spreads. That’s what the chaos cloud does to every star or planet it encounters.”

To avoid widespread panic, NASA has declined to make the alarming discovery public. But Dr. Sherwinski’s contacts at the agency’s Chandra X-ray Observatory leaked to him striking images of the newly discovered chaos cloud obliterating a large asteroid.

“It’s like watching a helpless hog being dissolved in a vat of acid,” one NASA scientist told Dr. Sherwinski.

Ordinarily, Hawkings Radiation is harmless.

“It’s produced when an electron- positron pair are at the event horizon of a black hole,” Dr. Sherwinski explained. “The intense curvature of space-time of the hole can cause the positron to fall in, while the electron escapes.”

But when “infected” by mangled information from the black hole, the particles become a chaos cloud, which in turn mangles everything it touches.

“If it continues unchecked, the chaos cloud will eventually reduce our galaxy to the state of absolute chaos that existed before the birth of the universe,” the astrophysicist warned.

Some scientists say mankind’s best hope would be to build a “space ark” and hightail it to the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.1 million light-years away.

“We wouldn’t be able to save the entire human population, but perhaps the best and the brightest,” observed British rocket scientist Dr. David Hall, when asked about the feasibility of such a project.

But even if such a craft could be built in time, evacuating Earth might prove fruitless if theories about the origin of the chaos cloud are correct.

“A black hole at the center of Andromeda is about 15 times the size of the one in our own galaxy,” Dr. Sherwinski noted. “It might be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.”

Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a senior White House official said the president’s top science advisors are taking the findings in stride.

“This is a lot like global warming, where the jury is still out on whether it’s real or not,” said the official.

“The existence of this so called chaos cloud is only a theory. Americans shouldn’t panic until all the facts are in.”

This almost perfectly coincides w/ my theory of when my own life will cease to exist, thus becoming nothing more than a memory………quite strange indeed!