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I have just watched some TV and saw some shocking brutal child abuse in the form of religious fanaticism. It is all caught on video and you can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCODIhAXbQM I am afraid for the children and I am thinking of going to police to get permission to get these children away from this crazy woman. What I would like to know is whether legally this woman's behavior is classified as child abuse.

Conservatism advocates traditional values and free market. If a conservative is for prostitution he is against traditional values, yet if he is against prostitution he is against the free market. So is a conservative for prostitution or not?

I was at Portsea over the weekend at my sister's holiday house. She is a proud conservative. She always tells me that she thinks political correctness is bad. She cites examples like using the word "intellectually challenged" as opposed to "retard" is silly. She also thinks the word "domestic engineer" instead of "housewife" is also silly. However, one day I made a sexual joke to her that was quite tame in my opinion, but she was quite offended and told me not to tell rude jokes anymore. Isn't this hypocrisy?

I felt angry with my wife but after some days the anger wore off and I don't think I want to anger her or hurt her. Much of the problem has been solved now because I got a dishwasher during the post-Christmas sale. I paid 40% below retail price. My wife is a Protestant Christian (as opposed to Catholics), which means that she takes the bible seriously. Protestants believe in biblical inerrency. The bible is never wrong. The Protestants have no Pope, so the bible is the source of authority. She was an atheist before she converted to Christianity. Apparently she was miserable being an atheist.

I am not a Christian. I am non-religious. But my wife is a Christian. I write this thread so I can ask other Christians here for advice on a family issue. My daughter Lily lately has experimented with jewellery, just a plain gold necklace. She's only a little girl so I don't think jewellery is a good idea as she might lose it. But she loves wearing it. It makes her very happy, so I let her wear it because it's only $50. My wife found out that Lily was wearing jeweller and she got very angry. She told me that the bible forbids women from wearing jewellery. I said, "Prove it," and she took out the Holy Bible and pointed to Peter 3:3, which says "Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes." So I had to take the necklace away from little Lily. She was really upset. It broke my heart to see my little girl so sad. My wife reminded Lily that it was her duty according to the Ten Commandments to listen to what her parents told her. I have been reading the bible lately and I found something from 1 Timothy 2:11-12 that may help me: "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." In other words, the woman should be in silence. I am the man of the house and I should therefore make the decisions, and if I decide to allow Lily to wear jewellery then I assume the bible supports that. My wife would have to agree otherwise she is going against the Word of God. I continued to read the bible and read that "neither was man created for woman, but woman for man." (1 Corinthians 11:9.) In other words, God created her for me, not the other way around! Also, God created man first, not woman. So I am thinking of confronting my wife with this evidence, but I am a little worried. What do you think I should do? Is this a good idea?

My family is very excited because my sister is getting married soon. The man she is marrying is rather high income, so she has decided to stay home and be a housewife. She told me she will cook, clean, take care of the baby, and all that. I would have thought those tasks would take out the enthusiam from anyone but apparently some (maybe most) women like being traditional. The man she is marrying is rather rich, as I said, and as such he seems to have expensive tastes. He has in his driveway two Lexuses and he weaks Patek Phillipe watches. I have spoken to this man. His name is Stephen. I asked him why in the world he bought a Lexus LS when a Camry could easily get him from A to B for a fraction of the costs. I also asked him why he purchased a $30,000 prestige watch when a $20 Casio watch not only tells the time just as well but also has more features, e.g. stopwatch, countdown timer, and alarm. Stephen just laughed at me and told me he buys the Lexus because "it looks hot." The same goes for the watch. The man is obviously very much concerned about external beauty. My sister is rather young and attractive. I am worried because as my sister ages, she will get less attractive. Based on his Lexus and Patek Phillipe, Stephen seems like a man who places high priority on external beauty and his wife's external beauty will diminish over time. In addition, as Stephen ages he will get richer and richer and as such more and more women will want him, many of them maybe younger and more attractive than my sister. Because of this, I fear he will dump her in the future. Statistically, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. If my sister is a housewife all her life, and if she is dumped at age 40, no firm will want to hire her because she has no experience. But if, instead of being a housewife, she focused on her education and maybe focused on her career, even if the man dumps her, she can have something to fall back on, something to help her stand on both feet in the likely event she is dumped. I want to tell this to my sister but I'm afraid she might get mad at me. Is there any way I can communicate this concept to her in a tasteful and subtle way?

Not sure about that. Organization is strength too.

If you kiss a child, would that be pedophilia? E.g. look at the pic at the link below: http://fogarty7.lockergnome.net/blog/_archives/2005/1/9/235168.html

What are laws? Government is defined at the entity that has most power among a group of people. Thus if the mafia controls the government then the mafia is by definition the government since the mafia has most power. Government with this monopoly on power uses it to set a standard of right or wrong and enforces this standard with its power. An alternate definition of patriotism is not love of government but love of the people ruled by the government. Government and people are different things. Imagine a group of kids in a pre-school and the strongest boy in the group uses his muscles to gather all the males together and form a group. The group of all boys is a country ruled by that strongest boy, who is the government. Patriotism occurs when the boys who are members of this country (1) love this strong boy and this is like loyalty to government and/or (2) love other boys, i.e. love members of the same group. Either way, the members of this country have a bias towards members of their own group and the group is defined by the strongest boy. In other words, patriotism is love of select people and this selective love is in the hands of the entity with the most power. The boys under the control of this strongest boy, if they have patriotism, will show a bias towards members of their own group and thus they like less those not in the group, i.e. all females in the pre-school. In this example, patriotism = sexism simply because the entity in power has selective groups based upon whether they are male or female. The entity in power has control of who is a member or not and since a patriot likes people who the entity in power choses, then whomever a patriot likes is in the hands of the government. So in that way, patriotism is obedience to government since government defines those you like.

Can someone show me in a step-by-step way how the following partial differentiations were obtained?

Apologies for the ambiguities. I'll clarify what I was saying. When a firm hires someone for an important position, the firm takes into account the quality of the applicant's service that she or he provides to the firm. The quality of the applicant's service is a dependent on such things like whether or not she or he takes a break or leaves early to raise children. An important employee in a firm is like a gear in a machine. If this gear is taken out for a while or taken out completely, the machine (i.e. the firm) may not operate smoothly if an imperfect substitute is found. In other words, a firm will want to hire as few pregnant women as possible because a child-minded female is like a poor-quality gear in a machine that constantly needs replacing. A woman who leaves the firm will cost the firm money. Suppose the firm loses $10,000 if a female quits. This cost is in the form of search costs (a replacement must be found) and training costs (the replacement must be trained). In most high-end jobs this is difficult because the higher paid someone is the more unique he or she is in her or his skill set and experience and the harder it is to find a replacement. So like I said, suppose the firm loses $10,000 if a female quits. If only 1% of females have children, then the probability that the next female applicant will quit to have children is quite low. Even if the firm faces a loss of $10,000 if the female quits, the expected loss is if there is a 10% chance of this happening is $100, which the firm may decide is insignificant and so they firm hires many women. However, suppose women all of a sudden want to become traditional housewives, have children, and so on. Suppose the probability that women have children rises to 80 percent. Then the expected loss from hiring a woman is $8000. If it is uncommon for men to quit and take care of children (suppose it's zero percent) then if you are faced with hiring two people, one is female and the other is male, and both are of equal productivity or intelligence, but the female has an expected pregnancy cost of $8000 while the male is virtually nil, then who would you hire? The man. This may (or may not) explain the observation that the important jobs, i.e. senior management, senior executive and so on, are nearly all taken by men. This may explain the "glass ceiling" phenomenon. What I suggest is the power for firms to discriminate against women who have children. A woman must pledge to not have children to work and then the firm will have no rational reason to discriminate against her. If a firm is able to distinguish between a career woman and a Stepford Wife, then the Stepford Wives will not pull down the career woman with them.

Intellectual honesty is preferable to stubbornness. We've seen enough of that with the creationists.

I was reading the following Batroc Z Leaper http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.troll/msg/41eb3621851f2260 If it more likely that women will quit and raise babies, this will only make discrimination more tempting, especially for jobs of high importance. Imagine 80% of females quit and have babies. If you were hiring someone to be CEO and thought about a highly qualitifed female, you would think, "There is an 80% chance this female will quit and have children. The replacement costs would be high if she decides to quit. Perhaps I should hire a man instead." A female's decision to quit and have children, therefore, can hurt other females. I think this is really sad because if bosses lump hardworking career women with the Stepford Wives, then all females are pulled down together. On one hand, it's horrible that a female is discriminated against but on the other hand employers need to hire loyal people who won't quit, and if women just keep becoming housewives then there is just no easy solution to this.

[math]m_{t+h}-m_{t}=hm_t[/math], so [math]\frac{dm_t}{dt}=m_t[/math] I am told that you use differential equations to the get the differentiation above, but I don't see how. Can anybody see?

I've been reading Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and a general idea I get from this book is that economic freedom is a prerequisite for social freedom. E.g. in China the idea is that as the people get more and more prosperous their power increases relative to the government's and with this power they are more able to express their rights. Looking at today's political spectrum of Left versus Right, we see that the Left is socially liberal (e.g. porn is allowed) and economically authoritarian (e.g. protection from outsourcing) while the Right is socially conservative (bans on evolution and abortion, etc) and economically liberal (free trade, free markets, pro-business, and so on). If economic liberalism brigns about social liberalism, then it would follow that the Left and the Right are the same. If the conservatives are in power, their economic liberalism will bring about social liberalism. So either way, we become socially free. More or less.

I've just read a thread where someone labelled a country as uncivilized and I replied by bringing up the topic of methodological individualism. I thought that I might start a thread about the topic. Below is an example of how group thinking leads to fallacious thinking and how reasoning from the micro foundations helps explains contradictions that arise from looking at the world with eyes that see only grand entities (e.g. countries, nations, religions) rather than more fundamental entities (e.g. individuals, atoms, energy): From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Methological Individualism: “Methodological individualism became important, not as a way of avoiding the political thought-crime of 'collectivism,' but rather as a way of avoiding demonstrably fallacious inferences about the dynamics of collective action. For example, the traditional 'interest group' theory of democratic politics generally presupposes that groups who share a common interest also have an incentive to promote that interest, by lobbying politicians, funding research, and so on. Olson's major contribution was to have driven home the point that the existence of such a common interest just as often generates a free-rider incentive. Individuals would benefit from acting to promote that interest, but they would benefit even more by sitting back while the other members of the group acted to promote it. As a result, no one may act to promote it. However, Olson confined this observation to large groups. The prisoner's dilemma, on the other hand, demonstrated the ubiquity of this incentive structure.” What I'd like to explore is any criticism of the principle of methodological individualism. Can everything or is everything explained through reduction or do some phenomena naturally operate at a higher level?

Following from the principle of methodological individualism, I would suggest that it is not the country that is uncivilized but a subset of the individuals that make up that country. For a country to be uncivilized the barbarity would have to originate from the political system that defines the country, i.e. the government. For example, if the government officially practices gay bashings and burning of witches, and if these acts are uncivilized, then the country would be uncivilized. But this does not mean that all individuals within that country are uncivilized. The word "country" I assume focuses more on the government, those higher up in the power chain. The word "nation," however, many may agree would refer to the people in general that occupy the region bounded by the political borders defined by the power of the state. That a few or many individuals would take offence at a cartoon and then respond in an extreme way I don't think reflects on the country or the nation. In a political system that enforces freedom of expression, given that the ideas circulating (e.g. on the Internet) is virtually infinite, then if you look hard enough you are likely to find something that will offend you. Religious people like Christians and Muslims, when they browse the Internet, often come across pornography or even homosexual pornography, which would really offend some religious people. There are many things on the Internet that offend me, but I think that just for the society to operate smoothly freedom of expression should be allowed, but just as people have the right to freely express opinion, people should exercise their right to block offensive content from reaching them. For the example of pornography this is the reason that ratings are made by the MPAA. This increases the ability of people to discern content that may offend them. Content filtering software like Content Protect work well to filter unwanted content on the Internet. You cannot change human nature and it is extremely difficult to change the world, but the next best thing you can do is to change your perception of the world.

Is it healthy to swallow your own burp? What if you swallow someone else's burp? Often while I eat I take a mouthful of water and while the water is in my mouth I burp. The gas enters the mouth from the throat and I assume the gas mixes with the water. If I open my mouth, would the gas escape through the water? Whenever this happens I never feel any bubbling sensation in the water nor do I feel any burp escaping, suggesting that the gas may be trapped underneath the water. I have no choice but to swallow the water with my burp trapped in this water. I could spit the water out but I often don't want to waste water or I don't have anywhere to spit it out.

How can I solve the equations above using matrixes to get [math](u_1, u_2, ... , u_8)=\left(\frac{9}{34},\frac{3}{34},\frac{1}{17},\frac{3}{34},\frac{3}{34},\frac{1}{17},\frac{3}{34}, \frac{9}{34} \right)[/math]? I tried substitution but it soon became confusing trying to figure out which I had to substitute with which. Is there a systematic process I can use?

In the science classroom it is widely agreed that the teacher must provide factual information. It is not okay for the science teacher to gives lies to his or her students. If a small child asks a science teacher whether Santa is real, should the teacher lie and tell the child that Santa clause is real? When I talk about Santa I refer not to some real person who happens to posses physical characteristics similar to the Santa Clause marketed on December but the supernatural Santa Clause who can read minds (omniscient) and fly around the world at the speed of light.

Child pornography is banned. However, a child molestor or pedophile can get around this by looking for nudist sites. Since many nudists beaches in Europe contain not only nude adults but also nude children, pedophiles can use these nudist pictures as a substitute for child porn. For this reason, should nudism be banned?

I divide all my tasks into either work or leisure, quantify the different tasks, and then make sure that the leisure to work ratio does not spiral too high. Work can include things like exercise. Watching TV is leisure. The difficulty is in figuring the values for the different tasks. If work does not equal leisure at the end of the day, I punish myself. This has led me to do some quite nifty things like simultaneously engaging in work and leisure so that my activity gives neither cost nor benefit (it is a zero-sum activity). E.g. I often watch TV while I exercising on the treadmill. __________________ http://members.fortunecity.com/ketthia/fiction.html

If he's gay then he can go to a gay prostitute. If not sure if there are many around though, but you can search on the Internet. __________________ http://members.fortunecity.com/ketthia/fiction.html

Google "I am lonely" and press I'm Feeling Lucky to get to the site http://www.moviecodec.com/topics/2420p1.html where thousands of other people did the same. Check it out. I know it's hard to define but does naybody know what the stats are for incidence of loneliness and what its causes are?

I think what he means (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that unloading poo into toilet water that is highly concentrated with urine would cause urine to splash onto your buttocks. If the urine is sterile as some suggest then I suppose that's not a problem, but if it's not then contaminants may enter the bloodstream via the anus. Of course to prevent this you flush before you go.