Calboner, seriously, will you just STFU for a minute and stop criticising evrything.
If you are asking whether I will cease demanding evidence for extravagant claims and start accepting them simply on the basis of their appeal to my fantasies, which seems to be the policy that you follow, my answer is: No, I will do nothing of the sort, and I wish you would do likewise.
There is general belief that something is going to happen tomorrow, can't you at least imagine the possibility of such an event happening and prepare.
Of course I can imagine it! I can imagine that the moon is made of cheese. I can imagine that President Obama is a Martian in human guise. I can imagine all sorts of wild and improbable things. But I know better than to regard them as probable, because, in light of well-established facts, they are NOT probable.
As for your claim of a "general belief," it may be "general" in paranoid circles, but it is certainly not "general" among those with a sense of reality based on evidence, or even among the people who have been posting in this thread, most of whom regard your beliefs as patently preposterous.
I am not spouting this bullshit to scare people or sound like a smart arse and I am just trying to inform people. Also, I'm sure the UK has some equivalent of the emergency broadcast communications system that the USA has. How come we're not also having a test but the whole of the USA is?
Your capacity for inconsequent thinking continues to astonish me. Why on earth should the UK have a drill of its emergency alert system at the very same time that the USA is having a drill of
its system? I ask this of you seriously, because your presumption seems to me utterly baseless. It is as if a child in school were to learn that his school was having a fire drill and then find something suspicious about the fact that other schools in town were not also having a fire drill at the same time.
I am sure not going to let any skepticism from clouding my mind of the possibility of an event like this occuring, but apparently, according to you, there is simply no chance that it will occur.
First, I have nowhere claimed or implied that there is
no chance of "an event like this"--by which I take you to mean some scenario of disaster involving nuclear bombs going off, missiles being fired, man-made tsunamis, or the like; but I do claim (1) that such a scenario is so improbable as not to be worth taking seriously, and (2) that you have produced absolutely no sound reason to believe that it will occur.
Second, it is bizarre and very sad that you would speak of skepticism as something that might "cloud your mind," given that skepticism, as I understand it (with
Brian Dunning and
Michael Shermer), consists in demanding sufficient reason for any judgment that one might make, or, in positive terms, proportioning one's judgments to the strength of the available evidence. It is manifest that you yourself follow no such policy, but I did not think that you would go so far as to describe it as "clouding the mind."
Concerning the test scheduled for November 9, I stand corrected.
Hobbleme's account has been disabled.
He's now James J. Poke.
I wonder what happened.
That is very disappointing to me. It looks as though I shall never get an answer to my (repeated) question to him (##12, 25, 33 above). :frown1: