overtone

Not without the Black Panthers, he didn't. And his entire campaign was dedicated to liberating an oppressed people - they were oppressed in the first place largely due to being delibrately and overtly and disarmed by their local governments, placing them at the mercy of vigilantes and thugs with weapons and the official wink and nod. The idea is not to find oneself in King's, or say Gandhi's, position. The disarming of black people under Jim Crow was not done to keep them from overthrowing the US government. Taking up arms against tyranny is taking up arms against the petty and local means of tyranny's implementation.

As I have been repeating for days now, yep. But - - what happened to the followup? And that is entirely your fault. I should what - repeat myself fifty times? Type in caps? Give up on that stupid fence, and the entire toyworld of Fox stereotypes that goes with it. Start over, maybe (since it came up) beginning with the demonstrated fact that the people who voted for W were making an incontrovertibly demonstrated, serious, a priori obvious, and bizarrely stupid error in political judgment. And the reasons they did that carry over into their political thinking generally, including about guns - the insignia is a shoulder chip whenever they think they've spotted an intellectual.

The deflection into rebellion against government overlooks the more common type of oppression mediated by governmental disarmament - the creation of a vulnerability to cryptically associated organizations and common thugs. When powers that be disarm peasants, it usually isn't to prevent rebellion against the big national government. It's to create vulnerability to that government's agents and supporters and favored classes. We have, in the US, a clear and present example of that: the disarmament of black people and consequent century long oppression by terrorist organizations in the service of local powers, especially in the former Confederacy, from the late 1860s until the early 1970s. The governments did the disarming, with the full knowledge of the vulnerability so created and the consequences thereof. So it's not really a matter mistrust of government translating into taking up arms "against the government", in practice. It's not that simple. And we are not that long or that far from those days, as the people advocating for keeping gun rights uninfringed are well (often personally) aware.

Given your presumptions about me and my posts, your "reading between the lines" for what the person really "means", you have no credibility in assigning such labels as "America hater". I doubt you know what you're talking about - my guess is you would have labeled me an America hater, and a Jew hater, in a discussion forum in the wake of 9/11.

Taking 32% off of a higher number is not the same thing as adding 15% twice to a lower one (you don't get back to the original number) and your comparison of the two percentages is confused ( 32% of a whole is not 50% of that whole). Try an example: if your original bill was 1 dollar, your bill after the 15% and 15.6% increases (your description of what happened) will be 1X1.15X1.156 = 1.32 and change. That's a 32% increase (OK, 33% with normal rounding). You probably should not base your ideas on your current intuitive handling of things like depreciation and sunk costs and so forth.

Reading between the lines again? That shoulder chip is well known to interfere with perception. Rednecks are very' date=' very touchy about ignorance - they project all kinds of snobbery unto "elites" based on those elites thinking of them as ignorant. It's a factional trait, and one is advised to walk on eggshells whenever delivering a bit of information or contradiction of misinformation to a redneck. It's best if they can be manipulated into discovering it for themselves, so they don't have to react to someone trying to be superior to them. But that's a digression: I provided no label for the colossal, obvious, and hopefully instructional failure of judgment evident in having voted for W twice - I never even said it was single factor. There are many possibilities besides ignorance. They're mostly worse, though. In fact, I hinted that claiming ignorance would be a copout, and those worse ones were the likely blamed - I made reference to thirty years of liberal racket, leaving the implication that with all that liberal hootin' and hollerin' there was no good reason to be sufficiently ignorant to vote W in 2000 even, let alone 2004, and more intrinsic character traits had to be involved. I don't find ignorance to be that much of a flaw anyway - of all human shortcomings, the most familiar and most common and easiest remedied and least damaging IMHO. We're all ignorant, one way or another. We're not all vulnerable to the kinds of propaganda that sold W to his benighted voters. Believe me, I'm not assuming any self-awareness or re-evaluation of anything actually having taken place. I'm fully aware that a lot of this faction of Americans is walking around in a state of delusion and retrofitted self-justification that would choke a camel. I do think it's been long enough, though. I'm just pointing out that you don't treat me or my posts with even the minimal courtesy of reading and responding to what is actually written in them. And then you lecture me on "respect". And you guys have been getting away with this kind of thing, making these kinds of posts about "liberals" and so forth, for so long you take the privilege for granted. And so we would prefer to come around to the framing of gun control, the thread etc. But the next two or three posts from me would have to be devoted to correcting bullshit assigned to me by people who regard me as disrespecting them, and therefore harboring opinions regarding guns and gun owners and gun control I do not in fact entertain. Seems a hopeless business, eh? Side note: if we are ever getting around to attitudes toward gun control: this gun control issue has one unique feature taht provides hope - it is probably the only major political matter on the table now in which the problem actually is the existence of two factions of extremists wrecking the discussion and preventing the sane majority of centrists from haggling out something reasonable. Normally that assertion is a rhetorical ploy intended to wrongfoot the opposition and conceal the misdeeds of some batch of Republican bagmen and incompetents. But in this case, if we can get the anti-gun sane to openly side with the obvious reading of the 2nd Amendment and all the implications thereof, to turn to the folks who think gun owners are troglodyte paranoids with no rights anyone need respect and tell them to shut up and sit down and if we can get the pro-gun sane to openly recognize that a modern assault rifle does have some properties in common with sticks of dynamite and bottles of cyanide and other inanimate objects that should be kept carefully secured in the public interest, to turn to the folks who think we should arm schoolteachers in classrooms and patrol the streets with volunteers carrying Uzis to sit down and quit embarrassing them, that a compromise zone is available, workable, in actual existence.

As iggy pointed out, that is too black and white - the guns normally work by degrees and influences, for prevention not rebellion, and that is what they are thought to work for by their owners. But the extreme case can be defended, as well - the notion that we live in such advanced and modern times that a democratic government at some level (city, county, state, nation) cannot possibly go sour on us, that frequent and continuing patterns of other places or past times are somehow suspended or permanently deflected from our little town, is naive. It would of course be very rare, but also very serious - establishing societal norms that provide resources for responding to such an event is hardly foolish, even at some cost. One would term it prudent, rather.

I said no such thing. And had I said it, which I didn't (and wouldn't, as it is quite different from my actual opinion), you would have been obliged to treat it with respect, and answer it as an honestly held and legitimate opinion - according to your other posting here. But you didn't. Reread, and learn. And yes, that kind of garbage is exactly how one picks fights as opposed to discussing issues.

Clearly most snake and cow genes do not jump around like that. So one of the lessons, if this checks out, is that code set up to jump more easily may be significantly more likely to jump spontaneously than the calculated average stretch of code - i.e. it may actually happen, on a human life scale.

The two oil industry paleontolgy associated jobs I've seen hired into were both diatom experts hired on a contract basis, and both of them were PhDs with steady jobs teaching biology at the college level. It ought to be possible to acquire expertise in the taxonomy and paleontology of diatoms, radiolarians, foraminiferans, etc, without investing in a PhD level course of study, but I don't know if an interest in dinosaurs extends in that direction.

It isn't bigoted, or in the least deceitful. Whether it is hateful or not depnds on your degree of self-awareness. As far as meanness - maybe it's something I picked up from the people I've been working with and living among and going to family reunions with all my life, eh? Because another thing it isn't is wrong. So let's enter that as exhibit C, on this forum, backing my assertion that serious gun control in the US would involve an unacceptable level of coercion, an abrogation of civil liberties greatly in excess of any reasonably possible gain, and in pursuit of a comparatively subsidieary or second level benefit - not that specifically gun violence isn't a problem, but even just counting dead children there are several significantly worse problems that can be handled at far less political cost and with far less dubious justifications for governmental coercion. Which puts you into the "they're lying" camp, as opposed to the "they're stupid" camp. That's reasonable - I make that assessment contingently, issue by issue, myself, but the default of "they know what they're doing, they're just bad people" as a general background assumption can certainly be defended.

My arithmetic says 32%. Not sure what the point is, there - bad Australian politics? I doubt anyone considering the nature of the CO2 boost and what possible responses there are would be surprised at any involvement of bad politics.

It's hard to tell which is the more sentimentally crap fantasy there - the self-deluded picture of redneck life presented, or the bizarre and clueless media derived image of cityworld. Moe Bandy stroked the shoulder chip better, maybe, but this guy drew a truer bead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Bageant Sure there are. They are called "liberals", and one of these days you should try paying attention to what they've been trying to tell you these past thirty years and more. Because the people who elected W twice - - twice! - - - have had something about themselves demonstrated to them, in public, incontrovertibly, that should encourage self-reflection. It's never too late to grow the fuck up.

Although a steady 100k personal income is in the highest quintile, the standard definition of "rich", we can pay for a reasonable life by progressively taxing only the 200, maybe 250k and up. Most of the available wealth and income has accumulated in the very highest percentiles. SS is solid for many years - at least fifty, with only minimal tweaking. Medicare has the Republican Plan D anchor hung on its neck, but that is a simple (if not easy, politically) fix. The employer based private insurance setup is already doubling our costs, but we have proven willing to pay double to avoid treating the poor and undeserving, so that will go on for a while. If Obamacare actually provides diagnosis, painkillers, and symptom relief at reasonable cost to the poor, that will be a step up from current emergency room situations. I think it won't work, but it might - we'll see. Probably the middle class will most benefit from Obamacare, for a while, as continuing rocketing costs even further erode employer based health insurance but their incomes can buy them in at the income-controlled individual prices. Eventually we install a single payer system financed by steeply progressive taxation, or we give up on providing First World medical care to the majority of the citizens of the United States: either will probably involve the current Bandarlog of white male voters suffering a "hit bottom" experience. That's the only way those guys learn anything. The basic problem is that thirty years of government according to Reaganomics has fostered a degree of inequality in wealth and income that is creating (and if not corrected will continue to create) a second or even third world economy in the US. We have to figure out how to tax the rich.

The question is hard to interpret as stated, we seem to have a translation or paraphrase issue. It looks like one of those questions designed to evaluate the clarity of the student's understanding of accelleration - that friction etc are supposed to be encompassed in the "force used by the stroller", and the student is supposed to demonstrate that they know accelleration, not motion itself, characterizes unbalanced forces. Forgot to say: we in Minnesota have an issue with the standardized math exam intended to be a high school graduation requirement, in that too many kids are flunking it and will not graduate if the intention is enforced. And when the newspaper printed some sample questions, most (an actual majority of those printed in the paper) of them read more or less like the OP here - the sharper the attention paid, the more confusing the question became. This is getting to be a fairly serious problem, I think.

That's intended to be a rhetorical question, but it has some partial and relevant answers: According to the official pro-life position of the Republican Party in the US, even a month old embryo in the womb (let alone an actual child) has the right to kill the woman carrying it. Whether that also applies to an embryo implanted three inches away, in the fallopian tube, is one of those questions about the technical details of legislation we are not supposed to ask, but the principle that the woman has no right of self defense whatsoever is clear. Which means that, like the poster quoted, the people who wrote Republican Party policy are not actually imagining that month old embryo as a person, a child. Anyone can defend their own body from another person, even a child - they can shoot people who are invading their garages, let alone their internal organs - but in the world of the poster here and his kind in general that aspect of the situation does not exist.

Dunno about inow, but your positions and assertions here are far more idealistic than mine, and I am a classic "liberal" (or "center-left libertarian", if as seems llikely the word "liberal" has been rendered meaningless in your information sources). Paying one's bills, recognizing and honoring one's debts, is not idealism. Recognizing how large capitalistic corporations, as well as large governments, are set up and likely to treat people, landscapes, and civilizations, is not idealism. Recognizing the necessity of forcing people to pay such bills is not idealistic, either. I am being perfectly hardnosed and realisitic when I point out that the benefits obtained by coercive taxation will never be matched by private charity, for example - individuals who can pocket the cash and still live in town with a fire department often (too often) will do so, I'm afraid. And rich people will never voluntarily support education, medical care, etc, for poor people's children in general (paying lots of money for their own children's competition? no)- so without community coercion , that education and medical care will never happen. One way to spot idealism vs realism is by remembering, and checking, predictions and assertions and claims of the past. The people and stances that have proven to be more accurate at recognizing circumstances and estimating consequences are not properly termed "idealistic". The stuff that agrees with reality is called "realistic". Not watching TV is a decent start, and many "liberals" have you beat by many years there ("kill your television" bumper stickers have been showing up on liberal's cars since the 70s if not earlier). The key step, however, is acquiring reliable information and reasonable analysis and so forth from somewhere, and that step is where the current self-described "conservative" crowd stumbles - badly. You guys voted for W. Twice. Separated by four full years in which to come your senses. That wasn't just a victory of pandered and mistaken ideals over reality, but an inexplicably childish, borderline moronic example of that. Every liberal in the country was trying to get you to not do that, for not only solid and critical but realistically dead obvious reasons. Take a good look at that fact, and recognize what it means for your political ideology and "realism". Or, more simply, look at this gem of adolescent ideology: Anyone who thinks we're all one big public in this together with Exxon and their top executives, who describes allowing the people who are running the banks and investment firms to simply keep whatever share they can arrange of the wealth the entire economy produces as "leaving it with the public", who sincerely believes that the ruling corporate elite of the United States is part of the same public as everyone else coem tax time, is the type specimen of an idealist. You can't get any more hippy dippy kum by ya than that.

And now it is time to pay back the society that made all those opportunities possible, a society in which hard work is - unless you catch a bad break or two - rewarded, a society in which a vairety of jobs are available and promotions can be pushed for, in which you can move around and get work and invest in a regluated market with enforceable contracts and a solid monetary system, in which acquiring some wealth is not particularly difficult, for those with the requisite character and good fortune. You were fronted the use of enormous resources of various kinds, for many years. It wasn't easy to set them up, for you to use. Other people paid for them then, it's your turn now. ":A man of spirit will be unbearable unless he have two virtues: cleanliness and gratitude" (Nietzsche)

You'd learn something, and you're overdue. One thing that would happen to you is that your marginal tax rates would go up. That would be an interesting lesson. Another would be discovering that your hard work is not necessarily rewarded any more. But you won't. Rich guys are never so enamored of the ease and irresponsibility of the poor that they are motivated to join them.

One thug ousted another with the excuse of a trumped up war, returning the people - especially the women - of the British created sheikdom of Kuwait to their former and fairly ugly form of Islamic authoritarian rule. The motive was denial of Kuwait's oil to undesirable (uncooperative) Iraq. The welfare of the Kuwaiti people, especially the women, was a distant secondary concern. Saddam got played by the colonial powers, and almost lost his dictatorship from the mistake. If Kuwait has not returned to its former practice of slant drilling to poach Iraq's oil deposits, you can count me as surprised - I can't find confirmation one way or the other. None of this is to say anything bad about the general there, RIP - although his support of W for the Presidency cost his country dearly, and he was willing to play thug for people he might better have better estimated, he always seemed like the good sort of coach to me.

Anything physical will have some kind distant association with anything else physical, but other than that I see no particular connection. That's what I said, and yes I do think that. The basic problem is simpler than that: this poster thinks that problems with radiometric dating would somehow influence the current standard theory of evolution.

Those who benefit from the setup should pay for it. That's as fair as one can get - it accounts for luck, work, happily coincident abilities, fortunes of birth and circumstance, character traits well suited to its peculiarities, the whole shebang. We set up the system so that some people can use it to gain weatlh, on the presumption that those people will then pay for it, setting up the next round of beneficiaries. We always knew that many people would fail to amass wealth from any particular setup, for any number of reasons, and that is maybe not fair to them (another setup might have been more useful to them, but too bad) - this is the setup we decided on, and taxing its beneficiaries is how we pay for it. You are welcome to use our setup to amass wealth, but you are not welcome to then refuse to pay the bills for its use. We are under no obligation to accomodate freeloaders.

This has nothing to do with the "accuracy" (?) of the current standard theory of evolution, (which is not dependent on (and was not formulated with respect to) any particular technique of estimating the age of ionized plasmas, for starters). Why was this posted in Biology?

You've been bearing it for centuries now - and much worse. Priorities. The ugly nature of the public schools in the slums is far more serious - in dead children alone, never mind the rest of it - and can be addressed without Constitutional crisis. We've had experience with the unintended consequences of chucking the Constitution and/or coercing everybody - we don't have to make that mistake again, jsut to see what will happen. We have many more serious problems with child care, education, and so forth. Mass murders like this are way down the list. And if they cannot be usefully addressed without damage to our civil liberties etc, then that lowers them still farther in the emergency response priority hierarchy.