I know you are just riffing here, but there is a fundamental aspect to the concept of a day that you are missing. Coincidentally, some of the information in this post serves as a kind of shibboleth for certain types of Catholics and Jews - similar to the way the history of the Constitution of Medina can be used to identify radical Muslims from the true Brothers.

A 'day' is a period composed of both darkness and light. Light was not before the word. That does not mean that there was only literal darkness before the delineation, only that there was sameness that was broken by the delineation of light and dark. In this scenario, 'Let there be light' can actually be an invocation to create what we know as darkness - but is more typically interpreted to mean that the Word/bang/noise was accompanied by a great flooding energy of light that finally subsided such that light and darkness could be gathered as neither totally dominated the others. Pop Christians rarely make this distinction.

Traditionalist usually claim that God set a system in motion which began with the delineation between two things - and in this delineation we locate the manifest separation between God and those in his image - the power to name with totality, thereby both dividing and to binding across the physical, spiritual, and temporal realms.

So with this in mind, restating the creation story goes something like this. Everything wholly within our universe was still, though there were dormant planetary masses in the stillness such that there was no point in dividing the thought of one thing from the thought of another. Then there was a noise so catastrophic that the physical nature of the universe was immediately and irrevocably altered.

The most immediate result of this noise/bang/whatever is that the uniform stillness of the universe was first flooded with light, then divided into relative periodicities flowing outward from the creation event/word/noise/bang.

We don't actually see anything resembling an earth length day until Day 4 when the earth assumes regular orbit around the sun and the moon is placed (many say as a form of clock for the beasts of the earth). Then it goes Day5 Sea Life, Day6 Land Life.

So the only actual Days that you have a problem with are days 5 & 6 - after the earth stabilized on Day 4. Everything prior to that is being measured relative to Primum Movens, which had thus far in the narrative measurably expressed itself only as a binding and dividing force of which light and darkness (aka stable periodicity) formed the primary division of consequence.

Literally, the base unit of measure pre-Day4 is the unit of measure that Christians and Jews believe allowed all other things to come to pass - the separation of light and dark. It has nothing to do with orbital periods as there is an explicit statement that the body around which the earth orbits was acquired later along with our beloved satellite.

Wow. You just decoded the entire reason I don't run around killing people.

What do you think would happen if people started thinking about this more? Maybe we would soon see a "Hey, we have been wrong before so we will think a little more next time" popular uprising.

It will be chaos I tell you. People thinking thoughts.. talking to each other.. My god, I need my inhaler and HOMELAND SECURITY!!!

How about: "Hey, why are you free citizens of the United States of America exercising those freedoms!?!? Friggin assholes!!!"

You??

Yeah, good job and more please.

Whoever writes the speeches @ 1600 Penn ought to make sure this one at least gets some lip service. While not a big deal for the general public, it is something that shows some common sense due diligence and proactive thinking from a widely vilified branch of our Federal machinery.

This is true, but completely unacceptable:

Once upon a time I would have wondered aloud what we could do to assist the public in gaining information necessary to locate better medical assistance. Considering the fact that certain professions have social or monetary achievement expectations this attempt at identifying a positive path to resolution would have been daunting.

Luckily I am a United States citizen. Owing to the attention I have paid to the United States Government's shifting relationship with their own people I prefer going off down this rail regarding the current state of the medical community:

How do we hit this community so they Balkanize acceptably? Who do we marginalize so they Balkanize properly? When does the public convene to assure that this industry is not again moving toward centralization of control?

What markers of success or achievement can be conflated with polarizing practices to begin creating divisions of reputation and trust within the target community?

What existing disputes have legs such that covert support of misinformed factions would gather enough misplaced popular faith to undermine the public image of legitimate talent that attempts to hold the offending union of 'professionals' together?

Where will this offensive be received as a defensive action?

I apologize that this does not support the productive furthering of this conversation, but your observations go way beyond what the nots-class should have ever allowed themselves to accept as their lot in life.

Moving along:

Again, why are you allowing this to happen? You are suggesting that the reward for failure is that the vested parties move along? I don't think so, friend. You seem intelligent, why do you miss the fact that you are a member of the most brutal species to walk the modern face of this earth? Where is the sense of self-preservation?

I have consumed mass media related to Canadian, European, and Japanese health-care systems and I have the following to tell you: Someone went and convinced the white have-nots that those healthcare systems represent a threat to the founding principles of the United States of America.

Again, smash the system until no one recognizes it or you will not achieve the reinvestment of faith by enough of the disenfranchised to matter.

The divisions between humans grow shallow. Those who identify with their wealth will not be human much longer. While the establishment laughs the reality of a trans-humanist event is happening all around us.

It is in the malleable nature of the human experience. It doesn't require one ounce of silicone to be sunk into your body, just the willingness to accept that people like me will know everything about you, your children, your wives and lovers, prostates and vaginas; and you not caring enough to stop it.

As this progresses the real people will be known by their victory gardens, the fakes by their suicide rates. The only mechanism humans are supposed to both not understand and depend upon completely are typically endowed at birth.

Yeah, people who traded their authority as citizens are now numbers in ledger that holds the truth of this failure. It isn't too late to survive, but it is too late not to experience pain and developing nation style failure of both faith and mechanism in the pursuit of public health in the U.S.

You are right, this is all for another thread. You just expressed yourself in a way that I like ;)

Fair enough leaving it there. Funny fortune right now in the footer:

Seems to apply to my line of reasoning - though I still stand by the sink or swim theory of abandoning failed social experiments like industrialized health care. Put another way, if someone does not aspire to expertise in the theory of their field they shouldn't speak about application - so throw the bums out of your life.

Let me start by thanking you for taking the time to present your perspective.

I will accept that where health care is delivered in a blind fashion with expectations of access to information being equal across demographics, a GP serves as a gateway to more specialized knowledge.

I do not accept, and it would contradict my personal experience to accept, that anything approaching a majority of current practitioners are delivering on the dedication required to be considered an authoritative resource for their patients. This is in large part due to the fight involved to get compensation for procedures carried out under common insurance policies. Docs that see patients from non-optimal insurance policies sleepwalk through their days and recite boiler plate.

I have personally had a GP claim that they didn't refer me to a specialist after I saw the specialist on referral from the GP because the specialist recommended expensive testing. I later read that the entire clinic ended up being investigated over insurance matters, but then everyone went on practicing, and I'm sure they didn't change their 'practices.' What is a person supposed to do, hope the next doc will be better or find a more reliable resource?

I'm not arguing against a medical professional saying exactly as you predict if addressing the situation. I'm attacking the idea that the profession as a whole is communicating or collaborating enough, or maintains the commitment to auditing and integrity well enough to serve even the basic 'gateway to specialized information' requirement.

Given a nation committed to net-neutrality, a public library system that had the funding to approach 'library' as both gateway and repository, and a medical industrial complex that recognized the bottom-up value of hearing totally subjective feedback from patients we could maybe pull off the GP-as-gateway simply by dressing medical access as a task that spans the width and depth of our societies.

As it is I have a family member that is faced with changing doctors because his current one has signed a deal that requires all patients to store their records with major corporate entities (MS was one option). This is not my idea of bringing the social body to bear on the subject. This development is a final undercutting of the belief that the U.S. market can sustain a segment dedicated to fulfilling the Hippocratic Oath.

Furthermore, this statement holds no water when you have experienced institutional lack of understanding:

Sure, plenty may be 'really good.' The sum of the efforts is not at a level where it is responsible for a parent to believe they are going to get the basic information or assistance necessary to help them raise their child correctly. The reality of current service levels across vast swaths of the U.S. contradicts that this expectation is realistic.

After all that, we still agree on the negative impact exploit material can have on immature minds. I respect your opinion, but your motivation fails for proximity to a foul smelling industrial complex that has negatively impacted millions of people in many ways over many years.

I agree with you about harm from exposing children to exploitation materials when they will not be expected to encounter the situations portrayed in the material, but your reliance on the establishment is sickening.

You are not describing children that are being protected from harm when you ascribe your beliefs to all this research and context within which you have formed your opinions. You are describing how to produce children that will conform to an established idea of health, nothing more.

This is more harmful than exposing a child to material with which they must learn how to deal - this is the equivalent of telling your child that the world is round when you have never learned to perform the supporting observations yourself. Much like explaining gravity to a child even though the parent has no fucking idea how it works, the basis for prohibition you provide is worse than not-helpful - it is another monument to the colossal stupidity and arrogance of the human race.

If I live long enough to see my first child born (working on it) I vow to attempt to avoid indoctrinating them with my beliefs as much as I will resist their indoctrination from this insane history of bullshit upon which you are basing your argument.

Unfortunately this requires staying quiet while they come to the fact that most 'professionals' they meet will have no more than a passing acquaintance with their field of practice.

I have extensive experience with the medical profession including stints doing some terminal care advocacy (and watching at least one person die from a med mix-up), helping a sister through two NICU stays where she ended up losing a child, living with a family member on long-term anti-viral treatments, and being personally hospitalized so I could eat through a tube for a week after a reaction to prescribed meds.

There was ONE, count 'em, ONE doctor that I met through all of that that could intelligently discuss the research behind common treatments and current advancements in the field.

Every single other one of them was counting on the fact that they wouldn't get censured for missing a diagnosis outside of what they normally see or simply repeating what they heard in med school. Those people were barely above the level of quick lube mechanics on average - you know - the ones that can't rebuild an engine because they only work off corporate scripts like IT support desk monkeys.

So yeah, refrain from exposing a kid to shocking material that is going to redefine their immature understandings of human bodies in exploitative manners. But rely upon a doctor?

Ten to one most doctors recommend shit based on what they read in journals without doing any follow up on their own. According to a brother-in-law who vets research science most docs don't even have the statistical skills to dig into real trial research and stick to what drug reps tell them. Yet that doesn't stop them from attempting to speak with authority.

Why the fuck would let a by-and-large bullshit profession like that have any influence on the development of a child? They are only going to tell you what they read somewhere and only that if they think it won't get them in trouble.

Don't know about possessed, but if kudo's really testing something on the masses it's time to bust out the invisible black-ROFLCopter technology on his(her? its?) equivalent of an ass.

Using pure Debian means you know how to make it work. The fact that the images are going to be configured one way shouldn't mean anything to a Debian admin.

This is the reason there are so many downstream projects; that there is the joke: "Ubuntu is short for 'can't install Debian.'" This isn't supposed to be mean, just an observation about the differences between the goals of each community. That being said, I bet most people could run a deb box with very little actual effort.

I'm typing this from a 10.04 desktop and doing a lazy Squeeze setup via Webmin (cheating) on an old P4 and grooving on some Pink Floyd. You can pretty much use Webmin (BSD style license) as a tutorial GUI to learn a new system or just when messing around with a beta like squeeze.

Remember, this is supposed to be fun:

System hostname debSQZ32Proto.xx.xxx.xxx
Operating system Debian Linux 6.0
Webmin version 1.530
Time on system Thu Dec 16 18:43:52 2010
Kernel and CPU Linux 2.6.32-5-686 on i686
Processor information Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz, 1 cores
System uptime 0 hours, 47 minutes
Running processes 88
CPU load averages 0.00 (1 min) 0.01 (5 mins) 0.00 (15 mins)
CPU usage 0% user, 0% kernel, 0% IO, 100% idle
Real memory 493.11 MB total, 68.45 MB used
Virtual memory 1.86 GB total, 0 bytes used
Local disk space 71.50 GB total, 4.85 GB used
Package updates All installed packages are up to date

This thing barely breaks a sweat as a multi-purpose LAN services platform/filter on a 7 user network - and was running for something like four years with only incidental reboots before I swapped it into the prototype queue for an update to Squeeze. Debian rocks like that.

Just remember to remove the tools you use for setup before putting the box out in the wild (and lock the Webmin process to local access/set root directory explicitly whenever it is installed on your boxes). Once you get standardized and oriented you can create much more efficient installation procedures using automated tools...

Anyhow, Canonical is doing a good job on the 'casual workstation' part of things - their effort might be seen as allowing Debian to continue refining the foundational mission.

That is an interesting concept. One question might be how that decision is going to impact relationships across generations. Those that feel at home navigating the nets are going to be feel distanced from the priorities of 'French Culture.' Doesn't seem like a good move at this particular time.

The worst thing that could happen to the powers that be is that the proles rediscover sneaker-net.

A bunch of bullshit. Assange is in the safest possible place. Think of all the loonies out there. I would be very surprised if Julian had anything to tell the authorities that they do not already know - He is only accused of knowing things that they already know - and those secret bits have already been distributed.

No matter how many people want to make this about a person it will not become true. I'm going to fall back on my understanding of British pride in the suggestion that everybody within arm reach of Julian just wants to make sure he gets the hell out of their lap. The idea of the grandsons of the old Empire playing lapdog in some proxy sexual misconduct battle has got to chafe the poor lads.

Can't we compromise. Anything from de Sade works for me.

This is a bad idea. Even now there is a quasi-professional class of activists. I have known many, from tree-sitters that were attracted from their previous movement by the media attention, to recruiters that go with any issue that gets the hot college-age-pink bucking and heaving.

I once saw a group of white people associated with a prominent NYC professional activist show up at a Native rally only to drown out the speakers with their lame-ass white buffalo rendition of a Native ceremony. Asking them to stop only spurred accusations of oppression.

As it is these punks have to remain confined to the young people that are susceptible to this type of bullshit. Increasing the commonality of activists with bogus arrest records will make it harder to keep legitimate breeding stock out of the clutches of the professional leeches.