No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots.

This is one nation under God. -- George Bush Sr., to a reporter in 1988 "A tyrant mu The populations increase more rapidly than food supplies. So, there would always be more people in the world than can be fed, and wars and disease will be necessary to kill off the extra population. ( THOMAS MALTHUS Always remember: you re unique. Just like everyone else. If at first you don t succeed, consider yourself average The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits Never underestimate the power of stupid people in big groups Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have Take risks: if you win, you will be happy; if you don t you will be wise. Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened Don t put off till tomorrow what could be done today. Why not give yourself another week?

You have two ears

and one mouth. It is best to use them in that proportion As long as your mistakes are new ones you can argue that you are making progress Anything worth taking seriously is worth poking fun at. When the blind leadeth the blind . . . best get out of the way.

************* FIRST FECULENTIA The word of Sin is Restriction; seek therefore Righteousness, enquiring into Ini quity, and fortify thyself to overcome it through the power and the glory of the koton himself .V1 10th: People asked to write down a few words describing a university professor subsequently answer more Trivial Pursuit questions correctly than those describing a soccer hooligan 9th: Women s personal ads would attract more replies if they were written by a man. The opposite is not true of men s ads. 8th: The Mona Lisa seems enigmatic because Leonardo da Vinci painted her so that her smile appears more striking when people look at her eyes than at her mouth. 7th: Women van drivers are more likely than others to take more than ten items through the express lane in a supermarket, to break speed limits, and to park in restricted areas. (This one proved especially popular with women.) 6th: Some seemingly ghostly experiences, such as feeling an odd sense of presence, are actually due to low-frequency sound waves produced by the wind blowing across an open window. (This received the top score from men.) 5th: Words containing the k sound such as duck, quack, and Krusty the Clown are especially likely to make people laugh. 4th: People born during the summer are luckier than those born in the winter temperature differences around the time of birth make summer-borns more optimistic and open to opportunities 3rd: The best way of detecting a lie is to listen rather than look liars say less, give fewer details, and use the word I less than people telling the truth. 2nd: The difference between a genuine and a fake smile is all in the eyes in a genuine smile, the skin around the eyes crinkles; in a fake smile it remains much flatter.

1st: People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog feces and not washed than one that has been drycleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer. Five Common Misconceptions about Women 1. Women like men with souls. I don't know who is responsible for spreading this rumor, but I can assure you that it's not true. Women like to talk about how they want nice, pleasant, goodh earted men, but that's simply not the truth. When it all comes down to it, women want men who are more on the side of the Seven Deadly Sins than the Seven Contrary Virtues. So, forget about faith, hope, charity, courage, justice, prude nce, and abstinence. They might get you far in the eyes of the church, but they won't do shit for your dating life. 2. Women like men who will treat them 'right.' Sure, that's what we want you to think. We like to tell you that we want guys wh o will pull out our chairs, send us flowers, compliment us, and cook us dinner. We ll, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Women have come a long way over the past several millennia. Nowadays, we have the arm strength to pull out our own chairs, we have no need for gifts that represent decay, we already know how good we look, and we're more than capable of ordering out for dinner. So, if treating us 'right' is your game plan, you're going to be in for a long round of solitaire. And just to be clear, solitaire is a game for one. 3. Women like men who dote on them. Contrary to popular belief, women need some alone time, too. We don't like it when men are always around, waiting to be helpful. Sometimes we want to be bitchy and avoid thinking about the light at the end of the tunnel, so we don't need you to always be there with encouraging words. Sometimes we want to watch TV without a drink, so we don't need you to consistently ask if we need anything. Sometimes we want to take a bubble bath and relieve our stress without you asking if we want to be washed. Remember - our self-learned cleanliness is one of the things that attracted you to begin with. The point is, we are self-sufficient on our own, and we don't need you to always play the hero. 4. Women like men who are sensitive. Women like men who are sensitive about as much as men like women with gonorrhea. And unless you belong to a very strange breed of men, I'm sure we can all agree that gonorrhea is not too high on a man's list of necessary priori ties. Women have enough emotional hormones as it is. The last thing we want to do is sit around and pat your back while you let out a good, long sobbing session whil e you watch the Titanic sink. Sure, we all hate the idea of a life without Leonard o, but we don't want to think about how sad you would be in a life without Leonardo. Please be a man and leave the sensitivity to us! 5. Women DON'T like bastards. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of all. We may not like bastards in theory, but we sure do love them in practice. I don't know exactly what it is ab out them, but we just can't get enough of them. Maybe it's the way they look or the way they speak. Maybe it all stems down to the fact that we crave unobtainable things. Whatever the reason is, the point is still the same. Women love bastards

. Case closed We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psycho logical reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colle agues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent argume nts, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs fol low. I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about r eality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it. Reality exists indepe ndent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we ho ld at any given time. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest per son to fool. RICHARD FEYNMAN, SURELY YOU RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN, 1974 When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is w ronger than both of them put together. ISAAC ASIMOV, THE RELATIVITY OF WRONG, 1989 There once was a lady named Bright, Who traveled much faster than light. She dep arted one day, in a relative way, And returned on the previous night It's difficult to work in a group when you are omnipotent.' 'Lee is a 3-dimensional representation of a 4-dimensional shape' Just feel i should clarify a point regarding comments posted by me on here: - Q Star Trek: The next generation (episd 'De'ja Q') - Introduction to an Essay entitled- 'Do we Live in a Computer Simulation?' whic h explains how by using the Simulation Argument and applied logic, it is possibl e to descover weither yr personal reality is in fact a computer programme. -Kopimistiska belief is based on a few basic axioms; Information and informatio n value is is sacred to us and remixing information communicated by another is s een as an act of respect and an act of religious devotion. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is mere . I too see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one million year old light; a vast pattern of which I am a part . . .. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvellous

is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 'Specail Agent Tim Carroll was tossed out of his apartment by the landlady becau se one of Tim's many lady friends stayed over for the whole entire evening. This upset the old biddy who owned the building, and being a staunch, Godfearing charter member of the DAR, she canceled his lease and ordered him to leave the building. Displeased with the arbitrary and unilateral treatment and the upheaval caused by her dubious moral judgement, Tim didn't get angry; he got even. He had a trusted friend place a large sign in a hallway window of the landlady's apartment building. The seventh-floor window faced a busy business street, and the sign was quite visible to many hundreds of people. The sign read: TIM CARROLL SUCKS. The landlady didn't see the sign, so two days later, Tim's friend positioned another sign, this time in a sixth-floor-hall window. The second sign read: TIM CARROLL IS A FAG. The landlady saw both signs and removed them. Two days later, she got a letter from Tim, with a picture enclosed showing her building with the signs easily visible. The letter was Tim's complaint about personal slander and harassment. He asked her please to desist. Sometime early the next morning, in time for rush-hour morning traffic, a new sign went up in the window: TIM CARROLL BLOWS DEAD BEARS. At 8:30 A.M., the unsuspecting landlady received a call from an attorney friend of Tim's, citing the original slander and warning the woman against further incidents. Shaken, she swore her innocence. Ten minutes after hanging up, he called back, sounding furious because Tim had just called him about the latest sign. Flabbergasted, the old lady swore she would remove it and loudly proclaim her innocence. Another sign went up that afternoon in time for rush-hour the other way: TIM CARROLL IS A FLAMING HETEROSEXUAL. The landlady got the lawyer's call just after dark, when the sign was no longer visible. She was almost in tears because of his threats to sue. She begged to just talk to Tim, to tell him none of this was her doing. The attorney told her that he had advised his client to have no further discussions with her. The next day's sign read: FOR A GOOD LAY, CALL TIM CARROLL. That evening, a new sign went up. The landlady, frantic, according to Tim's friend who was putting up the signs, got to it fifteen minutes after it went up. The attorney called her five minutes after she go back to her own apartment. Tim related, "You might feel almost sorry for the old lady, except that she had told me earlier that she was going to keep my security deposit and that I would have to forfeit the month's rent I had paid in advance because I had violated the morality clause in my lease. The was no such clause. I found out she had done this same thing to two other guys a year before and some guys before that. She also tossed out a couple because they weren't married. She'd come into your room when you were gone and snoop, too. That bugged me." No signs went up for the next three days, although the woman checked the windows every twenty minutes or so. On the fourth day,

hundreds of passersby, accustomed to the signs weren't disappointed. The new sign read: TIM CARROLL'S WHOREHOUSE. Although it took her an hour to discover and remove it, the lawyer friend of Tim's didn't call until the next morning, when a new sign was in the window: WHOREHOUSE UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. The landlady's telephone number was listed. A second sign was placed on the sixth-floor window underneath: TIM CARROLL COULDN'T BEAT THE COMPETITION. In his best tones, the attorney explained that enough was enough and that on behalf of his client, Mr. Carroll, he would be filing an action. The woman was distraught. He told her to have her attorney present for a meeting at three the following afternoon. He asked her who attorney was and said the meeting should be in his office. Tim and his attorney postponed this meeting several times, then told the woman that since she had stopped putting up the signs, they would hold the suit in limbo for the time. Reportedly, she monitored the halls and windows of that building regularly for for five months. But more importantly, she also left her tenants t o their own moral lives.'Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fu n if they tried making love. At very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom t oo, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it a gain. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even close r to each other. What do you think about that, was it OK for them to make love?s it OK for them to make love? In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it. "Don't be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you. The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned. Mexican hero General Alvaro Obregon "Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. "Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. ..."

"There is nothing either good or bad," said Shakespeare, "but thinking makes it so." Emerson said: "Every man I meet is my superior in some way, In that, I learn of him." Were I (who to my cost already am One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man.)

A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas d to weare, I d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear. Or any thing but that vain Animal, Who is so proud of being rational. The senses are too gross, and he ll contrive A Sixth, to contradict the other Five; And before certain instinct, will preferr Reason, which Fifty times for one does err. John Wilmot,2nd Earl of Rochester For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein t he beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced. FRANCIS BACON, Novum Organum, 1620 The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest per son to fool. RICHARD FEYNMAN, SURELY Who is the third who always walks beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded. from T. S. Eliot s poem The Waste Land :

pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren s ong of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whe never our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, durin g challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminis hed cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us then, ha bits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. CARL SAGAN, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is w ronger than both of them put together. ISAAC ASIMOV, THE RELATIVITY OF WRONG, 1989 Don t worry about the world coming to an end today. It s already

tomorrow in Australia There once was a lady named Bright, Who traveled much faster than light. She dep arted one day, in a relative way, And returned on the previous night.

It's difficult to work in a group when you are omnipotent. Skoll the wolf who shall scare the Moon Till he flies to the Wood-of-Woe: Hati the wolf, Hridvitnir s kin, Who shall pursue the sun. GRIMNISMAL,

The Elder Edda

"It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives." --Francis Bacon You....cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You....cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You...cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You....cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You....cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You ... cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You.....cannot establish security on borrowed money. You.....cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence. You.....cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. ------- J. Paul Getty Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. --- Elie Wiesel If you don't want to have critics: don't do anything and don't be anybody Wherever you go , go with your whole heart. ----- Confucious Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lea d. Just walk beside me and be my friend. --- Albert Camus Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your charact er is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you ar e. ------ John Wooden 1910-2010 A man said to the universe: Sir, I exist, However, replied the universe not created in me a sense of obligation. -- Stephen Crane Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.----Albert Einstein Do what you feel to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway. Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain, and most fools do. --- Dale Carneg ie The fact has

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave y our own trail. ----- Emerson The most important thing in this world is the destruction of superstition. Superstition interferes with the happiness of mankind. Superstition is a terrible serpent, reaching in frightful coils from heaven to earth and thrusting its poisoned fangs into the hearts of men. While I live, I am going to do what little I can for the destruction of this monster. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible comb ination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre. In the mid-1960s, building on theoretical work being undertaken at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Milgram decided to take a hands-on approach to understanding the small-world phenomenon One hundred and ninety-eight people living in Nebraska were sent a letter in which they were asked to help ensure that it made its way to a target person a particular stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. There was, however, a catch. Participants could not mail the letter directly to the stockbroker; they had to send it to people they knew on first-name terms and who they thought might know the stockbroker. Each recipient was asked to do the same; and again, the recipients had to send the letter to people they knew on first-name terms. How many people were needed to link complete strangers? Given the tens of millions of people in America, many were surprised to discover that there tended to be just six people linking the initial volunteer and the target person giving rise to the popular notion that we are all connected by just six degrees of separation Hume s Maxim: The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, un-less the testimony be of such a kind, t hat its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.