Thomas Kirby

No frontal attack on a problem like this will work short of total effective control of the entire human population. If they achieve this, I hope that it is after I am dead. Even torturing me until I die of a heart attack is preferable to this state of affairs. There has been a tremendous fight against knowing the causes of this kind of problem and dealing with it correctly. This fight has been pretty successful. No one dares talk about the frustration of the sexual impulse and the negative results of this frustration in the current atmosphere, especially anyone who has the credibility of a Ph.D. and wants to maintain any funding. This part of science has been cauterized. No legislation aimed directly at this problem will work.

I'm not going any further than the Einstein-Planck relationship.

The answer that these people have paid their "debt to society" is a good one. I often believe that society overcharges and pockets the difference. I want to be able to protect minors but the real threats are far more numerous and damaging than the threats posed by copping a feel, which most of the charges are about. Personally I think it is a neurotic delusion to believe that putting a hand on someone's butt is the same as raping them. A lot of capital is made promoting that delusion, too. It is extremely profitable in terms of money and power over people. If we dealt realistically with real threats to the well-being of children, the picture would change drastically. Sex simply isn't the number one threat to the well-being of children. I'm not sure whether doctoring is the number one threat, schooling, or the forcing of a prolonged period of immaturity upon them. These threats form a connected system of deliberate physical and psychological damage to children. Overlaid upon this system is a system of ignorance and complacency. Ignorance makes it possible to not see what is threatening to children, to see threats where there are none, and to greatly exaggerate the impact of threats that actually exist.

This is more like I'm explaining it from the observed reality viewpoint.

YT2095: Thank you, I was about to recommend the use of a light bulb myself. Douglas, Lance: The voice of experience and knowledge can tell you this: There are many power supplies that can be damaged by hooking a large capacitor directly across the terminals. At best you might have a shut-down condition or blow a fuse. If you do something like that with a wall transformer, it is usually permanent. If your power supply isn't carefully protected, and a lot of hobbyist power supplies aren't, placing a discharged capacitor directly across the leads can zap the rectifier diodes, the series pass transistor, the three-terminal regulator, and in some cases even the wire itself before the capacitor charges. There is also the fact that it is difficult to protect fairly high current low voltage power supplies. The price of one small part protects all of your electronics from damaging conditions. I've bought new resistors for as low as USD 0.015 each in small quantities.

Would I be a terrible person if I said no?

Because the "wavelength" of the photon is the physical size of the packet. Redshift and blueshift are due to the change in the energy carried by the photon, not the change in "frequency" such as in Doppler shift. The Doppler shift is about overtaking or moving away from wavefronts, so that the observer intercepts fewer or more wavefronts depending on the direction of motion.

The problem with pornography being banned is that we will be right back where birth control information is banned and complete ignorance (rather than almost complete ignorance) reigns about human sexuality. Will it be better if we are so ignorant that a boy can come back from the boy's school with a sore bottom and we won't have a clue what the headmaster did to him?

No I do not. I consider it a violent crime that should be dealt with severely. "Monstrous" places it in the realm of magic, where rational minds cannot deal with it at all. In cases like this, we need our rationality even worse than ever. One reason is so that we can deal with such cases in any manner that might even be mistaken for intelligently, and preferably in a manner that no one can look back and say "What a freaking circus." Another reason is so that we don't see so many monsters behind the bushes, at work, in school, or wherever, monsters that exist in our mind.

Punching someone's teeth out is violating someone in a way that no one should be violated, ever, also. Even more importantly, forcing someone to hate their bodies and their sex is a violation that is just as personal as raping them. Most of my objection to this system is that the terms such as "rape" and "pedophilia" are abused to stir up hatred against individuals, self-hatred, bodily shame, guilt over natural feelings, and of course to generate billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. If the laws are in place to enable abuse and exploitation of children and adults, we may well be better off without them.

The redshift/blueshift of light is not due to the Doppler effect.

Everyone did catch the fact that I thought that rape should be considered to be a form of assault, right? What I want to remove is the way that sex makes it so very special. Holding the attacker responsible for damage to someone's personal parts is quite acceptable. I'm tired of the way that sex crimes have a super special oh my god status. I'm even more tired of the way people obsess about them. Someone committed a sex crime, let's design ways to be more violent to more of our fellow humans in order to solve this problem, even if we know that doesn't work. While we're at it, let's treat all other violent crime as if it is nothing special, business as usual, and let's not worry about it unless they do something sexual. That's the mindset that I see. I also see a lot of glorification of violence by people who say bad things about sex.

No one else here knows of any statistics for false accusations of rape or child molestation, do they? It is interesting that anyone here would just know that I am wrong without knowing of any studies to prove me wrong or them right, one way or the other. Dak, I'm not all that sure that they care about evidence or witnesses. Here is just one link to one investigator's estimate of the number of false accusations made: Charles McDowell

I for one don't actually believe that there are any aliens out there who have told us that we can't have interplanetary spacecraft. Does anyone wish to correct me on this thought? I thought not. We needed to have nice little nuclear powered spacecraft in 1970. The simple fact is that if we had worked with this technology for 35 years, we would have 35 years of hands-on experience and R&D with it, and we could have had manned missions to the Kuiper belt by now, let alone the asteroid belt.

Yes, Douglas, I would say that issues about "sexual predation" would be on topic for a discussion titled "Another Twist in the Issue of Sexual Predators. I was unaware of requirements that I be some kind of master debater who followed certain forms or dressed his essays up as if they were Ph.D. theses, so I still don't plan to try to do that. I would personally seriously consider repealing every law against the rape of a woman on several grounds. One of these is that men in prison who are raped never seem to be able to charge their aggressors with rape, that I am aware of. Another is that the rate of false accusations is high enough to make the laws of questionable worth. Certainly, I might consider repealing all of those laws, then never touch a woman again unless she forced me to, which would give me considerable peace. At the same time, though, I would allow claims of assault and battery pretty much as always, but not "sexual" battery. Frankly, in my own not very humble opinion, I don't think humanity is ready for it. Women would still be quite free to form their little cliques that would exclude men from messing with them. If they would, just to be kind and sweet and civilized, please be clear on what they want when they approach a man for any reason, they could avoid a lot of misunderstandings. Coquettishness would have to be practiced with greater discretion. Whatever is right or wrong about "sexual" assault, I still say "don't tease the animals" and "take responsibility for yourself." I also say to men "If she waves it in your face and you don't trust the setup, leave the room, the house, maybe even the country or the planet." It's one of the other things that I am tired of seeing used as an excuse to ban pornography, sexual devices, and some sexual practices. A lot of the people, and I am just talking about what I have seen with my own eyes, a lot of the people who want sexually explicit materials banned aren't themselves grown up. They carry a hugely unhealthy measure of self-hatred in them. They are violent. One person I know who postured about keeping sexual information away from his children also allowed those children to run wild, vandalize the neighborhood, and steal whatever wasn't nailed down. Another such person made a career of beating her children as painfully and in as prolonged a manner as she could any time she felt like it and could excuse it. A whole coven of them at the elementary school I went to had to be able to hold that posture. It was the only thing they had to prove that they had any connection whatsoever to anything that could even be mistaken for "human decency." I could really use a means to rub their faces in the fact that "decency" requires a lot more of a person than that they simply not have sex with certain people. Getting rid of any laws against any form of sex would scare the life out of these people, these predators. They've always had "perverts" to use as human shields. In fact, I could compile a list of rules that they use to identify "perverts." The first rule is, the kids actually like the suspect. The other rules, in no particular order: The supect treats the kids as if they were human beings. He fails to treat them like dirt. He actually tries to help kids who aren't doing as well with their schoolwork. He sticks up for kids who are bullied. He actually has non-adversarial relationships with the children. By the rules of the neurotics, a man or a woman who is like this is either having sex with one or more of the kids, or he or she is thinking about it or is going to. It would scare these people literally to death if they had to play on a level playing field. With today's setup, any investigation of child abuse is likely to stop right where they find a "sexual predator." It doesn't matter if the real predators used an innocent man or woman. They don't care. They would sacrifice him, a bus full of children, anyone, just to keep from having to own up to their own offenses. They would also commit suicide. The number one killer of neurotics is being forced to examine their own lives.

So it got a bit more personal than I would have liked, Pangloss. Even so, how about we keep arguments concerning this thread in this thread?

Pangloss: If we simply must bring in material about a debate in another thread that you yourself wanted to end, then here is my reply to that: There is a good reason why I told you that I perceived you a certain way. I have every right to tell you what impression I am receiving from you. I was pretty annoyed. I kept it as civil as I could. Here, I have kept it as impersonal as possible with regards to members of the board, and I think I've been good at it. I've seen you take things personally before that weren't aimed at you. In this discussion thread, what exactly is it that you seem to be taking personally? The fact that I am throwing the practice of demonization back in the faces of people who presumably aren't here reading this discussion? The fact that I criticize a practice that I sincerely believe exists? How about the fact that it is sometimes impossible to describe certain rhetorical tactics without to some degree appearing to use them? I didn't label anyone a conservative in this thread until you complained that conservatives weren't getting a fair hearing. Don't even get me started on what I think a conservative considers to be a fair hearing. At that, I didn't even label a particular person a conservative. My answer to the charges of stifling debate? This discussion thread is in its sixth page. I seem to have been superbly successful at stifling debate, haven't I? I have every right to bear witness to what I have seen without formal requirements that I provide page and verse to support every statement. AFAIK, there is no requirement, especially in this particular part of this board, that I do this. Your accusations against me in this regard are just plain specious. First, this isn't a peer-reviewed journal. Second, if I sound like I know what I am talking about, maybe it's because I do. Third, there is a little more to being a bad little boy than having a certain writing style. Give a man a chance to fully explain his point of view without also having to write a book report for a teacher who probably isn't going to read it through anyway. OK, maybe I did label you a conservative in passing, but you have been handing out a few insults of your own.

Pangloss: If I am mistaken about my evaluation of the political uses of the phenomenon of pedophilia, at least I am making my best attempt to actually explain what my problem is in that context. I am not getting personal with other members of the board on this issue. I am not even behaving so "badly" as using terms like "conspiracy theorist" to put someone down, or to accuse them of being about to shoot up a group of people. What happened, did you get some warning points? You do know that other people can't see those points, don't you? Even if I were overgeneralizing, which I don't think that I am, I don't think that what at worst might be called an honest mistake qualifies as a violation of board policy. The conservatives around here get away with jumping in and calling me a "conspiracy theorist" when I report certain historical facts, so I think you guys are getting quite enough leeway that you should be satisfied. I think that what is actually not tolerated from the far-right posters is when they descend to name-calling and bullying that they seem to feel entitled to after they have laid down the "word of God." Back to topic: However awkwardly I am doing it, I am explaining that there is a pretty large, well-funded attempt to link every aspect of sexuality with pedophilia, using the phenomenon of pedophilia as a weight to sink everything else related to sexuality. Even I almost flipped to that side when I saw a certain news story today that I don't want to talk about. It could have been a very convincing conversion and very profitable. Very closely related is the habit of using the idea of protection of children from any sort of sexuality to close down adult book stores, prosecute people for making videos involving adults havings sex, prosecute people for having sex without taking videos, and to excuse special laws against sex that only involves consenting adults. So, no, I am not making an overgeneralization. I am reporting one. I have even done it without overusing the word "exploitation." In short, two wrongs give me the write to draw and quote the offenders.

Only if there is something in place to keep the plane from climbing. Too high an angle of attack will cause the plane to try to spin on its left-right axis. This is pitch. Turbulence over the wing will cause a tendency to buck up and down, changing the angle of attack randomly and abruptly. That laminar flow that keeps a vortex from forming just above the wing is more important than any lift from the Bernoulli principle, which as I said requires a push from the underside anyway.

The wing creates a partial vacuum behind it as it pushes air aside. "Behind" is also "above" if the wing is tipped so that the leading edge is higher than the trailing edge. It doesn't take a curved surface to create the vacuum, and it doesn't take accelerating the air over the curved surface. The curved surface is required to allow the displaced air to flow over it smoothly. A flat wing isn't going to lack lift. It is going to start bucking at a much lower airspeed.

That is why they do it. It was not clear to you that I was describing someone else's behavior?