Yeah, Baby! Back to the Moon!

[JimC]

At least it keeps him off the streets...

[Galaxian]

I have a friend who is schizophrenic. I used to listen to him and pander to his delusions thinking I was helping. I met a psychiatrist who told me this is absolutely not what you should do.
You should disengage this from one.

You met a psychiatrist? Good for you! The arse end of the medical profession; those who have no diagnostic basis for their 300+ DSM prognostications that commit millions of children to forced psychotropic medication.

Yes, I happen to agree that I should not pander to the delusions of schizophrenics or the feeble minded.

[Galaxian]

Your first interjection qualifies you as a philosophical idealist. How can I know the sea is salty, you ask: it may have been salty the last time I went for a paddle, but at this very moment, now, with no immediate access to the shore and, therefore, no direct experience that would confirm the saltiness of seawater I have no rational basis on which to contend the essential minerality of oceanic bodies - one way or another. Indeed, you ask not only whether I can assure my contentions about sea salinity, but charge me with providing some sort of proof, if only to myself, that oceans, along with the bodies which they enclose, even exist at all.

Philosophical idealism maintains that reality is a mental construct rooted in perceptual experience--that is; that the experience of reality is the reality of experience--and thus, accordingly, the doctrine exerts a significant degree of skepticism about the possibility of knowledge and of knowing anything that we cannot experience, or are not experiencing, directly - right here, right now. In this respect your interjection undermines your own assertions: how can you know anything about Moon Bases Alpha and Beta; have you been there; did you read it somewhere, did somebody tell you about it, and how can you trust them or secure what they report about their own experience; if the Moon was in the heavens last night how do you know it will be there this evening; does the Moon even exist at all? You can see the limits of taking this approach to requests for support I'm sure.

There is a certain predictability in this defence which must be accounted for. By predictability I do not mean that your reply is predictable in as much as it foregoes addressing the point in favour of shifting the burden and challenging the foundation of knowledge, which of course it does. I mean there is a certain predictability in the systems of the natural world which we encounter and understand both on an experiential level and on the level of our attempts to identify and explicate through the epistemological adventures of scientific endeavour the nature of things and stuff.

The ocean does not turn into jam; doors do not become cattle before forming simulacra of Lara Croft (would that they were); carbon atoms do not sprout legs an wings and carry distressed maidens off to the impossible heights of invisible castles. The story of the possible is not written in the realm of the imagination but in the empirical realm. While all natural systems are in flux they are not fluxible to such a wild degree and, therefore, if we are rigours in our observation and diligent in our reasoning, we can systematically chip away at the edifice of our own ignorance to get at a seam of knowledge beneath; to arrive at a point where we can say that we are, to some qualified extent, entitled to our claims to understanding and knowledge.

The ocean is a body of specific, identifiable chemical elements, a large body of H2O which forms the substrate for a raft of other elements, our understanding of the nature of chemical reactions is rigorously supported by observation and experimentation, and it is the repeatability of those experiments, as attempts to provide a genuine test of any theory or hypothesis and by so doing endeavour to falsify the implicit claim, and/or to refute it, which ultimately confirm those observations, support the claims, and allow us to develop and deploy predictive models of the natural world based thereon.

When a theory or hypothesis resists all attempts to falsify it then we are entitled to say that we know a particular something-or-other about a particular something-or-other - if only until new information or a better, more parsimonious explanation of the information we have comes along. Claims to knowledge which cannot be falsified by any means, which cannot be tested, foreclose on the possibility of corroboratory or confirmatory support. Basically, they are worthless - the knowledge to which they aspire is beyond even the reach of those making the claim.

But scientific processes aside, we know from our own direct experience that things in the natural world, which we encounter in our everyday livse, are bound to certain predictabilities: the fire that burnt you today will burn you tomorrow; trees do not change position in the landscape without some mighty force to act upon them; water does not flow uphill; kicking a rock with all your strength will hurt your toes as surely as kicking a policeman will get you arrested.

If your contention is that we cannot rely upon the observed and observable predictability of the natural world or upon the mechanisms--whether that be from our own direct, incorrigible experiences or via the rigorously supported hypotheses, theories, or laws developed by others--by which we apprehend reality, and that as such that which we call knowledge and understanding are rooted in things so uncertain and fluxious that only the direct apprehension of personal experiences, now, in the moment, can confirm and assure any and all knowledge claims, then you must, as must each of us, reobserve and reconfirm all that we think we know about the world - and not simply each morning upon waking, but each passing moment - right here, right now.

In other words, to eschew the predictability of the systems which comprise the natural world is to assert that reality and all knowledge which underpins our understanding of the world, even our own direct experiences, is without both use and meaning. You, my friend, ask us to inhabit a world without knowledge, and an anecdote is no substitution for a fact I can tell you.

Thus the conjecture of your first interjection is undermined, rationally, and fatally so.

Undermining your second interjection relies on similar factors to your first, again you're shifting the burden to avoid addressing the point while issuing challenges rooted in the incorrigible and conflicting nature of your and your challengers personal experiences. Though I would much rather you addressed the points directly, it nonetheless follows, again, that your own specious contentions can be forestalled by the same mean in which you address them, to wit: have you seen one of these marvellous vehicles going up in the sky; how often have you looked for them in a clear, dark sky; do you have records of any such observation and could they be corroborated and confirms, and if so how exactly? Be truthful now!

Astronomers use various means to attend to the local and wider cosmological environment, and routinely observe things which are beyond the direct perceptual capacities, and therefore beyond the direct experience, of humans. Yet, even from Earth, armed with nothing but a clear sky and sturdily secured pair of high-quality binoculars we can observe objects such as asteroids in the shadow of Jupiter even though they emit no light or energy - their passage across a field of view is discernible and mapped by what they occlude. And astronomy is an endeavour not just limited to tenured scientists, engineers, and their assistants, but as a field it benefits significantly from the contributions of a huge, and proportionally much larger, number of enthusiastic armatures in every part of the globe. The sky is a surveilled domain - this issue is not whether I've seen these mysterious travellers or not, but why nobody has seen them.

Now perhaps you are tempted to suggested that the cool-sounding Mach Tractors are designed in such a way as to avoid detection from any observation point on the Earth or in near-orbit, and that the technologies employed are so sophisticated that even the unavoidable, not to mention spectacular, ionisation of the upper atmosphere caused by friction can be, somehow, suppressed or avoided; that the motive forces generated by such machines do not employ the principles of thrust and therefore produce no emissions; that the manufacture of components, and the assembly and maintenance of theses vehicles is completely untraceable, perhaps having no impact on resource and commodity movements or markets, or maybe not even being drawn from resource stocks found on Earth. All these reasons would, surely, explain why no trace of these advanced manufactured items has been, or will ever become, apparent?

However, to say such things would be to erect an unrealisable assertion, like invoking super-natural powers or magick, one which ill-serves your own claims - for if the lauded Mach Tractor is so advances as to be invisible to us in every respect then on what basis do you, dear Galaxian, stake a claim for their existence? Don't hold back now - you are among friends.

You third and fourth interjections rely on that other well-established discursive tactic so prevalent among conspiracy theorists and ideologues of every strip: the fallacy of presuming your conclusion in your premise. To cut a long story short, because the nurse is due shortly to attend to my sores, you presume the existence of advanced technologies and compare and assert that those who employ them have advanced or evolved beyond humans to the same extent or degree that we have evolved and advanced beyond our biological brethren the chimpanzee. By this you offer us insight into their motivation and our status in relation to them, and entreat us to believe without even so much as a hint of any reasonable, rational support that these things even exist in the first place. A better setting for errant rectum-custard of this magnitude is in a work of fiction or fantasy as such forms allow the imagination to range widely and freely without the necessary encumbrances of evidences and rational argument.

In your final remarks you relieve yourself, figuratively speaking of course, of the burden of supporting your own claims, and by so doing you stymie the tentative process of elevating them from their pitiful status of wishful fantasies. You implore us to take your utterances as 'information', as a means to us 'persuading ourselves' in the manner so familiar to those snake oil sellers commonly referred to as religious authorities: "This thing is true. Believe me. Trust me. First you have to want to believe. All you need is Faith. The evidence is all around you - you only have to look for it."

Confabulation on this scale may work for and on feeble-minded dolts, but for most of us belief in the veracity of a claims follows from some reasoned, rational, and therefore compelling, evidence in support of those claims. It is wholly irrational, not mention wholly unreasonable (in every sense), to believe first and then cast around for something, anything, that looks like evidence for it - particularly when all that is being brought to the table are circular arguments and magical thinking. Frankly, your entire conjecture is beyond a joke, and if you think it passes for diligent inquiry and a sound, supported, rigorous, rational conclusion then the joke, such that it is, is on you.

As you chose to begin your rejoiner with The Bard of Avon it seems only fitting that I should conclude this missive in a similar manner.

• Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
  To the last syllable of recorded time;
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
  Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
  And then is heard no more. It is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.
  
  • -- Shakespeare, Macbeth

Amazing, how you've demolished your entire previous position in a long, confused & rambling diatribe that misconstrues what I've written. Maybe you didn't even understand what I had written.

For example: Galaxian never asked you whether the sea is salty. You were asked: "...is the water around La Roche Godon (Amsterdam Island) salty? How would you know? Have you been there? If you've read it somewhere, how do you know it is true? Does La Roche Godon even exist?"

You are the 'philosophical idealist', in that, like a four year old, you demand a serial set of explanations & proofs for every jot & tittle of your perceived enemy's argument. Even though/when you are incapable of understanding it.

Thank you for your 'Readers Digest' synopsis of the elements of marine chemistry, and your 'Penguin Ladybird' picture book version of astronomical knowledge & how it is gained.

You have a very purist and sycophantic attitude to official propaganda; imagining that it is all well meaning & honest. That it must be accepted, since it emanates from on-high. That it is all verifiable & challengeable by any commoner. That it is all by disinterested 'experts' who have no vested interests or political, cultural, or philosophical preconceptions.

All of the above excludes you from rational investigation into things you do not know about, which amount to an infinity. Since you assume, nay, are convinced that you already know about them: The archetypal WYSIWYG mindset.

Indeed, the Bard was right: "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing."

[Hermit]

You have a very purist and sycophantic attitude to official propaganda; imagining that it is all well meaning & honest. That it must be accepted, since it emanates from on-high. That it is all verifiable & challengeable by any commoner.

Do tell us how you discovered the existence of all the advanced technology, such as Mach Tractors, anti-gravity generators & plasma drives. I take it there is evidence for all that stuff, and by evidence I do not mean "someone else said it exists".

[rainbow]

[ Distinguishing them from the rulers, Illuminati, alien overlords (or any synonym), in other words, those who rule us & govern all important affairs.

I don't get this. If these overlords are so powerful and in control, why is the world in such a mess?

[pErvinalia]

Coz they want it that way. Duh.

[Brian Peacock]

Your first interjection qualifies you as a philosophical idealist. How can I know the sea is salty, you ask: it may have been salty the last time I went for a paddle, but at this very moment, now, with no immediate access to the shore and, therefore, no direct experience that would confirm the saltiness of seawater I have no rational basis on which to contend the essential minerality of oceanic bodies - one way or another. Indeed, you ask not only whether I can assure my contentions about sea salinity, but charge me with providing some sort of proof, if only to myself, that oceans, along with the bodies which they enclose, even exist at all.

Philosophical idealism maintains that reality is a mental construct rooted in perceptual experience--that is; that the experience of reality is the reality of experience--and thus, accordingly, the doctrine exerts a significant degree of skepticism about the possibility of knowledge and of knowing anything that we cannot experience, or are not experiencing, directly - right here, right now. In this respect your interjection undermines your own assertions: how can you know anything about Moon Bases Alpha and Beta; have you been there; did you read it somewhere, did somebody tell you about it, and how can you trust them or secure what they report about their own experience; if the Moon was in the heavens last night how do you know it will be there this evening; does the Moon even exist at all? You can see the limits of taking this approach to requests for support I'm sure.

There is a certain predictability in this defence which must be accounted for. By predictability I do not mean that your reply is predictable in as much as it foregoes addressing the point in favour of shifting the burden and challenging the foundation of knowledge, which of course it does. I mean there is a certain predictability in the systems of the natural world which we encounter and understand both on an experiential level and on the level of our attempts to identify and explicate through the epistemological adventures of scientific endeavour the nature of things and stuff.

The ocean does not turn into jam; doors do not become cattle before forming simulacra of Lara Croft (would that they were); carbon atoms do not sprout legs an wings and carry distressed maidens off to the impossible heights of invisible castles. The story of the possible is not written in the realm of the imagination but in the empirical realm. While all natural systems are in flux they are not fluxible to such a wild degree and, therefore, if we are rigours in our observation and diligent in our reasoning, we can systematically chip away at the edifice of our own ignorance to get at a seam of knowledge beneath; to arrive at a point where we can say that we are, to some qualified extent, entitled to our claims to understanding and knowledge.

The ocean is a body of specific, identifiable chemical elements, a large body of H2O which forms the substrate for a raft of other elements, our understanding of the nature of chemical reactions is rigorously supported by observation and experimentation, and it is the repeatability of those experiments, as attempts to provide a genuine test of any theory or hypothesis and by so doing endeavour to falsify the implicit claim, and/or to refute it, which ultimately confirm those observations, support the claims, and allow us to develop and deploy predictive models of the natural world based thereon.

When a theory or hypothesis resists all attempts to falsify it then we are entitled to say that we know a particular something-or-other about a particular something-or-other - if only until new information or a better, more parsimonious explanation of the information we have comes along. Claims to knowledge which cannot be falsified by any means, which cannot be tested, foreclose on the possibility of corroboratory or confirmatory support. Basically, they are worthless - the knowledge to which they aspire is beyond even the reach of those making the claim.

But scientific processes aside, we know from our own direct experience that things in the natural world, which we encounter in our everyday livse, are bound to certain predictabilities: the fire that burnt you today will burn you tomorrow; trees do not change position in the landscape without some mighty force to act upon them; water does not flow uphill; kicking a rock with all your strength will hurt your toes as surely as kicking a policeman will get you arrested.

If your contention is that we cannot rely upon the observed and observable predictability of the natural world or upon the mechanisms--whether that be from our own direct, incorrigible experiences or via the rigorously supported hypotheses, theories, or laws developed by others--by which we apprehend reality, and that as such that which we call knowledge and understanding are rooted in things so uncertain and fluxious that only the direct apprehension of personal experiences, now, in the moment, can confirm and assure any and all knowledge claims, then you must, as must each of us, reobserve and reconfirm all that we think we know about the world - and not simply each morning upon waking, but each passing moment - right here, right now.

In other words, to eschew the predictability of the systems which comprise the natural world is to assert that reality and all knowledge which underpins our understanding of the world, even our own direct experiences, is without both use and meaning. You, my friend, ask us to inhabit a world without knowledge, and an anecdote is no substitution for a fact I can tell you.

Thus the conjecture of your first interjection is undermined, rationally, and fatally so.

Undermining your second interjection relies on similar factors to your first, again you're shifting the burden to avoid addressing the point while issuing challenges rooted in the incorrigible and conflicting nature of your and your challengers personal experiences. Though I would much rather you addressed the points directly, it nonetheless follows, again, that your own specious contentions can be forestalled by the same mean in which you address them, to wit: have you seen one of these marvellous vehicles going up in the sky; how often have you looked for them in a clear, dark sky; do you have records of any such observation and could they be corroborated and confirms, and if so how exactly? Be truthful now!

Astronomers use various means to attend to the local and wider cosmological environment, and routinely observe things which are beyond the direct perceptual capacities, and therefore beyond the direct experience, of humans. Yet, even from Earth, armed with nothing but a clear sky and sturdily secured pair of high-quality binoculars we can observe objects such as asteroids in the shadow of Jupiter even though they emit no light or energy - their passage across a field of view is discernible and mapped by what they occlude. And astronomy is an endeavour not just limited to tenured scientists, engineers, and their assistants, but as a field it benefits significantly from the contributions of a huge, and proportionally much larger, number of enthusiastic armatures in every part of the globe. The sky is a surveilled domain - this issue is not whether I've seen these mysterious travellers or not, but why nobody has seen them.

Now perhaps you are tempted to suggested that the cool-sounding Mach Tractors are designed in such a way as to avoid detection from any observation point on the Earth or in near-orbit, and that the technologies employed are so sophisticated that even the unavoidable, not to mention spectacular, ionisation of the upper atmosphere caused by friction can be, somehow, suppressed or avoided; that the motive forces generated by such machines do not employ the principles of thrust and therefore produce no emissions; that the manufacture of components, and the assembly and maintenance of theses vehicles is completely untraceable, perhaps having no impact on resource and commodity movements or markets, or maybe not even being drawn from resource stocks found on Earth. All these reasons would, surely, explain why no trace of these advanced manufactured items has been, or will ever become, apparent?

However, to say such things would be to erect an unrealisable assertion, like invoking super-natural powers or magick, one which ill-serves your own claims - for if the lauded Mach Tractor is so advances as to be invisible to us in every respect then on what basis do you, dear Galaxian, stake a claim for their existence? Don't hold back now - you are among friends.

You third and fourth interjections rely on that other well-established discursive tactic so prevalent among conspiracy theorists and ideologues of every strip: the fallacy of presuming your conclusion in your premise. To cut a long story short, because the nurse is due shortly to attend to my sores, you presume the existence of advanced technologies and compare and assert that those who employ them have advanced or evolved beyond humans to the same extent or degree that we have evolved and advanced beyond our biological brethren the chimpanzee. By this you offer us insight into their motivation and our status in relation to them, and entreat us to believe without even so much as a hint of any reasonable, rational support that these things even exist in the first place. A better setting for errant rectum-custard of this magnitude is in a work of fiction or fantasy as such forms allow the imagination to range widely and freely without the necessary encumbrances of evidences and rational argument.

In your final remarks you relieve yourself, figuratively speaking of course, of the burden of supporting your own claims, and by so doing you stymie the tentative process of elevating them from their pitiful status of wishful fantasies. You implore us to take your utterances as 'information', as a means to us 'persuading ourselves' in the manner so familiar to those snake oil sellers commonly referred to as religious authorities: "This thing is true. Believe me. Trust me. First you have to want to believe. All you need is Faith. The evidence is all around you - you only have to look for it."

Confabulation on this scale may work for and on feeble-minded dolts, but for most of us belief in the veracity of a claims follows from some reasoned, rational, and therefore compelling, evidence in support of those claims. It is wholly irrational, not mention wholly unreasonable (in every sense), to believe first and then cast around for something, anything, that looks like evidence for it - particularly when all that is being brought to the table are circular arguments and magical thinking. Frankly, your entire conjecture is beyond a joke, and if you think it passes for diligent inquiry and a sound, supported, rigorous, rational conclusion then the joke, such that it is, is on you.

As you chose to begin your rejoiner with The Bard of Avon it seems only fitting that I should conclude this missive in a similar manner.

• Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
  To the last syllable of recorded time;
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
  Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
  And then is heard no more. It is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.
  
  • -- Shakespeare, Macbeth

Amazing, how you've demolished your entire previous position in a long, confused & rambling diatribe that misconstrues what I've written. Maybe you didn't even understand what I had written.

For example: Galaxian never asked you whether the sea is salty. You were asked: "...is the water around La Roche Godon (Amsterdam Island) salty? How would you know? Have you been there? If you've read it somewhere, how do you know it is true? Does La Roche Godon even exist?"

You are the 'philosophical idealist', in that, like a four year old, you demand a serial set of explanations & proofs for every jot & tittle of your perceived enemy's argument. Even though/when you are incapable of understanding it.

Thank you for your 'Readers Digest' synopsis of the elements of marine chemistry, and your 'Penguin Ladybird' picture book version of astronomical knowledge & how it is gained.

You have a very purist and sycophantic attitude to official propaganda; imagining that it is all well meaning & honest. That it must be accepted, since it emanates from on-high. That it is all verifiable & challengeable by any commoner. That it is all by disinterested 'experts' who have no vested interests or political, cultural, or philosophical preconceptions.

All of the above excludes you from rational investigation into things you do not know about, which amount to an infinity. Since you assume, nay, are convinced that you already know about them: The archetypal WYSIWYG mindset.

Indeed, the Bard was right: "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing."

So I guess you have no evidence to support your fantastical idealism - it's literally all inside your head. All your ideas have in support is a big bag of fallacies and heroic sense of indignation at not being taken seriously.

[Brian Peacock]

[ Distinguishing them from the rulers, Illuminati, alien overlords (or any synonym), in other words, those who rule us & govern all important affairs.

I don't get this. If these overlords are so powerful and in control, why is the world in such a mess?

And why are they so shy?

[NineBerry]

Always had hair day.

[Galaxian]

You have a very purist and sycophantic attitude to official propaganda; imagining that it is all well meaning & honest. That it must be accepted, since it emanates from on-high. That it is all verifiable & challengeable by any commoner.

Do tell us how you discovered the existence of all the advanced technology, such as Mach Tractors, anti-gravity generators & plasma drives. I take it there is evidence for all that stuff, and by evidence I do not mean "someone else said it exists".

Hi Hermit. I am forbidden to tell you how I know about the advanced technology, but can go one better, and tell you how you can discover it. Here's a few aperitifs:
Mach Tractor: http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//ful ... 2.000.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn8hqX9JBOE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy6hLZ02naM


Anti-gravity: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35861334
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pj4d4zqkAc


Plasma Drive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_propulsion_engine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVsgSjm_vXg


The problem is that most people ARE sheeple. That is not an insult, it is a fact. Humans are a herd species, so most fall into that mode of behavior.
It is well known that most people/sheeple follow the Overton window. Since the window looks out on to the standard permissible belief system, the ordinary person is struck with cognitive dissociation if/when faced with 'outlandish' ideas, such as the obvious fact that WTC 1, 2, 7 were brought down by controlled demolition.

And no amount of evidence will persuade the cognitively dissociated sheeple to accept the obvious facts, because it is not an officially authorized bit of news. As the Overton window shifts, then the masses follow suit. If the Overton window says that God is real and in the sky, the sheeple accept it. If later the fad is that there is no God, then the masses will follow that. In both cases only a few outliers, such as Galaxian, will dare to be freethinkers.

And such outliers take a serious risk of being attacked or killed, such as on this site. The only reason Galaxian is not attacked more fiercely is because he is inaccessible, though warnings have been given via the locking of bank accounts and banning from forums, such as RatSkep.

So YOU need to realize that acquired knowledge is far more satisfying than gifted ignorance & stupidity

[pErvinalia]

You have a very purist and sycophantic attitude to official propaganda; imagining that it is all well meaning & honest. That it must be accepted, since it emanates from on-high. That it is all verifiable & challengeable by any commoner.

Do tell us how you discovered the existence of all the advanced technology, such as Mach Tractors, anti-gravity generators & plasma drives. I take it there is evidence for all that stuff, and by evidence I do not mean "someone else said it exists".

Hi Hermit. I am forbidden to tell you how I know about the advanced technology

[Scot Dutchy]

Is he hard wired or does it just appear so?

[pErvinalia]

And no amount of evidence will persuade the cognitively dissociated sheeple to accept the obvious facts, because it is not an officially authorized bit of news. As the Overton window shifts, then the masses follow suit. If the Overton window says that God is real and in the sky, the sheeple accept it. If later the fad is that there is no God, then the masses will follow that. In both cases only a few outliers, such as Galaxian, will dare to be freethinkers.

You are a walking logical fallacy. Earlier you claimed that there were no moon bases and then a few posts later claimed that there were. And now you are claiming that it is logically coherent to hold that God both does and doesn't exist. Well done.

[Woodbutcher]

And no amount of evidence will persuade the cognitively dissociated sheeple to accept the obvious facts, because it is not an officially authorized bit of news. As the Overton window shifts, then the masses follow suit. If the Overton window says that God is real and in the sky, the sheeple accept it. If later the fad is that there is no God, then the masses will follow that. In both cases only a few outliers, such as Galaxian, will dare to be freethinkers.

You are a walking logical fallacy. Earlier you claimed that there were no moon bases and then a few posts later claimed that there were. And now you are claiming that it is logically coherent to hold that God both does and doesn't exist. Well done.

It all makes sense in the quantum universe, according to Schrödinger and Einstein. Gods are created out of nothing just as easily as moon bases; they are not and then they are!

[L'Emmerdeur]

You just don't want to recognize the truth, because you're too emotionally invested, IMO: http://www.investors.com/politics/comme ... ry-at-all/ and http://www.compete.org/storage/reports/ ... 120516.pdf

Ah, so now we should blame Obama for a trend that's been going of for decades? If that's the best you can do, your argument is dead in the water.

The fact is that the economy recovered during the Obama presidency. I'm not arguing that it's been a great recovery, and there are still problems with the economy, but to say that there was "no recovery at all" is ridiculous partisan rhetoric.

As for that article:

The good news is, it can be fixed. But it will take radically different policies and the political will to buck the special interests, lobbyists and crony capitalists that stand in the way.

Given that Trump has filled his administration with crony capitalists and has kowtowed to the "special interests" by showing that he's dead set on eliminating the measures put in place to try to prevent a recurrence of the last recession, there isn't any good news to be had.