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[Inner Screaming Squirrel Twerk]

I don't mind if people YOGA... its some kind of exercise and Eris Knows that most Americans should get some kind of exercise whenever they can. I don't care that its kinda ripped off from Hindu and is now used by Soccer Moms.

What really makes my Inner Screaming Squirrel Twerk is when the Newage, Hippy Bullshitters ACTUALLY THINK THAT THE AMERICAN STRETCHING EXERCISE YOGA is somehow SPIRITUAL.

This reminds me of the observations by Robert Sapolsky on Baboons. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387823/

Basically, after most of the dominant males had been wiped out, the baboon troop had a major shift (culture?) in how males interacted both with males and with females. Most of the observations circle around stress and agression... but it seems interesting in the context of the OP question as well.

Wow, I guess I missed all the fun

It seems to me that this boils down to several truisms.

1. People who feel sure of a position tend to join a tribe which supports that position (There is YHVH, There is Allah, Thelemic Magic works, Free Market Works, There is not any God, The Government should be socialist, Fuck Everyone and Hail Eris etc etc etc).

2. All tribes have loud, obnoxious assholes (Fred Phelps, Bin Laden, Rush Limbaugh, Dawkins, AKK etc etc etc)

3. Often humans generalize the tribe based on the loud obnoxious assholes. They speak ill of the tribe, when they really intend to speak ill of the assholes.

4. Other members of the tribe can get pissed off when they're lumped in with the assholes.

5. Tribal identity can thus make even cool, non-assholes act like assholes, because their tribe has been attacked.

Faithfools, Libertards, Athiests, Pagans, Madjickians etc etc etc can all be broad generalized labels used to attack a tribe based on the loud tribal idiots. Since generalizations often are overly broad, other members of the tribe are upset since the generalization doesn't apply to them. Personal attacks, personal offense are thus normal defensive mechanisms of tribes.

That's actually pretty interesting.

I did convince them to read Strange Times with the "there's no worship there" tactic.

They want me to come back with some kind of presentation, and we can argue about it. They're going the "the bible must br true because EVIDENCE" route, which is funny.

OH yes, entire books on that topic. "Is the Bible Really the Word of God?", "Reasoning from the Scriptures", All Scriptures are Insipired" etc.

Some things to note: They have no idea that most secular references to Jesus appear either fake or not particularly referencing Jesus. They accept as fact (and assume archeology supports) Israel being slaves in Egypt, The Exodus, the taking of the Promised Land and the Kings from Saul through Zedekiah.They also accept as fact that Israel was destroyed by the Babylonians in 607 BCE instead of 586 like the rest of the world. That bit is important, since it allows them to calculate the Gentile Times (the time from the last King of Israel to the time when Jesus became Gods chosen King in 1914, thus beginning the End Times) and tell everyone that the End is Near (though they did have to keep tweaking that one from "Armeggedon will be in 1914" to "1914 marks the beginning of the end which will happen right after the heros of the Bible are brought back to life" to "1914 marks the beginning of the end and 1975 marks the 6000th year of human existance and thus Armeggedon" to "The generation that was alive in 1914 will not all die out before the end" to "fuzzy fuzzy mushmouth no one knows the day or the hour". 

They are very vocal that they are not "Young Earth Creationists" and will generally say that since the Bible says "1000 years is as a day to the Lord" that the Creative Days were 1000 years each and that the earth itself might have been here for millions of years before God began to prepare it for life.

They will likely dazzle you with all the prophecies that have come to be fulfilled. The March of the World Powers, Daniel's prophecy of the rise of Alexandar the Great (the Hairy He Goat from his dream). There's the great prophecy about how the city of Tyre would be completely destroyed and never used again, which I bet would surprise the people of Tyre who live there today... but evidence never gets in the way of Prophecy Fulfillment

I trust you made it very clear that you have nothing to do with any filthy pagans.

Everything Not Christian is Pagan for JW's. Also, anything Christian but not JW is False Christianity.

[random stranger]

There is no hypocrisy.  All I was saying was that we are allies in the sense that we have a common enemy.  I'm not allowed to receive any financial support from them, and they REALLY want to fund the opposition.  And I wouldn't formally align with them because they'd turn around and try to sabatoge our efforts to change policies to reduce access to alcohol.

You are allies, you aren't allies, you are allies. Sounds like an onion to me. Leave.

Phox left because of THAT asswipe?
That sucks. Because Phoxy could net-stomp RWHN with both hands tied behind her back.

I know, I know, not even worth the effort.

FUCK.

It was the main contributing factor. I probably shouldn't have said anything, but I'm just so sick of this, it's turning the place nasty.

I mean, Jesus Christ, how old are you? 
Net-Stomp.
I mean, I'm glad you have a jolly time here in Teh Wonderful World of Make-Believe, but for chrissakes wake up. 
All this huff and puff on this site about how broken and fucked everything is here and you guys get your panties in a twist over a random stranger spag who thinks a little differently thant you.  obsessing over "net-stomping" that spag.
C'mon, don't you see how fucked that is?  How about some IRL stomping of some actual problems in the world.
Stop being so fucking pathetic.

That's the problem, though, isn't it? May 19th, 2005. That's more than 8 years I've known you. And yet you play yourself off as a random stranger. Miserable excuse for a friend, is what it is. Pathetic, yes, is what it is. Miserable fake. I became an adult here. I learned how to write and think critically here. I worked through some of the toughest, stupidest shit in my life with these folks, which is admittedly little shits compared to others, but it's my shit, and I /owned/ it. And I met the love of my life here. And as many times as I've been ticked off at Roger, or Cain, or Nigel, or the inverse, I still hold the deepest respect for them, value them as people, think only the best of them, which is probably why it hurts so much when we don't get along.

But you? You were apparently never even a person, for all I thought I knew you. Leave.

Ok, this. Kai is one of the smartest, kindest, most open to feedback people I know. That I've never met.

That you've pissed Ki off is horrible.

Addicts hurt everyone around them, and often don't even realize it.

Ah to  be a martyr (perhaps, unless these are just some Roman dudes and not at all Christian bones).

Imagine, sacrificing your wealth, your livelihood, your friends, your family and even your life for a religion that you Truly Believe In.

Then imagine later followers of your religion hauling out your bones and sticking more than the net worth of your entire life on you as decorations. As you lay there for centuries in this splendor, the people around your corpse and penniless and dying of starvation.

Well, God did promise them a fantastic FABULOUS!! afterlife.

Just got back. Had tons of fun and we're doing it again next week.

Don't get sucked it

You gotta fit the jews in somewhere. It's their bread and butter. Are you asking for satire, or actual goofiness?

Nah, JWs don't put any particular significance on the Jews or lost children of Israel... Not beyond their role in the Old Testament anyway.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/02/new-zealand-drug-law_n_3696809.html

New New Zealand law to legalize and regulate synthetic drugs.

I wonder what the oldest internet meme is? The oldest one I know of is "lemon chicken", but I think that possibly "kites" is older.

What about that weird dancing baby?

ETA: So I was thinking about my old Geek Code and realized that Kibo predates the dancing baby. If we go way back into Usenet, there are a lot of dead tree memes that became popular internet memes, Hitchhiker's Guide memes, Discordian memes, Python memes etc. There are some memes that were popular among the tech crowd, like the use of "Magic" from the "Magic/More Magic" switch story at MIT. Even old memes in coding like variables named foo, bar and baz... I guess it really depends on where we draw the line on defining a meme and defining what group it would need to be popular among; the general public (which would push the date forward) or old school geeks, which have loads of memes within that subculture (ala the Jargon File).

The dancing baby was way later.

You're right, I looked it up and that was 1996.

http://www.abstractsonline.com/Plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?mID=3086&sKey=3e3df4f9-a49f-40e7-a260-ccc3c54e0125&cKey=c7c6690d-3e5e-438e-9de4-d6f67a0703fb&mKey=9b2d28e7-24a0-466f-a3c9-07c21f6e9bc9 (from this year)

Conclusion
Our pooled results showed no significant association between the intensity, duration, or cumulative consumption of cannabis smoke and the risk of lung cancer overall or in never smokers. Cannabis use is under international control and its legal status varies, so reporting bias is of concern. However, since the reported prevalence in our data is comparable to nation-specific survey results and not differential between cases and controls, it is unlikely to fully explain the lack of significant association. Our results cannot preclude the possibility that cannabis may exhibit an association with lung cancer risk at extremely high dosage. We will also present data after applying restricted cubic splines to explore non-linear relationships.

Just the abstract, it would be nice to have access to the full paper.

I vaguely remember a book with a rocketpropulsion cyborg guard dog in some cyberpunk setting, I just can't remember the book it was in. The concept terrifies me.

Snow Crash is a book by Neal Stephenson that has some nuclear-powered cyborg dogs in it.

Thanks! I can't believe i forgot about Snow Crash.

Yeah, Snow Crash and also Gibson's book Neuromancer has cyborg dogs and Count Zero had a robotic assassin dog which had nearly killed the character Turner.

Farenheit 451.  Hello.

Yep that too, though I don't usually think of it as cyberpunk, I should probably reconsider that classification.

IMO, doing ANYTHING to impair your driving is stupid.

I don't think anyone here is arguing that people should drive stoned.

So much THIS. If any causation is involved here, perhaps its that people who are stoned make the more 'paranoid/conservative' decision not to drive, whereas people who are drunk make the more stupid decision to drive impaired.

Assumes facts not in evidence.  My suspicion is that people tend to smoke at home, rather than go out, but there's no data supporting that, or even solid proof that there's causation here at all.

Which is why I said 'if'

As far as I can tell there are lots of conflicting reports on the topic and none of them seem to have anything other than correlation.

IMO, doing ANYTHING to impair your driving is stupid.

I don't think anyone here is arguing that people should drive stoned.

So much THIS. If any causation is involved here, perhaps its that people who are stoned make the more 'paranoid/conservative' decision not to drive, whereas people who are drunk make the more stupid decision to drive impaired.