ParanoiA

Interesting position from a democrat. I would never agree to conscription. All military should be volunteer only. If you are fighting a noble and worthy campaign, then the country will be behind it and volunteers will be plentiful. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,230598,00.html http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/19/rangel.draft.ap/index.html It's funny too, because democrats are supposed to be the anti-war crowd. I guess Rangel didn't get the memo. I wonder how many New Yorkers are feeling betrayed after voting for him. These next two years with the Dems in power are going to be so awesome...

See, I hear this said alot and certainly the hollywood depiction of the classic southern redneck would lead you to believe they just sit around all day drinkin' beer, drivin' their pick-em-up trucks and shootin' thangs that move. Quit it. It's not 1960 anymore. They are certainly out there, but how many incidents involving gun misuse actually involve drunken rednecks? Please. Everytime some idiot shoots an innocent person (or themselves) it's a city slicker or a criminal. Southern rednecks are the people that should have guns. If our government was to turn on us, it's the rednecks of the country that are going to be doing most of the fighting while us city folk run for it.

This is why I don't even respond to bascule anymore. His ego prevents him from reading and attaining depth, and presenting himself as anything more than a pimply teenager obsessed with looking cool in front of his peers. Really? I had no idea. My sister in law has used the Title 19 government handout for most of her births. It covers everything, before and after birth - like a year or so afterward. But if you have insurance, it sucks because you have out of pocket co-pays and so forth for every visit. And if you have sucky insurance, I'm sure those out of pocket expenses get worse. I would be curious whether or not these women who fly to the UK have insurance or not.

I'm embarrassed to say I never saw it coming...good one though

I believe convicted felons, certainly violent felons, are not allowed firearms for some period of their life, if not permanently. I would agree, in a heartbeat, for a competency test for anyone who's been convicted of a crime or upon release of psychiatric facilities. There's a way to enforce a competency test on those who've "earned" it, through their stupid behavior, without impacting the law abiding citizenry and jeopardizing the framework of our government. Perhaps using conviction and mental history could work.

I didn't realize that anyone here was promoting total gun-freedom nor a total-gun ban. I thought the discussion here was a competency test. I don't like the government authoring a competency test. A competency test is far more likely to be subjected to biased tampering and manipulation on an incremental scale. Perhaps a psychiatric evaluation could still be objective with respect to gun ownership if it is the same psyche eval used for other things unrelated to gun ownership competency, but I'm not sure I like that either. It sets up the citizen to have to prove themselves to its government rather than the other way around. Most of our legal process assumes the rights of the citizen is given and the government has to prove itself justified to trump the rights of that individual.

So are you saying our current system would be just fine if we got rid of these little programs and design a simpler system? See, I don't like the "fend for yourself" mentallity about health care. I suppose that's a strange place to draw the line seeing as how we require everyone to basically fend for themselves in fetching food, clothing and shelter. But it seems silly to provide police protection to all - socialized - but you're on your own to find and pay for a doctor to deal with your liver disease. And we don't have a tier system for fire or police either. We all get the same - well in theory anyway. Health care just seems like a natural progression from that.

Well, the privileged elite he's talking about is like half the freaking country. The rest are "illegal aliens" that apparently like being illegal and getting screwed on wages and benefits - but since no hospital can turn them away for lack of funds, the taxpayers get to pay for it. Or they're welfare recipients that are waiting for a job to knock on their door and provide them with everything they need. Or some other similar tale of bloodsucking consequence.

Actually they would. Think that out AP. 300 million people in this country - at least 100 million are men. Of those, at least 20 million are old or young enough to fight. Of those, at least half can be armed - that's 10 million armed men. 10 million out of 300 million people - that's being VERY conservative. So, 10 million armed americans versus a military that will have to bomb and send in ground troops like a third world country. Or, perhaps they just go in on the ground from the very beginning. They're still going to destroy the infrastructure of most of the country before they could claim victory. That's quite a commitment. China didn't even like slaughtering all of those "unarmed" students in Tiananmen Square and that was easy pickings. An armed society contributes more by its presence than it does by exercising its function.

Well, united kingdom residents might not see it because your government has always been thrust upon you. You may like the current state of affairs, but history doesn't share your perspective. Our government is our own creation by the very people it is for and built with the direct implication of limiting and controlling its total power. Gun ownership, gauranteed by the constitution is central to that. When your citizens are armed, even against a ridiculously formidable military, it effects the balance of power. It keeps the idea of your government turning on you from ever really becoming an idea, if you know what I mean. Competence legislation applied to central amendments of the constitution is a dangerous precedent. You could theoretically do the same thing with freedom of speech. Only the "competent" can practice free speech - thereby establishing a way to filter out the rebellious.

True, but what I've been asking is not a dream and has yet to be answered. I don't mean that offensively, actually it validates that it's a complicated subject. So cheap political rhetoric between liberals and conservatives doesn't do anything to acknowledge the complexity of economics and health care. I would think we would want to spend more money on the outset and then trim back to size. With government invovled, that won't be an issue. So I would say, roll out the socialized health care while the democrats are running things as nobody enjoys spending other people's money more than them - and then they'll pat themselves on the back for the good work they've done in spending our money. Then when the republicans get back in power, they'll trim it up to fund anti-terrorism and domestic spying.

Because access to a machine that carts you around isn't central to maintaining a free government by the people.

And I wonder if it's because there's really no way to practice and use them regularly like you can in more rural areas, or suburbia close to rural areas. If I lived in the city, I'm not sure how I'd ever get to a shooting range and teach my kids respect and safety within the fun of shooting holes in stuff. Yet, I would still have a firearm of some kind. Another problem I see, is the glorification and over-rated mentallity towards handguns. Handguns have no practical use other than to kill living things really close up. Not practical for hunting. Not practical for home protection either since you need to be worried about high velocity rounds traveling through walls into rooms of innocent family members. It seems to be mainly practical for mobility as well as concealment. Only police officers and criminals have that need. Now, I realize there are conceal and carry laws that require a class and I know several people that have done this so I guess that's ok, but really, shotguns and rifles should be the main firearms of law abiding citizens. Shotguns for home protection and hunting, and rifles just for hunting. Those arms would still be more effective than handguns should our government turn against us too.

According to Greene, "the gravitational force allows us to declare that all observers - regardless of their state of motion - are on absolute equal footing. Even those whom we would normally think of as accelerating may claim to be at rest, since they can attribute the force they feel to their being immersed in a gravitational field." I can understand how we're all under the same force, so we're all in the same reference frame with respect to that force. But I don't see how that allows acceleration to be nulled. I thought that if I travel at 60 mph to work, while my buddy travels 40 mph on his way to work, that he has aged more than me - albeit in billionths of billionths of a second probably. Anyone care to explain what I'm missing here?

Ok, I understand the regulation thing and where it comes from. I would agree under just about any other circumstance, except that the right to bare arms is a pillar of the American check and balance system. It's more important to gaurantee the country the unrestricted access to raise arms against its government than it is to protect the citizens from idiot gun owners. Stop and think about it. We all know that incrementalism can be drastic when time lapsed. If you start something like this, it could cause consequences not realized until 100 years down the line. The fate of country could literally be at stake. That's why it's an amendment - the 2nd one no less - 2nd only to free speech. As the American psyche changes and evolves, the idea of what is competent and what is not could change to a perverted form that we had no intention of supporting. Slowly and incrementally, society could be disarmed leading to a government over the people, not by the people. I know you think of gun-toting, beer drinking minority dragging hicks when you think of rights to bare arms, but the major majority of gun owners are responsible, ethical hunters with gun cases and lockers and strict rules about gun safety. Admittedly, this is more of a personal observation, but I've met far more responsible gun owners than idiots in my life and lived in the south, Oklahoma, for 32 years.

This is exactly the kind of negatives I'm talking about. You're not going to see this represented as statistics. You're not going to see this in the amount of money spent in the US versus how much money was spent in the UK. You're not going to see this when comparing efficiency and so forth. This is why I don't really care what the numbers say, in terms of what country spends the most or the least on health care - there are so many other factors that aren't considered. You could easily say that america spends more on health care because we do aggressive follow up and testing. We do dialysis over 55. We do go the extra mile. This is the kind of thing my dad is always telling me about when he compares our system to other countries. I really like the idea of socialized medicine, but this example is unacceptable. How do we get socialized medicine without losing the quality of care we are used to?

I was yankin' yer chain the whole time. You didn't really take my soul decomposition earth eating light riding example seriously did you? But, in an attempt to at least appear intellectually honest, I was proposing that you and your organs would decompose at the same time, and your sole would be absorbed into the earth and drawn to its core to remain until release by the sun eating the earth 5 billion years or so down the line. So, if one of my organs was donated to somebody, then it doesn't decompose with the rest of my body and remain apart of my soul - it is now separated. So, when that person dies, my body part becomes part of their soul, rather than hunt down its original owner in the core of the earth. Then, when I'm converted back to mass due to my soul traveling as electromagnetic waves of light that entered the atmosphere of planet Kladografov, I won't have that body part and I immediately die. Thanks alot...

If you have the patience and desire I would love to read an ellaboration on that. I don't know what you mean by "rest" mass. It sounds as if it might have something to do with energy being similar to mass on certain levels. And now that I'm reading about quantum uncertainty and quantum field theory, it's making me wonder if perhaps the energy keeps jumping around from photon to photon so that no single photon really "carries" the energy at c. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about as I'm at that dangerous stage of learning where you know just enough to make an ass out of yourself if you're not careful.

I love this kind of thing. I made my kids watch it too. This would be a decent example of paradigm shifting and thinking outside of the "block"...hehe...ok that was stupid

I thought photons have zero mass. I thought that's why they could travel at c. So if light is electromagnetic waves that carry energy, then energy can travel at c...?

I would say yes, but the ambiguity is in the fact that we could reduce the light frequency, thereby reducing the energy of the photon so its effect on the electron at impact is minimal - for a more accurate measurement of its velocity. But then, with the light wave length being so much longer, the accuracy of its position is now less accurate. So you either get one or the other. That's the uncertainty principle as I understand it anyway. I'm still trying to fully absorb Klaynos' statement on the matter. Or at least the consequences of it.

So you don't have an opinion of your own then. I understand. We're all so smart that we've said everything that can be said on the matter.

Well, craddling your immune system isn't smart either. I don't think people should run to the doctor as soon as they get the sniffles. That's why I hardly ever get sick. I almost get sick every year. But my immune system thinks I'm not going to do squat about it and apparently takes care of the problem. My wife, on the other hand, visits the doctor three or four times a year getting prescriptions for this and that while she wonders why I never get what she has. Everybody's different, I know, but I wonder if part of America's problem is an obsession to always feel perfect. And yes, I've spent hours in the emergency room with a sick child. The difference is though, we waited to be discharged after we got the care and attention. Some of these places my dad has told me about have you waiting before you ever get looked at.

No bully on the national level? After Bush and the republican GOP have been characterized as bullies - making america the grand bully of the world? Naw, I get your point. That's a strange set of attributes though. Liberal, aggressive. Yeah I don't know if that's very sane actually. I'm looking for the candidate that comes along and tells everyone how it is, whether they realize it or not. I'm looking for the guy that tells the american people to quit acting so childish and stupid, grow up and face reality, that sort of thing. Someone who explains why we give tax cuts to the rich, rather than capitalizing off of american stupidity and playing to the emotions of the public. Someone who explains why "protective" tariffs, like the imported sugar tax to protect sugar farmers, drives manufacturing out of the country, costing us jobs AND poor farmers. I'm looking for the guy who lays it down as it is, rather than feeding the sheep what they want to hear. Sometimes, the fix isn't a tax, a law, or government intervention of any kind.