overtone

Uh, which side are you arguing for? The disarmed people in US history have been oppressed - blacks, reds, yellows, browns. They were disarmed intentionally to abet oppression. This is throughout US history, and right up into the living memory of the adults governing many regions of this country. The armed people have not been oppressed. Still aren't - as you note. That's not much of an argument for disarming people. It's not laughed out of the room because it's balanced by equivalent nonsense from gun control advocates, and ridding the room of only one side of extremists hands public policy over to the other side of them. The entire public debate is dominated by this level of crap. Both sides. Mexican Standoff. https://mrleecurtis.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/reservoir-dogs-mexican-standoff.jpg That is going to have to be applied to both sides, to stick. And that's going to be uncomfortable for a good many gun control advocates. The gun nuts are not the only irrational, panic-mode, martyr-complex, hyperventilating, silly-talking folks in this debate. Anyone who's sincere about de-poisoning this well is going to find themselves in the middle of a real mess. Of course Obama's minor and obviously beneficial regulatory decisions are no-brainers and part of his job (overdue part) - that's why almost everybody supports them, in the abstract. Support for reasonable gun control is not the problem - it's already there. btw: According to this posted link - https://en.wikipedia.../Combat_shotgun - a combat shotgun normally has a 20 inch barrel, sometimes 18.5, and shorter barrels than that are used as "riot guns" by police. That may be how 18 inches came to be written into so many laws as the legal limit - avoids the Constitutional issue. In my State, last I checked, the prohibition was against modifying the stock length of the barrel - this came up because a couple of guys invented a very long barrel shotgun for hunting crows in populated areas, to suppress the noise (that works - they are very quiet), and somebody pointed out that they were technically illegal. The local sheriff reassured them that the letter of that law would not be enforced, since the spirit was obviously obeyed.

They are still in the error bars for the common, standard IPCC models. And we just had El Nino hit, a large one, at the end of an already very warm year, so - - - The CATO report there, always dubious and agenda driven with fuzzy logic, has been completely dismissed by the discovery that the ocean temp measurements had not been calibrated accurately - the correction for bucket temps had been omitted under the mistaken impression that temps reported from ships were no longer being measured by bucket, but many were. Restoring that correction takes care of all of CATO's concerns. And there are other factors: even with the failure to calibrate the buckets and so forth, even without the discovery of faster deep and midwater heating than had been allowed for, even without the correction for the recently discovered melt acceleration in Greenland and Antarctica,. there was solid increase in temps - so it's a bit scary at the moment: if we are losing track of such major heat stores adn sinks, but still measuring a solid increase in temps, what happens next? Suddenly the high end predictions come into likelihood. Sure. But you seem to be assuming the "serious debate" isn't occurring, and that if it were allowed unto the media stage it would present the IPCC as having been alarmist. There are serious debates for the finding, and the most common suspicion or conclusion one finds in them seems to be that the IPCC is being too cautious and conservative, while the data show low percentage but significant likelihood of greater drama and more radical threats. There is no serious debate involving the bs from the CATO institute, the Heritage Foundation, Fox News, or the rest. Those are not serious people, in this matter.

Probably both too expensive and a performance problem for target shooting or hunting. Also unlikely to survive impact. There was an idea floating around to tag the powder loads with registered mixtures of isotopes of stuff, so the powder residue could be traced to the purchaser of the ammo. Not sure what happened to that - some kind of technical problem (it wasn't very expensive).

They don't want to be oppressed, in the first place. And in avoiding oppression in the first place, causing a crisis of legitimacy in the government is not all that relevant. And although I haven't checked into that list of successful nonviolent resistances, what I do know is that calling the arson and beatings and destruction of the mob resistance to the Stamp Act , the resistance to the Townsend Acts which included club-wielding stone-throwing mobs being fired on by British soldiers threatened with beating or worse, and the resistance to the Coercive Acts which included a bunch of guys giving up on the lame-ass mob violence and launching the Revolutionary War, "nonviolent", is a considerable stretch of that term. And calling those three acts of riot and violence "successful nonviolence" is ludicrous - their failure led directly to full scale rebellion by military force, which escalation of violence from mob to militia and army was the response that succeeded. If the rest of that list is similarly nearsighted, it rather undermines than supports the prospect of nonviolent resistance.

Interesting question. You'll find people who are pretty devoted to their motorcycles. But a careful inquiry into that question is not going to be simple. For starters, here's a factor: we have a long history of racial oppression in the US, and it worked partly - significantly - by disarming black people. That is also how the red people were subjugated. And how the brown people were robbed, in Texas and New Mexico. And how the yellow people were initially - back in the home country - made so poor they emigrated to be borderline slaves also forbidden weapons. And the people most devoted to guns=freedom in the US are to a large extent the cultural heirs of the ones who did that oppressing and that subjugating - culturally, that's the heritage. And it's not ancient history - the young boys joining in the famous firebombing and beatings of the Freedom Riders, (one bus of whom were saved because by rumor an undercover cop among them, by rumor the guy often described as a State Trooper "arriving late", was carrying a gun, when they were supposed to be unarmed, therefore vulnerable), were part of a cohort now in their 60s. They remember the role of disarmament in this: http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/freedom-riders-1961/

Your book is wrong. Gay rights has nothing to do with left/right politics. Libertarians are found all along that axis. Government regulations can be leftwing or rightwing - Authoritarians are found all along that axis. Obamacare is rightwing. Quantitative easing by the private central bank is rightwing. Military base closing is neither (unless it involves selling government property to private capitalist concerns, contracting to corporations for former government services, etc - then it's rightwing). Anti-gun is neither (there are a lot of leftwing gun libertarians, and rightwing gun confiscators) Ranks in government social service agencies have not swelled, while ranks in government police and security and "intelligence" and so forth have swelled. Michael Moore is not a government official, or anything like it, and does not put FEMA in charge of things - meanwhile, FEMA's powers have been reduced from earlier years (W did that, among other incompetencies), a swing to the right. And so forth. And Party line voting has been Republican Party policy, enforced and demanded by Party leaders, since 1992 when Gingrich set out to purge the moderates and create what we see today in Congress. Yes, it's stupid. But it's what the core 27% that has been voting for those guys obviously wanted - why else would they keep voting for it? For a little while immediately after the Crash. They tried to form a coalition with the Blue Dogs and the small Lefty contingent and so forth, get some Party unity facing the disciplined Republicans. And they did get a lot done, considering, But the Republicans were devoted to making sure the legislative process could not get anything done favorable to the President, then and ever since, and they were effective. Granted they couldn't stop everything, but they could stop most things - and they did. Constant committee fights and poison bills and disruptive maneuverings. Hundreds of filibusters -literally. Except it isn't "mischaracterization" when it's accurate. The President is saying true things, and the Republicans are saying false things. There is a difference. There is a reality. Government is not a "he said, she said" sandbox.

You refer of course to the current Republican Party politics, and the associated corporate corruption of the journalistic media in the marketing of AGW denial, right? That's nonsense, of course. Where are you getting that from? There are quite a few obvious problems with this guy's "argument" or whatever he wants us to see there, but I'll pick one odd one from the sludge for comment: "it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, - - " Uh, yeah, it is. The 1.5 is on top of the 1 already, giving 2.5 from AGW in less than two hundred years, which is a bit over the hazard line and into the possible very bad stuff happening range. And that's the very lowest end. There is also the unsupported and unlikely and unconsensus claim that the low end is "marginally beneficial", combined with the truly bizarre claim that if the high end of 4+ is just one unlikely end its "terrifyingly harmful" import is not a danger. What's up with this strange logic whereby the (claimed) unlikely is therefore not a danger? Risk is always just that - a probability. There are climate change possibilities and events a sane person would not take a one in a thousand risk of if they could avoid it. If everyone agrees that there is a reasonable possibility of another 3C AGW by century's end, then everyone agrees that AGW is dangerous. That's a consensus.

Then quit bringing up stuff that's his administration's fault, and blaming it on other people. The dysfunctional security systems we've been stuck with at airports, for example. And we've made some progress cleaning up after that spectacle - not much, but it's been difficult to get cooperation, and the damage done was phenomenal. One doesn't blame the cleaning lady - however slow - for the frat house afterparty pigsty. Especially if she has to vacuum around the fratboys still curled up in their vomit and trying to trip her or play with her cleaning gear for entertainment. Why? None of it was their fault.

Two overlooked factors: finding out what the consensus of the well informed is, and determining whether or not it's justified. Determining what the consensus is requires a medium, a go-between, for most people faced with scientific matters. They have no way of evaluating credentials, distinguishing major from minor differences in positions, or often even getting a reasonable and comprehensible statement of what the consensus is from those who have joined in it. The corruption of this essential mediating function in our information sources bedevils us in the US, with regard to climate change especially. ("The loss of journalism" is one way to put it. ) The second factor, which is usually "does adequate expertise exist in this field, to justify this consensus", can be found informally explained in various places - Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink", Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow", for example. And in this matter one key feature is that the experts themselves are not reliable. They are not always wrong, or blind, but they can be - credentialed expertise is not a guarantee, or even an indication, of the necessary awareness. Stock market investment advisors are perhaps the most famous example, new fields of science have in the past provided others (although not any more, of course). So it's not as simple as weighing consensus vs alternative.

"Smart guns" make sense here. Even an aftermarket "smart trigger lock" would prevent some of these, at small cost.

Yet another quote that illustrates where the mistrust comes from. One of the obvious facts is that most people's guns aren't very dangerous - safer than motorcycles, safer than swimming pools, safer than a lot of things that people don't get all panicky over - another obvious fact is that besides the silly daydreams they do and very often have proven effective in self defense, properly described. The US is in many places a dangerous place, with a violent and vulnerable population still afflicted with economic oppression as well as racial and religious hostility, and the threat of a gun present has prevented a lot of bad stuff from happening to good people. Which in many people's view makes up for the bad stuff happening to bad people who brought it on themselves that is the great bulk of the non-suicide, non-police, gun violence in the US. Sure the gun nuts are nuts. But a sound approach to gun control would begin by making their case in its strong form, not its loud and crazy. If your argument for gun control rests on manipulated and bogus statistics, mockery of nutjobs, and denials of the implications of your recommendations (how do you plan to reduce the number of guns in private hands in the US without confiscating them?), it's not to be trusted with power.

Utter bullshit. Seriously. 1) Obama needed 60 votes in the Senate to pass anything opposed by the Republicans (who did vote Party line, and did filibuster almost everything they opposed), and the most Democrats he ever had in the Senate was 58. As luck had it, both Independents caucused with the Democrats, so 58 + 2 was enough as long as the Senate Dems all backed Obama without exception, so for two months in 2009 Obama could get anything done that every single Dem in the Senate and more than 85% (about 218 of about 256) in the House supported: he had 58 votes in July and August of 2009, and then in October 2009 through January of 2010, but the Senate was not in session in August, November, or December, and did no legislative business in January: so this magic time you imagine as Obama running the show and doing whatever he wanted was - at most, given complete Party Line Dem support - July of 2009, and October of 2009. And that was it. The rest was struggle. Mind you, 2009 was under W's trillion dollar deficit budget and W's war fiascos and in the middle of the Republican Crash of 2008 - so he didn't have much working room that year. That situation was because the Republican Party from 2008 on organized itself to prevent the nation's business from being done so they could blame Obama for ineffectiveness and win the next Presidential election (that's not me guessing - that's what they said they were doing), and among their tactics was filibustering essentially everything - the judge appointments, the ambassadors, the agency heads, any legislation that had full Democratic support, at one point a Republican Senator filibustered his own bill because Obama supported it. 2) There is no such "they" as you imagine. Unlike the Republicans, purified and disciplined by Gingrich in the 90s, the Dems didn't block vote and refuse compromise and crash the procedure rather than lose the debate. And there were and are many extremely conservative Dems - an entire caucus of them, called the Blue Dogs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition - that often joined Republican efforts in those years, when there were still a few trappings of reasonableness stuck to the shoe of the monster Gingrich had created (and even after they fell off). So anyone considering themselves a conservative should refer to those Democrats as "we", not "they". So find the Republican voter a mirror, and show him the cause of his pain. The Republican core voter is responsible for the way "we" have been screwing it up, and what they don't like is largely a consequence of their own voting. Almost everything in the US government the core Republican voter bitches about all day long is a direct consequence of the behavior of someone they voted for, repeatedly. This Party they've been backing is a horrible disaster, and it's wrecking their country. There have been no swings to the left in the US in your adult lifetime. On the left/right axis the US paused in the mid 1960s and has been moving to the right ever since, occasionally pausing but never once swinging back.

No. You can't, now, because of George W Bush. So the UN is advocating regime change in Syria. What else could be meant by a Syrian-led transition to free and fair elections resulting in credible and inclusive governance? I doubt Assad will go quietly.

The major obstacle to reasonable gun regulation in the US is the mistrust a significant fraction of voters have for the advocates of gun regulation. And this mistrust is well founded, as is visible in those quotes. They are typical quotes. Briefly: a well-regulated (not "well ordered") militia requires private firearm ownership, not the other way around, in the 2nd Amendment. The people in the US do not have the authority to take any rights away from individuals without due process of law, and all rights granted to the people are held by each and any of the people referred to. The existence of one right is not a legitimate reason for actual infringement of another - even if there were some sense in which the risk of gunshot were a general one unavoidably borne by the population at large (it is not). ( You'd end up with no rights very quickly, on that logic, each one depriving you of the others - that's not just a slippery slope, it's an engraved request to be kicked down it) You're wrong about that, as past and recent events have shown (Citizen's United, etc). The writers of the Constitution were liberals, and their fellow liberals have been happy with and faithful to the language down the centuries. All modern dictionaries with "Webster" in the name are inferior, especially in the usage prescriptions most critically involved in discussions here. You are in error. A well regulated militia does require a well-armed private citizenry - each and every individual, independent citizen - and did at the time so obviously as to need no elaboration. It's a necessary condition, however insufficient. The only reason militia are even mentioned there is to make clear that the arms at issue were military grade weapons - the kind of weapons that the kings and princes and lairds had forbidden their peasants, in the direct and family experience of many American citizens, because a well armed peasantry is hard to keep subjugated.

Sorry about the vanish - I got pissed off at the mods for their dumbassery re GMOs, took a break before getting tossed. Tar: You objected to the Common Core, a while back, describing it thus: None of that is in the Common Core Curriculum. Your sources of information are deeply, badly, corrupt. I posted, way back, an account of the sources of most of that bad stuff in the Federal Educational impositions - W's No Child Left Behind, Republican intransigence and refusal to cooperate in fixing it's problems, how and why the Republican John Kline finally managed to make headway after years of struggle against his own Party's misgovernance - and notice in that account that I do not like the Federal impositions on the school systems. I'm on your side, in the sense that we would both like to get rid of them. But there is no way to cooperate with you in that matter, if you regard these impositions as Democratic or Liberal and the Republican Party as a competent and honestly motivated ally. It's like trying to push a car out of the ditch, with 27% of the help choosing to sit in it and floor the brake pedal. So how do we "solve" the current disastrous nature of the Republican Party, and its effects on the US? Seriously: what do we do about the Republican Party we have now? It's getting more and more difficult to get information about it on the major media news outlets, even - the money is heavy, and talking loud. But you obviously will let that happen. You will vote for it. You guys voted for W twice . Trump is currently leading Clinton among white males 35 - 65 in key areas; the demographic that voted for Palin rather than a competent black guy, that voted for Romney (the original source of "Obamacare") because they didn't like Obamacare, that endorses as a group a whole slew of batshit folly because it's "conservative", is lining up behind Trump. There's the Republican Party right on TV, more or less completely taken over by the "KKK Nazis" as you name it (it's called "fascism"), running mainstream legitimate candidates for President and being treated with respect, and you don't have my back at all. Whoever that Party nominates for President, the candidate of the "KKK Nazis", will have a decent chance of gaining the office, and you are considering whether or not you would vote for him yourself. Like this guy? https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2014/06/03/22/pg-31-tiananmen-6-ap.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tiananmen-square-what-happened-to-tank-man-9483398.html&h=1536&w=2048&tbnid=iubnSGUbPXI0xM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=200&docid=tiBwv_JM3OXpNM&itg=1&client=safari&usg=__UltpcNZ16r9p3AFFADCB2MSTSWg= The white, European, Western, enlightenment, industrial revolution, WWI and WWII part of that picture is the row of tanks. And maybe the streetlight.

Once again a GMO thread is closed by intelligent, expert, and completely clueless, bizarrely uncomprehending

I'll go out on a limb here: I bet no such "elements" of any "mandates" exist in the Core Curriculum. Try it. Name a couple.

You are unable to make that assessment. What you lack is the knowledge, understanding, and capability. Look: Your team is allied, politically, with Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Kuwait, a long list of the worst offenders in the whipping girls category - and then your team invades, of all places, Iraq. You destroy the government and civilization's infrastructure of one of the most Westernized of the major Islamic States, and you turn the place over to the girl-whipping Wahabis and Islamic jihadists and medieval imams. Which then export their crazy to neighboring Syria - something like Iran and Lebanon in the '80s, only worse (Iran being a more reasonable place than Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or Yemen, or Kuwait). Every country you've influenced now looks a lot more like the rest of your allies in the region than it used to, in other words. Do you think that is a coincidence? If you want to reduce the abuse of women under Islamic authority, and curb the spread of Saudi-style Islam and sharia law and all that, try getting your team to sit on its hands for a few years. You couldn't do any worse than you have.

W gave us No Child Left Behind - a uniquely intrusive expansion of the Federal government into local schools, contrary to almost all supposed conservative or traditional Republican principles, and unpopular with everybody as soon as they had any experience with it. John Kline's partial reform of the No Child Left Behind boondoggle just passed. John Kline is a Republican, a Representative from a district in Minnesota, and he has been trying to do something about the problems with NCLB for years now. In this effort he has had almost complete popular support - basically everybody wanted that law changed in one way or another, many wanted it completely scrapped. If you are curious about how such a popular effort could have been so difficult to bring to resolution, how his several earlier efforts could have failed in Congress, consider the following: He is retiring - this is his last year in office, and he does not have to get Party support for anything or raise money from the normal sources. So he paid no personal campaign penalty for his strategy of collaborating with Democratic politicians and compromising with their concerns (even the White House!) in the final bill, as other Republican Congressmen have in the recent past (the Senate is more insulated, elected for six year terms). And this: http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/261889-house-passes-no-child-left-behind-rewrite And this: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/paul-ryan-congress-no-child-left-behind-216696- Notice that the Presidential candidates in the Senate were heavily represented in the otherwise quite short no vote and voting "no" column. They can't afford to alienate their base, or their money. So that's what setting aside "divisiveness" looks like in the US Federal government: isolating the worst of the wingnut Republicans, finding a Republican who can defy the campaign financiers and the threat of being primaried by his Party, and finessing the enormous power of the rightwing Republican corporate cash "speech". Then you can get something done - after years of struggle, over what is basically a no-brainer.

Regulators are hired by us, are accountable to us, work in public not in secrecy, and do not benefit from doing a bad job. If we set up competent government, that is. Businessmen are not hired by us, not accountable to us, work in secrecy, and can make big money for themselves by cheating us and ruining our communities and lives. That isn't true. In the modern Republican Party era we've seen Party line votes on lots of stuff that almost everybody wants. 85% of the country wants good background checks on all gun purchasers, for example. They want federal judge positions filled quickly and efficiently with competent and respected jurists. They want the US government to pay its bills on time. So why are you mad at the government, instead of the scammers at UBS?

Likewise working for minimum wage, which pays twice as much per hour - usually for easier work. Crime is hard work. No rational person goes into crime because it's easier than working.

I can certainly oppose the plans and schemes of American political factions who are setting out to do very bad, wrong, and damaging things. I can also attempt to hold them to account, and refuse to allow them to pretend otherwise, when they succeed in doing those things and the predicted consequences are consequent. In fact, as a citizen of a democracy that is my duty as an adult. It's like when your mother's a drunk. Sure she's your mother, but even so she crashed the family car because she was drunk. If you can, you should try to stop her from getting drunk and driving around like that. Right? Sure. In this case, bad and ignorant reasons used to justify horrible crimes. Let's not do that any more. But not in practice. The wonderfulness of the spiritual qualities of the W&Cheney administration and its political base is of course assumed and undeniable, because how could they possibly be otherwise, but what they actually said and did was by turns depraved, disgraceful, ugly, murderous, and stupid. Our approach so far has not worked. Spectacularly not worked. Not worked for thirty or forty years. Not worked to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dead people, millions of refugees, the economic crippling of our entire economy, and the rise of Islamic jihad against us. So being consistent with that approach, and making the situation work, appear to be conflicting goals. Depleted uranium munitions was a major topic of the link I provided you on the subject - which you responded to, and claimed to have read. It was also mentioned in my posting, which granted you often don't read before posting your opinions on it, but still: every opinion you have about "left-leaning" stuff, or even my posting, seems to be based on a strange inability to register what some people are saying. Why does your reading comprehension go to goofy when you think the source is "leftwing" or whatever?

It's also misleading to think of h/g people as having shorter lifespans. They had higher rates of trauma mortality in youth, and lower rates of childbirth, but barring accident, war, and the like, they lived longer in better health: generally the transition to agriculture is marked by a drop in expected lifespan, a reduction in adult height, and poorer health as revealed in skeletal lesions and disorders (including bad teeth).

The 82nd Airborne was in more than one building. They were in the former Baath Party headquarters, and in the school building, and in a couple of other places. When the protest demonstration began, it visited first the City Hall - where there were some Americans - and then marched past the Baath Party headquarters (full of American soldiers), and then marched to and gathered at the school building that was the major cause of friction. When the 3rd Cavalry took over, they were a smaller force - they only occupied the Baath Headquarters building, and did not occupy the school. This is all explicit in the links. It's been quite a while since that happened. Of course, maybe it's been quite a while since anyone was defeated by the US? No, the "US" did not think that. Only some people in the US believed that bs. A lot of people in the US knew better, and said so. It was pretty close to the reception the Iraqis in Fallujah did provide. Until they got to know the Americans better. Yet another reason nobody with any sense wants to allow your team to start yet another war in the region. There are millions of soldiers in all the neighboring States who are better armed and better trained than Daesh. They can handle the situation. Or just provide satellite info to the huge armies on all sides of Daesh, and stay out of it otherwise. Haven't you guys done enough damage, with all of Europe now dealing with yet another wave of refugees launched by the Iraq War?

That isn't true. You have performed an inversion - I do claim that the entire Republican Party has been coopted by the corporate rightwing authoritarian militarized political faction and their base in societal bigotry we used to call "fascism", and is now a disaster - the single biggest problem America faces as a country, and essentially incapable of doing anything worthwhile or beneficial for the country as a whole. So right now, currently, in point of fact, I claim all Republican stuff is bad. But that is not the same as the inverted argument you assign to me - I do not claim that everything bad is Republican or caused by the Republicans or to be blamed on "the Republicans". Much less do I denigrate Conservative ideas - I'm borderline conservative myself, in many if not most political respects. The Republican Party's abandonment of core principles of conservative thought is a lot of the problem with that Party. Also, I do not take anyone's word for something being "Conservative/Republican". You can't wind me up by merely labeling. Off hand, I can point to GMOs, the nuclear waste from Fukushima, gun control, CO2 buildup and its effects, mercury and other such contamination, racial bigotry and oppression in police work and other areas, all matters of heated debate here - nowhere will you find me claiming that Republicans as a Party caused the problems we face in these areas. We need an example - I claim there is no good Republican policy at the moment, in fact. There is rhetoric, held over from the days of principle and conservative ideology, but to the extent it is "good" there is no actual policy behind it. Do you have an example, to contradict my claim? If you want liberals to back rightwing or conservative policy when it's good or seems good, that we see all the time - a vote for a Clinton (either one) being a prime example.