Religion, No religion Human Motivation is a mess. Religion and Cult's wont vanish until we hit a singular government for the globe.

On the Dark Side of the Moon is a big "No Entry Sign"

My son was big into it for years, especially corals, but he's much richer since he gave it up! Expensive and incredibly time consuming, and a million things to go wrong. You won't believe it, but even here in UK it ran too hot in summer, and he had to invest in a very expensive refrigeration unit. Looks fantastic when you get it right though.

Nope, I think you'll find that on the Dark Side of the Moon it says 'Pink Floyd'.

The huge problem is that religion is trying to do two things. One, people turn to religion to try and explain the mystery of life, and as a support group, and two, to control other people and make them do what you want.

Doesn't matter which religion you look at. I use to regularly go to one of the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh places to do some work for them. You know, the Orange people? Nice people, but it was very interesting to study them. If you used your observations you could easily see who was in charge.

There would be a big crowd of them milling around, but if you unfocussed your eyes you could see patterns in the crowd as some more purposeful people were moving thru the crowd.

All religions are like people locked into a heavily shuttered room, and they are trying to tell what's on the outside thru cracks in the shutters. All they get are brief glimpses and they make up stories to explain these. Since few people see the same thing, you can see that this is a fertile ground for debate.

Having made up their minds, they then can't face anything that challenges their belief system, for fear they will look stupid.

They have to ignore the elephant(s) in the room.

Hopefully our christian friend will be well enough recovered from her cold to be able to return and explain away all the elephants that I have pointed out.

I'd particularly like to discuss why it is that we need a church, priests or popes in order to get into heaven, when so many of these people are themselves incapable of adhering to even the most basic rules, ie Buggering Children is Wrong.

There are a couple of secrets that really help. First off, keep the fish population in a coral tank to a minimum as their nitrogenous waste will choke and kill off the corals. Inverts effectively need zero nitrates.

Second (and this applies to freshwater too), use a twin tank system so that water is pumped up into the show tank, from whence it overflows into the bottom. (this keeps a clean water surface). The bigger the sump, the better.

Finally, never use and undergravel type filtration, have a plenum system in both tanks, and make use of the Berlin system with a living rock reef - as big as you can get. The sump tank can either use living rock or use a static bed of material like Kaldness.

I used to find that a lot of the expenses related to not having dealt with the nitrates properly.

Mind you, the lights are horrendously expensive, the water with its special salts has to be changed religiously, you need to boost the KH continuously, and ideally there needs to be vigourous water flow to wash crap off the corals too.

Not cheap, but as you say, incredibly beautiful. By the time I had to give it all up, I was just about getting the hang of it all.

Yes, as I said, he was biiiiig into it, had all the gizmos, very keen on live corals, £40-50+ for a little lump of rock! I used to take him to get his stuff, we never seemed to come out of the place without spending less than £100. It was worse than babysitting a child if he went away, we had to go and regularly check everything was OK, skimmers working, temps ok, no alarms etc. I was happy when he gave it up!

Yeah, I can understand that. Mind you, I used to love just sitting there for ages watching all the tiny things that lived in and on the rocks.

As drugs minister for two years and more recently as defence secretary visiting the opium-producing region of Afghanistan, Bob Ainsworth says he saw how a policy of prohibition has failed to reduce the harms that drugs cause: in his words, "fuelling burglaries, gifting the trade to gangsters and increasing HIV infections".

Now, he argues, it is time to make all drugs available legally within a strict system of regulation - either prescribed by doctors or sold under licence like tobacco.

Many people find inconceivable the idea that you could pop to the High Street and buy some cannabis or ecstasy along with a packet of twenty and a bottle of scotch. The notion that a doctor might sign a script for pure cocaine or diamorphine might seem equally extraordinary.

But Bob Ainsworth's ideas reflect the situation that existed in Britain in the last century. Until 1916 you could buy cocaine and heroin over the counter in Harrods. Shop assistants might have suggested "Ryno's Hay Fever and Catarrh Remedy" (basically pure cocaine) "for when the nose is stuffed up, red and sore". And what better way to support the boys at the front during World War I than Harrods gift packs containing morphine and cocaine?

Until the mid-sixties in Britain, doctors could and did prescribe heroin and cocaine to patients. Records confirm that in 1962 one London doctor prescribed more than 600,000 heroin tablets to hundreds of users.

The patient list of psychiatrist Lady Isabella Frankau reads like a Who's Who of sixties bohemian cool. Poets, actors, musicians, writers and refugees from the strict drug laws in the US and Canada knew that Lady F would not ask too many questions and, if you were a bit short of readies, might even waive her consultancy fee. American jazz trumpeter Chet Baker turned up at her door and later recalled how "she simply asked my name, my address and how much cocaine and heroin I wanted per day".

So Mr Ainsworth seems to be essentially calling for a return to a situation that was once described as "the British System" of narcotics control - regarding drug use as a health rather than a criminal matter.

The theory is that if you regulate the supply of drugs, so that they are available legally, you take the trade away from criminal gangs. Instead of buying heavily-adulterated and dangerous heroin from a street dealer, a user could obtain quality-controlled morphine from a GP - and be encouraged to get treatment and support to overcome addiction.

Mr Ainsworth is not the first drugs minister to change their tune on prohibition once leaving office. His predecessor in the job Mo Mowlam wrote an article in the Guardian in 2002 in which she said pretty much the same thing, as British troops fought the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"May I suggest that rather than bombing civilians in various Muslim countries, the United States and Britain begin to take a more intelligent approach to the international drugs trade: namely, to legalise it. For by doing this, not only will we help solve one of the major problems facing the world today, the unregulated growth of drugs trafficking, but it would also further isolate the terrorists."
Mr Ainsworth knows that public attitudes and the political weather are against him - so, rather than simply urging that ministers end the system of prohibition, he wants an impact assessment to be conducted on the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 - the legislation which introduced drug classification in the UK:

"I call on those on all sides of the debate to support an independent, evidence-based review, exploring all policy options, including: further resourcing the war on drugs, decriminalising the possession of drugs, and legally regulating their production and supply."
Last week, in the foreword to a new UK drugs strategy, the home secretary said: "This Government does not believe that liberalisation and legalisation are the answer. Decriminalisation fails to recognise the complexity of the problem." Indeed, as reported at this blog, the government only considered two options in respect of its drugs strategy: doing nothing or implementing a prohibition-based strategy.
In my piece on BBC Breakfast this morning, Minister for Crime Prevention James Brokenshire said: "We don't think legalisation is the answer because it ignores why people actually get addicted to drugs in the first place. Those are a number of very complicated factors: some of them inter-generational, some of them relating to issues like homelessness or mental health."

However, Mr Ainsworth joins a growing number of public figures in Britain and around the world who are arguing for a rethink on global drugs strategy, among them chairman of the Bar Council Nicholas Green and former head of the Royal College of Physicians Sir Ian Gilmore.

Mr Ainsworth agrees that he has come a long way since his time as drugs minister. Then, in a debate in 2002, he warned Parliament that legalising drugs could see a rise in some crimes and that availability would inevitably increase with the risk that children as young as 10 could start using heroin and cocaine.

One MP on the opposite benches took a different view. "I ask the Government not to return to retribution and war on drugs. That has been tried, and we all know that it does not work," the member said. The rising star of the Conservative back benches had recently urged ministers to engage with the United Nations in considering legalisation and regulation of drugs. The MP's name was David Cameron.

source http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20101216/...r-dba1618.html

Karma on its way.

The other thing they don't mention is that given the quality control and purity of illegal drugs is in the hands of criminals, the number of drug deaths is absolutely tiny.

I think more people die from paracetamol than die from heroin, and aspirin kills more people that ecstasy.

The usual whine-a-thon re legalising drugs is that legalising them won't be problem free. True, but I'm willing to bet that legalisation, sale under prescription or licence, and fredom to grow all the dope you can smoke will cause far less problems than we are experiencing today.

From what I’ve seen and heard our young people are already growing and making their own, it’s one of the reasons I think the internet to be such a dangerous place.

The ordinary guys in the slums might be happy with just sticking a few seeds in a window box, but the clever chemistry students are mass-producing the really dangerous stuff, intended for horses, in their garages and selling them in bulk in our discoteques.

The law has to play catch-up every time a new and dangerous substance hits the streets, usually after a few people have died after trying it. That trend can only become worse and only legalisation can be the answer.

Or shooting a few chemistry students to set an example.

(I used to be one, but only ever brought some Oleum home, very carefully. I put a tiny drop on a plank of wood in my bedroom and it burned its way through three floors into the cellar and beyond).

That must have been really fuming to do that. We used to mix ammonium hydroxide with iodine crystals to give a purple sludge. When it dried it was a contact explosive that gave a 'cold ' explosion of considerable force.

You were more adventurous than I. The worst thing I did in chemistry was:
Teacher demonstrated explosive gas mixtures by filling a plastic wash bottle with coal gas igniting it and after a few minutes it went pop.
We were invited to try the experiment.
I filled my bottle, lit it, tapped my m8 on the shoulder squeezed the bottle and burnt his eye brows off.

Why disturb them ?

http://news.uk.msn.com/uk/articles.a...ntid=155643706

I have gotta ask. Why are people so bothered? If people want to believe in something so what? If people don't, good on them, I honestly don't understand what the hell it has to do with anyone else. I hear Bil's concerns with the whole school thing but I honestly think that more school children are at risk from self absorbed and opinionated teachers than will ever be effected by faith schools and I just don't see how peoples faith effects anyone else, I have loads of religious friends, of many faiths, and I love to hear them talk about what makes their faith important to them, and I have to say, by and large, in my humble opinion, faithless people tend to be either some of the most aggressive, in your face "botherers" I have ever met or they are just intensely dull.

Live and let live people.

Our teacher used electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then mixed the gases and bubbled them thru washing up liquid to make a foam. He then told us to stand well back and stuck a lighted taper into it.

It went 'pop'. When we had finished pissing ourselves laughing, he redid the experiment, and forget to tell us to stand back, so we were crowded quite close to ground zero when he stuck the taper in and damn near blew the windows out.

I always did like chemistry......

Why am I bothered? Well, I regard the dissemination of false information as a real crime. I don't care if you, for example believe that Santa is real, and that the Easter Bunny paints the sky blue.

What I do object to is when people teach children lies about the way the world works, and then indoctrinate them into being unable to apply critical reasoning.

Believe what you will. Just don't ever hurt or damage other people in the enjoyment of your beliefs.

Oh yeah, and don't tell lies.