Posts made by Spintendo

@fancydude:

The people quoted in the article said secular governments are SUPERIOR to religious ones.

Prime Minister Kenny's saying "superior" was not a proposition of value, it was a proposition of fact. Religious institutions are nominally subordinate to the laws of the government of Ireland.

@leatherbear:

Santorum provided Hill no succor, saying that the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" injected "social engineering" into the military.

Santorum's argument is ironic — considering that warfare conducted by a military is humanity's most violent form of social engineering.

:laugh:

Amorous Squid Seeks Partner: Any Sex Will Do
By JAMES GORMAN of The New York Times
September 20, 2011

A five-and-a-half-inch deep-sea squid that lives a solitary life up to half a mile down in the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean is the latest addition to the hundreds of species that are known to engage in same-sex sex. Over the years, scientists have added one creature after another to the list, making it clear that although Nature may abhor a vacuum, it seems to be fine with just about everything else. Male squid, for example, pay no attention to the sex of other squid. Understandably so. They live alone in the dark, males and females are hard to tell apart, and only occasionally do squids pass in the night. Far better to risk wasting a few million sperm than to miss out on a chance to reproduce.

This is only one among many sorts of same-sex sexual behavior. In some insect species, males engage in traumatic insemination, which is just what it sounds like, of other males and females alike. Among mammals, bottlenose dolphins and bonobos engage in lots of different kinds of sex. Male dolphins pursue sex with males and females equally, but the females show a preference for males. Bonobos pair off in all the combinations, often. Laysan albatrosses form long-term female/female pair bonds, but for them the point is raising chicks, not sex. If one female can arrange a quick liaison with a male from another pair, the two females will tend the young. Noah might well have had two female albatrosses on the ark.

But for sheer amazement, the mating behavior of the squid, Octopoteuthis deletron, has to rank near the top. And the same-sex part is the least of it. For the record, Octopoteuthis is the first among the spineless masses of invertebrates known to mate equally with males and females, Hendrik J.T. Hoving and two colleagues report in their paper, “A shot in the dark: same-sex sexual behavior in a deep-sea squid,” published, lurid title and all, in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology Letters. No surprise given its life in the deep. The way the squid mate is something else. Little is known about the details but it seems that the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. If males are the recipient of these rocket sperm, they are just stuck with them. It is the kind of mating that would make a good video game.

And the visible evidence of those embedded sperm is what allowed Dr. Hoving and his co-authors to document the squid’s mating choices. They pored over video recordings acquired during almost 20 years of dives by remotely operated vehicles sent out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, where Dr. Hoving is doing research, to the deep Monterey Canyon off California. One hundred and eight individual squid had been captured on video, and of that number the scientists could determine the sex of 39 of them: 19 females and 20 males. The equal numbers of males and females suggested that the sample was representative. So when they found that of these 39, 9 males and 10 females had embedded sperm — roughly equal numbers — they concluded that males were trying to mate equally with other males and females.

Dr. Hoving, who was leaving for research at sea himself around publication time for his paper, was prepared for attention to the same-sex behavior and was ready for people to conflate squid and human behavior and announce the discovery of gay squid. He fended off that notion, reiterating that the squid has no discernible sexual orientation, and that a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh really has nothing to do with human behavior. Marlene Zuk, author of the newly published “Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World,” and a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, agreed. She has written about the evolution of same-sex sex in a variety of insects and other animals, and she added a further caution. Don’t imagine that squid are stupid, Ms. Zuk said, at least about being squid. “The animal is not making a mistake. It’s not mistaken to deposit sperm with another male,” because somehow, the behavior works, or natural selection would have eradicated the behavior or the squid.

And, she said, "we still have squid.”

@MrMazda:

I completely agree. There are so many other things that the money that was spent on this useless study could have been spent on.

That research was funded in part by The American Institute Of Bisexuality, a 501 (3) that sponsors projects like education, research, training and media outreach. Not exactly a charity, 501 (c)(3)'s like AIB receive most of their income from investments and endowments. That income is used to make grants to other organizations (in this case the college performing the study) rather than being dispersed directly for charitable activities.

Their reasons for doing this boil down to one: to raise the visibility and promote understanding and awareness of the diversity of sexual orientation in a society that is still, to a large degree, fearful and ignorant of such things. You can laugh at their methods, and question their fiduciary capacities, but you cannot fault them for their ideals.

Irish Rupture With Vatican Sets Off a Transformation
By SARAH LYALL of The New York Times

DUBLIN — Even as it remains preoccupied with its struggling economy, Ireland is in the midst of a profound transformation, as rapid as it is revolutionary: it is recalibrating its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that has permeated almost every aspect of life here for generations. This is still a country where abortion is against the law, where divorce became legal only in 1995, where the church runs more than 90 percent of the primary schools and where 87 percent of the population identifies itself as Catholic. But the awe, respect and fear the Vatican once commanded have given way to something new — rage, disgust and defiance — after a long series of horrific revelations about decades of abuse of children entrusted to the church’s care by a reverential populace.

While similar disclosures have tarnished the Vatican’s image in other countries, perhaps nowhere have they shaken a whole society so thoroughly or so intensely as in Ireland. And so when the normally mild-mannered prime minister, Enda Kenny, unexpectedly took the floor in Parliament this summer to criticize the church, he was giving voice not just to his own pent-up feelings, but to those of a nation. His remarks were a ringing declaration of the supremacy of state over church, in words of outrage and indignation that had never before been used publicly by an Irish leader. “For the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry into a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago,” Mr. Kenny said, referring to the Cloyne Report, which detailed abuse and cover-ups by church officials in southern Ireland through 2009.

Reiterating the report’s claim that the church had encouraged bishops to ignore child-protection guidelines the bishops themselves had adopted, the prime minister attacked “the dysfunction, the disconnection, the elitism” that he said “dominate the culture of the Vatican. The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.” Instead of listening with humility to the heartbreaking evidence of “humiliation and betrayal,” he said, “the Vatican’s response was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.” The effect of his speech was instant and electric.

“It was a seminal moment,” said Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent for The Irish Times. “No Irish prime minister has ever talked to the Catholic Church before in this fashion. The obsequiousness of the Irish state toward the Vatican is gone. The deference is gone.” While both sides are talking in more emollient terms now, there is no question that Mr. Kenny’s declaration deeply angered the Vatican. It immediately withdrew its ambassador from Dublin, ostensibly to help fashion the Vatican’s formal response. (The ambassador has since been reassigned to the Czech Republic.) The position of Irish ambassador to the Vatican is currently vacant, too, and there is talk here of merging it with the ambassadorship to Italy. While government officials say the question is part of a general re-examination of the diplomatic budget, such a move would be seen as a pointed snub to the Holy See, a sovereign state to which countries generally dedicate separate embassies.

Meanwhile, in what has developed into a tit-for-tat war of words, the church’s latest formal communication with Dublin — 24 pages of densely argued prose — took issue with both the Cloyne Report and Mr. Kenny’s remarks, saying that a crucial document had been “misrepresented” by the inquiry and calling “unsubstantiated” Mr. Kenny’s assertion that the Vatican had tried to “frustrate an inquiry” into the abuse scandal. Sympathizers with the church’s position say the Vatican made valid and nuanced points. And they say Mr. Kenny went too far. “Personally, I think it was excessive,” David Quinn, founder of the Iona Institute, a right-leaning religious advocacy group, said of the prime minister’s speech. In an interview, Mr. Quinn said that the relationship between the Vatican and the Irish government was “at a very low ebb.” The state of affairs had not been helped by the fact that newspapers in China, he said, had written editorials using Mr. Kenny’s remarks as an argument for “why the church should be under government control.”

Mr. Kenny, who took office in March after the long-dominant Fianna Fail party imploded over the financial crisis, has been accused of opportunism by some critics. But his position as a practicing Catholic from a conservative area helped give moral weight to his speech. And his government’s feisty new tone has been met with widespread approval in a place that feels doubly betrayed: first by the abuse itself, and second by what many see as a cover-up by the church, compounded by the often opaque, legalistic language with which it defends itself. “You can talk about the finesse of diplomatic ties and maneuverings, but what Kenny was actually saying was that you have to prioritize the victims of abuse, and you have to assert very loudly that this is a republic and civil law has to take precedence over canon law,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin.

While most people have not abandoned their religion, many seem to have abandoned the habit of practicing it. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, recently estimated that only 18 percent of the Catholics in his archdiocese attended Mass every week. The government has announced that it will introduce a package of new legislation to protect children from abuse and neglect, including a law — considered but rejected as too contentious by previous governments — that would make it mandatory to report evidence of crimes to the authorities. It has also established a group to examine how to remove half of the country’s Catholic primary schools from church control. In a recent interview, Eamon Gilmore, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, said that Ireland had asserted its role as a “modern democracy.”

No longer would the church enjoy its previous privileges and powers as in times past, when it, with the government’s collusion, “effectively dictated the social policy of the state,” he said. “Historically, there was a view within the Catholic Church that there was a parallel law, that they had their own system of law, and that was the law to which they were accountable,” Mr. Gilmore said. “At a minimum, that blurred the understanding of the necessity for full compliance with the law of the state.” He added: “The Catholic Church is perfectly entitled to have its own view and its one rule and to view matters according to its own light. But this is a republic. And there is one law.”

When it comes to protecting children, Mr. Gilmore said, “Everybody in the state — irrespective of whether they’re ordinary citizens doing everyday work, or a priest or a bishop — has to comply with the law.”

Hague Is Asked to Investigate Vatican Over Abuse
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN of The New York Times
September 13, 2011

Human rights lawyers and victims of clergy sexual abuse filed a complaint on Tuesday urging the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate and prosecute Pope Benedict XVI and three top Vatican officials for crimes against humanity for what they described as abetting and covering up the rape and sexual assault of children by priests. The formal filing of nearly 80 pages by two American advocacy groups, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, marks the most substantive effort yet to hold the pope and the Vatican accountable in an international court for sexual abuse by priests.

A spokesperson at the court said that the prosecutor’s office will examine the papers, “as we do with all such communications.” The first step will be “to analyse whether the alleged crimes fall under the court’s jurisdiction,” Florence Olara, the prosecutor’s spokeswoman said.

Complaints about the Vatican and child abuse by Catholic priests have been received at the court before, court records showed. But Ms. Olara said that details are not normally disclosed by the court unless a case goes forward. Lawyers familiar with the I.C.C. said that it was unlikely that complaint against the Vatican would fit the court’s mandate to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But even an examination of the issue by the prosecution office would appear to serve the plaintiffs’ goal of getting international attention for the case.

A Vatican spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Vatican officials have often said that the decisions about priests accused of abuse are made by bishops — not by the Vatican hierarchy — and that the church is far more decentralized than is widely believed. But the lawyers and abuse victims who are taking the case to the international court say their action is necessary because all the cases brought against priests and bishops in various countries have not been sufficient to prevent the crimes from continuing. “National jurisdictions can’t really get their arms around this,” said Pamela Spees, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who helped prepare the filing. “Prosecuting individual instances of child molestation or sexual assault has not gotten at the larger systemic problem here. Accountability is the goal, and the I.C.C. makes the most sense, given that it’s a global problem.”

In addition to Pope Benedict XVI, the filing asks the court to prosecute Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state; Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the previous secretary of state and the current dean of the College of Cardinals; and Cardinal William Levada, who is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office designated to receive cases of clergy sexual abuse that are forwarded by bishops.

A central question is whether the accusations will fit the court’s criteria. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed after July 1, 2002, when the court opened. It is independent of the United Nations and has jurisdiction in the 117 countries that so far have ratified the Rome Statute that created the court. Italy, Germany and the Netherlands are signatories, while the Vatican and the United States are not. The filing against the Vatican cites five cases in which priests have been accused of abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the United States; the priests in these cases are from Belgium, India and the United States. Ms. Spees said she hoped to convince the court that the cases were within its jurisdiction, because they involve abuses that she said were “systematic and widespread,” and because the pope and two of the three cardinals named in the filing are from nations that are signatories to the Rome Statute.

Experts in international law said they thought the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, would be reluctant to accept the cases because of thorny jurisdictional questions, as well as political and religious sensitivities. They said that the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests was sufficiently heinous and numerous to meet the court’s standards. The question is whether the facts show that the Vatican officials actually perpetuated the abuse.

Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, which is based in London, said he thought that the Court would open a preliminary investigation to determine whether it has jurisdiction — and that it would probably conclude that it did not. “Crimes against humanity means acts that are committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population,” Mr. Ellis said. “What you’re looking at is really a policy, in which the government or the authorities are planning the attack. When you look at the concept of why and how the I.C.C. was created, I just don’t think this fits,” he said.

“But the filing does something that’s important. It raises awareness. Ultimately the plaintiffs will elevate this in the public eye and it will force the court to respond.”

Pierre Boulle — La planète des singes.

No Surprise for Bisexual Men: Report Indicates They Exist
By DAVID TULLER of The New York Times
Published: August 22, 2011

In an unusual scientific about-face, researchers at Northwestern University have found evidence that at least some men who identify themselves as bisexual are, in fact, sexually aroused by both women and men. The finding is not likely to surprise bisexuals, who have long asserted that attraction often is not limited to one sex. But for many years the question of bisexuality has bedeviled scientists. A widely publicized study published in 2005, also by researchers at Northwestern, reported that “with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists.”

That conclusion outraged bisexual men and women, who said it appeared to support a stereotype of bisexual men as closeted homosexuals.

In the new study, published online in the journal Biological Psychology, the researchers relied on more stringent criteria for selecting participants. To improve their chances of finding men aroused by women as well as men, the researchers recruited subjects from online venues specifically catering to bisexuals. They also required participants to have had sexual experiences with at least two people of each sex and a romantic relationship of at least three months with at least one person of each sex. Men in the 2005 study, on the other hand, were recruited through advertisements in gay-oriented and alternative publications and were identified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual based on responses to a standard questionnaire.

In both studies, men watched videos of male and female same-sex intimacy while genital sensors monitored their erectile responses. While the first study reported that the bisexuals generally resembled homosexuals in their responses, the new one finds that bisexual men responded to both the male and female videos, while gay and straight men in the study did not. Both studies also found that bisexuals reported subjective arousal to both sexes, notwithstanding their genital responses. “Someone who is bisexual might say, ‘Well, duh!’” said Allen Rosenthal, the lead author of the new Northwestern study and a doctoral student in psychology at the university. “But this will be validating to a lot of bisexual men who had heard about the earlier work and felt that scientists weren’t getting them.”

The Northwestern study is the second one published this year to report a distinctive pattern of sexual arousal among bisexual men.

In March, a study in Archives of Sexual Behavior reported the results of a different approach to the question. As in the Northwestern study, the researchers showed participants erotic videos of two men and two women and monitored genital as well as subjective arousal. But they also included scenes of a man having sex with both a woman and another man, on the theory that these might appeal to bisexual men. The researchers — Jerome Cerny, a retired psychology professor at Indiana State University, and Erick Janssen, a senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute — found that bisexual men were more likely than heterosexuals or gay men to experience both genital and subjective arousal while watching these videos. Dr. Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah and an expert on sexual orientation, said that the two new studies, taken together, represented a significant step toward demonstrating that bisexual men do have specific arousal patterns.

“I’ve interviewed a lot of individuals about how invalidating it is when their own family members think they’re confused or going through a stage or in denial,” she said. “These converging lines of evidence, using different methods and stimuli, give us the scientific confidence to say this is something real.”

The new studies are relatively small in size, making it hard to draw generalities, especially since bisexual men may have varying levels of sexual, romantic and emotional attraction to partners of either sex. And of course the studies reveal nothing about patterns of arousal among bisexual women. The Northwestern study included 100 men, closely split among bisexuals, heterosexuals and homosexuals. The study in Archives of Sexual Behavior included 59 participants, among them 13 bisexuals.

The new Northwestern study was financed in part by the American Institute of Bisexuality, a group that promotes research and education regarding bisexuality. Still, advocates expressed mixed feelings about the research. Jim Larsen, 53, a chairman of the Bisexual Organizing Project, a Minnesota-based advocacy group, said the findings could help bisexuals still struggling to accept themselves. “It’s great that they’ve come out with affirmation that bisexuality exists,” he said. “Having said that, they’re proving what we in the community already know. It’s insulting. I think it’s unfortunate that anyone doubts an individual who says, ‘This is what I am and who I am.’ ”

Ellyn Ruthstrom, president of the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, echoed Mr. Larsen’s discomfort. “This unfortunately reduces sexuality and relationships to just sexual stimulation,” Ms. Ruthstrom said. “Researchers want to fit bi attraction into a little box — you have to be exactly the same, attracted to men and women, and you’re bisexual. That’s nonsense. What I love is that people express their bisexuality in so many different ways.” Despite her cautious praise of the new research, Dr. Diamond also noted that the kind of sexual arousal tested in the studies is only one element of sexual orientation and identity. And simply interpreting results about sexual arousal is complicated, because monitoring genital response to erotic images in a laboratory setting cannot replicate an actual human interaction, she added.

“Sexual arousal is a very complicated thing,” she said. “The real phenomenon in day-to-day life is extraordinarily messy and multifactorial.”

A place with no less than nine national holidays every year inspired by God (eleven if you count the first two of carnival) added to that the individual city-legislated days… and now its time for more  ... heheh

I think Brazil is a closet-hoarder of religious holidays.

@avalonmoore:

Minister of Justice and Police, Martin Misiedjan said that the government will seek wide support to implement these recommendations.

Minister Misiedjan must be quite skilled in the art of legerdemain, for apparently it hasn't occured to the Minister that it is the lack of wide support in the first place that brought about the UN recommendations.

Reminds me of the secret formula for becoming a millionaire…  "First, get a million dollars …"

@Noughty:

So I guess if someone says:
_all x should be killed…

Disclaimer. Author doesn't encourage the killing of x._
I do not think disclaimers can be used then you are expressing your opinion, because what is the point of expressing your opinion then.

Those who make a profession of faith in all regards must come to ruin among others in a world of Reason and Knowledge. Hence it is necessary for the faithful, if they wish to maintain themselves, to learn to use doubletalk — and to use this and not use it, according to necessity.

@cumeaternc:

It hasn't stopped anyone yet.

Then I'm confused as to the rationale for making a change, because if the category picture and its wording have—according to you and danijelr15—worked so well before, why are they being changed now?

Another question: By all appearances the font now used in the categories seems to match each other. I don't see that font represented in the new choices, which means that categories font will not appear as the others do. If the reason is to change the picture, why is the font also being changed?

Will this new font now be used on all of the other categories?

Is there any specific reason why English is to be used? Doesn't that ignore, or at least complicate, searches made by members for whom English is not the predominate language?

Wouldn't a symbol that is not language specific work best, perhaps something like this?

Since this man Koeppel is a car dealer, he should be pretty good at spotting a lemon.  :blink:

@RaveRocks:

BAD Uploaders include those who take a week to complete an upload.

I would think that anyone who invests an entire week of time into a project that does not come to fruition could be more idealistically described as at least dedicated in spirit, if not arguably incompetent however.  ???
Is there no E for effort given on your 'bad uploader' list?

@RaveRocks:

by allowing uploaders to hide behind the (antonymous) label means the rest of us can't avoid their future attempts to upload.

At the bottom of every torrent page is a button marked SEND A MESSAGE. When clicked, you find that your problem with user anonymity is irrelevant.

:blind:

@MrMazda:

I've never found the price at Starbucks to be worth what you get for it.

thank you…..Starbucks is like the 'McDonalds' of coffeeshops, and yet unlike McDonalds, people dont mind paying extra for this crap. If Mcdonalds charged $10 for a hamburger, people would die. But $6 for something that barely passes for 'coffee' ? No prob!

???

Of all the information found in those seeder/leecher lists, the most valuable in my opinion are the percentages showing where everyone is positioned at that moment in the torrents life cycle, and im sad to see that it's been removed.  While I realize and support the effort for privacy sake, there must be some way of replicating the information. If a torrent is like a freeway, what I need to know before I get on is how many other cars are on the road, specifically how many are positioned in front of and behind me. Who in particular is driving the car, what kind of car (torrent client) they're using, or their ratio, is not needed–only their position on the freeway.

Lets hope this seeder/leecher Nav can make a comeback in a variant that ensures privacy and responsible driving.

:blownose: