All someone needs to do is ask Myers what scientific evidence can he put forward to show that the propagation of science is a necesary good. Science can show the effects of the propagation of science and the effects in societies where scientific knowledge is lacking, but it can't determine why either condition is necessarily preferred. For scientists to do that, they must adopt a standard of good that lies outside of strict phenomenology. And when they do that, they are no longer scientists. It doesn't mean they necessarily become religious, but they are certainly adopting an ethic that is not scientific.

In fact, all someone needs to do is ask Myers for evidence of his own sense of self. There is no scientific evidence for a sense of self. Science can measure the secondary and tertiary footprints of a sense of self, but it cannot measure the sense of self directly. Scientists, like everyone else, know a sense of self intuitively, by looking within. And that's fine, but that's not science. That's mystical, as in an avenue of self-knowledge as opposed to material knowledge. If the mind is stilled and all the senses are withdrawn, the inward looking ascetic still knows a sense of self, which means that self-knowledge is not based on those finite avenues of knowledge. And voila! suddenly it is realized that material knowledge is not the only knowledge available to us.

Sankara Saranam

Perhaps Squire didn't go far enough back.

She's right, time is not linear. It is definitely cyclical. But before 5k years, there is evidence of matrilineal societies. Perhaps, with devolution, comes male domination. With backwards ideas of the infinite, like monotheism, comes theological notions of monogamy. From positional notation we get Roman numerals -- hulking, brute, and innefficient. We also inherited monoculturing from this darker but relatively recent past.

I'm not for women over men, though my wife and I have long been observing this quaint western form of marriage that thrives best in a vacuum, but I am for a balancing of male and female elements. I think we have a long way to go before that balance is reestablished.

And if time is cyclical, perhaps we need a few centuries of matriarchy just to balance the scales. It's hard to know the center when we don't know both extremes.

These people act as if they just gave birth to war profiteering, and that it will take the public time to discover their novel baby!

No doubt, the Bush years brought on a flood of hubris, empowering war enablers with the sense that they could get away with ... well, when you see people getting away with torture and murder, who will care about mere war profiteers?

Everyone who is against war will, because war and profiting from war are historically conjoined twins. The only new spawn NBC might be bearing is an historic level of arrogance.