Not picking on you personally, but there sure are a lot of dumb ass conspiracy theories on a thread about critical thinking.

The purpose of the neurological changes that take place in a teenagers brain seems to be in part to inspire rebellion against their parents to the point where they flee the nest, once the rebellion succeeds grandchildren bring relative harmony for a decade or more.

Nope, good grammar does that, he just failed to state he was paraphrasing.

The actual meaning of the quote was NOT lost. ie: it explicitly states they oppose CT because they believe it will lead children to doubt their parents or as they put it "undermining parental authority", the wording also strongly implies they don't want the "authority" of fixed beliefs "undermined". The subtext of the quote is that parents and fixed beliefs are infallible and should not be questioned.

In simpler words the policy as you have quoted it says - We don't want educated children, we want obedient children.

Yes, the very nature of large organisations drains initiative, males in particular evolved to work in small groups of 5-6 and live in tribes of ~150 people, anyone not in their tribe was by definition "sub-human" but not necessarily a mortal enemy. A wise organisation acknowledges this and will give small teams a great deal of autonomy to achieve a particular goal, eg: think how the military would tackle the goal of "keep the park tidy and well maintained", you may have to explain to them that anyone can use the park, but you get the idea.

Disclaimer: I spent seven years in the 90's as technical lead on an automated job dispatch system that handled thousand of workers and tens of thousands of jobs each day, it covered the continent of Australia, at that time it was by far the largest mobile dispatch system in the southern hemisphere in volume of work and geographical coverage. The backend used "linear programming" techniques (WW2 logistics), no human could beat the daily work plan it churned out. A bunch of execs would get up at 5am and paw all over the plan, add some "special constraints" and end up with a less efficient solution. Often the "special constraints" were accepted anyway, since - we can't have (say) the telecoms minister waiting 2 days for a new install in his office, it has to be done first thing today, and it has to be done by employee X who drinks at the same pub, who gives a flying fuck if 25 nobodys drop off the original work plan?

I'm 55, the phrase has been around for a long time, Carl Sagan was fond of it (unfortunately my HS never mentioned it) so it wasn't until I dropped out and saw Sagan and Randi talking about it on TV that I became personally aware that it was a skill that can be taught. Perhaps it's been hijacked lately in the US to mean something else but I haven't noticed. To me it has always meant 'skepticism', in particular self-skepticism. Sagan also referred to it as his "bullshit detection kit". As for TFA, memorising facts* is essential but insufficient, ie: you can't even start to think about things that you don't remember, which is what Newton was getting at with his "shoulders of giants" comment.

*Facts as in - "two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them", that the force is ~9.8m/s on Earth's surface is trivia, handy to know but not essential to the concept that's being memorised since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong. Of course there are exceptions where memorising numbers is a useful "short-cut" for the student, multiplication tables being the most obvious

"That's a good thing".....for the hyper-dominant side.

BTW "Modern full scale combat" is a nuclear holocaust, and yes, it would almost certainly put an end to human conflict forever.

20K+ battles in world of tanks, one life per battle. Why anyone would WANT to play for real is beyond me.

Say what? The UK will not extradite anyone to a country where they have a reasonable chance of receiving the death penalty, Sweden has no such qualms. When the UK decided to extradite him to Sweden he moved into the Ecuador embassy to prevent that happening.

Depends how you measure "liberty". For example, a random US citizen in the US has seven times the chance of being incarcerated as a random Chinese citizen in China. China has also dragged more people out of abject poverty in the last 40yrs than the rest of the world combined.

Maths that accurately describes the physical world is DISCOVERED not "made up". Seriously, read a fucking text book and immunise yourself against that populist nonsense.

Had a lady friend like that, it was a good long distance relationship with a friend of a friend, she had wanted to come live in Melbourne for work so I invited her to move in with me (we both had 2 teenage kids each who got on well with each other). Religion didn't come up until she moved in and spotted Darwin's biography and Dawkins "selfish gene" on my bookshelf, took me 3 weeks to decide the way her brain worked was just too fucking annoying to live with, took me 3 months to get her out.

It's an endless source of humour looking back at it, at the time I thought she was joking when she saw the logo on a NASA web page I was reading and started asking me about how to find aliens in NASA's basement via the internet. Looking back at it now, I'm sure she wasn't joking.

Personally I think they are both "good men" in the sense that their heart is in the right place, but it's certainly not unheard of for good men to go to war.

Haven't read TFA but I do know Roman battalions advanced by marching for a few days, stopping at a strategic point, and proceed to turn a nearby forest into a 3 storey fort in a single day. The forts were all of the same design and required ~5,000 trees to build, each man was an expert at a specific task. Reinforcements moved from fort to fort and signal towers were set up in between so that there was a visual link along the entire path. Today, we call this strategy a "supply line".

The Romans did a similar thing building up their Navy with spectacular speed when circumstances required, it was a classic "assembly line production" that existed 2000yrs before Henry Ford "invented" it. They also stole the boat design from the Carthaginians who had kindly numbered all the individual planks for them (no IP lawyers back then).

For a modern army or even a well organised militia, erecting a fake ruin in a day is definitely doable, so it boils down to motivation, which both sides have in spades.

Yep, the French and the British are still arguing about who shot the nose off the Sphinx during the Napoleonic wars. Military types don't generally blow up iconic buildings for fun, they do it for propaganda purposes, eg Shi'a mosques in Northern Iraq are currently getting pounded into dust by the Sunni extremists. Irregular forces are more inclined to go for iconic building to demonstrate their power, eg: twin towers, UK parliament, etc.

The worst case of heritage destruction I can recall recently was on the 3rd day of the Iraq war when the US sacked the entire public service and then sat on their hands while the locals went on a looting spree. It was an extremely foolish decision that backfired badly, no cops, no ambulance, no garbage collection, no school, etc. After the looting rampage was over the US had well and truly lost the "hearts and minds" battle with ordinary Iraqi's.

Coincidentally, the earliest known stone villages appeared in Turkey ~12,000 years ago, they had no streets and the houses had no doors, they were all squashed together as one big flat building, people entered individual homes by navigating the roof and descending through a hole into their "cubicle". They also had a habit of burying dead relatives in the living room. Similar architecture and burial practices were common across the N. Hemisphere for the next 10,000yrs.