jerryskids

Maybe some of our southeast geeks can tell you; I've wondered how this works myself. Maybe people say "Coca Cola" if they specifically want a Coke?

Interesting. Seems like it is a thing, or was anyway: https://fun107.com/massachusetts-new-england-soda-tonic/ Above is from Reddit, link problems. Lots of other examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=do+they+call+soda+tonic+in+south+boston%3F&oq=do&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCAgBEEUYJxg7MgYIABBFGDwyCAgBEEUYJxg7MggIAhBFGCcYOzIGCAMQRRg5MhAIBBAuGMcBGLEDGNEDGIAEMgYIBRBFGDwyBggGEEUYPDIGCAcQRRhB0gEIMzU5NWowajSoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#ip=1

Some townies in Bahstahn called it "tonic" when I was there. Do you ever hear that?

If Strike's method doesn't work, I use "Behind the Overlay" on Chrome and the NYT one came up (not the FP one tho). If neither works for you and you want a copy of the NYT text, shoot me a PM.

On the actual topic, I saw a pharma ad recently which had some warning for "people assigned female at birth." My guess is that this will become the norm for such ads, as pharma companies hope to avoid lawsuits from women who identify as men (or vice versa) and ignore the warnings. I would hope that for medical/pharmaceutical purposes, we could agree that a woman is a woman, but here we are.

You're into pee games? Alrighty...

Yeah, I thought this was going to be a discussion on store-bought tomato sauces. I don't like them anymore, they are too sweet. My wife is a good cook and makes her own sauce, with much less added sugar.

Calling all soda "coke" is ratarded.

what?

Definitely Raven, boyo.

I can see why Muslims hate Israel so much. Muslims fancy themselves world conquerors (and they are off to a good start in many European countries), but they have been Israel's biotch since... well, Israel. It must be quite a cactus thorn in their burka.

If only computer usage had grown since 2001.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/07/30/biden-calls-100-percent-clean-electricity-by-2035-heres-how-far-we-have-go/

Perhaps "cult" is too strong. People need "religion," a belief in some higher authority. Those that don't believe in God often replace God with climate change. This is an interesting analysis of the subject, written in 2010 I believe but still very relevant. It's a long essay; I've only pasted the section I believe is most relevant, but the whole thing is worth a read. Describing environmentalism as a religion is not equivalent to saying that global warming is not real. Indeed, the evidence for it is overwhelming, and there are powerful reasons to believe that humans are causing it. But no matter its empirical basis, environmentalism is progressively taking the social form of a religion and fulfilling some of the individual needs associated with religion, with major political and policy implications. William James, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher, defined religion as a belief that the world has an unseen order, coupled with the desire to live in harmony with that order. In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James pointed to the value of a community of shared beliefs and practices. He also appreciated the individual quest for spirituality — a search for meaning through encounters with the world. More recently, the late analytic philosopher William P. Alston outlined in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy what he considered the essential characteristics of religions. They include a distinction between sacred and profane objects; ritual acts focused upon sacred objects; a moral code; feelings of awe, mystery, and guilt; adoration in the presence of sacred objects and during rituals; a worldview that includes a notion of where the individual fits; and a cohesive social group of the likeminded. Environmentalism lines up pretty readily with both of those accounts of religion. As climate change literally transforms the heavens above us, faith-based environmentalism increasingly sports saints, sins, prophets, predictions, heretics, demons, sacraments, and rituals. Chief among its holy men is Al Gore — who, according to his supporters, was crucified in the 2000 election, then rose from the political dead and ascended to heaven twice — not only as a Nobel deity, but an Academy Awards angel. He speaks of “Creation care” and cites the Bible in hopes of appealing to evangelicals. Selling indulgences is out of fashion these days. But you can now assuage your guilt by buying carbon offsets. Fire and brimstone, too, are much in vogue — accompanied by an unmistakable whiff of authoritarianism: “A professor writing in the Medical Journal of Australia calls on the Australian government to impose a carbon charge of $5,000 on every birth, annual carbon fees of $800 per child and provide a carbon credit for sterilization,” writes Braden R. Allenby, an Arizona State University professor of environmental engineering, ethics, and law. An “article in the New Scientist suggests that the problem with obesity is the additional carbon load it imposes on the environment; others that a major social cost of divorce is the additional carbon burden resulting from splitting up families.” Allenby, writing in a 2008 article on GreenBiz.com, continues: The sheer volume of vicious language employed to recast social and cultural trends in terms of their carbon footprint suggests the rise of what Allenby calls a dangerous new “carbon fundamentalism.” Some observers detect parallels between the ecological movement and the medieval Church. “One could see Greenpeacers as crusaders, with the industrialist cast as the infidel,” writes Richard North in New Scientist. That may be a stretch, but it does seem that this new religion has its share of excommunicated heretics. For example, since daring to challenge environmentalist orthodoxy, Freeman Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” and “an old coot riding into the sunset.” For his part, Dyson remains cheerily unrepentant. “We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake,” he has said. “But unfortunately I am an old heretic…. What the world needs is young heretics.” Many of those making the case that environmentalism has become a religion throw around the word “religion” as a pejorative. This disdain is rooted in an uncontroversial proposition: You cannot reason your way to faith. That’s the idea behind the “leap of faith” — or the leap to faith, in Kierkegaard’s original formulation: the act of believing in something without, or in spite of, empirical evidence. Kierkegaard argued that if we choose faith, we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. So those on the right side of the political spectrum who portray environmentalism as a religion do so because, if faith is inherently not achievable through rationality, and if environmentalism is a religion, then environmentalism is utterly irrational and must be discredited and ignored. That is the essence of Michael Crichton’s 2003 speech. “Increasingly,” he said, “it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.” Environmentalism, he argued, has become totally divorced from science. “It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.” A similar attack from the right comes from Ray Evans, an Australian businessman, politician, and global-warming skeptic: Leftists also sometimes disparage environmentalism as religion. In their case, the main objection is usually pragmatic: rationalism effects change and religion doesn’t. So, for instance, the Sixties radical Murray Bookchin saw the way environmentalism was hooking up with New Age spirituality as pathetic. “The real cancer that afflicts the planet is capitalism and hierarchy,” he wrote. “I don’t think we can count on prayers, rituals, and good vibes to remove this cancer. I think we have to fight it actively and with all the power we have.” Bookchin, a self-described revolutionary, dismissed green spirituality as “flaky.” He said that his own brand of “social ecology,” by contrast, “does not fall back on incantations, sutras, flow diagrams, or spiritual vagaries. It is avowedly rational. It does not try to regale metaphorical forms of spiritual mechanism and crude biologisms with Taoist, Buddhist, Christian, or shamanistic ‘Eco-la-la.’” https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/environmentalism-as-religion

I think a lot of people in the climate cult think we will be 100% renewable in the not too distant future.

Really? Nobody?

Gotcha, thanks. Yeah, he needs to be nominated for this prestigious award.

Is this your submission for dumbest poster of the year? It's the right's fault that millions of illegals are coming to the border, because the right mentions that its wide open?

What's a Daulton and what are its aliases here?

I don't get the Tim hate. Clearly it is tied to posters who also posted a lot on FBG, which I didn't. I think he is fine here. We've had many good discussions.

That river thingy is supposed to come here and rain on our golf tournament. I was planning to go on Friday with my son, but decided to hold off on buying a ticket until we see the weather. Friday looks dry but we'll see. The Sonoran Desert has two rainy seasons: the summer monsoon, and the week of the Phoenix Open (ok, Jan/Feb).

Focking love Dickey Betts guitar in this at 3:38, but the keyboard, heck every instrument rocks:

Well, given your "fock yes" description, it seems like you are currently without work, or about to be, and you have your kid to worry about. So I voted "yes," presuming you don't have other alternatives. Besides, you can get daily examples up close of how cultish they are, and share it with us for hilarity.