Hollywood Gets Religion

Have to agree 100 percent with this . All this money we have spent has given us nothing but failed wars , massive debt , and a horrible world image . Our defense budget needs to be an actual defense budget , not world police funding .

 

Imagine if we spent the same money solely on defense techn

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Imagine if we spent the same money solely on defense technology .

 

Same money as what? I'm not following you.

Are you asking what would happen if we took our entire defense budget and spent it on other things? Well, one test is to look at how effectively our non-defense spending is going now and how it's gone throughout our history. I'd argue that waste, fraud, and plain stupidity are just as much marks of non-defense spending as defense spending. Politicians don't suddenly get smart when the bucks are non-defense.

Another question, perhaps the most important, is why not assume that money unspent by the government is returned to those who earned it - the people and their businesses? People and businesses allocate their money to things they think will do them the most good. In the aggregate, they're usually right. The most productive and useful things to do with money are almost never what government would do with it. The pols spend money to buy votes and make themselves look good. People may be grateful for politicians' gifts, but those gifts are seldom what's best for the country.

What I would expect if government could absorb the defense budget is a national orgy resembling the toga party in the movie "Animal House." It would be fun, and when all the money was spent, we'd be left hung over with nothing. Not a good idea. Meanwhile, the countries we could no longer intimidate with our military would have muscled us off the economic map, so we'd lose much of our ability to earn new wealth to replace what we'd wasted.

 

OK..... imagine yourself as a being composed of fundamental energy.... and you have already invested nearly infinite time in the past planning and choreographing an essentially infinite number of Big Bang events that expand and expand and expand the universe......to eleven or perhaps 26 dimensions of space - time........ would you tend to get emotionally attached to your creation....... and try to figure out some way to get people and animals and angels and Watchers and aliens and Cherubs and Seraphim, to behave toward each other in a manner that could be termed altruistic?


http://www.carbonbias.blogspot.ca

Theoretical Physics seems to fit with Near Death Experiences.
If all of us humans can be compared to an I.Q. test....how high of a score do you expect a Creator Dad and Mom, composed of fundamental energy would score?

http://www.allaboutchristian.com/spirituality/index.html

People in Hollywood..... tend to be well informed on subject like the non-linear nature of time...... so of course they are attracted to philosophy!

 

If the State of Utah could be convinced to print up a Utah Dollar..... it could be used to partly finance a nearly infinite number of documentary and reality film projects where homeless people are hired to play the role of homeless people.... then victims of the sex trade industry could play the role of victims... drug addicts could play the role of drug addicts...... and those Mormons might just become some of the best documentary and reality films in the world... which would of course lead to emulation by the other churches??!!


http://www.politicalforum.com/polit...-could-utah-state-dollar-save-usa-dollar.html

Could a Utah State Dollar save the USA Dollar?
Have you seen any of the following films:

1. The Future of Food
2. Food Inc
3. The World According to Monsanto.

If so..... then you know that the USA dollar to some degree is linked to and backed up by a plan to control the world's production of food in such a way that could eventually produce global famine.


"George Soros says that America must give up the dollar and accept world currency."
http://www.examiner.com/article/geor...88381481237582


Back in 1994 I found out that President Lincoln had saved American taxpayers four billion dollars in interest payments and since that time I have been wondering what alternative was available to improve monetary policy that would not scare the investors on Wall Street.

A Utah State Dollar could perhaps be the answer!????!!!

 

No. If we spent money on solely defense weapons, not offensive weapons/soldiers that are used to help us invade other countries and lose wars.

 

Why do you assume that atheists need to replace religion with something else? I don't see a need for that and I am an atheist.

 

On the contrary -- if what you're saying is true, and you really believe in self-government, then you're a leftist. You would be amazed to discover that everything you've heard about leftists is untrue. Welcome aboard, yourself!

 

Eric Hoffer said, “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.” That means of course that atheists, who believe there is no god based on their faith in a materialistic worldview, end up mirroring everything they hate about the religious because their impulse springs from basically the same place as the religious impulse.

I came across this article a few years ago that encapsulated that observation: Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett: Evangelical atheists?

Particularly this paragraph:

There is, as has often been noted, something peculiarly evangelistic about what has been termed the new atheist movement. The new atheists have their own special interest groups and ad campaigns. They even have their own holiday (International Blasphemy Day). It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism–an atheist fundamentalism. The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore.This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name). Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer. This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervor.

In other words, atheism has turned into just another religion. The Soviet Union and Maoist China adopted atheism but instead of societies based on reason, you had some of the largest mass murders in human history. Thanks atheists!

You may be the exception to the rule. I dunno since I don't know you, but atheists I've known personally have mostly been of the fanatical, evangelical type.

 

That's supposed to be the way that it works, but look at the NSA. No one's going to jail for their abuses yet. The guy who revealed all this and should be seen as a hero (Edward Snowden) is instead the guy being pursued for prosecution.

I don't see it as a left-right thing. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that the parties present an illusion of choice here. They're quite similar on a lot of issues -- particularly foreign policy and the surveillance state.

Contrary to what you might think, I'm actually more libertarian than liberal. The reason I posited these things in the previous post is because I regularly see our government abuse our rights, and yet, there seems to be little in the way of recourse.

The NSA runs roughshod over privacy and rules concerning warrants.

Big business gets bailouts while the people they destroy the retirement funds of get nothing other than bankruptcy and maybe a welfare check.

Whistleblowers who reveal the government's abuses have to leave the country and seek shelter in countries like Russia, of all places.

So no, I don't buy that the Constitution alone is going to protect us. It's only worth something if the people charged with enforcing it faithfully carry through with their duties.

Nowadays, a lot of countries have doctrines similar to our own. They even typically call them constitutions, but regardless of what these documents say, they only matter if they are actually enforced as they should be.

 

If you describe the universe(s) as a self-designed game by some Supreme Gamer, then there's no reason at all to make people altruistic. The spectacle is more entertaining without it. Since most people are not altruistic most of the time, except with the few people they love, and not always then, the evidence is that your Supreme Gamer agrees with me.

 

I don't believe there's such a thing as a solely defensive weapon. Military strategists understand that "the best defense is a good offense." An offensive capability is what deters others from attacking us.

 

I was raised in a communist family in a communist community. Until I reached college, I knew few people who weren't leftists. My description of the left is based on decades of personal experience, not theory. Your reply is clever and witty, but it says something which isn't true. The left/socialists/communists/Marxists/progressives/etc. is all about government power. The Tea Party is all about taking power away from government. I've attended thousands of leftist meetings, demonstrations, etc. I challenge you to attend one Tea Party meeting.

 

Abuses occur everywhere, e.g., the NSA and (much worse) the IRS scandals. That doesn't mean we should accept abuse as normal.

You're right that Democrats and Republicans often agree. (Not usually a good thing.) But the left goes much further. You're indignant about the NSA. A real leftist would accept NSA surveillance as necessary and inevitable so long as leftists were in control of the NSA.

We're in entire agreement about the need to defend and enforce the Constitution to make it real. We may differ about how that can happen. "The people charged with enforcing" the Constitution are the very ones with reasons to undermine it - power-hungry and megalomaniacal pols. We, the People, are the ones really charged with defending and enforcing the Constitution. If we let pols crush us, they will. We - you and me - are the last line of defense.

 

It is a catchy saying , but this " good offense" that has been our defense has contributed greatly to our debt and our public image. Times change . The best example I will give you of why this is relevant is think about the strategy of war. Besides the mid to late 20th century, when has a country or civilization engaged in war with out being willing to use their most powerful weapon. When you go through history , the side with the most powerful weapon ( with the ability to produce them enough that they actually exist) has used them to full effect. With nuclear combat, this is not the case anymore.

For instance, lets say we really wanted to conquer or dominate a country/ civilization. If we had spent 5 years in a row during vietnam purely bombing from airplanes, we would have destroyed any ability to fight. But every war we have engaged in since ww2 , we have had no idea what a victory means. How do you win a war with out knowing what winning means ?

For instance, lets say we had developed and manufactured an easily deliverable nuclear bomb during the early stage of ww2 on the German front. Instead of sending solders in for d-day, we wiped out a large portion of native Germany with nuclear war..... the will to fight would have been eliminated with out a single ground soldier. What we have done is developed a war strategy and technology we are not willing to use ( thank god). If Vietnam consisted of us dropping 10 to 15 nuclear bombs in the northern area, the war would have been over. But we engage in warfare that has no objective or measurable victory. All of our most expensive weapons of war have almost zero value in modern warfare.

 

The US has been remarkably restrained. We bomb and use other high tech weapons because we don't want to risk our soldier's lives. We don't do all the damage we could because we want to think well of ourselves, and because it helps to have something in reserve - threats are better than actual destruction. We've won our small fast wars - Panama, Grenada, etc., because they had simple clear objectives. But since Vietnam, we've made the mistake of assuming everyone shared American values and would live like us if only given the chance. We go into a country, "liberate" it, and wait for the locals to join the Rotary. That's been our definition of victory - when the people of a country abandon their own culture and traditions and become de facto Americans. Of course this never happens, so we keep on until exhausted. It's not the lack of an objective; it's the pursuit of an unwinnable objective.

 

I think the reason America doesn't do all the damage you could is very clear. Any attempt at using nuclear weapons (which I'm assuming you're alluding to), is simply because of the very real risk that you would face nuclear retaliation. In Vietnam you would have the Chinese to contend with, and in Afghanistan which the more bellicose forum members would love to see nuked, their Russian neighbours would not be too pleased to have nuclear weapons and their assorted radiation plumes wandering over their nation.
Bear in mind that in those scenarios you would not be dealing with an already beaten enemy, as with Japan in 1945...

 

I didn't mean nuclear weapons. The risk of retaliation is obviously too great. But we have many other ultra-sophisticated new weapons we use with restraint. We have non-nuclear bombs as powerful as atom bombs. We have drones as small as dragonflies that can guide missiles to targets, etc. Modern war is unlike anything we knew even 10 years ago. Tactically, we now prefer precise targeting to the stupid blow-everything-up warfare of yesteryear. Identifying targets of military and political relevance and just going after those is better. Most Americans don't even know we're fighting a war with Al-Qaeda in Yemen right now because the war is largely through drones - no D-Day style landings of umpteen Marines on the beaches.

 

Again I would argue. America used as much of its high-rechnology as it it could muster in Vietnam and it achieved nothing. A reversion to the blunt instrument of carpet bombing achieved nothing. Moving on a few decades to Iraq and Afghanistan and we see the same pattern emerging; immensely costly wars waged for no return on the investment. The futility of using a multi-million dollar drone to kill one or two suspects is also clear-you can't defeat ideas and ideologies with military weapons.

 

Go back to my earlier post about the futility of wars whose objective is to transform cultures. No possible military action of any sort can accomplish that. An army can kill and destroy, and it can occupy and control. That's it. No army can change how people think or feel or live.

 

Intriguing!!!!!!!!!!!

 

But.......... planning and working out a nearly infinite number of Big Bang events..... gives that Being/Beings a very different view than that of a created Cherub.... who is much much younger!


http://www.near-death.com/experiences/reincarnation04.html#a05

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..... Boys..... will be boys...... as they say!!!!!!???
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.near-death.com/forum/nde/000/91.html

 

I read the book about two weeks ago.

It was exceptionally good!

http://heavenisforreal.net

 

Agreed.

I don't know about that. I see rightists defend government overreach when their guys are in office too.

Again, that's less of an ideological thing than simply a human failing. It takes extra effort and perception to remain consistent regarding principles.

Agreed, but it's starting to look like revolution is needed.

 

That could be political, not violent, revolution.

Are you familiar with Mark Levin's latest book? In it, he urges that the second method of amending the Constitution, unused until now, be applied. The state governments can call for a convention to propose amendments; these proposals must still be approved by 3/4 of the states, just as in the usual method. The advantage is that this cuts the Federal government entirely out of the process of Constitutional amendment. He proposes several amendments which would have the effect of returning power to the states and the people, as in the 10th Amendment. Check it out.