Pangloss

I didn't make that request, and I think your story just underscores my point. And as long as we're tossing straw men around, my cousin didn't need a handgun -- his father's hunting rifle (which New Zealand doesn't ban) did the job just fine. And I've always felt that his decision was casual and based on a temporary situation that could easily have been resolved had he only asked for help. Nonsense. That would be a completely hypocritical position given that you've declared this evidence to be absolute proof that they raise the suicide rate, and you've also declared that handguns serve no useful purpose. You have to support a ban -- your own conclusion requires it. So the only reason you'd say something like the above is to appear moderate. Well that's a dishonest position and I don't buy it. Though frankly I have no idea why you even have an opinion on the subject at all. You already HAVE a handgun ban. Congratulations, you've produced 11 pages of advocacy about something which doesn't impact you and which you have no vote on. Well I disrespectfully dismiss New Zealand and its holier-than-thou attitude toward handguns. And nuclear weapons. And the ecology. And human rights. I guess if you don't HAVE the technology or resources to do a thing, you might as well insist that it's because you don't want to and everyone else is wrong to do it. Doesn't cost you anything, and might gain you something.

Yeah that was my feeling as well; it felt artificial. I agree with DH's analysis, though. IMO the Supreme Court is exactly where it needs to be, and the balance and ages suggest (to me anyway) that McCain could do more harm than Obama. Of course, eight years is a long time and those people are human beings, so it's not inconceivable that the next justice who leaves the bench could be Alito or Roberts. You never know.

That's what academic journals are for. Unfortunately many of them are subscription-based, but in most fields there are many journals that can be accessed without spending money. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with biology or medicine, but perhaps someone here can help out.

Not that I'm defending Georgia (or disagreeing with you at all), but does anybody out there believe that Russia wants South Ossetia to be an independent state? Nice analysis of a very complex situation.

Well, no surprise there, I guess. The question was worthless, near as I can tell. How can you use hindsight about SCOTUS appointments? They're legendary for not doing what they're "told".

I did catch that specific statement about not putting those four judges up, and it really made me cringe, mainly just at the sheer audacity of any politician criticizing any of the current justices in any way. Politicians should DREAM of a day when they have an IOTA of the mental capacity, reasoning ability or objectivity of a BAD supreme court justice. Yeesh.

Who says they can't tack on their own political opinion coyly posed as "scientific reasoning"? Who's going to stop them? A journalist? Don't make me laugh. They'll just get ten more scientists to say "the debate is over" and then the journalist just looks like an idiot. That is complete nonsense, because we just had a freaking membership ROLL CALL of agreement with you about what the science says. It's only the CONCLUSION they don't agree with you on. The obvious truth is that you're hiding your own emotional investment here. You haven't spent 11 pages backed into a wall just because you think the suicide rate is higher with easier handgun availability. No, you want the guns. But the data doesn't steer us over obstacles like personal defense or home invasion or the freedom to kill one's self. So you keep jamming this down everyone's throats, insisting that this scientific data forces a specific political conclusion, even though you know full well that people just aren't going to go there with you. So you keep saying the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result. That's not science, it's insanity.

I completely forgot about this and ran off to swing at some golf balls with the wife. Thanks for the link. I guess it's not a debate after all, just a pair of sit-downs in sequence. Not nearly as interesting. Sorry guys, I passed along some bad info there. The article did say it wasn't a real debate, but it sounded like he would have both on stage at the same time, at least. Oh well.

Thus reminding us that news site comments are about as insightful as callers on Rush Limbaugh or Air America. That first argument might actually work if (a) Russia had only entered S. Ossetia, instead of invading all over Georgia, and/or (b) there wasn't this larger geopolitical, realpolitik struggle taking place for control over the resources of the region. As for your follow-up, I've already quoted sources that this dispute is not US-derived. The EU is taking the diplomatic point on this (Georgia wants to join the EU, not the US), and the truce came from French president Sarkozy, not the US. The "meddling" began at Georgia's invitation and was a joint venture between European and American companies. You know, it's bad enough when the ABB arguments are so shallow they won't get the tops of your shoes wet, but when they're debunked before they're even posted it becomes pretty obvious that the only reason it IS being posted is to perpetuate the message. I guess no matter how poorly reasoned an argument is, if you say it enough times, sooner or later people will repeat it.

Atlanta and rural Georgia. I spent time in rural scout troops for a while and we lived "Deliverance" every weekend up in the mountains. Later my dad moved me to an inner-city troop in Atlanta where I eventually did my Eagle project. (Talk about eye-opening -- I was the only white person in the building most of the time.) Never saw anyone get bullied over lack of faith. Bullied, definitely, but not over that. Of course kids will bully over any subject, and if you threw that in a bully's face they'd be happy to leverage it into an ass-wuppin'. But it wasn't because they had any special thoughts for baby Jesus. But really more to the point, even if you saw that sort of thing that doesn't mean it was prevalent in the country. Americans have always been tolerant of other religions and no religion. The 1960s were famous for an explosion of atheism. Before then it was common for people to go to church out of habit and tradition even if they didn't believe. But even if they didn't go to church, I've never seen anything in the literature to suggest a regular pattern of physical danger for non-observers, at least not since, say, the Salem Witch Hunts. Is there a body of work on this that I've just missed somewhere?

The data does NOT prove that, it only suggests one aspect of the picture. It does support your point, but it doesn't lay the case to rest -- not by a long shot. (Wups, cross-posted with Sayo.) It's also not a scientific point at all, and I think it's a cop-out to pretend that it is. You're deliberately interpreting the data in a specific manner. That's a political message. I think using science in this faux-logical manner is dangerous, and we see it all too often. It's the sort of thing that gets politicians and activists all riled up, and then six months later when another factor is discovered you have to tell these people "oh, sorry, never mind", and by then it's too late, you've got six new laws on the books and 30 or 40 innocent people rotting in jail and thousands of corporate employees out of work. Or you've spent billions on last-ditch-salvation technology that never mattered in the first place. And then we wonder why people turn away from science.

Not bad for a unearthly entity with mental issues.

For whom? You mean in terms of employment or in private group affiliations? Because I don't think it's ever really been physically dangerous to be non-religious in this country, at least in my lifetime.

I think it's far more than that. I would say that most Americans' idea of "faith" is so casual as to be downright offensive to any true believer. Even if they go to church on Sunday often do so out of habit or a distant notion of "hedging their bets". The "moral majority" concept is a total crock -- the majority of Americans couldn't care less. They get rallied around and pushed from ideology to ideology, some of which are called 'faith', but that actually happens out of populist demagoguery, not out of religious conviction.

That's an interesting point. The media kinda latches on sometimes to the notion that "if you do the same thing to both sides then it's okay" (as you say, a "wash"). But that kinda strikes me as an example of two wrongs making a right. Maybe that's putting too fine a point on it (it's not exactly illegal, or even a huge, tragic kind of wrong), but I think it's a legitimate concern and I think it's one that's overlooked by the media because agnostic moderates aren't exactly a dramatic lot in general. I've often wondered if the reason why the religious right attained such influence in the 2000 election and beyond was because of media attention, which gave them a stronger sense of empowerment, which in turn lead to greater influence. When the media started talking about Bush's appeal to the religious right, I remember thinking at the time that that was rather odd, because the religious right didn't strike me as a particularly influential group. Then, suddenly, it was.

I'm wondering if any unmanaged (non-framework) language will ever be "popular" again. Who writes an operating system anymore? Game programming is definitely on the rise, but the kids coming up through the ranks want to learn the languages that are already vested at the grind houses, so they're not going to look past C/C++, and even there managed code has made huge inroads thanks to Microsoft's XNA stuff. It's pretty much up to you scientists and engineers. And we all know how popular you guys are.

For whatever it's worth, I think we've returned to "dull and lockable", as Sayo put it. I don't know why there's all this fuss. I guess some people have a problem with evidence that doesn't agree with their philosophy. From where I sit Lance has made a perfectly valid statistical point. But it's also a point that doesn't in the slightest direct society to a specific, obvious coarse of action. The decision whether to do something about that is political, not scientific, because it involves infringing on one right for the sake of another one. You have an opinion on it, and I think you've made that opinion clear. What else is there to say?

Negative sir, that is not a requirement of this web site. You are welcome to communicate real personal information about yourself if that is your wish, but nobody is required to do so. Thanks.

Rofl. I was going to say something about the swiftboating of Obama, but then I was suddenly distracted by a drive-by video depicting actual, relevant, substantive points. When I was done I came back here to... wait... what were we talking about here??

(I've merged the two threads and adopted your subject line (which makes more sense than one that says "tomorrow" in it, lol). Thanks for the suggestion. Now the only thing weird about the OP is that it doesn't contain my opinion on the subject, so let me rectify that.) I agree with your point -- I think it's very poor judgment to have a debate on those grounds, especially the very first one. I don't know that it actually signifies "religious control in our government", but I can understand that reaction -- it certainly suggests it, and it seems to me that people who are driven by such motivations are often more interested in what appearances "suggest" rather than what the law says. But I guess that's another discussion. On the "plus" side, Warren is someone who's considered acceptable to religious Democrats as well as religious Republicans. But what they may not have considered is that the move may tick off non-religious Republicans as well as non-religious Democrats.

The first presidential debate is scheduled for Saturday, August 16th at 8pm Eastern time, and will be broadcast live on the Fox News Channel. The debate will take place at the church of evangelical pastor Rick Warren, who's seen as a moderate, non-religious-right (kinder, gentler?) evangelical. Perhaps still somewhat anathema to many of us, but both candidates will be there taking questions from the man, so it's probably worth a look.

The question of what really prompted this may be coming into focus. Below is an interesting article in BusinessWeek talking about how international pipeline development efforts in the region have been shattered by the hostilities between Russia and Georgia. Apparently it's not so much that S. Ossetia has any oil or pipelines, but rather the potential threat of invasion in other Russian-bordering countries. A new pipeline in Georgia has been shut down, and apparently Turkmenistan is now considering a pipeline agreement with Russian oil companies instead of western ones. The development is a severe blow to American oil companies, who have been working on these pipelines since the Clinton administration hooked them up in the region back in the 1990s. That may sound like a mixed bag (oh no, those poor oil companies, how sad!), but it's worth keeping in mind that at the time it was considered important by virtually all international observers (except Russian ones, of course) to give the former Soviet states an independent means of bringing their oil to market. It was also considered strategically important because it would reduce European dependence on Russian oil. The issue received a lot of attention in the pre-9/11 world, and was even the subject of a James Bond movie. But Russia, struggling with severe economic issues and desperate to regain its superpower status, never forgot what outside pipelines in the former Soviet states meant to its own oil's value. In short, the war may have actually been over oil, and it almost went unnoticed. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097000700662_page_2.htm (Great quote at the end of the first paragraph below.) line[/hr] So apparently a deal has been brokered in which the fighting stops and Georgia agrees to let Russia stay and occupy their country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the EU-proposed and -supported deal was brokered by French President Sarkozy. Perhaps he offered Paris as collateral. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4543728.ece The Bush administration seems to have abandoned it's 8/6 requirement and gone along with the EU. Ouch. Humiliation is definitely the right word. I guess that's the difference between Putin and Saddam Hussein. Putin has the muscle to back it up. But apparently this is better than fighting in the eyes of Europe. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that a third of their oil comes from Russia, and none of it comes from Georgia. Oh wait, that's impossible, only Americans trade blood (or in this case independence) for oil. Silly me, I forgot.

If that doesn't work try a proxy server. Here's a free one I used a while back: http://www.freeproxyserver.net/ If that one doesn't work, google "free proxy servers".

Dunno if you guys caught this, but I know we have a lot of Linux folks here who might appreciate the humor of it. Apparently one of the projectors threw this image up during the opening ceremony in Beijing the other day: The first comment on the story this page is amusing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10015872-1.html

On that particular issue they're both right. What seems to be happening is that reduced demand is causing a drop in the price per barrel because speculators are taking profits, believing the cap has been hit. IMO what's silly is thinking that long-term reductions can be realized through offshore drilling or regular removals from the reserve. Those could have short-term impacts on speculation as well, but are unlikely to have lasting impact on prices because of overseas demand. Rofl!