Aileron

Hmm, actually the deduction numbers were going to be 35%, 50%, 65%, and % respectively. I know % deduction seems ridiculous but keep in mind that it would be for the last 1/6th of the round, and they would be so far behind pop-wise that they would be lucky if they could attack anyone. Thus JDS' plan means less deduction but more well-rounded abilities.

Hmm, I happen to be Catholic and have never heard that one. I think the purpose of this thread is to get me to outline every thing I've come to obserb about atheists, because they are actually a lot more well-defined than they like to let on. An atheist is a person who is absolutely certain of the belief that there is no divine being beyond the universe. Furthermore, they believe that any other person who believes in a divine being is an outdated fool stuck in supers!@#$%^&*ion. Atheists believe that they are the most moral of religions. This is obtained not through actual humanitarianism but because atheism is not organized. For instance, Stalin, an atheist, rounded up any non-atheist in the USSR and put them in death camps. Were this any other religion, that behavior would be described as an inquisition, but because atheism isn't organized the behavor is labeled as an aspect of Communism thus any atheist who isn't a communist can claim to be a member of a religion which has never practiced an inquisition. Atheists believe that one day science will disprove the existence of any divine being. That is despite the fact that science by definition only answers how the universe works rather than why the universe exists, and thus trying to use science to prove or disprove religion is like trying to cook an omelette using a toaster. Not being deterred completely, they furthermore state that they are the most scientific religion. This usually stems from the fact that the major religions were around during the dark ages and atheism isn't organized and thus are not attached to their dark age counterparts. Their favorite is the inprisonment of Copernicus, the man who initially theorized that the Earth revolves around the Sun. What they don't mention is Copernicus was a far cry from what the modern world would call a career scientist. He made his bread an butter by telling fortunes and 'reading the stars' to supersticious farmers. He was essentially a quack who got lucky once. Astrologist quacks aren't as harmless as one would think. Just a few decades ago, a cult committed suicide while coinciding with Hailey's Comet's arrival. In the dark ages people were a lot less educated, more supersticious, more oppressed, and more desperate than they are now, and would buy in to these sort of things a lot easier. Granted, it still doesn't make it seem right, but the whole point is that this is modern criticism towards actions in a world than was nothing like the modern world. Atheists do have a myth towards the end of the world. Generally, they believe mankind will do ourselves in one way or another. In the 70s it was global cooling. In the 90s it was el nino and the y2k bug. Now it happens to be global warming. So far none of these panics have panned out yet, but with each new one comes a legion of 'experts' who manage to scream and scream and scream until the politicians buy their arguements and inact drastic measures to fix the so called catastrophe. They also have their creation myth - Darwin's Theory of Evolution. While the statement that a species will evolve in and of itself is fairly solid, over a century and a half of trying they have yet to prove that a species can actually evolve out of a different species and furthermore that all life on Earth came from a single life-form. For this to happen, there would need to be an almost continuous line of intermittent changes, making Darwinism the most successfull theory that is dependent upon the existance of Bigfoot. They have many examples of proof, such as the classic story of black and white winged moths in England, where as it turns out the biologist deliberately pinned the moths to the trunks of trees, which would be unnatural behavior for that species of moths and would invalidate the experiment. Still the experiment is posted in high school textbooks. Furthermore, thanks to the courts, it is illegal for any high school to even mention any theory other than Darwin's. The point being, instead of being supported by the evidence and the biological community, Darwinism is supported by the legal system. With Darwinism comes a bunch of philisophical statements. That humankind is a cosmic accident and therefore life is cheap. That over time to "fittest" will survive, and thus we do not need to put effort towards equality. Infact, if there is any inequity it is because the have-nots are not as fit as the haves. (For reference, the defintion of "fittest" in this case is "that which has the adaptations conducive to survival", so "Survival of the Fittest" is actually circular logic.) Other religions believe that God made every human being to be a sentient being, and thus every human is intended to have certain rights such as life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc. - implied from the fact that God would never create a sentient person and then deny him or her these things, much like how a shipwright would never build a boat with the intention that it will never get wet. (Freedom of Religion is infact one of those - God want His children to follow Him freely - hence why He is going through such lengths to be undetectible.) Atheists don't believe in God but rather that there is no authority on Earth greater than that of the majority of the populace, aka. the angry mob, and thus human freedoms are something a government may or may not need to supply their citizens in order to pacify the angry mob. Finally, Atheists have no comprehension towards the purpose of religious texts. They treat them as a historical text and routinely try to prove or disprove events at least a millenium old in Islamic texts, two millenia old for Christians, and several millenia old for Jewish, as if evidence that old is commonplace and that it isn't a small miracle that we have anything left of ancient Egypt at all. Still, the point of religious texts is that they have a meaning. For instance, the story of the prodigal son. Whether or not some time two thousand years ago some son left his father, lived in disgrace, came back and was forgiveen is unimportant historically. What is important are the wisdoms of the parable - that good father's forgive their sons, and furthermore that they will care for the ones they have lost and found again moreso than for the son who never left. This ofcourse is lost on Atheists who believe wisdom stems from survival and thus the only purpose of history is to laugh at the 'fools' who didn't survive. In short, atheist are a very hypocritical form of animal that is very dangerous. I can understand why people can be agnostic as its impossible to definitatively prove God - though in Mathematics admittingly one style of proof is to assume the opposite and find a contradiction, in which case atheism and polytheism have numerous contradictions on the level of "our whole theology is wrong". I mean, monotheistics can be hypocritical too, but the only thing that contradicts is the indivuals' self-righteousness.

You're splitting hairs. The intent of the message is to point out that the maintainance of freedom does require effort. I wouldn't lump it in the same catagory as wisdom, but still, its splitting hairs. We all agree on the point the sentence was making.

Well, what happened is that on July 11th, the IAEA came to their conclusions. They met with Iran's chief diplomat, and told him they were going to refer Iran to the UN Security Council. Also, the G8 Summit was right around the corner. After the meeting, the Iranian diplomat, instead of going back to Iran, flew to Damascus, where he met with some Syrian officials as well as certain representatives from a certain political party based in Lebanon. In something completely unrelated, the next day Hezbollah spontaneously decided to conduct a raid against Israel, kidnapping two soldiers and starting the recent conflict between Israel and Lebanon. Due to that completely unrelated event, the UN and G8 were paying attention to Lebanon and sort of put concerns over Iran's nuclear program on the back burner. Now ofcourse, if any of this implied that after hearing the hammer was about to drop on their arse, that Iran's amb!@#$%^&*ador flew to Syria to give his Hezbollah lackies orders to provide a distraction, you're absolutely wrong. Iran's a peace-loving nation! They don't have ties to terrorists! Those nuclear reactors are for electricity! LALALALALA And to liberals: I've read Ahmenijad's letters. My conclusion is that Ahmenijad is trying to mimic liberalism. In one of them he accuses the US of being a police state where "Private phones are tapped, suspects are arbitrarily arrested, sometimes beaten in the streets, or even shot to death." (November 29, 2006) I for one can credit Iranian intelligence on this one. I live in the US and I haven't noticed this behavior going on, but apparently Ahmenijad has sniffed it out from the other side of the world! Look, he doesn't believe this stuff. He believes in his Mahdi - his writings make that clear. What he is doing is taking things our broadcasts on television and the internet, he has identified the type of people who oppose Bush, and he is simply reiterating their viewpoint. He probably doesn't believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy; he is using that to try to turn over some liberals. He doesn't belive that Iraq never had chemical weapons - it would be hard given that those chemical weapons had wiped out several million Iranians during the Iraq-Iran war. However, he is willing to make those statements in order to appeal to liberals. Why? Because he wants us to pull out of Iraq after setting up a vote but before installing basic freedoms. Ahmenijad does not think in terms of national boundaries but religious boundaries, and Iraq is % Shi'ite. If Iraq were to become a majority-dictatorship, it would be a defacto part of Ahmenijad's empire.

Sever, you got it backwards. I am a person with an opinion, which I can choose to support with cir!@#$%^&*stancial evidence or not. I'm speaking on an internet forum no more than a hundred people know about. Ahmenijad is the leader of a country. He doesn't speak for his opinion, but the path which Iran is going to follow. He's given access to the UN because he is supposedly a world leader. He is making public accusations that the US government secretly caused 9/11. Amenijhad certainly has no proof of ~those~ accusations, and he is speaking at the United Nations General !@#$%^&*embly!!!! He's not en!@#$%^&*led to make such comments because he is a world leader, and world leaders are people who should have standards. Ahmenijad wanted to talk to Bush about converting to Islam. Bush isn't interested. Actually, I'm getting this from books rather than the media. Granted, the books are right wing, but this guy did choose a good spread of people to interview, and wrote down his complete record of them. He interviewed a general, a CIA guy, and a college professor, and all three agreed upon the fact that Ahmenijad is a fanatic.

Whatever. I know the Catholic track record for treating other groups in a humane fashion is bad, but the athiest track record is worse - they just incorporate a secular !@#$%^&*le for themselves so that subsequent athiest nuts don't have to feel guilty. And such a hands off policy towards the morality of others can be dangerous. If your neighbor thought he had a right to be a slave owner, and did take action towards becoming one, would you not have reason to act? The belief that we can all not judge each other and have peace is too simple for a complicated world.

Well, there are several aspects. World leaders are as a policy to be given access to the UN. However, Ahmenijad is also speaking at a few universities and wished to be given access to Ground Zero. I would agree that it would be fair to let him go to the UN. To the rest of it I would just tell him to go f___ himself. We don't have to like him. He's denied the Holocaust happened. He thinks 9/11 was caused by a cruise missile. Were this some idiotic college student majoring in compairative literature who's experience in covert operations consists of watching way too many episodes of the X-files, that would be one thing, but this guy is supposedly a world leader. He has access to Iran's intelligence network, and is in the position where one shouldn't say things without proof. Since Ahmenijad has been in charge, Iran has been smuggling weapons to aid the Shi'ites tribes in Iraq. Now, IEDs have armor-piercing shrapnel, and their rocket-propelled grenades have been replaced with surface-to-air missiles. Iran has built facilities that would make it easier for them to develop a nuclear weapon, not a 'dirty bomb', but the real deal. As the number 2 oil exporting nation, they claim those facilities are there to produce energy. Most of these things are underground underneath suburban neighborhoods, unlike our power plants which are deliberately placed in the boonies. He's stated in his domestic addresses that his goal is to cause the return of the Mahdi, the "hidden imam" of Shi'ite Islam who in the 8th century fell down a well. According to the belief's of Ahmenijad's mentor, the Mahdi will return after a sufficient global apocalypse has happened. His beliefs might very well be that he is trying to bring about the return of this Mahdi by killing a lot of people, probably with a nuclear device, and that's according to people who are far more experienced in such matters than I.

There was no such thing as a great athiest scientist. The good scientists, the ones who truly made heavy contributions were Christians with exception to Einstein, who was Jewish. However, Athiests like to spread the myth that they are the scientific ones because the Athiest religion cannot survive without science. They need the Theory of Evolution, because without it Athiests don't have a creation story. They need Global Warming, because without it they don't have an apacolypse story. Every time any scientist contradicts one of these theories, he is sued, stripped of his standing, and discredited. Neither of these theories is relevent really. Evolution concerns pre-history, and we are going to run out of fossil fuels soon enough anyway. Meanwhile the Physics and Chemistry experts, those who's efforts will determine our future and will find the next source of energy are mostly religious people. I guess thanks to the ACLU, most scientists have to be agnostic nowadays, because to be a scientist and contradict Athiesm is heresy and if you are a heretic legal action is taken against you. Also, "Freedom of Religion" != "Seperation of Church and State". Ancient Egypt had seperation between Church and State, but not freedom of religion. The Pharoh did manage to pull the feat of keeping the secular government independent of the temple, while being the sole link between the two, and still managed to impose their form a paganism on the populace.

!@#$%^&*, I thought a day was 24 hours. I went on vacation mode at 5 AM yesterday for a day and started getting hit 7 hours later. Talk about bs.

Hey, I'm suspicious too. Keep in mind his defense is hurting my clan more than it is yours. I also know that UP is king, and I for one have been slacking there.

On top of that are the protesters who do that as a social event. Many of them just show up just for the sake of protesting, because they apparently can't find a good bar or a hobby which they enjoy. And the problem with that is that it creates a "boy who cried wolf" situation, where government officials almost have to ignore protesters now, because so many of them simply don't have a cause; they just wish to protest 'the establishment', which is going to always be a fact of life. Hypothetically, next week Kerry could be confronted by a protester who might have an actual point, but that one will be ignored because Kerry is unlikely to listen to any more protesters due to this idiot.

Tasers can be lethal to people with heart conditions, sure. He appears to be young and healthy though. People in modern society can be wimps sometimes.

....!@#$%^&*, hate to bring validity to a shameless piece of advertising, but I do happen to be looking for a job atm. Not THAT job, but the company does seem to have other positions.

What is annoying is that this was a textbook protest. Go to a public place, make a huge scene, don't leave without being arrested, etc. "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" "Hey did you see that? You saw him repressing me, didn't you?" The worse thing about this is at college campuses, all of the young hippy protesters of the 60s have grown up to be humanities professors who give instruction on protesting. I am a Penn State grad, and though I don't know the course, I do know that organizing a protest is a final project in one of the courses there. At the end of every semester, a general protest group would form in which the professors would attend and grade the students based upon how much of a scene they made. It annoys me that some courses rather than try to build some marketable skills, teach students how to annoy people. LiDDiS, have you seen any city in the past 30 years? We have slums all over the place, and the simplist reason for that is because crime is rampant because police have too many t's to cross and i's to dot while handling a suspect. Most criminals deserve as much, and innocent people tasered mistakingly can get over it. This kid for instance wasn't going to leave that auditorium without being zapped atleast once, so I for once have no pity for him.

JDS, were you referring to the treatment of Japanese during WWII? Yes, it was somewhat non-legal, but it was an action taken during a war, and it certainly did not last "generations". They weren't "inhumane" camps either. The persons got food and medical care, and got let out after the war was over. If only that were the worst event to occur in WWII... Look, Al Queda's, and their financial backbone, the Muslim Brotherhood, have a stated goal which is to force the world to convert to Islam. The United States was the first to cons!@#$%^&*utionalize freedom of religion. They cannot tolerate that because it is in direct interference with their goals. For their goals to be obtained, the principle of freedom of religion must be abolished, and thus they attack any nation which supports it. Anyone who wishes to blame this on Israel has too much of a one-track mind. It was Al Queda, not Hamas. Even if what you were saying is true, which it isn't, but even if it was, the theory that 9/11 was caused by Israel falls short in that the people who "lost land" weren't involved in 9/11. The people who were involved in 9/11 were a bunch of sunnis from Saudi Arabia who certainly haven't been hurt by the United States in terms of material property. The act of suicide bombing is contradictory to greed. Thus the motivation for it cannot be material. Its not money or oil or land they care about. What they care about is forcing their ideaology upon the world.

Score wasn't taken yesterday. Too much wierdness going on.

Bak, are you being serious or sarcastic? I honestly can't tell sometimes.

The student's actions don't follow the first amendment not even in theory. Generally modern law is such that your rights' end where another person's rights begin. For instance, stealing is crime because while you have an inalienable right to pursue happiness, the action infringes upon the property owner's right to pursue his happiness. Its the same thing here. The student has a right to make his own speech, but here he is trying to steal Kerry's speaking time, and interfere with Kerry's creator-endowed inalienable right to free speech. I personally believe that one should not have a right to use free speech in order to speak against free speech. At very least, I view the action as an indicator of stupidity. I think that anyone who is protesting against a speech is a moron, and if they are interfering with the speaker's right to speak, they should furthermore be a criminal. That being said, Bush hasn't had any of his protesters tasered, and he's had to put up with a heck of a lot more idiot protestors. I think Bush deserves kudos for atleast that much. Also, I think this event should create some understanding as to why Bush usually screens the audience a little before flying over to somewhere in give a speech.

Well, first off I will point out that if the SS RPG is to be reinstalled, version 3 is out. It may be a good idea to upgrade. I didn't really want to upgrade because the programmer was vague about what it actually does, only stating that it should "fix some bugs". Not to be cynical but that probably means trading the old bugs that we know about and know how to fix for newer more interesting bugs. Thus, my plan was to wait for ~other~ people to download version 3, wait for ~them~ to find and fix all the bugs, and then install v3. (Anyone who's stuck running on Windows Vista can appreciate this line of reasoning.) However, so far no one else has downloaded the new version either, so if we are doing a replacement we might as well bite the bullet, install v3, deal with the bugs, and get the props for it. Maybe the programmers would listen to a few suggestions from us if we do them a favor. As for changing the races/weapons, I personally don't care what the things are called. If there's a way to make the game more simple I'm all for it too. However, there are three other factors which are equally important: making it so that players only have to log on 3 times a day, making the game more difficult as somebody rises in the ranks, and rewarding players/clans for bringing new players in. If players are going to get pummeled every time they go to work, school, or sleep, they won't play because doing so would interfere with their life. If people who are behind can't catch up to the people on top, they won't play because they have already lost. And finally, reality is that we are going to lose players at a steady rate even under perfect conditions. What needs to be done is to keep the recruitment rate higher than the drop rate.

The Nightwasp is now playable. Again, no deduction bonus, but it will have plenty of time to catch up.

People on vacation mode do not count in the ranks and do not earn tallies. Sound hasn't scored any tallies since yesterday, and JDS is the player with the strongest attack.

I meant in terms of intellectual age, not chronological age.

Then rename it. I'd be happy to rename the clan to whatever you want. Actually, I'd prefer a renaming of that clan. When one reaches a certain age beyond puberty, one finds that naming a clan after a reproductive organ really isn't that funny, and it would be nice if I could do some of this stuff at the library which has better internet.

Would you consider coming back to the SS RPG for real? There's a new ship tomorrow, and several new clans that could use your help.

Top news today is a political scandal. A nameless accountant had been mismanaging state finances. Certain internationally based funds which were intended to go to Ailestan's covert training facilities, known internationally as the "Feed the Starving Orphans" fund, were incorrectly diverted to soup kitchens which service parentless children. This was found during a routine budget review. The accountant was within an hour arrested, tried, convicted of treason, and sent on a sabotage mission. After freeing up the funding, Ailestan quickly improved the training standards for our intelligence and policing services. Almost immeadiately, Ailestani police used their new training to uncover a bacon smuggling ring believed to be run by Falcoknight himself. That his agents had operated for such a long period of time in Ailestan undetected disturbed many government officials. However, action was swift. Some quick raids in Falcoknight's territory shut down the smuggling ring, and improvements in our police forces will prevent infidels from infiltrating our holy land for a long time.