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U.S. Pushing Conservative Science
mozumder writes "Does abortion lead to breast cancer? Does condom use lead to increased sexual activity? According to the government, the answer is now inconclusive. The New York Times has a story on how the government is altering low-level scientific conclusions to satisfy conservatives. Will this lead to a mistrust of the government? Or is the government now correct?"
Will this lead to a mistrust of the government? Umm, since when was the government actually trusted?
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
It is just to make sure all the PC is adressed and everything is Politically Correct because heaven forbid someone is offended by the government. It doesnt suprise me, and it shouldnt suprise you, we should be used to the governemtn changing things. I wouldnt be suprised if they change things to make a case for us to go to war.
---
You see, there *are* consequences to *not* voting, Virginia.
What else is there really to comment on?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
They altered scientific conclusions to satisfy conservatives too.
but most readers familiar with the way science "works" won't be all that shocked. Scientific results are frequently altered or completely made up for one reason. Money
Most science is funded by a sponsorship of some kind. Very little is done out of the scientist pocket. Because of this, science becomes a sort of business model. As long as the scientist is producing results, his funding continues. See where this is going?
Is this going to lead to a distrust of government.? Doubtful. It may wake up a few but the vast majority either know now, or will never know.
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
Tell me again how a sheep's bladder may be used to prevent earthquakes!
We all know that Bush and his cronies want to set the clock back 50 years. After all, the last time that the president and both houses of Congress were republican was then - In the Eisenhower administration. Do you really think the whole Trent Lott fiasco was because he "misspoke himself"? Fact is, he just got too cocky...but you notice that it took Bush a long time and a lot of hot water before he distanced himself from Lotto. Besides, daddy Bush is running the country, with help from old buddy: "dickie boy" Cheney.
I can see how the abortion/breast cancer issue is blatant suppression of scientific evidence,
however, reading the article the information about condom use seems very accurate to me, and very similar to the information I was taught in middle/high school sex education, condoms work alot of the time, but the only truly sure way to stay safe is abstinence, or monogamy...
not that most of the slashdot crowd should care eh?
I mean really a post about sex on a geek website, not having to do with pr0n... come on guys... really..
the majority of studies suggesting a link between abortion and cancer
You didn't post any links or references, so I'm curious. Did this "majority of studies" find a link between abortion and breast cancer, or a link between not carrying a pregnancy to term and breast cancer?
I don't blame them. According to the studies I've heard, I should be blind now. I haven't had any real problems other than needing to shave my hands once in a while.
I assume that Bush is attributable to this. Hes tried to fuck the environment, start a war, increase oil consumption, and now brain wash the masses. Hes going to hell, plain and simple.
... some archives are "reinterpreted" so that Watergate never happened, first A-Bomb scientists never disagree with its use, and Bush never choked on a pretzel.
Welcome to 1984... well, actually 2003, but short term previsions are always optimistics.
--
Arkan
So..... I take it you're not going to vote for Bush in 2004?
Condom use leads to increased sexual activity which causes more "accidents" which is why America has a much larger population (density) than China!!
I hope I'm not trolling, but it seems to me as if the government should have something better to do. This might not "wake up" the average citizen, but I think that I've lost even more faith in my country while still considering it the best in the world.
God bless America, we sure as hell need it.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Thank you CONSUMER #4483928323423. We have updated you TIA profile. You are now restricted from buying anything or using any goverment service. If you wish to appeal please deliver a letter to our offices in Alaska.
Disclaimer: For the last 20 years, I have been a legal resident that cannot vote in the U.S., and on every political placement test I've taken, be they from the right or the left, I have landed smack dab in the middle.(end disclaimer)
That no one ever mentions the idea of "Liberal Science" I find somewhat amusing (and quite frankly, a little biased). Do we all think that products like RU-486 sprung from the ground unaided? The findings of science have ALWAYS been slanted to advance someone's politics, be they environmentalists, cultural conservatives, radical feminists or bomb-throwing moderates such as myself."Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Yeah but Galileo lived in the 16th/17th centuries, when the church's power was supreme, and countries were ruled by power-crazed morons... Now you mention it, part of that does sound familiar...
Please drive carefully. (And don't walk on the grass).
How is this "news for nerds"???
This administration is one of the most idealogically fixated administrations in recent history. Ideology always trumps reality in the decision making of this administration. Consider their positions on Iraq vs. North Korea. Consider their positions regarding our signed commitments and treaties vs. our Oil interests (Kyoto treaty). Or "Free Trade" vs. the interests of our Steel and Lumber producers. Or contraception vs. AIDS.
From what I can tell, the basic ideology of this administration seems to be: The interests of the United States of America lie with the interests of it's big companies, it's religious right, and it's rich and powerful.
Of course, now I can expect friendly clicks on my telephone and strange delays to the delivery of my email.
EnkiduEOT ( bomb uranium plutonium smallpox anthrax sarin mustard )
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I hate to be a party pooper, but there actually may be something to the abortion theory. To be fair, however, it probably has little to do with the act of abortion itself.
The human breast does not reach full maturity until at least one pregnancy is completed. If a person has multiple abortions and never carries a pregnancy to term, their risk for breast cancer COULD be higher, but it may be because of never having children; the fact that the woman aborted all her pregnancies is just the method. She could just as easily be a spinster or nun, and carry the same risk.
It's shortsighted to automatically assume that science is bad, simply because it contradicts some concept one holds dear. Look at the research objectively, and judge it on its merits.
Knowledge is Good.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Hormonal cycles are radically disrupted by an aborted pregnancy. Ever been around post-abortive women? You know what I'm talking about. There's almost always a fair amount of internal damage when tools are used, depending on the method of operation. The vacuum device (sorry.. don't know the name) that collapses the skull has a sharp edged attachment and it's difficult to maneuver. That's a pretty confined space to work in, after all.
Kinda related... I read a book recently which contained some rather compelling evidence for the theory that bras (the kind with wires - not sports bras) contribute to breast cancer.. seems the wires restrict the flow of lymph and the toxins build up. Free radicals accumulate to ridiculous levels in women who wear their bras overnight. I actually know this chick who wears one to bed all the time. Try googling for "breast cancer"+lymph+bras or something... ?
I doubt anybody here cares, but if you really want to prevent breast cancer, have a kid early. Breast cancer rates are less than half of 'normal' if you successfully bear a child before the age of 26. This does not apply to men as far as I know. OK. Have a nice night.
How can there be any such thing as liberal or conservative science? If the new conclusions are consistent with scientific principles, then they are scientific. The end.
Oh, you don't like them? BFD. Science doesn't care what you think or what you wish to be true. And guess what -- sometimes science just happens to support the positions of the political right. Anyone who is intellectually honest will just have to accept that.
And I'm not just some right-wing Bible thumper. I happen to be an atheist and a strong advocate of science. But even I can see how the political left in this country has politicized science and it fucking pisses me off. Science isn't about trying to verify your political prejudices and the political left doesn't have a monopoly on science.
more and more, every day.
I've been looking into moving to Switzerland... non-EU country, nice LOW probability of being attacked, much friendlier foreign policy. Sure, I'll have to learn German, French or Italian. It sure is better than being shafted by Bush and his cronies.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
This whole story is actually a really great look at the liberal bias of American media, arising not as part of some conspiracy, but rather from the simple fact that a number of journalists are in fact liberals and thus see policies of the Democratic Party as "normal" or expected and only Republican policies as obtuse or idiotic.
Your facts are a bit TOO simple, as they ignore a critical reality. By and large journalists have their work edited and reviewed by editors and managers...gatekeepers who were carefully selected by ownership/management to reflect the editorial desires of those who control the business. These gatekeepers, by and large, are NOT liberals. And they control what gets published/aired. It has always been this way and this reality won't change anytime soon.
Two recent political leaders allegedly had
this nefarious habit:
-: Both came to power after dubious elections,
by non-electorial and irregular methods.
-: Both nations immediately experienced attacks
on famous public buildings.
-: Both blamed an ethnic minority before
forensics had any evidence.
-: Both led "witch-hunts" against the accused
minority.
-: Both suspended civil liberties "temporarily."
-: Both put the citizenry under surveillance.
-: Both maintained secret and clandestine
governments.
-: Both launched wars against most of the world.
One had a funny mustache.
Can you name the other one?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Q: Does masturbation cause you to go blind?
A: Not as far as I can see.
And what they want is to get money for themselves and their big campaign contributors, that is absolutely all they are about
Isn't capitalism great? This is what happens when governmental Ideals mix with economics. It's also interesting that any country that America helps has a EULA about allowing American businesses in to help "stimulate" the economy. Yeah we see how great it's going right now. And don't give me this stuff that it is because of 9/11 that's what these great accountants tell the share holders in hopes that they don't sell. Much of this has been brewing way before that. It also doesn't help that politicians have so many ways to acquire money from different sources. It will always happen and will continue to happen in our country because of people that would read this and call me a troll because I think the economy and government is too corrupted, instead of going out and voting, hell I would even be happy if people actually took the time to learn about the candidates. In fact how many people here even go to a local council meeting, or city meeting? Oh well this isn't a politics story it's about conservatism, or the conservatism of the governments medical ideas. Now we all get Smallpox vaccine, well not all of us the Government doesn't want to be blamed for the few deaths that will happened, they would rather give you the option to take it, then ask you to fill out a waiver of responsibility.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Stories like this show exactly how government funding of science leads to government control and bias. Sometimes that bias is to the left and sometimes to the right, but it is almost always leads to research justifying expanded government power (ie - global warming, banning abortions, umpteen environmental scares, the dangers of drugs, etc..)
It is naive to think that science funded by anyone can be free of bias. The best hope if for funding to from as many independant sources as possible, such as companies, universities and charitable foundations.
The sad thing is that, as the condom information permeates through the population, the message will end up as "condoms aren't any use" and a load of teens won't bother with them (amazingly they'll still have sex) and infection and pregnancy rates will go up. Tom
Bush's pernicious zealotry is mainifesting itself in far more that revisionism; last July, he cut funding to the UN Population Fund (normally at http://ww.unfpa.org , but I can't seem to get in ATM).
/. tradition, I know. Forgive me.), and came across a plethora of news stories on the topic, most of which run along the lines of "Bush cuts funds to UN body that supports coerced abortion", usually with a denial from some Chinese official. Here's the Telegraph version.
An enthusiastic bunch of our right-wing friends in the Population Research Institute claimed - without evidence and despite UN law to the contrary - that the UNFPA supported coerced abortions in China. Everyone from Colin Powell down who knew anything on the subject derided the PRI's claimes - check out the PDF from the House of Representatives - but despite all the evidence to the contraray, Bush went ahead and cut funding.
Interestingly, I googled to check the facts before posting (going against
The PRI are here; couldn't find a link to the story.
- generally it is a retrospective study, which cannot prove X causes Y, only that X is associated with Y. Retrospective studies are not good science, and you only use them when it is too difficult or expensive to do a proper (prospective) study.
- the statistical test used in medicine to decide if X is associated with Y is that if the result had less than 1 in 20 chance of occurring by chance.
- Factor in publication bias (the tendancy to only publish positive results) and this means that at least one in twenty medical stories you read about is rubbish.
This is one of the dangers of data-mining, especially if done by people with people with political agendas.Humorous signatures are over-rated.
The myth that the rich are all conservative is an old lie. Warren Buffet (The second richest man in the U.S and prime funder of the Washington Post) and Ted Turner (CNN) are well know liberals. Rich people are for the most part not conservative. George Bush lost almost half the vote of those making more than $100,000 a year in the last election.
Source.
Shouldn't this story be on kuro5hin? They're the techie site turned liberal play ground, not slashdot... err... wait...
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Why dont the /. editors emphasize both sides of the issues here.
I see good scores for posts that support the article and bad scores for posts that oppose it.
Talk about dogma.
then guns must lead to more killing, no?
;-P
i'd like to hear the conservative gun crowd scream "it's not the gun, it's the criminal" and then in the same breath tell us it's not the teenager, it's the condom.
so which do we get rid of? condoms? or guns?
that personal accountability thing is pretty sneaky!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If I could, I'd mod you up for the quotes alone.
Reminds me of a book from 4th grade about a "third child" whose parent hid from the government.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
As someone wiser than me already noticed: This century, it ain't about xianity vs. islam or any that media bullshit. It's about fundamentalism vs. people-with-brains. There really isn't much difference between xian right or conservatives of the bush streak, or islamist terrorists. They're all bludgoning their world-view into other peoples heads with whatever tools are available, and moral is something that applies only to other people.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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Somebody tell me...
This week, are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia? I can't seem to remember...
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
If you don't already completely distrust the government to the point that you expect little other than mismanagement at best and death at worst, you're not very smart in the first place. Why would anyone trust a government which could do something as heinous as the Tuskegee experiments? And the sad thing is that is not even as bad as it gets. Sure, this isn't the Soviet Union under Stalin, but saying we're better than mass murderers seems to be damning faint praise.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
And so far it turns out that no one has, including you. I reckon that as a local with a keen interest in both science and the law I might have heard of such suits, and I haven't. This strikes me as strange - unless, of course, you're a lying troll.
Have a nice day.
I mean come one who here has condoms and does not intend the use them. I mean most of the US is rational I assume and knows that outside of a monogamous relationship, abstinence or safe sex in that order are the two best ways to avoid STDs. Condoms are among the best forms of protection and thus it is stupid to conclude that people who use condoms won't have sex with more partners or sex in general. I mean who out there buys condoms without the intent to use them? I know when I have a condom with me I'm far more likely to have sex with a girl than when I don't have a condom. I mean come on get a clue, condoms leads to increased sexual activity? No it must be a right wing conspiracy to suggest that idea. Everyone knows that if there were no condoms the same amount of people would be having promiscuous sex. (end sarcasm)
(It'd be a sad day for the American people if that were true.)
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
We are closer and more honest since we focus solely on our friendship and relationship, rather than sex.
:)
I'm sorry.
That must be really boring.
Hey! I'm mostly kidding! I entirely respect btakita's view!
Sig.i>
Land of the free and home of the bullshit...
You are right in that the sex between two people who actually love each other tends to be much better than a one night stand (which, I think, are is great most of the time too). However, I object to your use of marriage as a criteria for healthy and great sex. To be blunt, I would say that marriage has nothing to do with love.
Then again, I come from a broken home and have seen much so more love between unmarried (gay and hetero) couples than between my mom and dad that I practically consider marriage mostly a trap and a sham at best.
Abstinence is not taught in schools because it is common sense. If you don't want to have sex, you don't have it. Yet, kids - no matter how you would like to sugarcoat this - are human beings with a just awakened, ferocious hunger for sex. This brings us to the use of condoms the safe use of which does not come naturally. Thanks to the religiously influenced misinformation and teens' natural insecurity about their sexuality, even going to the drug store to buy condoms can be so embarrasing to a teen that he rather risks unprotected sex. And even if he gathers up enough courage to buy condoms, peer pressure ("you used rubber? what kind of loser are you?" and/or unfamiliarity with the use of a condom leads into unsafe sex. This is what the sex ed should be taught: If you are going to have sex, it is not only OK but necessary that you get condoms and know how to use them. If you are not going to have sex, that is ok too.
No point in favouring either option because that will be more like coercing kids into your own world view. Let them make their own decisions and mistakes and BE there for them when they need your help (pregnancy, STD, whatever).
If you follow these steps exactly, I can confidently assure you that you will feel no earthquake at all.
OK. For some reason, all the posts sem to say the same thing.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
they make sex safer from unintended consequences.
All we need to do is apply this to guns, then there'll be more, but safer guns.
The conclusion is obvious. Nerf bullets.
KFG
To hell with an euphemism like 'pushing conservative science'. What the NYT describes seems plain censorship and degradation of science to me. So much again for your Land of the Free.
I seem to recall that Clinton's entire administration, including Al Gore, was composed of nothing but perpetual liars and thieves. How. about Bush Senior? Or Raegan (ROFL).
Are you even from this country? Nothing to see here, move along.
Politics, it is readily apparent, seriously stupifies people--as I can see this forum is no exception. So here's a warning: think twice or not at all.
The liberals complain about conservatives; conservatives complain about liberals. And they both lose sight of anything *real*. This article looks like a troll. And you guys are falling for it completely; not because its true but because it reassures your own predetermined views on things.
Don't be stupid like that.
How the fuck did this get modded up? There is nothing here. If you change 'Bush sucks.' to 'Clinton sucks.' you get the same rant but with a rightist spin. Nothing about anything written in the article, hell, this post isn't even funny.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
It wasn't really so much that Bush 'stole' the election but rather the Supreme Court improperly intervened. Clearly the Court's established Political Question Doctrine and the Constitution's own words regarding how presidential electors are to be chosen direct that the Bush v. Gore case not be heard. So Bush is not so much the person who 'stole' the election but rather the receiver of a fradulently awarded position. That is not to say that Bush is would be innocent in that situation. There is much speculation that improprieties were directed performed on his behalf. For more on those improprieties look here: http://www.gregpalast.com/unprecedented.htme wad.html
For Law School Teachers' commentary on the Supreme Court decision look here: http://www.the-rule-of-law.com/archive/supreme/vi
and also the root site here: http://www.the-rule-of-law.com/archive/supreme/
According to revised estimates, implementing the Kyoto Treaty would increase gas prices in the USA upwards of 60 cents per gallon
That would be a good thing. I'm sick of kissing Saudi ass and funding terrorists so that commuters and soccer moms can drive around in 11mpg Lincoln Navigators. Bush and Cheney have made it clear that they have no intention of doing anything to encourage fuel conservation. So the only way it can be done is through consumer demand -- and that won't happen unless fuel prices go up significantly.
I have a VW Golf TDI. It gets 45MPG on average and I've broken 50mpg. It handles far better than the aforementioned SUVs and has plenty of power, with acceleration that bests most of them. The same engine and fuel economy is available in the two and four door hatchbacks (Golfs), four door sedans (Jettas), and four door station wagons (Jetta wagons). Honda and Toyota also make extremely fuel-efficient vehicles. So it's not like the vehicles aren't there. If fuel prices went up and many consumers converted to those vehicles, our reliance on foreign oil would go away and our air would be far cleaner (since SUVs are permitted to pollute far more than passenger cars).
This isn't insightful, it's out and out bigotry.
"Bigotry" is defined as intolerance. Why the hell should I be tolerant of people who are distorting science, including medical science, in order to push their own political agenda?
All you're saying is that if I don't believe as I do, you're wrong.
I am saying that anyone who believes that scientific studies should be "revised" to fit a political agenda is wrong. And I am saying that anyone who would defend those actions is wrong.
I don't need to be tolerant of deceipt.
This is the New York Times, not the friendlist of all outlets towards the conservatives. You have to take most of their stories with a huge grain of salt, because they'll always be tilted that way.
;-) And, hey, is bran good or bad for you this week? I'm sure that the Times would find some Conservative Conspiracy to suggest that the cereal makers have Republican politicians in their pockets and link that to the different studies as to whether bran is supposed to be good or bad for you...)
Why can't it be, perhaps, that the science is being corrected to suit the truth? Maybe the science was perverted in the first place to please the liberals in power at the time?
No, it's the Times. The first and only assumption is that conservatives are changing everything around to please them.
It's science. It changes and evolved as we learn more. Different interpretations of the data can lead to different conclusions. And it's not always right the first time, either. (Remember the whole "earth is flat" fiasco?
I think the problem with the article is that it starts on the assumption that liberals are fair and true, and conservatives twist the truth to their own ends. But it's the New York Times. Of course they would think that. Keep that in mind.
-Augie
It's always funny to see people fall for the corrolation = causation. Heck, I've even seen profs with PhDs fall for exactly the same, so it's not like it's just the stupid.
Did you for instance know that the more firemen we send to a fire, the bigger the fire damage is? So we should stop sending out firemen, right?
[spoiler]Well, there's this little underlying variable, the size of the fire itself.[/spoiler]
Likewise, you can easily "prove" without problems that condoms increase sexual activity, if you simply ignore that those that have and use condoms probably are more interested in sex and sexuality in the first place, and would be at it like rabbits anyway.
I'm pretty sure I can make any statistical conclusion I want about just about anything, and still fool 90%+ of the population by simple selective data gathering, omission and presentation. No need to fabricate data, just a little reality distortion field...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's funny. Let's see, we have a president sitting in the White House who lost the election. The election was rigged in a state run by his brother, oversaw by Florida Sec. of State Kathleen Harris (G. Bush's Florida campaign director). This election included denying tens of thousands the right of voting by a deliberate move of removing felons from the voting rolls (fine) and people whose names and SSNs were similar to those of a felon (not fine!). There are clearly documented examples (referenced by federal US election officials) of denying blacks and minorities the right to vote and of several Republican counties throwing ballots away. When the vote was close military ships and bases overseas were alerted to get more people to vote (on the theory those votes would be overwhemingly Republican). Despite the law clearly saying those votes had to have a valid postmark by the election day, Harris' Florida election people said to count those votes that were not validly postmarked.
Voting was confused enough that a recount was ordered, a recount approved by the Flordia state Supreme Court. When it was clear that Gore was going to win the recount, the media clearly had to fix Bush in the public's mind as the winner. So the head of Fox News (G. Bush's first cousin) called the election in Bush's favor.
The vote then moved to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court had to work fast because Gore was catching up and would soon pass Bush in the recount. One Supreme Court "justice" [sic] had a son working for the legal firm which presented the Republican's case. Another "justice" [sic] had a wife working for Bush's campaign transition team. Yet those 2 justices did not recuse themselves, and instead were the key votes in the 5-4 decision to stop the recount. A very nice, clean, bloodless coup!
Many times I've heard the US president tell tales of how the IAEA said in 1998 Iraq was working on nuclear weapons, but he IAEA said no such thing. Many times I've heard the president say how the UN weapons inspectors were "kicked out" of Iraq -- yet they left voluntarily after being frustrated by Iraqi resistance to inspections. It's clear these repeated incidents are not "slips of the tongue." It's clear why the president is lying like this -- he simply wants to build support for an attack on Iraq.
Why this ramble? My point is this: What person is fool enough to trust the government now? What makes you think we're that naive?
Given the above examples, given the lies surrounding the Iran-Contra affair and the US importing of drugs to support the Contras during the 1980s, given the history of the Vietnam era -- deliberate large-scale lies to the American people and attempts by the Nixon administration to rig an election -- is there any person who really thinks we live in a democratic republic and that our government is trustworthy?!
This message -- and your e-mail and movements across the WWW/Internet -- is being monitored by the US gov't and it's "new" version of the First Amendment. Don't worry, you have nothing to fear, just trust us -- we'll only use these new draconian laws on the bad guys and you're "free" talk talk about J.Lo or the Super Bowl all you want...
But, only on bottles of Dr. Pepper.
I believe that the former has been occurring for decades. There are many contradicting reports, even those that say tobacco is good for you. This administration is 10 fold more open and honest about what is going on then the last one. What are you so pissed about? I would have to guess that you don't actually read anything, that you are being lead by a ring in your nose and you do not know it.
Get a free ipod.
More than that, the same thing happened in the opposite direction under the Clinton administration. It is one of the reasons that Ayn Rand (and no, I'm not a Randian; I think her books are lousy) claimed that government-sponsored science cannot be science.
That said, this problem is everywhere. Take a look at science news this week, for example. Every week, at least two of their articles are directly politically topics, mostly on the liberal end.
Or try Scientific American. Just in time for a big Democrat Party gun-control push, they came out with a whole issue complete devoted to the source of terrorist and revolutionary-army weaponry.
I have no inherent reason to believe the latest results any less or any more than the results that came out of the Clinton Administration, "proving" that condom use reduced the incidence of STDs, or anything else of a political nature, for that matter. The real benefit (if you want to call it that) of all this pseudo-scientific politics is that it allows anyone to believe whatever they want, and draws all of society away from reality into a fantasy land.
I'll go one step farther and personalize the statement: if this is the first time that you noticed anything, or if this is the first time you complained -- then you need to rethink whether what you call "science" really is science.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
This administration lies about everything -- every goddamned thing -- as a matter of permanent policy. They will say anything that they want the public to believe, while they do whatever they want. And what they want is to get money for themselves and their big campaign contributors, that is absolutely all they are about. What a disaster for the country. The worst administation ever, the American version of a "kleptocracy."
Please, someone mod this crap down. Of course the government tells lies - all governments/businesses/institutions/individuals do.
But have you any idea of how good we have it in the west? Have you the slightest inkling at what shit people have to put up with in North Korea, Iraq or Zimbabwe? The governments there do lie virtually all the time. And if anyone happens to question those lies, they are thrown into prison, beaten, tortured and eventually killed.
That doesn't happen in the US, UK, Australia, Western Europe or any other civilized country I can think of (I know Western Europe isn't a country). Many of us don't know how good we have it. Of course, that doesn't mean we should take it for granted. Nor should we neglect to question the government at every possible opportunity>
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
Since a lot of people seem to make some sort of bond between this topic and global warming, I agree that there isn't much proof that the planet is warming, in an abstract theoretical sense. However I consider what I experience as proof for me:
When I got to Europe in 1986 from Africa, Winters were blisteringly cold in Berlin in Germany, and I remember one Winter in particular, 86-87, where the temperature went down to -29 Degrees Centigrade. I remember summers here being a balmy 26 to 28 Degrees Centigrade, on a hot summer. I mived to Switzerland in 1989 in time to see a small lake near to Zurich freezing over for most of the Winter for the last time.
Since then, in the countryside near to Zurich, the last time the small ski-stations had enough snow, anytime in winter for people to ski for more than a week was 1992. I remember sitting outside in the sunshine at 14 degrees Centigrade in a T-shirt, playing my bass guitar, on January 14th 1998. Summers have, since the mid to late 90's, regularly broken all time high records and almost every summer since about 1998 has reached 30 to 32 Degrees Centigrade.
On top of this the weather has become increasingly chaotic. Autumn and Spring storms that regularly reach huricane strength, each couple of years breaking the record of the last set of storms a few years ago, meandering cold fronts going off their usual west-east course in Winter and bringing a week of sudden (in the space of one hour) freezes of down to -14 Degrees Centigrade which last a few days and the temperature then suddenly boucing back up to 10 Degrees Centigrade. Almost every year now has major flooding in central Europe.
That was my experience here in Europe. My sister in Australia tells me that the country is getting dryer all the time and the bush fires bigger every year.
That does make me think, and I don't think that any piece of strange, backward legislation by a somwhat dubious Dubya is going to change that.
We aren't even all that dependent on Arab oil
That is simply untrue. In 2001, we imported 1.61 million barrels per day from Saudi Arabia. That was about 18% of our oil. Saudi Arabia is the largest single foreign supplier of oil to the U.S.
quite frankly, we'd prefer our oil reserves to be left when everyone else's are gone
Then please explain to me why Bush wants to give his buddies in the oil industry permission to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
All it would do is require U.S. businesses to buy pollution credits from other countries in order to maintain the status quo.
Or they could pollute less. That was the point. There would be an economic penalty for polluting (the fees to buy pollution credits). When a company found a way to reduce pollution, then they would not have to buy credits, giving them an economic advantage over their competitors.
Not that signing Kyoto would reduce the amount of oil exported, or even potentially used in the aggregate.
Never read a book on economics, have you? When the price goes up, the demand goes down. If oil prices rise, people will seek out more fuel-efficient cars. That will result in a long-term reduction in fuel usage and a reduction, or even elimination, of our reliance on imported oil.
Both statements of yours were true.
Condoms do lead to more sex, by legitimizing sex (as does pornography). As part of that, one must remember that *sex can kill*. I seem to remember reading some Washingtom Post articles about AIDS-transmission parties. True or not, sex can kill through STDs. Nor is it always voluntary.
And guns *do* legitimize killing (in case nobody noticed the upcoming Iraq Wars sequel, "Clone of the Attack". ).
That said, I would be happy to get rid of all guns, so long as we start with the most evil people, since guns also empower. So it would have been fine for Germany to get rid of guns if they had first had the German *government* and *army* and SS Troopers get rid of their guns. Likewise, we first have to get the guns out of the hands of the most power-hungry Americans, the government... and then I'm sure that the second Amendment will become unnecessary.
So by all means... get rid of both.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Yes, an abortion is bound to do strange things to hormonal cycles in women, however, the question the post poses, and to which the times article refers, is whether or not the government is altering scientific data on health-related sites to suit a conservative agenda. The answer The Times article gave can be summed up with the words 'it seems so to many people including pro-choice politicians.'
Having got that out of the way, we can examine the poster's statements to extract an implicit argument.
This is not accurate. According to one site, the discomfort associated with a D and C procedure (dilation and curettage, the most usual procedure in early stage abortions) is similar to the discomfort of menstral cramps. With this in mind, what the poster says makes things sound like major surgery is going on. That is weird, but things only start to get really hallucinatory when the poster writes about 'the vacuum device.'
Technical and clinical sounding, and gruesome enough to get your adrenaline pumping, but it has no substance: it is wet and sloshy when it comes to the facts.
This description of the procedure presupposes a long wait before the decision to terminate the pregnancy in question is undertaken. A long wait before one makes the decision is a possible pathway to abortion but it is by no means a necessary one despite the writer's implicit assertion. Dilation and curettage is only one of a number of options open to women in the United States and there is no reason to assume that abortion involving skull-collapsing sharp things that no one knows the name of is the only option or in any way the norm.
Current in-home pregnancy tests can allow a woman to know that she is pregnant within 10 days of conception and the poster works hard to describe a procedure that would note be necessary to abort the fetus after tens of weeks have gone by when in truth, during the second month of pregnancy, during the eighth week, the fetus is a legless thing measuring, 0.63 inches long from crown to rump and weighing four hundredths of an ounce.
The right of men and women to plan and control their reproduction--to control if, when and under what circumstances they will become parents, is an important one. If one is to present arguments where one's tacit assumption is that it's alright to rewrite the conclusions of scientific papers or throw out ideologically inconvenient statistics, one should try to get at least *some* of his facts from somewhere other than pro-life websites or the big book of urban legends.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
You guys are trying to mix political terms with science in a very odd way just to stir something up here. Anywhere else on here and this would be modded down.
/. editiors it seems, had a political axe to grind.
Conservative science means running the experiment twice instead of once.
It is not the same as conservative politics, which I think all this was supposed to be about. Unfortunatly the author, and the
So now we are left with a parent post that is not a good report on politics, not a good report on science, and is just not good reporting at all.
Or am I wrong? Is it more important to grind the political axe than to have honor in journalism?
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
It would also create millions of jobs - where do you think that money would go?
Into the hands of those making environmentally friendly technologies - something which the US ought to be good at.
Am I the only one who thinks maybe we could do with a few extra jobs right now? Or maybe people think tax cuts for the rich are a better buy?
Everyone knows that abortions, along with oxygen, water, and artificial colorings, cause cancer.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
I left the US about a year and a half ago (and if the current trends continue, I may never return), and now I am teaching English in Japan. My students often ask me what I think about what I think of North Korea developing nuclear weapons (as well as US vs. Iraq, the "War on Free^H^H^H^HTerror" and other things), and I usually tell them that I am not worried about North Korea. I am much more worried about what the number one manufacturer of nuclear weapons in the world is trying to do. They often ask me what Japan can do to improve its economy, and I usually tell them that Japan needs to get all of its eggs out of the US Economic basket and spread them around, so if that basket falls, not all of the eggs will break. They often ask me why I don't like the US and I usually respond by asking them why they aren't afraid of George W. Bush.
I know I am getting way off-topic here, but I'm in a ranty mood and I have karma to burn. I read recently (maybe a few weeks ago) in the Daily Yomiuri (a Japanese newspaper) that President(emperor?) Bush wanted to reserve the right to pre-emptively use nuclear weapons against enemies he feels are a direct threat to the United States. Umm...hello...if that isn't the scariest thing you have heard in a long time then you are not listening. Of course, what do Americans think about nuclear weapons? Well, according to my sister (a school teacher in upstate New York...so take this with as much salt as you like), there was recently a poll in some paper (yeah, I know...how much more vague can I get) which stated that 80% of those polled said they would agree with and support an nuclear retaliatory attack on anyone who attacked (whether the poll specified nuclear or not, I don't know) the US.
Ok, so, now I am off topic, quoting unreliable sources, and not backing up anything I am saying...goodbye karma, I knew you well...but honestly, I am becoming very afraid of the position that the US federal government is trying to take within and outside of its own borders. And living in the only country in the world to ever be attacked with a nuclear weapon has helped me put a different perspective on things.
If President Bush gets re-elected, how long before he "dissolves the imperial senate" so to speak? Will the ACLU and the EFF be enough of a "rebel alliance" to restore peace, or will we find out how Star Wars could have ended? (sorry for the Star Wars references, but Bush reminds me so much of Palpatine)
Ok...sorry for the rant. I usually don't but this has been sitting inside for a long time. Feel free to mod me down through the floor boards, but mod the parent up...I think I'll just start sending my students to that post.
Peace On Earth. Purity Of Essence. and all that.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
The problem isn't just the administration, its the Republican echo chamber that chose the candidate, chose the policies and lied to the people to get him elected.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington times have a new version of Gobbel's 'big lie' it is the myth of the 'liberal media'. By repeating this myth often enough they aim to immunize themselves against criticism for their packs of lies.
That is why we have in the Whitehouse a Vietnam draft dogger who deserted his National guard post that daddy pulled strings to get, a man with a criminal conviction and a man who was investigated by the SEC for corruption who got off on a 'technicality' - if you call having daddy being Vice President at the time a technicality.
All of this was known during the campaign but the Republican echo chamber made sure that attention was instead focused on the 'real issues' of Gore's 'lies', like saying he went to Texas fires with the head of FEMA, not the deputy head, according to the Republican echo chamber this was an attempt to embelish his record, a vice president claiming to be on equal terms with an agency director! imagine!
Very little is being said about the fact that the SEC is currently investigating Cheney for corrupt accounting. One would thing that would be a big story, bigger than Lott's racist gaffe even. But no the big story the Republican echo chamber want to talk about is the alleged cost of Kerry's hairdo.
And so having made a mess of the economy and failled to catch Bin Laden the Administration is desperately trying to start a war in the hope that everyone (or at least sufficient numbers) can be fooled by the flag waving.
Question for the republican slashdot monitors - can you honestly claim that W, who deserted from the National guard would have served in the war he wants to start with Iraq?
Over where I come from we have words for people like W, they are Hypocrite, Liar and Coward.
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Like the subject says, this kind of bullshit has been going on for many years on a much bigger scale. Marijuana, anyone? Even though any clinical study done (none within the US, of course... they're not allowed) has shown zero possibility for death, next to no physical addiction, and few few if any long term side effects, the US government has been saying for almost a century that marijuana is evil, bad for you, and has been locking up thousands of innocent people based on pure, unadulterated 100% scientific bullshit.
"And what, apart from wood, also floats on water?"
"Apples!"
"Gravy!"
"Very small rocks!"
"Churches! Churches!"
"A DUCK!"
"Precisely. So..."
"...if she...ways the same as a duck...then she's made of wood..."
"And, therefore..."
"a WITCH!!!!"
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
So any greens out there who still can't tell the difference between Bush and Gore> If you are really that stupid heres some clues:
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Google abortion "breast cancer" Australia lawsuit.
Mentioned here and here.
I reckon that in a tech-oriented locale such as /., people would have at least learned to check Google before calling someone a "lying troll".
Kill, Tux, kill!
As long as the scientist is producing results, his funding continues.
Yes, for most funding agencies (except openly biased ones) this is true. As long as a scientist produces results they get funding. Not neccessarily any particular experimental outcome, but results that stand up to peer review and are publishable. NSERC (the main Canadian gov't funding agency) for example, seems to have a "business model" that good science is worth the money. Of course, how much money that is varies with the political/economic tides, but it's generally sufficient, and as a result a lot of good research goes on here. Corporate funding sometimes sweetens the pot but it's not required to do basic research.
Don't become cynical about scientists and research just because of a few bad apples in the funding basket (*cough cough* pharmaceutical companies *cough cough*). Most of us publish the results we get, not just the ones we wanted, and still keep our funding. And those results usually turn out to be more interesting than the ones we wanted anyway...
Freedom: "I won't!"
In the current political climate (in all of North America, not just the US), teaching proper risk management in relation to contraception is near-impossible. And of course, it's the key to using "birth control" properly. Don't like the odds with just a condom? Use a condom and the Pill, or a condom and contraceptive foam together. The odds of both failing are (odds of method 1 failing) X (odds of method 2 failing). For two methods with a 1% failure rate there's a 1/10 000 risk of your contraception not working. That's a lot of sex ;-) Of course, it's a little more complicated if you're worried about diseases, you have to educate yourself and know which methods work against infection as well. I say "educate yourself", because odds are you won't learn it in school :-(
Freedom: "I won't!"
It's just your sort of attitude that has forced me to give up on the political [right]. Anything that doesn't support your political prejudices is wrong/flawed/unscientific/["liberal"]/motivated by [atheists]/motivated by hate/greed/[communism]/power/evil. Well sometimes your political oppenents on the [left] are correct.
See how easy that was? This is why traditional left wing/right wing politics, especially with only two major parties, is so unproductive. And it's certainly why politics and science should NEVER mix. Politics is the opposite of true science - the truth is worthless and the lies keep changing.
Freedom: "I won't!"
The cost is already being passed onto me, and other American citizens: In the health damage associated with petro pollution. In the incoherence of foreign policy. In the instability in the Middle East and South America. In the sons and daughters sent to die to maintain our petroleum addicition -- and in the conscience and psyche of our sons and daughters sent to kill others to maintain our petroluem addiction.
Not all value is economic value. We are already paying for these failures... we might as well translate it to simple economic cost (and safeguard the environment while we're at it).
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
"The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!"
Freedom: "I won't!"
It's funny how people believe in capitalism
In the long term, one of two things happens:
PolluteCo gets wise, invests in cleaner technology, reduces its emissions, and so escapes the need to buy credits. End result: The industry as a whole is cleaner.
PolluteCo never wises up, remains dirty, fails to invest in clean tech, continues to pay for the credits. CleanCo continues to derive economic benefit from its clean technologies, so it maintains its lower prices and draws more of the market to it. PolluteCo ramps down production (due to falling orders) and/or eventually goes out of business. End result: The industry as a whole is cleaner.
Either way, pollution credits lead to the desired result. And amazingly they do so through clear, clean market efficiency. (For those who complain that the setting of credits is an intervention, I riposte that costs and prices are measures of desires, which lie outside the market paradigm. Why did everyone want a beanie baby? Not due to market forces.)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
There's one problem with your scenario: you can't have wide-scale adoption of diesel power for automobiles because Diesel #2 fuel sold in the USA contains too much sulfur compounds, which will quickly corrode the modern fuel-delivery and exhaust emission control systems found on European diesel-powered cars.
This will change in a few years when the EPA will require diesel fuel with no more than 80 parts per million of sulfur compounds; this will allow the introduction on a large scale of diesel-powered automobiles, pickup trucks and SUV's that will have 25 to 40 percent better fuel mileage but still meet the strict Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) exhaust emission standard.
I can see by 2006 a major switch on pickup trucks, SUV's and minivans to turbodiesel power; it's actually better for these type of vehicles since the high low-end torque of turbodiesel engines are well-suited for this type of application.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
. . .W, who deserted from the National guard . . .
Really? This is the first I've heard of this. Seriously. Can you point me to some info on this?
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/2002/10/25_D eserter.html
There is actually a whole website devoted to this topic:
http://www.awolbush.com/
I was trying to find an article that didn't have much spin to it (hah, yeah right) and unfortunately basically everyone was either saying the fact that he deserted was the worst thing ever to happen in history, or it was good for the country.
Gore would continue the status-quo of pushover democrats who only do enough to get the left vote, but not enough to acually appease them. Hopefully he'll now be the last.
:)
Don't blame the greens for voting for the person they actually wanted to be president, blame Gore for playing the fence. Besides, if everyone who voted for Gore voted for Nader, we wouldn't be in this mess either
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
AWOLBush has the basic facts. Shrub's military record shows that he did not show up for duty between May 1972 and October 1973.
There is no statute of limitations for desertion in time of war. If this was Clinton, Ken Starr would have investigated. However because it is a republican he gets off.
See also Bush's Top 10 Lies, Exaggerations And 'Obsfucations' About His Military Service
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I propose we spread a meme around.
Call the U.S. government by a better name - commercracy. Our Commercratic States of America.
Maybe other people will realize the reality of the situation. Any better names?
Well, I knew someone would say that, that's why I chose a link from each side. The second one says the *scientific* link is fabricated, not the Australian lawsuit, which is what the post I replied to was claiming.
From the pro-choice site:
Raising the stakes even higher, a dubious lawsuit was settled in Australia in September 2001...
More lawsuits like the Australia case are on the way...
The pro-choice site does not question that there was a lawsuit and that the plaintif received a settlement. The grandparent post made a factually correct statement about the lawsuit (saying nothing about the underlying science) and was quickly modded troll. In light of this article's topic, don't you find that mildly ironic?
Kill, Tux, kill!
I just wanted to reply in thanks for what you wrote - you said everything I'd wanted to say, and better than I probably would have said it. I agree with you 100% there.
Your post is all the more eerie as I am currently reading The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson, an excellent novel which features as part of its backdrop a world where the US military/industrial machine has grown larger than ever. Oddly enough, reading this book, written in the 80s, I'm constantly struck that I feel I am living in the times it describes. We're there now, and we have a choice of what kind of world we want to build.
A quick Google search turned these up:
From the Boston Globe: One Year Gap in Bush's National Guard Duty
From the Dallas Morning News (reprinted in the Washington Post): Records of Bush's Alabama Military Duty Cannot Be Found
A guy then used the Freedom of Information Act to get the actual reports detailing Bush's "issues" with reporting for duty: You Can't Just Walk Away
CNN reported Bush's denial (Bush Dismisses Report He Skipped Air National Guard Service), but it's notable what a weak denial it was: "Asked about his Air National Guard attendance record, Bush told reporters it was 'spotty attendance but I did the duty necessary... I did the time that was required in the Guard.' " Not the kind of ringing denial you'd expect if there wasn't at least an element of truth to the story.
Unsurprisingly, the media didn't press him on the issue back during the campaign, and they're certainly not likely to now. But as far as I can see the questions are still open, and the "Bush was AWOL" side seems to have more facts and evidence at their disposal than does the "no he wasn't" side.
Read my blog.
I cannot believe that some people haven't heard about this. Please, open your eyes and look around you.
You know... I asked a legitimate question. Could I have found the answers myself? Yes. I asked the question not only to learn about this topic, but also to see what kind of responses I'd get. You attack... I say fuck you. Coward.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Like it or not taxes are a necessary evil. Without taxation the infrastructure would not be in place to allow a country to compete in the world market. It would be impossible for the private sector to replicate the same services and still make a profit. Nobody would do it, and if you could pull it off, the shockwaves it would create through an economy would be devestating. Imagine if every highway had a 10 dollar toll or something like that. Very possible with monopoly situations..
Even social infrastrcture is important. Imagine if a good portion of our society was forced to restrt to crime just to live..and forget about a police force or prisons to deal with the problem..just a mess.
Having compulsory voting makes you vote.
:)
Well, OK, that's pretty much what compulsory means.
Presumably voting is an aspect of freedom, and being forced to vote runs against that. Although it's not a practice I readily endorse, I know perfectly intelligent people here in the States who have boycotted elections out of disgust. If they should must be coerced, it would make a lot more sense to force themm to get involved at the grassroots level, or to contribute money to minor candidates, that to force them to ratify the result of a selection process they think is corrupt.
I don't see how increased "swing votes" prove people care more. Detailed surveys might, but vote counts could mean different things. Swingers can be either principled or fickle. Also, it is inevitable that a swing group will develop and grow, because the major parites will adjust their policies to get as many voters as possible, resulting in roughly even split. The swing group simple develops at this split, their loyalties divided and thus up for grabs.
Being forced to vote would make me mad. I'd vote against it.
What's _pretty_safe_ about those figures?
a ts.html
98%-100%? That's a wide range isn't it? There is a big difference between 1 in 50 being infected and 0 in infinity.
1 in 50 FUBAR rate is a lot worse than skydiving when I last checked (1 in 3800 participants).
http://www.afn.org/skydive/sta/st
People nowadays seem to give more respect to leaping out of an airplane than to sex.
0.5-3% is pretty much in line of typical condom failure rates in various studies. Note for most contraceptive studies failure = pregnancy, not infection. Humans aren't very fertile, so it is likely that the barrier failure rates are higher. While AIDS isn't that infectious, hepatitis B/C and other dangerous STDs are significantly more infectious.
People who keep saying condoms = safe sex are irresponsible.
Hot-blooded youth need to know the true risks. Given a real idea of the risks some may indeed decide to make safer choices.
Saying they'll all be promiscuous anyway is wrong and patronising. Some sex surveys have indicated that in some countries premarital sex isn't that common. If the prevalent culture is risky and the risk/benefit ratio is bad, work to change the culture.
Well, you haven't really said anything here about Bush, just about yourself... But then, the "Bush sucks" posts don't say anything about why he sucks, so most of those are equally invalid.
No, what's more interesting is the stuff about how Bush went AWOL during a war for over a year - potentially an act of treason, how Cheney's accounting scandals have been swept under the rug, etc. Refute those, and we can start discussing Bush's suck-factor.
* Second, if you believe in global warming, find some real evidence. Yeah there may be an elevated level of CO2 in the air now, but CO2 is a piss poor 'greenhouse gas', methane and water vapor work way better. If there is a global warming trend I'd be inclined to think that it's the sun causing it as there is evidence that Mars is warming, also.
From the EPA's Global Warming site:
A warming trend of about 1F has been recorded since the late 19th century. Warming has occurred in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and over the oceans. Confirmation of 20th-century global warming is further substantiated by melting glaciers, decreased snow cover in the northern hemisphere and even warming below ground.
Now, OTOH, what's that mean? Average temperatures have increased slightly, but that could be a natural cyclical trend - records don't go back long enough.
Rather than saying "find some real evidence" - plenty exists - you should be saying "what does that evidence really mean?"
Incidentally, on the last Talk of the Nation Science Friday (from NPR), they had a segment on Antarctic science that mentioned global warming studies. Interestingly enough, though parts of the continent are warming, others are cooling, and there's about a 60% cooling trend across the continent.
Global warming is happening - but we have no idea what that means yet.
* Thirdly. What's the best way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases? Condoms or Abstinence? Maybe there was a leftist bias on those pages to begin with and they really do refect more acurately scientific evidence?
Depends on your definition of "best". What is the surest way to prevent pregnancy? Abstinence. What is the one that most people would be willing to follow? Condoms.
Look, if what's going on with the Catholic Church is any indication, not even priests can maintain a vow of chastity. To believe that anyone else can is wishful thinking at best and self-delusion at worst.
People will have sex. Teenagers will have sex. While abstinence would be best, they aren't going to do that. We might be able to get them to compromise and wear condoms, and that is much more preferable to the alternative.
Similar is dieting - obesity is a huge [pun intended] problem in this country. The obvious solution - eat less, eat more nutritionally, exercise more, etc. is very tough for a lot of people to do. Humans, in general, tend to lack the willpower for self-denial. So, though people know that they're slowly killing themselves, they continue eating Super-sized big mac meals.
Likewise smoking - anyone who doesn't know at this point that smoking is harmful is an idiot and has been living in a shack for the past sixty years. Nonetheless people still smoke. It takes a whole lot of willpower to change behaviors, particularly when you have to deny yourself immediate gratification - such as the Big Mac, the Marlboro, or the blow job - in exchange for a few possible extra years on your life... at the end, particularly when you don't know if you'll be hit by a bus or drafted and not get to die of natural causes.
In short, this is why condom use is the best way to prevent pregnancy and STDs - it's the one people will actually follow.
-T
Come on dude. No one trusts the government now. Government serves its own interest in the name of preserving its power. The government has, in the past, rigged data (apple juice, red dye to name a few) for political purposes. Everyone (I hope ) knows this. I fear the day people start by saying they trust the government.
I'm curious as to where you get idea that American media has a liberal bias. Oooh, wait, let me guess... it was from certain sections of American media, right ? I guess the more conservative pundits tend to believe that other outlets have a liberal bias. It depends entirely on where you stand, if you believe the media should be more conservative, one complains of liberal bias, if you believe it should be more liberal one complains of conservative bias.
So, perversely enough, the more one hears of a liberal bias, the more conservative the media must be, and vica versa.
I don't think there is an objective answer to this, but, could you maybe mention a country with a more conservative media than America ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I knew what every comment would be like to this article before I even clicked the link, but I did so anyway. Stupid, stupid.
Politcal rants lacking in any thoughtful merit infallibly supporting whichever team (lib/cons) allegiance has been pledged to. It's all so frivalous.
and not always `low level,' why which i mean innocuous. for instance, they've been pushing vaccination on and off for two centuries, despite the heaps of science proving the stuff is unsafe and ineffective.
When the budget was balanced the Congress was controlled by those dastardly Republicans. The legislation needed to balance the budget had to originate (as per the Constitution) in the House of Representatives controlled then by those horrible Republicans. President Clinton, like all Presidents before him, has only limited control over whether there are deficits or not.
I was skimming your paragraph:
That is why we have in the Whitehouse a Vietnam draft dogger who deserted his National guard post that daddy pulled strings to get, a man with a criminal conviction and a man who was investigated by the SEC for corruption who got off on a 'technicality' - if you call having daddy being Vice President at the time a technicality.
and forgive me if for a moment I flashed back to President Clinton. His offenses were not precisely the same, but there are plenty of parallels. Clinton's weakness tended to run to sexual rather than financial dealings. Both men shared some difficulties with the draft, certain unclean dabblings with the courts, and a peculiar lying about past drug use, lies I can only think Americans somehow demand of them. None of this makes me happy. But we know this stuff (well, OK, I thought everyone know about Bush ducking his incredibly valuable duties learning to fly antiquated airplanes in Texas -- but that's relatively minor), it's not going to change much now. Also, forgive me but there is a certain amount of common sense in trying to avoid going to Vietnam. The biggest objection I have is that ducking the draft effectively meant sending some less connected in your place. (Notes: Clinton allegedly did a double-duck -- getting ROTC for draft immunity, then ducking ROTC when his draft number showed he would not have been drafted. Bush's alleged double-duck was that he skated into a flight training program desired by many, with barely passing test scores, then didn't show up for a third of it anyway, yet was not punished).
I'm not attacking or defending anyone, I just don't think the character attacks do much good, esp. over stuff 25 years ago except to put down misrepresentations. Character and record are things to think about in deciding whom to trust, but now that the election is past (on which I accept the result but insist on reform) really there's plenty concrete to criticize without digging up the past or speculating about the future. I don't happen to believe President Bush is a person of great character -- compare him to his father even -- but I'm a lot more worried that he just isn't showing much common sense, and so many of his actions or inactions appear beholden to certain minority (and I don't mean race) interests.
So rather than become liberal Rush Limbaughs -- what a concept! -- let's ask about the Iraq agenda, the economy, prescription drugs, Wall Street corruption, Enron and family, domestic spying, immigration law, peculiar tax breaks, budget deficits, and so on and so on
Hope metamoderators get this one
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Condoms don't kill people, people kill people.
Or on the flip side...
People don't kill people, condoms kill people!
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
if one would have the choice of birth control methods (and humans were certianly created/evolved/morphed with brains to make choice), then abstitence clearly has less of a failure rate and would be the better choice.
Likewise, I suppose that abstinence of gun usage is probably the best method of preventing gun fatalities. That is the logic you are using.
Condoms are for prevention of pregnancy and protection from STDs. Pure and simple. Not unlike a gardening glove. Not unlike the safety on a firearm. Not unlike a redundant power supply.
A condom is a safety device. It protects against things which can result from something that everyone does.
Saying a condom promoted sex is like saying that a safety promotes gun usage. It doesn't promote it. It just makes the act safer.
If people are going to do it anyway, then there is nothing wrong with people doing it safer.
Typical nonsense from the repug dimwits. Your claim that Clinton is a draft dodger is demonstrably false, whereas the Bush AWOL business is directly documented in the archives of the Air National Guard. Lies are lies, however often you repeat them.
As for the lying under oath, well, yes. He did. He lied about fellatio. He didn't want to admit to a BJ. Big fucking whoop. As opposed to the mass of indicted felons in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I and II juntas this is a relatively minor thing, IMHO. The most they ever managed to come up with after mercilessly hounding the Clinton administration for year after year was one single blowjob. That's it. And they still work that one for everything they can, despite the complete irrelevance of the issue.
Honestly, what a bunch of shameless twats.
This is why these organizations should be privatized non-profits. The FDA, EPA, NCI, etc. should be able to say whatever they think best. If some group disagrees, then they can start another group that says something else. No social or political group should be backed by the government as the absolute authority on a subject. This would lead to honesty and lower taxes.
(Vote libertarian!)Well, you see, Bush DOES suck, and Clinton doesn't. Therefore a post saying the latter wouldn't really be insightful, would it.
And the fore fathers for te screwy election system. If it was decided by a popular vote, Gore would have won.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
this sickens me. What is wrong with the american government. Every day it grows more and more orwellian.
But the economy is not his fault. That's all those venture capitalists who sunk billions of investment dollars into 1) Invest lotsa money in .com 2)???? 3) Profit! schemes.
That money being spent on companies that never created a useful product instead of wisely spent on endeavors that would have created useful product (and thus economic growth) is what killed the economy. Who got elected 2 years ago had nothing to do with it.
paintball
Even if the studies are for not carrying a pregnancy to term, abortions are a subset of not carrying a pregnancy to term, and thus having an abortion (as opposed to completing the pregnancy) increases your chance of developing breast cancer. That having a miscarraige would do the same thing is irrelevant, we're only concerned with whether you're more likely to have breast cancer if you have an abortion than if you don't.
paintball
No, no, no!
Convservatives think that women who have sex outside a monogamous unbreakable marriage are bad. Homosexual sex is evil. (Women involved in a three-way or are performaning for men don't really count as homosexuals.)
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
But have you any idea of how good we have it in the west? Have you the slightest inkling at what shit people have to put up with in North Korea, Iraq or Zimbabwe? The governments there do lie virtually all the time. And if anyone happens to question those lies, they are thrown into prison, beaten, tortured and eventually killed.
Yes, it is nice to know that we do not hold americans without lawyers access (the kid from Seattle/Denver, the Chicagoan who is accused of building a nuke), that all prisoners have access to a speedy trial (Mitnick, The above), and police burutality never occurs (In Ft. Collins, CO, where I was an EMT, we picked up prisoner being transported by Ernie Telez who fell on door handle - He was in ICU for 3 days for which the city attorney laughed - BTW, prisoner was first time offender for stolen car - finally, that was one offense out of over 100 against him, and ernie still got off at his trial as a number of officers lied). Likewise, we treat other ppl the same way that we want to be treated (my ex-girlfriend was raped and beaten in Noreiga's dungen with CIA agents watching and directing - her crime was being opposed to noriega, the treatment of the current prisoners down in Cuba, who are handed of to other countries so that we do not dirty our hands). Yes, we have a number of things to like about ourselves and we do have it good. But we also have a number of things that are getting worse and need to be stopped now. Simply ignoring these problems and proclaiming how great we are solves nothing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Good God man. Calm down about your "Republican echo chamber" and wake up to American politics. Start naming any politicians, Democrat or Republican, that aren't hypocrites, liars, or cowards. Politics has absolutely nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative or Democrat vs. Republican and everything to do with rich vs. poor.
What's really sad is not the fact that Bush is in office, but the fact that the Democratic party couldn't cough up a candidate to utterly trouce him in the election. Any halfway decent candidate would've beaten him in a landslide and look what happened. Now we have corporate America even more thoroughly entrenced in the government.
"Software is like sex. It's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
The problem is having someone to vote for. While most people think of not voting as a form of laziness, there is also conscientiously looking at the cantidates and deciding that none of them deserve a vote. If 'none of the above' were a meaningful option on the ballot, I'd vote a lot more.
Currently, the best one can do is not vote at all, or game the system by voting for the most contentious rivals and hope they are caught in a hopeless snarl of infighting and don't get to do too much damage.
Currently, we have as close to none of the above as we have ever had, but to little effect. I should think that a vote resulting in a margin smaller than statistical error should send a message, but it seems that the recipiants are oblivious.
As for the issue at hand, this sort of revisionism is truly a cornerstone of the 1984 scenerio, but I have little doubt that Gore would have done it as well.
I propose an alternative: End all dependance on foreign oil and withdraw ALL economic and political support of the Middle East. Decades of the U.S., Soviet Union, and (to a lesser degree) Europe playing puppeteer with the Middle East, and pumping weapons and money into the region has resulted in the current problems.
The aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union has shown us how effective peace at gunpoint was and how popular the installed 'democracies' really were.
Really? Who ditched the National Guard?
Didn't you hear?
Gore's not running.
If you want a hundred examples of outright leftist falsehood, you only need to look to junkscience.com. It's updated daily. They're not always right, but they seem to have brought back the concept of healthy skepticism.
This is not a defense of untruth by the right either. I've noticed just the opposite of your contention. Untruths are more a historical phenomenon for the right and more a contemporary phenomenon for the left.
The thing is, political falsehood is usually used to oppress people, not to free them. In general, modern conservatives in the US want more freedom, and modern liberals want more control over people. This represents a shift from the '60s, and it goes hand-in-hand with the shift in political untruth-telling.
I honestly think I personally could do a better job if I was in charge of the DNC, and that's a sad state of affairs. I think I could come up with something better than the jab-and-retreat, non-aggression and "appeasement" strategies for dealing with conservatives and their rhetoric. I don't know what's going going on in their heads, but whatever it is they clearly don't have the right mindset. And since party leaders aren't chosen democratically I don't feel like there is anything I can do about it.
ever notice how the left always screams "bush this, bush that, he's taking over the world, destroying freedom, etc." and never provide a shred of evidence. when you provide a reasoned, educated piece that clearly shows the truth, you are called a facist.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
My grandmother always said that she never voted "because then nobody could blame [her] for anything that our leaders did." Not a bad strategy if you ask me ^_^
Because they're his buddies, duh. If his buddies were against drilling then he'd be against drilling. It's the way most people work - they go with the flow and believe what their friends believe, without applying critical thinking. That's what this country needs: more critical thinking.
Naturally, abstinance is the only 100% effective way to prevent pregnancy and STDs. I don't think anyone disputes that.
Another fact is that some percentage of people don't abstain. We also know that some (many) of those people have more than one partner in a lifetime (otherwise, there wouldn't be any STDs). So far, not much controversy
It is also fairly clear cut that condoms reduce the odds of pregnancy and STDs vs. unprotected sex. No real controversy there.
The real question is will education about condoms reduce abstinance. According to the study that USED to be published on the CDC website, the answer is no (though one study is not the final word).
Note that from a public health standpoint, the real question is will promotion of safe sex ultimately reduce incidence of STDs and unwanted pregnancies or not.
I fail to understand how we are to solve the problem if we ignore any scientific evidence that is inconvieniant to ideology. It would seem that the Bush administration actually advocates ignorance.
Well, you see, Bush DOES suck, and Clinton doesn't.
Right. Clinton *got* sucked. Big difference.
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
Where are you diging this up from? I've had family members who have died from smoking, was their death faked for me by the left?
Air pollution is getting worse, try breathing country air compared to the air in Detroit where I live.
No homeless in the country? Have you ever left the pedistol you're on and visited, oh I don't know, ANY inner city?
Want examples of women being paid less than men? Let me take you to the k-mart where I used to work where I would get a $0.35 raise and a woman would only get a $0.25 raise.
Of course cigarette smoking dosen't cost the public money, because people who are suffering from lung cancer don't go to the hospital, right?
Animals don't have rights? Tell me that again when the ecosystem is in shambles and we don't have anything to eat.
No species going extinct per day? Oh what do you care, they're just insignifigant bugs.
Nuclear power isn't dangerous? Go visit Eastern Europe and tell people that.
For the love of God, think before you sound tremendously stupid, but above all, remember that no one political party is out to "get you", and so no one political party is going to make up world history and scientific breakthroughs over the past century! I suppose man never landed on the moon too, right?
SecondPageMedia - Wha
"Guns don't kill people. Physics Kills People"
Offtopic, I realize, but I did try to establish at least minimal relevance with the subject line.
Every politician does this... But because of Nadar's big mouth you and the media mostly accuse gore of this.
Oh well... some people can't appreciate good politicians as you probably would not be here on slashdot posting had it not been for Gore's tremendous support of privatizing and expanding the internet first as a congressmen then as a president.
INSTEAD because of that jackass nadar combined with our voting system we are having our flags burned not just in arab countries but also places like south korea.
Hmmm... Pie...
Even as an american i can tell you that we gave saddam the power to abuse his people and his neigbors.
How did we do that? By not giving a damn what the rest of the world cares about. It doesn't matter whether or not Bush directly attacks Stockholm using biological weapons (not that Iraq is more so likely to do so).
I guess my point is that the world is a MORE dangerous place due to our intervention in the middle east.
Creation of Israel, mass jewish immigration to Israel, mass Palestinians forced to leave Israel.
Creation of a powerful and bastardly Saddam who is a menace at best.
Sure the U.S. isn't dangerous to the world. Keep telling yourself that.
Hmmm... Pie...
2. The funding of science is even more political. Especially if your funding comes from a political body.
Unfortunately, liberal atheists often see science as their religion, so when conservatives have any input to science, they tend to cry apostate. Never mind that the Clinton Administration, for example, heavily politicized NIST grants for liberal pet causes...
...-.-
You are true on that, Clinton was more a less a dipshit, and had nothing to do with the economy or the deficite. Then again neither did Congress. Having a giant surplus had a lot to do with that and a fast growing economy, that again, well shy of Al Gore inventing the internet, had nothing to do with the president. As far as the "Conservative science" is asinine and I'm tired of all groups(Conservative and Liberal) constantly having studies only to skew the results to make their argument look better. Abortions cause cancer, who cares, condoms equals more sex, so what. Anything that leads to a reduction in the population, especially in the ultra liberal/conservative portions, is a good thing.
Bush: "There's Adam Clymer -- major league asshole from the New York Times."
Cheney: "Yeah, big time."
Fourteen House Democrats, including Henry A. Waxman of California, senior minority member of the House Government Reform Committee, have written to Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services, charging that the new versions "distort and suppress scientific information for ideological purposes."
Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the new statement on abortion and breast cancer "simply doesn't track the best available science."
The problem is having someone to vote for. While most people think of not voting as a form of laziness, there is also conscientiously looking at the cantidates and deciding that none of them deserve a vote. If 'none of the above' were a meaningful option on the ballot, I'd vote a lot more.
Not to be redundant, but this is why I would tend to agree with those posters in favor of compulsory voting with the ability to vote for "none of the above".
moto411.com
They're not *inherently* bad, but they have a collective history of essentially "buying results" that show their drugs are safe/effective/etc. when in fact they are not, and suppressing negative results (Google for "Nancy Olivieri"). Plus, if they funded all medical research we'd never cure anything, just get more drugs to treat symptoms...
Freedom: "I won't!"
From an old Dilbert:
... Because ... Because that's the way I was raised.
Dilbert: People who don't vote have no right to complain.
Dogbert: Why not?
Dilbert: Because
Dogbert: You were raised by bumber stickers?
FreeSpeech.org
if science were conservative...
president bush wouldn't exist.
the united states wouldn't exist.
the Earth would be flat.
Horses would be the best form of transportation.
the artificial heart would be a dream.
china would have been taken over by marauding mongols.
McDonald's would still be a farm with a quack quack here.
The dutch would never have given the japanese gunpowder in the 1500's.
I would never have typed out this crap!
They're using their grammar skills there.
Fuck the economic consequences.
Tell that to the several hundred thousand Americans who are currently out of a job due to the poor economic conditions in the US. Tell that to the pilots of United who have just seen their entire retirement go up in smoke with the bankruptcy of that company.
The current generation has no right to fuck the environment, potentially for the rest of the life of the planet, just to maintain your fucked up vision of a properly run economy.
First, you can't even define what "fucking up the evironment" means: it's subjective. Second, the planet does not have a life. It's all matter that changes form over time. Third, what you see as "fucked up" is totally sane to another. Who's right? Using such qualifiers, there is no clear answer.
Burning fossil fuels adds to greenhouse gases which screws with the environment in ways which we can't undo.
I have not seen the evidence that shows this. I do recognize that it's been a goal of the left to get people of out cars and into mass transportation. But not privately-run mass transportation -- government-run mass transportation.
So we have to stop burning fossil fuels. Simple as that.
If it really was so simple then you wouldn't need to label it as such -- its simplicity would be obvious to all.
And if there are other things contributing to global warming, then we have to do something about them too.
If the average temperature of the earth cools and heats on its own accord (i.e., shy of human intervention), then why do we have to do something about them? Just saying, "We have to do something!" doesn't cut it.
And fuck the economic cost. Or there'll be no-one left in 500 years to count your precious pennies.
There is no way that you could know that.
Everyone else (except for Israel) is quite happy left to their own devices, and only has weapons to protect themselves from the inevidable invasion from the US military / economy.
One-third of all US aid goes to Israel. Where do you think the other two-thirds goes? So much for your claim that "everone else is quite happy left to their own devices." And your claim that the "only" reason other countries has weapons is to defend themselves from the US is false.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Well.... I'm more concerned about condom use leading to more sexual activity. I myself have worn a condom for the past 6 months and never once have I sucessfully had sex with a person of any sex. It seems obvious to me that my condom use did not increase my sexual activity :( Oh well.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
If you want to be a freak, have at it. But don't try pushing your religious BS on everyone. Sex is a normal and healthy part of life, and the last thing we need is people like you dragging us back into the Dark Ages.
How can there be "Jewish science"? If this were 1942 and you were in Germany, I'm sure you'd be happy to explain to us what the answer is.
If the new conclusions are consistent with scientific principles, then they are scientific. The end.
Where the fuck did you get the idea that rewrites of scientific papers done by political propagandists are consistent with scientific principles? Because a government you support says so?
Science doesn't care what you think or what you wish to be true. And guess what -- sometimes science just happens to support the positions of the political right. Anyone who is intellectually honest will just have to accept that. So accepting the rewritten conclusions of a scientific report is a sign of intellectual honesty when the underlying research hasn't been redone to provide information to support it?
And I'm not just some right-wing Bible thumper. I happen to be an atheist and a strong advocate of science.
Anyone willing to accept the output of Bush regime bureaucrats who know no more of science than Jerry Falwell as TRUTH is no longer an atheist. You have become something even more pathetic than a right-wing Bible thumper. You are a right-wing worshiper of George Bush. Suck it up and deal with it. If this is what you want to be, set up an altar with our Presidential shrub's face on it.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I could go for that, though if 'none of the above' was an option and could cause something meaningful to happen, I would happily vote without compulsion.
Compulsory voting leads to a danger for abuse. What would be really interesting (but won't happen) would be no vote = no government services = no taxes. Given most American's opinions of how well their tax dollars are spent, it would lead to a record low turnout :-)
What you are encouraging your students to do is pseudo-participation at best. To truly participate, they would have to care and actually inform themselves on the issues. That is part of our civic duty - to be citizens and know what is going on as best we can and make the best informed decisions possible. What you suggest is about as bad as a parent that wants the TV to substitute for loving interaction with their children. As long as something is interacting, its called participation, right? Not.
The problem with your approach is that the randomness will be mostly effected by the amount of exposure they have had to a certain name or a catchy slogan. Advertising has a powerful influence.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
All through the '70s and '80s there was a push to fund the panicmonger scientists on the left - The new ice age (switched to global warming, but they will probably be back to Ice Age in a decade or so), Acid Rain (lakes that were highly acid in 1800 but were limed returned to becoming acid, but it was our fault).
The Hyperliberal New York Times is now upset that instead of giving THE LIBERAL PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC LINE they National Cancer Institute is actually looking at data.
Abortion is either a factor or a nonfactor in breast cancer. There have been studies validating both sides, but Bill Clinton will have the NCI say there is no effect, and GWB will have it say there is a clear causal connection.
Condoms are another problem. If they were a drug the FDA would ban them for not being effective or being too hard to use. "Those who used latex condoms correctly and consistently". But how many is that out of everyone who uses condoms? And what of things like HPV that isn't covered by the condom. That, and abstinence. was being censored by the previous administration.
Maybe there will be a page saying "We recommend the use of low-tar cigarettes and filters" and not making any mention of quitting or abstinence of cigarettes if a Tobacco state politician becomes president.
The government should stay out of this too. Where in the constitution does it give them the power to do this?
Nixon stepped down because otherwise he would have been impeached. He would have been impeached because he was caught on tape committing serious crimes. If you think anything Clinton did is even comparable to Nixon's treason, you are very, very delusional. Typical Republican, no idea of history, but willing to loudly talk about it.
nothing funny about it.. wellstone wouldnt have gotten too many votes at least not anymore than nader.
MTV had a recent news show about high school sex education. They focused on Lubbock county in Texas, where their schools had strict abstinence-only sex ed. And their county's STD and pregnancy rate was TRIPLE the national average (where most students receive "regular" sex ed). This seems to imply that after receiving abstinence-only sex ed, Lubbock teenagers are either THREE TIMES more sexually active or that their average (or below average) sex rate is highly ineffective at preventing STDs and pregnancy.
The following (biased) article mentions some of the facts, but then concludes that Lubbock needs MORE abstincence-only sex ed: High teen pregnancy rates spark interest in True Love Waits events
cpeterso
"News for you, pal: it's not a totalitarian measure if people vote for it. " what if you went back to 1700? and you forced everyone in ANY country at that time to vote if slavery should be legal? hmmm... perhaps you should think a little more about that statement.
only in the USA would people not be alarmed when the son of the previous king, an oil baron, is whisked into office through suspicious elections in the state controlled by the previous king's other son.
cpeterso
WTC would be standing based on what? pray tell. right wing fundamentalists like people who are more left wing than bush? That is astonishing!
I'd prefer they suicide bomb eachother
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
I think some of the quibbles the poster was having was the left exaggerating some figures for personal gain. Global warming states, extinction rates, smoking deaths, etc, all fall under that catagory.
As for nuclear power, it *is* safer then coal if done right. Although I don't have the statistics in front of me, I bet that I could find more deaths in the US due to coal power generation then nuclear power generation. Hell, I'd rather smoke a pack a day then be a coal miner, and I'm not that fond of the idea of living next to a coal power plant either. (During the coal electricity generation process, the coal is turned into a fine black powder, which becomes easily airborn.) I don't care about the miniscule effects of radiation from a nuclear plant either - I'd recieve more radiation moving to Denver.
Now I agree with you that animals have rights, but that's *not* a science decision. It never has been, and it never will be. Its a philosophical decision. Just because we will be hurting alot when a large percentage of animals go extinct does not mean that they have rights - Does the air have rights as well then? After all, if we pollute that, we screw ourselves as well.
Lets bring up cigarette smoking again, since its a good example. Cigarettes aren't healthy. However, there is good evidence that the effects of second hand smoke isn't as severe as most of us believe. Plus, we have some of the most unintelligent cigarette commercials in the US, which are only surpassed by the anti-drug commercials in the US (Nick and Norm has taught me that if you buy gasoline and diamonds [as well as a lot of other goods] you are EVIL).
Cigarette smoking does end up costing the public money. So does obesity. So does not wearing your seatbelt. Hell, not brushing your teeth for 5 minutes a day costs the public money.
Don't misunderstand me, I lean towards the liberal side of politics. However, I can't justify faulty logic no matter which side of the fence you are on. It benefits nobody.
any scientific theory that supports left wing ideology MUST be the truth! How convenient.
Lead to mistrust? Man, I have never trusted them.
Yes. It is all the Catholic Church's fault.
YES, they are evil because promoting backward thinking in Africa.
Well, TOO FREAKIN' LATE. Many Africans have beat them to it by thousands of years.
I have been to roundtable meetings about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. There are lots of disturbing statistics. Almost 100% of militaries are HIV positive. Why? They have a hookers for the platoons they drive with the men. Brilliant. There are also whole villages that have been wiped out by HIV. What? Whole villages? IS EVERYONE SCREWING EVERYONE ALL THE TIME THERE? Great. I would assume that many now know that sex can kill, but they do nothing about it.
I understand what you are thinking. I agree. The Catholic Church is waaaay behind the times and should not endorse that condoms are bad. But they also say that sex in general is bad, and surprise, celibacy (although not so easy as one thinks it is) is a sure fire way to prevent the spread of HIV and pregnancy. I don't care how stupid or from what culture they come from, people know sex causes babies, and should be able to understand what a disease is... y'know, illness? That thing which makes us sick?
This is a fact: African men with HIV many times rape virginal women as a cure to get rid of the "evil" in them when they have HIV, hoping to "give" it to the virgin. ISN'T THAT A COMFORTING THOUGHT. That IMHO just might be a *teeny tiny* PROBLEM over there.
Also, I recently read in the news that in Johannesburg several people were beaten to death by an angry mob thought those people were freakin' Vampires. *I kid you not.*
So with all of that, Catholicism doesn't sound so bad anymore.
So really, there is no way around this. They are screwed either way. No Catholic Church? Then the shaman tells them to rape a virgin, or maybe there is a vampire to blame. It is all so pathetic it is making my head hurt.
too bad you can't mod stories
char *mySig;
the democrats werent to quick to distance from him. he was the democratic leader for 12 years.
Cigarette smokers end up saving the public money. They die younger, saving years of health-care and social security payments. They also pay huge amounts in cigarette taxes. Cigarette smoking is a net postive contributor to public coffers.
This isn't an endorsement of smoking or anything else except the facts.
If we could just all be reasonable and try to find out the real facts, then discussions like this could be more about solutions and less about how "George Bush sucks" and "John Ashcroft is the devil". Maybe someday...
Umm, let me guess, the devil in the White House???
Because they're his buddies, duh. If his buddies were against drilling then he'd be against drilling.
I knew that. It was a rhetorical question intended to point out how Bush's policies are harmful to our country's long-term goals.
Campaigns are already filled with enough soundbite garbage made to attract voters who don't get into the issues far enough to see what's really going on. All things being equal, people who follow the issues more are more likely to vote. I like it that way because sometimes the right policy is not the one with the best soundbites. Sometimes the best candidate is not the one with the best haircut and speechwriter. When voting becomes manditory or too easy (like internet voting), policy will be made by soundbites. The candidate who makes the most promises will win, and not enough voters will check to see of those promises are kept.
The right to vote is very, very important, but it bears with it a responsibility. I like having to drive out to vote. I'm glad I have to register in advance. I'm not huge on big efforts to get people out to vote. If they don't want to vote and they don't know what they'd be voting for, I'd rather they don't vote.
Part of me would like a little quiz on the US Constitution when you vote and the vote only counts if you do well enough on it, but that's obviously unconstitional so I wouldn't actually support it. Point is: ignorant voters make for bad governmnet.
char *mySig;
Bullshit. What you get are kids that have sex and try to cover it up. You get kids that have unsafe sex because they are scared to death that someone at the drugstore might tell dad he was buying rubbers. You get girls that hide their pregnancies, give birth in bathrooms, and leave their babies in trash cans.
Where/when I went to high school, no body did anything except get drunk on the weekends.
Just because you couldn't get any, you shouldn't assume everyone else couldn't, too.
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
More Republican lies, the SEC just upgraded the Halliburton probe
Why tell lies about things that are so easily checked? Cheney is still under investigation, he was CEO while the accounting irregularities occurred.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Oh, I don't know... North Korea, Iran, Iraq? That's about the only ones I can think of, though...
That is all.
This administration lies about everything -- every goddamned thing -- as a matter of permanent policy. They will say anything that they want the public to believe, while they do whatever they want. And what they want is to get money for themselves and their big campaign contributors, that is absolutely all they are about. What a disaster for the country. The worst administation ever, the American version of a "kleptocracy."
BTW a "kleptocracy" is a "government by thieves," the best possible description of the Bush administration. A couple of recent examples of their mendacity (mendacity means "whorishness"):
How industry lobbyists totally control the White House
How the Bush "administration" is planning to let the lead industry start poisoning children again, like in the good old days.
Go ahead and mod me down again, I'll just repost my comment. I have karma to burn.
- Have a picture
For the love of God, think before you try and refute a collection of (not actually) statistics by dragging out a bunch of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is worth less than the IP packets you used to post it.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I said they weren't right all the time.
Are you contending that if Philip Morris agrees with something, then it's automatically untrue? Perhaps if Philip Morris funded a study confirming gravity's effects, you'd conclude you could walk on the ceiling?
You seem to have established junkscience.com as politically incorrect. You've said little about whether they're factually incorrect.
BTW:
Why not check your references next time.
A your link is from a web site by a long-time anti cell phone activist who insists that cell phones cause illness.
At least I think so -- this is my first time playing "check your references" :)
in big fat government bureaucracies like yours. maybe I should move to your country, if their are plenty of people who think like you.. I mightr make a ton!
Actually, I find your opinion disgusting and amoral. Men and women both have the right to plan their reproduction, but once they reproduce, they can't renege on the deal. Not to mention, I find it unlikely that you would support my right to abortion, in the event my girlfriend were to become pregnant. Sorta sexist, isn't it? Especially if the procedure is as trivial as you imply.
Even so, I can't find it in my heart to disagree on the main point. I find it all too likely that indirect pressure is put on studies and acadamia to make up lies to support conservative agendas. I wouldn't be suprised if I found out that extreme "persuasions" were occuring. Dubya just gives me that kind of impression.
Really sucks when you realize that neither side is "your" side. Is hilarious when someone rants why the democrats/republicans are so much more morally superior to the republicans/democrats, though....
to tell you the truth what the fuck was your stupid point? take a few more shrooms and relax.
My favorite one is the TV commercial where they have the two kids smoking a bong in their dad's study, and one of them pulls out a gun and it goes off accidentally. Then the message flashes on the screen: "Marijuana can distort your sense of reality."
Well, what about bullshit propaganda? Doesn't THAT distort one's sense of reality?
and what was the real danger there? The two teenage kids smoking pot? Or the complete idiot parent who left a loaded gun where the kids can get at it, and who did not teach his kids responsible gun ownership?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
how is it stupid? and I suppose if the european union becomes one nation, smaller former countries are going to love only picking french, english and german leaders. btw ive heard of something even more stupid. you.
bush is poisoning are children!
run away! run away! and holycow! lobbyists! there werent any during clintons years! I swear!
the more you post it bud, the more ridiculous you sound.
later. oh wait, the killer tomatoes are coming! the killer tomatoes are coming!
total joke.
I don't need to be tolerant of deceipt.
You are assuming that the scientific approach is "right". In the past, scientific discoveries are often bent or suppressed for religious or political reasons. We now consider that "wrong".
However, you should also accept that some time in the future, your current views may be just as "wrong" as the Inquisition. Science as we know it today may turn into a gross approximation of a greater truth, the way Newtonian mechanics approximates Einsteinian "truth". I make this analogy deliberately - Einstein may turn out to be slightly or substantially wrong.
Science is a tool by which we discover truth, and it may not be the only or even best tool to discover truth. (For example, Science will likely never prove or disprove God.) To be "intolerant" is to risk not seeing, and is in fact contradictory to the skepticism required of scientists.
This is not to say I don't think that science is the best tool we have today.
It's the new junk-science McCarthyism at work. If you don't like someone's position on a scientific topic, just link that person to a tobacco company. Presto! They're discredited by association. No need to put any further thought into it.
Seastead this.
You also forgot a cabinet full of similar people except for poor Colin Powell trying to put out all the fires lit by Bush Jr. and Company.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
This administration treats the word "science" the same as "compassionate conservatism". It's pure marketing. It's the only way they can ease rules on how much arsenic would be permitted in drinking water and how much fecal matter in the meat covered by the federal school lunch program.
Previous administrations (both Republican and Democrat) made rulings based upon science. This administration makes science based upon the rulings which they desire to enact. Anyone who doesn't see that is letting their views be distorted by their blind love for the Republicans and loathing for Democrats. AKA a Rush Limbaugh "ditto-head".
"if they funded all medical research we'd never cure anything, just get more drugs to treat symptoms..."
.um, hello?
. .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This isn't even close to a scientific argument or anything like that. You just linked the founder of the web site to tobacco companies. Guilt by association, I guess.
What's the point though? Is it "don't listen to the devil words; he's a witch"? Is it "don't read and decide for yourself"?
This is supposed to be a science topic. Shouldn't reason prevail?
I should have left that out. I think it can be easily demonstrated to be false based on a few incontrovertable assumptions about the nature of Rights, but it's not an outright lie.
Sorry. Better editing next time. (I didn't post it at +5. Who knew if anyone would even see it?)
You know, if the government wasn't funding this research, no one would care.
Science has traditionally been funded by "patrons". In the modern world, the patron is often the government. Perhaps we need to go back to an earlier day when the state didn't have a near universal monopoly in the funding of science. Then the problem of taxing the liberals to pay for conservative research (or vice versa, lest we forget the 90's) will disappear.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Pot. Kettle. Black. Slander and Bias have more examples to disprove your assertion than you can shake a stick at.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
It's a tough decision to make. One I personally don't think the government is particularly qualified to make.
I don't play word games. For the goverment to make "decisions", it would imply that sometimes they decide for, rather than against abortion. The goverment, despite all its flaws, has never forced someone to have an abortion, that I am aware of. This is in stark contrast to those nations whose goverments do "make such a decision".
The entire point, is that there is that there is no decision to make. Decisions, if made at all, should be made when you're getting ready to have sex with someone, not 3 weeks later when you realize how utterly fucking retarded you were.
If abortion isn't completely amoral, and a decision no one should ever be allowed to make, then how do you feel about infanticide? There are already those starting to argue such things philosophically and academically, and frankly I am unnerved that I even have to live in the same society as those who could debate shit like that.
All that said, let me say that I find the "pro lifers" equally repugnant. With their wink-wink-nudge-nudge "We'd NEVER condone clinic bombings!" bullshit, there is almost no one to turn to. It's a sick fucking world.
Well, maybe we should get away from how to get more participation in the electorial process to the real issue here. That issue is weather science is being made "conservative" (whatever that means) for political ends? First, we should note that everyone brings their biases to bear when looking at any field of knowledge. The question that must be asked, is how do they deal with this fact. I have to say that over the last 20 years I have seen a lot of "liberal science" in terms of biases exhibited by the researchers. Does this mean that the science was bad? Not necessarily, but it does mean that it was biased. For example, the social biologist that told me that they didn't want to look at "nature" vs. "nurture" in terms of sexual orientation. Why? Because they didn't want to know if it was a "choice" instead of how people were born.
Given the biases of the New York Times, and you have to admit it has biases that are decidely "liberal" (whatever that means), you have to ask what is motivating this article. With that said, let's look at the issues that were raised in the "teaser" for this area.
What is the impact of abortion on breast cancer? Given that breast cancer was known for many years as "the nun's disease", due to the fact that postponing child bearing and failing to nurse have a negative impact on breast cancer risk, is it possible that abortion has impacts on it? Yes, it is possible. Should we look at this risk? I would argue yes. And how about research into the potential risks of abortion in fertility? How widely had this been funded or looked at? The few - and I stress few, because there aren't many - studies I have seen show a significant increase in the risk of being unable to carry a child to term if you have had an abortion. Of course, this isn't "acceptable" science in some quarters and hasn't been looked at in depth.
How about condom availability vs. sexual activity. I think the results are of interest. Also, given the change in social dynamics, I would argue that this is research that should be conducted on a regular basis. What is wrong with asking these questions? Why are we afraid of the results being they for, againist, or neutral?
Anyone who knows what is good for them will make sure they don't repeat such unpatriotic statements.
You republicans get more utterly despicable every day. Bush is many things but a competent plumber certainly ain't one of them. You folks can't even fix an election without leaving a trail a mile wide so don't pretend you can run a police state.
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Bush White House stops EPA from issuing warning about asbestos insulation in homes!
- Have a picture
Conservative Science aka Pseudo Science..
What this article calls conservative science is little more than an attempt to force "Christian/family values" on everyone. Contrary to what some conservatives would have you believe sex isn't dirty its part of life, what reasons people have for engaging in it are there own and shouldn't be subjected to government approval. As for condoms increasing sexual activity, I doubt most people are that weak willed and if they are we have bigger problems to deal with, just because you have a condom doesn't mean your going to have sex more frequently. It's nieve to assume everyone is going to practice abstence. Truth be told teens in Europe are given more information and more sexual freedom and yet American teens have much higher rates of STD's etc. You can't legislate morality..Especially in a free society.
You are assuming that the scientific approach is "right". In the past, scientific discoveries are often bent or suppressed for religious or political reasons. We now consider that "wrong".
You are confusing the scientific method and scientific conclusions. I do not believe that the scientific method will be changed in the foreseeable future. As measurement tools improve, we will doubtless see new discoveries and future studies may reveal flaws our now-current scientific beliefs.
But when a major, peer-reviewed scientific study shows that there is no link between abortions and later breast cancer, suppressing that information is outrageous.
To be "intolerant" is to risk not seeing, and is in fact contradictory to the skepticism required of scientists.
I completely disagree. All reputable scientists are intolerant of the suppression of scientific studies, or the alteration of the results, by those wishing to put forward some political agenda. I am skeptical of the Bush administration, not of the scientists whose work they are suppressing.
Clinton was the worst excuse for a President and a human being every to walk into Washington.
I hope the Democrates never get back into office.
Quicker
"The right of men and women to plan and control their reproduction--to control if, when and under what circumstances they will become parents, is an important one." so youre saying in this case killing a human is ok in this case. which is fine since its ok to kill in self defense. but lets call a spade a spade,sir and thats a FACT.
There have been some thirty years of questionable "studies" (read: politicized science) that favor the political agenda of the Left, yet somehow it was never reported in the mainstream Press.
From Kellermann's shameful "research" concluding that a gun in the home is x times more likely to kill you or a loved one than an intruder (and he couldn't even get x in the same order of magnitude when he repeated the study) to the spotted owl bullshit to today's "global warming" scaremongering, all or most of what passes for government-sponsored "science" has lacked credibility for a long, long time.
But somehow, this was never "news."
But let the Bush Administration follow any kind of science -- and I haven't educated myself on the specifics of the present brouhaha, so I use the word "science" lightly here -- that Leftists don't agree with, and suddenly we're all going to Hell in a handbasket!
I don't think so. We were already well on our way long before GW ever came into power.
Will the alleged "conservative" politicization of Science destroy the reputation of government-sponsored "research?" I think not. Its credibility was destroyed decades ago -- by "liberals."
For the record, I am not a "conservative." At least, not in the sense that the word is being used in America.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Oh, right, so different from the "Do-whatever-you-want-and-someone-else-will-pay-f
Okay, I'm only going to say this once, so pay attention: When the economy is booming, the gov't skims its half of the action and its revenues boom along with the economy. When the economy crashes (in this instance, due to an overinflated tech bubble -- pricked by Clinton's Injustice Department and their pursuit of the Evil Bill Gates©), gov't revenues crash as well. I focus on the revenue side of things, as Federal outlays vary over time in only one direction -- up. Only the rate of increase changes under different leadership, and Clinton's crew pushed that ball ever to the upward direction.
Excuse me? Which President had bin Laden offered to him and refused the offer? Which President timed responses to terrorism explicitly to distract Congressional votes on impeachment? Which President wasted $2 million missles on $10 tents? Which President put into place politically-correct "fast-track" visas for our friends, the Saudis?
Crimus, learn a little history before mindlessly spouting the DNC's nonsense.
Hmmm... I only see one dumbass here -- posting as an AC.
Liberty in our Lifetime
If you intend to suggest that the pursuit of knowledge is (or even can be) neutral and unbiased, then -- no offense -- you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing when human beings are involved. The naturalistic approach to science (for example) assumes that all phenomena can and must be explained without reference to anyone or anything outside the observable universe. This is a prejudice. We may debate the value of it, but it is a bias, pure and simple.
On the other hand - and for the sake of equal time - the religious person assumes at the very least the possibility of divine involvement in "the system" at some time or other - past, present, or future. Again, we may debate the value of it, but it is a bias, pure and simple.
Science does not take place in a vacuum, and there is no such thing as an uninterpreted "fact".
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Ah yes the evil george bush somehow tricked a bunch of rich folks in florida to vote for buchanan instead of gore. And bush somewhow got the election to a statistical tie over Gores awesome message. Also bush bribed Nader into stealing left wing votes.
hmmm no wonder why the dems didnt do as well as a party not in the presidency during midterms.
youre new sig should be:
yea, bush is a moron but hes not as dumb or pathetic as a bunch of liberal clowns.
would totally abolish the constitution. Oh wait.. they already did. but saying this obviously proves that dudes point. since when is not killing a human heartless BTW?
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington times have a new version of Gobbel's 'big lie' it is the myth of the 'liberal media'. By repeating this myth often enough they aim to immunize themselves against criticism for their packs of lies.
Well, just saying it is a "lie" doesn't cut it. There must be some way to evaluate the "liberal media" claim objectively. Perhaps one could look at the voting patterns and party identification of members of the media (reporters, producers, industry executives) just to find out if there is a tilt one way or the other. That doesn't necessarily prove that their personal biases influence their reporting but it could suggest whether or not they *have* those biases. From there one might evaluate major media treatment of politicians and policies from either side of the ideological divide. On could evaluate the use of adjectives to describe partisans or their positions. One could evaluate whether individuals from one side or the other are more often identified by ideology or party (and thus implied to be biased) or not (and thus implied to be impartial). One could measure the amount of time each side of a controversy is given to make their case, etc.
As it turns out such polls & studies *have* been done and while some of the analysis of those studies have been themselves biased the studies themselves seem reasonable and the results are unambiguous. As a demographic group media professionals overwhelmingly self-identify themselves as liberal whereas a signficant majority of the population self-identifies as conservative. Polls of reporters, producers, editors etc. reveal voting patterns that are almost as solidly Democratic as the Black vote. This much is incontrovertible and not even controversial. What remains is whether these acknowledged private biases result in reporting that is actually biased. It is hard to believe that such uniformity of opinion in the newsroom wouldn't result in those uniformly held opinions finding their way into the reporting. However, it would be harder to prove such bias and to be fair some of the individual reporters most closely associated with the Democratic party are widely held to be among the most fair (former Democratic congressional staffers Tim Russert & Chris Matthews come to mind). that being said using such metrics as the use of pejorative adjectives, time given to differing arguments in a controversy etc. *suggest* that the private liberal biases of reporters DO find their way into the reporting.
That unselfconscious bias is pronounced enough that some media outlets have arisen that are self-concscously, more transparently and more distinctly conservative - Fox News being the prime example. The Washington Times is another example though they are balanced by liberal papers that are just as tranparent in their ideological tilt like the Boston Globe (or conservatives would argue the old Gray Lady herself - the New York Times) - On the whole though the great bulk of the mainstream media has a subtle liberal bias while a few newer media outlets have a more pronounced conservative bias.
However - I was relating what happened to my buddy's g/f (and also to another chick I worked with). Dude's g/f is a basket case still, and the operation was almost four years ago. Internal parts were gouged by the sharp end of the curette, much like it is described over here and here. They call it "uterine perforation," which (to me) is a nice way of saying "we gouged a hole in your uterus. whoops! better luck next time."
Your immediate ad hominem response, is a fairly slackwitted conclusion, since all information related in my prior post was from people who have undergone the procedure directly.
Your information here is erroneous, as a quick trip to the google can show..
According to two decent sources, "Dilation and curettage (D&C) is usually done if another abortion method has failed to completely remove the contents of the uterus. D&C is done to be sure that no tissue is left in the uterus. "
Again, this ignores the possibility of an undersized foetus or ectopic pregnancy, or a botched first attempt; additionally, according to Yale Newhaven Health, dilation+curettage+evacuation certainly is the standard for abortions in the second 12 weeks.. This negates your assumption that
In fact, 'tis quite the contrary, my dear. See the Newhaven link above for details.
In case you're wondering, I grabbed my links from the first google for abortion+dilation+vacuum and you can do the same.. I don't discriminate against correct and factual information, even if it does come from a highly biased source. Next time, do some research before trying to enlighten people. Thanks.
Or maybe you could look at the political views of the owners of the media. Murdoch makes no secret of the fact he sells the editorial line in his newspapers and TV to whatever political faction matches his personal interests. That typically means anti-union and most important anti regulations that restrict media monopolies.
The only sense in which there is a 'liberal bias' in the media is on social issues where racist opinions like those that got Lott the boot recently are pretty much rejected by almost everyone in the mainstream media, as is anti-gay bigottry, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-catholic etc. When Lott, Barr, DeLay and co are complaining about the 'liberal media' they are in most cases complaining that their 'conservative social agenda' is rejected as biggotry by pretty much everyone with a college education under the age of 45.
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"Now we all get Smallpox vaccine, well not all of us the Government doesn't want to be blamed for the few deaths that will happened, they would rather give you the option to take it, then ask you to fill out a waiver of responsibility."
First off, you seem to think that giving out the small pox vaccinations immediately is patently the "right thing." This begs the question "What happens when (not if) thousands die in a nationwide small pox vaccination program and it turns out there never was going to be a small pox attack at all?"
Secondly, you seem to think that the small pox vaccine is just a little prick in the arm. It's not. The small pox vaccine has changed little (if at all) over the centuries. In fact, it is quite literally the first vaccine ever.
What is it? Is it some chemical anti-viral cocktail? Is it a dormant version of the virus in question? No, it's cow pox ("vaccine" comes from the Latin "vacus," which means "cow").
When you get this vaccine, you are given cow pox. The area on which you are vaccinated becomes a large, puss-filled blister, something that can spread around the body (like chicken pox), something that is quite contageous (like chicken pox). The area is kept bandaged to keep you or anybody else from touching it. Not that that stops all the other symptoms that will knock most otherwise healthy people on their asses for a week or so. This ain't no flu shot.
The small pox vaccine involves being voluntarily infected with a real disease. Cow pox is used because it's not as deadly as small pox. But there is a big gap between "not deadly" and "not as deadly as small pox."
Extacy puts holes in your brain!
The average heavy Marijuana smoker gets cancer at the age of 26!
Weed makes men grow breasts, and women hairy!
Marijuana use leads to use of other drugs!(Gateway theory.)
Marijuana has no medical value.
Is that what they call "Political Science"?
BTW, the second one is true, but only because the average age of heavy marijuana users is 26.
You could just as easily say the average person who uses words like "Fo Sheezy", and "Shiznitz" ges cancer at the age of 19.
I think a lot of us tend to be overlooking the real problem at work. Why should congress even be involved with this research in the first place. Someone will always be trying to influence the science thats produced with their money (lets face it how many people try to silence the studies showing that lax gun regulations lead to fewer murders etc). The real problem is that hte government has the power to control what gets researched. The government should not be involved in scientific research beyond that which is required for the military (which is clearly defined in the constitution).
I have yet to see anywhere in the constitution that gives the government the right to spend billions of dollars on scientific research for biased projects to appease those in power. It was not an option back then. Science should be funded by those who want the science done. Naturally standardization and scientific bureaus would end up springing forward to review them. but it is not the governments place to say what should and shouldn't researched.
People need to realize that the government can't be a cureall for anything. For every problem they solve a million more are normally created. Thats why the constitution tried to limit the governments intervention with private affairs.
Unfortunately too many people tend to be idealists and discount human nature. They don't think people are going to vie for power, or abuse the power they have, or be greedy and take advantage of the system. Idealism is just a silly joke though. No matter how much you say "in a perfect world government funding for medicine or science won't be biased" it won't take away the fact that we live in an imperfect world, and have to deal wtih the cards dealt to us. We can't always assume the ideal model is correct.
Philip Garcia
While EE's may have P-SPICE to verify their calculations that use ideal models, no such thing works for modeling humanity.
One-third of all US aid goes to Israel.
Holy shit, that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard!
It's so amazing, in fact, that I'd really, really like to see some sort of evidence to back that up. It's an impressive claim; it deserves impressive proof.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If only life were that simple. What about:
It's not always an easy decision. I would love it if we could always be sure that the decision to carry the baby to term was the right one. I would also love to live in a world where everyone would live in peace and harmony. But we have to live in the real world, where nothing is ever as simple as we would like.
I wanna be cool like SubjectLineTroll :(
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Now we're the largest supplier of food to them, followed by South Korea and Japan. However, they're so obsessed with controlling their population they re-bag the rice we donate so it still appears they are self-sufficient.
Unfortunately, sensibility has little to do with effectiveness as president. That dynamic duo is responsible for the current crisis with North Korea.
I'd like to see more immediate control over my taxes. You know that box that lets you decide whether $3 goes to federal matching funds? Let's extend that concept. After I've worked out how much tax I owe, let me designate exactly where it goes, i.e. what percentage of it goes to defense, what percentage to welfare programs, and so on.
Yes, I know there'd be problems with that; maybe it couldn't be left entirely up to me. If a significant part of my taxes could be directly allocated by me, though, that would be empowering me in a way almost as significant as the ballot itself.
Here is a free link to the news article.
Please post news.google or news.yahoo links instead. Thanks.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
#1 The poor med student deserves to be able to fuck, even when it could mess up her life for years to come. Let's even forget that abortion violates her Hippocratic Oath...
#2 Hellz yeh, this is what I'm talking about. Now, if she could only get rid of the other 2, there could be all sorts of spending/entertainment money! Note: I just re-read this. Most attourneys wouldn't have trouble arguing pre-emptive child support here, you know. Realistically, she could end up being landlord.
#3 Something I can't make fun of. I have an idea though, let's work on eliminating the real problem, which is rape.
#4 Ask any physically handicapped person... wouldn't you rather be dead? Wait, they say "No" ? Well, let's find one too dumb to be able to answer honestly...
#5 This has to be rare, but also just stupid enough to be true. But we could always just show her how $500 and an outpatient procedure can get rid of fetuses because.... sex doesn't create babies, it creates lumps of protoplasm! Yeh, that's what they are... why educate when we can operate.
It's never a decision. The decision comes when you are thinking about whether or not to spread your legs (see #3 for the exception). It's simpler then too, because deciding that you don't want to have a baby doesn't involve $$$ for an abortion or guilt (Is there any guilt? Unlike the moronic pro-lifers, I find it difficult to believe that anyone ever feels guilty). I mean, responsibility, or encouraging it in others is a bad thing, right?
I have a question : *HAS* the US instituted these pollution credits yet? Because if it has... I'm here in Lithuania, a great place to grow trees, and I'd love to start buying up land and planting trees.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Since turnabout is fair play, let me call attention to your typo. Paragraph 1, line 1, word 8:
First off: I have friends who have undergon abortions,
Then let me point out emotional responses are not ordinarily considered arbiters of fact in science. I don't know, but I can hardly imagine that 'grossness' is anywhere mentioned in JAMA when doctors weigh the pros and cons of surgical procedures.
In other words, what you personally think about the procedure is not relevant in arguing the ethics, efficacy or safety of it.
What happened to 'your buddy's girlfriend,' has problems as part of an argument:
1. Who are you and are you lying?
2. Can you give meaningful weight to another person's emotional state and its duration?
3. Your using the emotional state of women you've observed in your argument could be said to employ the either very old or very new analytical technique of 'small-sample statistics.'
Okay, so you're telling me that for your argument to be true or at least convincing, abortion has to involve medical malpractice.
See, 'small-sample,' above.
Your quote casts dilation and curettage as a follow-up, either as a method of insuring successful abortion or to effect a tissue removal after a successful abortion by other means. Since you quote a source that says it is by no means the only method, your statement contains my counterargument. Thank you, this saves time.
You then write:
"Again, this ignores the possibility of an undersized foetus or ectopic pregnancy, or a botched first attempt; additionally, according to Yale Newhaven Health [yalenewhavenhealth.org], dilation+curettage+evacuation certainly is the standard for abortions in the second 12 weeks.."
First, the 'again' in the above passage is meaningless. 'Again' implies that there was a first time. There wasn't. It seems to give your statement a weight it simply doesn't have.
Second, a human pregnancy is divided into three trimesters--three, three-month periods. You ignore everything except for situations and methodologies involving a woman's waiting at least twelve weeks, three full months, one third of the full term before procuring an abortion.
Your arguments assume that a woman *must* wait through *three* missed periods before discovering her pregnancy and deciding to do anything about it.
Again I tell you that this is not necessary. Few women in industrialized nations who suspect that they are pregnant are forced to wait for Friends to go into reruns before making their decisions.
You conclude your answer with this:
Actually, I wasn't wondering, but since you volunteer it, I might mention that an enlightened researcher probably should avoid strongly partisan sources when arguing about an issue: people with other-than-objective viewpoints tend to load their arguments with emotionally-charged language, spurious anecdotal observation and the employment of selective quotation in attempt to propagandize the inattentive.
Thank you for your response.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Or maybe you could look at the political views of the owners of the media. Murdoch makes no secret of the fact he sells the editorial line in his newspapers and TV to whatever political faction matches his personal interests.
Umm... Murdock, uh... Fox News which I specifically mentioned as one of the few explictly conservative media outlets. And one can certainly come up with eqaully liberal counter examples like Katherine Graham at the Washington Post. For the most part though the corporate owners of media outlets don't have anywhere near the control over the tilt of the reporting as the editors do. One could argue that the most they generally do is hire the editors who then set the tone. The bias of the editors (by and large) is known and I already dealt with it in my initial post - it is generally liberal. The one exception would be very new media outlets - like Fox news, or the Washington times where the owner set up the outlet sometimes with an explicit ideological purpose - but again for the most part these are the very same explictly conservative examples I've already cited.
The only sense in which there is a 'liberal bias' in the media is on social issues where racist opinions like those that got Lott the boot recently are pretty much rejected by almost everyone in the mainstream media, as is anti-gay bigottry, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-catholic etc.
I will agree that "liberal bias" is more pronounced on social issues but would not confine it to racism where there is a national consensus (heck, the National Review was more strident in calling for Lott's ouster than many liberal journals *- see note below) It also extends to more controversial issues where there is no concensus - like the precise policies to combat racism & it's effects (racism like Lott's is universally condemned - whether affirmative action is a valid or appropriate policy is a much more controversial and debatable matter), or abortion where opinion is evenly divided.
* It should be noted though that National Review has been working successfuly to purge the conservative movement of racists for decades starting with their successful campaign to marginalise groups like the John Birch Society. Think back to the letter Correta Scott King wrote to William F. Buckley thanking him for his contribution to purging society of racism. While it is tempting to go the route the NAACP seems content with recently that ANY opposition to their policy REGARDLESS OF IT'S REASONING is prima facia proof of racism. The world is more complex than that and there are good arguments, explictly anti-racialist/anti-racist arguments to be made against government policies that explictly note your race in order to grant favors to one race or another. It is ironic that Lott was asked (and seemed willing) to repudiate his belief that one race should be elevated over another in government policy by simply switching which race received the benefit. One could argue he was being asked to exchanging a bitter, hateful racism for a condescenging "white man's burden" version of the same.
Actually, I just read the answer to that in a back issue of National Geographic while sitting in a hospital waiting room. The reason is that it would take 20-30 years from the start of drilling for the fields along the artic costal plain to reach their full output capacity. So Bush+Co. really are looking to the long-term, which is pretty unusual for a politician. Just not in the way you'd like (unfortunately).
Here's another source as a bonus: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analy sis_publications/arctic_national_wildlife_refuge/h tml/summary.html
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
so youre saying in this case killing a human is ok
That is a moral argument based on a subjective set of ethics. Before you defend yourself, consider this - according to many (even Christian) belief systems, a person doesn't have a soul until they "draw the breath of life". It's not hard to realize that for many, the breath of life is oxygen outside the mothers womb (not as you may believe, the training of the lungs in the last trimester). In short - it's not a person, it's an organism. In that belief system, morality is not an issue. If you think that's a justification, please recall that its ok to kill in self defense is also a justification of a set of moral values. It's actually NOT OK to kill in self defense if you believe in such a thing as taking a life being immoral.
This argument will never be solved for one reason above all else - you CANNOT decide the actions another person WILL take, they must decide for themselves. You will never be able to stop abortion (nor will you be able to convince the rest of the world that your concept of morality is right) - it's the oldest procedure after the oldest proffession. Ancient cultures would stack rocks and logs on an unmarried womans stomach until 'it went away' if she became pregnant before marrage. It almost always ended in death. Being the advanced culture we are we've moved on to the more humane coat hanger.
In short Tom, before you become engrossed in the 'facts' of your morality, consider the morality of killing two people when you can prevent the death of one. Temper your judgement with compassion, and learn how to forgive.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
If your religious dogma is liberal, how can your religion be taught by 'repeat after me'? (Dogma and Liberal have nearly opposite meanings...) ;)
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
...but it didn't increase my sexual activity one bit.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Nonsense indeed, there are no 'levels' of integrity. You either have it or you don't. Defending or attacking the _magnitude_ of someone's lack of integrity as justification doesn't (in my opinion) make them more or less trust worthy or respectable than another... it makes them devoid of integrity and unworthy of the respect you think they deserve.
I'm not defending anyone, I'm attacking your ambigious sense of honor.
Before responding, understand that I'm not pro-bush or republican or anti-democrat, I just can't stand those who think thier "side" is better than the other. When will you understand that there aren't sides, there are only those who get caught in the middle? Step back for a minute from the fray and look at the collateral damage your 'sides' are causing. Then tell me again who it is your defending.
PS - Clinton was also indicted - did we forget whitewater? By my count that makes us 5 for 5 of the Presidents you named.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Did the whole Whitewater nonsense result in a single felony conviction of any sort, on anyone?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Oh, right, so different from the "Do-whatever-you-want-and-someone-else-will-pay-fo r-it" ethos of the Clinton years.
As far as keeping the budget defecit down, the "Tax-and-spend" liberals seem to make better sense than the "Cut-taxes-and-spend" conservatives. Anyone with a modicum of financial sense can tell you, you're better off paying for it now than paying for it later. Of course, most Americans don't have that much sense, judging from the average household's consumer debt.
When the economy crashes (in this instance, due to an overinflated tech bubble -- pricked by Clinton's Injustice Department and their pursuit of the Evil Bill Gates©), gov't revenues crash as well.
Riiight. The stock market collapsed due to US v. Microsoft. Not because idiot investors were pumping their retirement savings into Pets.com and certainly not because of the accounting shenanigans going on at corporations like Enron and WorldCom.
Which President wasted $2 million missles on $10 tents?
Oh, and the current 'War on Terrorism' is producing a much better ROI? We've got a bunch of guys who might have something to do with Al-Qaeda locked up in Cuba, but terrorist attacks continue unabated. Big improvement there. But that's ok, Dubya can draw attention away from his failure to get bin Laden by starting crap with Iraq again. If Clinton had done that, he would have been (perhaps rightfully, I'll admit) accused of 'wagging the dog'.
Of course, this is now so far off topic it's hardly worth posting.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
That is a moral argument based on a subjective set of ethics. Before you defend yourself, consider this - according to many (even Christian) belief systems, a person doesn't have a soul until they "draw the breath of life".
And according to other belief systems, a person doesn't have a soul until he/she is given a name. In fact, in some belief systems, people don't have souls at all. So perhaps we should discard any laws enforcing anyone's right to life, because our 'belief systems' can't all agree on when it begins and ends?
Obviously that won't work, so we have to have a logical, scientifically-defined beginning and end of life, and no one argues that cessation of breathing is the end of life, so why should commencement of breathing mark the beginning? Brain function would seem a more reasonable measure, although given the definition of "life" found in most biology textbooks it would be hard to argue against conception being the beginning of life.
In short - it's not a person, it's an organism.
And if you keep repeating that long enough, people will believe it. Some already do. But that doesn't make it so. If it's not a person, what is it? Surely you're not suggesting it is something other than homo sapiens?
It's actually NOT OK to kill in self defense if you believe in such a thing as taking a life being immoral.
Huh? Are you trying to say that a set of moral values can't have exceptions to its rules?
You will never be able to stop abortion (nor will you be able to convince the rest of the world that your concept of morality is right) - it's the oldest procedure after the oldest proffession.
Unfortunately true. However, we'll never be able to stop murder, theft, or rape either. That doesn't stop us from making them illegal.
In an ideal world, all the pro-lifers would be working on making abortion unnecessary by improving the adoption system, removing rapists from the streets, and promoting better sex education and easier availability of effective contraceptives. Work toward these goals would do much more to lower the number of abortions performed than blocking clinics, harassing their unfortunate customers, and killing doctors.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Without the poisonous influence of the DoJ's meddling, the stock market would still have declined, but perhaps with a softer landing (and less serious impact on those companies which were marginal, but should have been able to pull out of their dives).
Erhm, where in the US have these terrorist attacks taken place? Certainly, there have been attacks overseas, but we have not seen anything new here (unless you count the anthrax attacks, which are arguably linked to Iraq, rather than al Qaeda). Knock wood, our forces have been wildly successful at preventing a repeat of 9-11.I'm not a fan of everything Bush has done, but to accuse him of failing to "win" the war on terrorism when there have been no further attacks in the US seems like a huge stretch.
Yes, I know that this has strayed off-topic, but your arguments are simply too specious to ignore.
Liberty in our Lifetime
That anybody has a right to anything is a matter of belief.
Historically, people have right to own land if they get there first, win a war, or perhaps purchase it. However, in a communist society, there simply is no such individual right to own land.
Civil rights for black people in the US is a very recent thing, just like women's rights, including reproductive rights concerning abortion or even contraception. In most countries, euthanasia is not a right, but it may be in the future. Drinking alcohol was not a right during certain periods, but even now marijuana is legal in certain places.
Coming back to the point, if you eat a dog, the police in one country might arrest you, while police in another might ask you if it was tasty. You can't eat beef in some places. In general, endangered species enjoy the right to be free from hunting. Many managed species (fish, for example) can only be hunted in limited ways. Different animals have different rights to life that we grant them.
So I'm not sure what you mean by "incontrovertible assumptions about the nature of Rights".
Can you provide proof of that, or are you just making it up? Many smokers have long lived health problems, and many of those are on Medicare/Medicaid.
or, you know, if it was decided by the voting system we have Gore would have won. But it wasn't. Between the "Jews for Buchanan" vote, the black voters that Jeb tossed off the voting rolls without cause, and black voters that were harassed on election day there were about 60k Gore votes uncounted. And in any case the election wasn't decided by votes, it was decided by judicial fiat.
If I remember it right, Sendero Luminoso in neighbour Peru killed peasants who had the finger marked with the indelible ink used to avoid repeat voting. And voting was compulsory.
And, in Sierra Leone, the rebels chopped the hands of voters.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Part of me would like a little quiz on the US Constitution when you vote and the vote only counts if you do well enough on it, but that's obviously unconstitional so I wouldn't actually support it.
What about this? Present the test, those who answer it don't know it's unconstitutional. Thus, only thos e who refuse the test are allowed to vote.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
1) It's a collection of cells that are in the process of becoming a human being. A collection of cells that are not self aware (at least not until sometime in the 3rd trimester, certainly not in the first), cannot survive outside the womb, and only scientfically qualify as an embryo, not a fully developed human being.
... Which I think is kind of what you ended with, but it's hard to tell with some of the hardline tactics you started with...
2) Yes, I'm saying a set of moral values cannot have exceptions (if you want people to take them seriously anyway). Ghandi was a fine example - he would not resort to violence even if it meant dying for his beliefs. You can MAKE exceptions, but by making them, you are breaking the very morals you claim to hold.
3) In an ideal world, all the pro-lifers would be working on making abortion unnecessary by improving the adoption system, removing rapists from the streets, and promoting better sex education and easier availability of effective contraceptives I'm sorry... as opposed to... ? The "pro-choicers'" want that too -- let's not leave out pedofiles and incest cases. But you still aren't taking into account medical reasons for abortion. Find me one person who WANTS abortion to be a part of this world, and I'll show you someone who probably has kids buried in the back yard.
Your other arguments belittle and do not properly address the issue of respecting the beliefs and rights of others (not stopping us from making rape, murder, theft illegal, discard any laws enforcing anyone's right to life, etc.). That's not the point that is being made and you know it. I could use the same tactic on you by saying that by your standards, a woman who has an abortion for a blighted ovum should be put jail for murder. (A blighted ovum is where the embryonic sac develops but there's no baby inside. It'll kill the mother if she doesn't get an abortion, it's an abortion by all rights, but there's no baby involved.)
I'll simplify my point (and to some degree the pro-choice position) for you:
There are thousands of reasons a woman would want or need an abortion. You are not in a position to judge the morality of that decision, nor are you in a position to pass judgement. There are far too many emotional, physical, moral, religious and pure economic reasons for you (or anyone other than the woman and in SOME cases the man responsible) to get involved. You don't have to live with it, and I can tell you first hand that it is not something a woman does lightly. You may think it's wrong, you may believe with all your heart that it is murder in the highest, but it's still not for you to decide. If you believe in God, believe he'll take care of it. If you don't but believe it's morally wrong, then you have a moral dilema that only you can solve for yourself - you cannot solve it for the rest of the world.
Yes, you could make it illegal. Throw another stick of plutonium on the legal system, because it's not like we've already criminalized the living shit out of everything else anyway. This is NOT an issue that the law, the church, morality, your personal convictions or GOD himself can sort out (short of killing everyone on the planet). We'd all be better served by solving the reasons women get abortions, making it illegal will only make things worse.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Because if you aren't tolerant of other people's opinion, then by your own definition you're a bigot.
Then I'm a bigot. I have no problem with that.
I don't see any global warming around here in the midwest.
Perhaps if they taught science, rather than creationism, in the midwest, you wouldn't make absurd statements like that.
The reason is that it would take 20-30 years from the start of drilling for the fields along the artic costal plain to reach their full output capacity. So Bush+Co. really are looking to the long-term, which is pretty unusual for a politician.
And, at that peak, it would produce about 2% of the oil that we use. Bush is not looking long-term. He's just paying off the oil companies that donated so much to his campaign.
You seem to conveniently ignore the cost of converting to a cleaner technology. It might be cheaper in the long run for PolluteCo to continue to buy pollution credits.
So you prefer the current system where there is no real economic incentive for them to reduce pollution? Sorry, but I'd rather see if the pollution credit system resulted in cleaner technologies rather than simply wait for the Earth to become uninhabitable.
How did you think we arrived at the scientific method to start with? The process of obtaining the truth is iterative, and the point is that at one point in time people felt perfectly "right" - as right as you feel today - to throw away scientific findings because they contradict "higher" principles.
As I point out in my earlier post, science as we know it today has obvious failings. The most obvious one is its complete inapplicability to the concept and knowledge of God. There are other examples. For example, we are terrible at tracing cause. Medical science has identified hundreds of carcinogens, but it is very difficult to conclude that something causes cancer.
We might be learning about our universe in a very different way five hundred years from now. I don't think it is possible to say what that method even looks like, the same way a priest in the Middle Ages could not imagine science today. The scientific method is not only not the pinnacle of learning, it might actually be near the end of its usefulness.
suppressing that information is outrageous.
I agree. It is possibly even criminal.
Funny, I interpret this as the current administration is willing to review and investigate other scientific findings that are currently censored and degraded by the national media -- media such as the NYT that are aligned with the political party opposed to the current administration. This willingness fully embodies the concept of "The Land of the Free", because we are free to hold any ideas we wish, even if those ideas go against the "teachings" of the national media.
Governments aren't the only organizations we should distrust.
.... a "none of the above" choice.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
As I point out in my earlier post, science as we know it today has obvious failings. The most obvious one is its complete inapplicability to the concept and knowledge of God.
I do not consider that a "failing." I believe that religion is one reason that so many people are incapable of the critical thought necessary for science. Religion teaches people to believe in fantastic things for which there is no real evidence. Religion is the antithesis of science.
You mention a "knowledge" of God. I understand that there are strongly held beliefs in God, but what knowledge is there? Beliefs, no matter how strongly held, do not constitute knowledge. Consider the Heaven's Gate cult. The members of that cult were were so absolutely convinced of their beliefs that they killed themselves, believing they were shedding their earthly "containers" to catch a ride on an unseen spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp Comet.
The scientific method is not only not the pinnacle of learning, it might actually be near the end of its usefulness.
The scientific method has not changed since it was invented by William Harvey in the 16th century. It has stood the test of time. And it is so simple that I really do not believe that it has some yet-to-be-discovered flaw. The scientific theory is just these simple steps:
* Observe: Collect evidence and make measurements relating to the phenomenon you intend to study.
* Hypothesize: Invent a hypothesis explaining the phenomenon that you have observed.
* Predict: Use the hypothesis to predict the results of new observations or measurements.
* Verify: Perform experiments to test those predictions. "Testing", or attempting to experimentally falsify, is thought by many to be a better choice of term here.
* Evaluate: If the experiments contradict your hypothesis, reject it and form another. If they confirm it, make more predictions and test it further.
These steps are repeated continually, building a larger and larger set of well-tested hypotheses to explain more and more phenomena.
I do not believe that the method is flawed in some way and is, in fact, rock-solid. There are nuances having to do with the way one designs an experiment, statistical significance, control groups, etc., but the basics of the Scientific theory have stood the test of time.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The naturalistic assumption rejects without consideration even the possibility of non-naturalistic explanations of events. By making this assumption, the scientist betrays that he is not interested in explaining things, but that he is interested only in explanations that suit his biases. In my judgment this raises two questions:
And it doesn't work the other way around: just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it's supernatural.
Of course. But the naturalist goes too far. He says, "I can't explain it, but it is definitely not supernatural." This is preposterous. A man who admits he can't explain something is not in the best of positions for making bold claims about those things. The fact that a thing cannot presently be explained certainly does not mean that it has an immediate supernatural cause, but it may have one. Rejection of this possibility is intellectually dishonest when it comes from someone who would have us believe that he is only seeking to "explain phenomena", and it reveals that the "seeker" is not really interested in the answers, but only in answers of a certain kind.
This fact, in my view, more than justifies the observation that scientists are no more "objective" than politicians. They have their axes to grind, too, and we need to stop believing the myth of neutrality.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
William G. Manning, et al., "The Taxes of Sin: Do Smokers and Drinkers Pay Their Way?" Journal of the American Medical Association, March 17, 1989, p. 1604
Ahem.
:).
1) Have you heard of adoption? If this 'young med student' were really concerned about the lives she could save as a doctor, she could easily put her child up for adoption or give parental responsibility to one of her ever-willing relatives...
2) What the hell kind of example is that? What kind of whore fucks a guy for rent, anyways... trailer park trash. That's who. In the United States, is she going to have enough money to get an abortion, anyway? NO. And by the way, your precious mother would be losing custody of all 3 of her children.
3) Ah, the one case in which abortion is fairly widely accepted. I'd like to reiterate a point from nomorenicksleft when I say that perhaps we should focus on eliminating rape.
4) Well, she can always hand over custody to adoption services... Social workers love all kinds of children. Are you trying to say that killing a child is better than at least giving it a chance with a family that has the means or the time to cater to his or her needs?
5) What kind of assbackwards example is this? She didn't know anything, and then Billy Joe from accross the street says "can I plow your bramble patch"? Get real. And as for little children not knowing how babies are made, perhaps it's for the best... we don't need to inform children about the wonders of life when they should be worrying about simpler things.
I think the big problem with teaching abstinence in schools is that most of these schools take it as an excuse to not teach anything else.
They merely say "don't have sex" and consider the case solved. This has to be taught within the context of healthy relationships, sensible precautions, actual dangers (not overhyped, context-less ones), and real options.
It's just simply not enough to merely say "don't do it."
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
You didn't post any links or references, so I'm curious. Did this "majority of studies" find a link between abortion and breast cancer, or a link between not carrying a pregnancy to term and breast cancer?
I don't have the references here, so I can't give them. However, I can say that the studies are about the link between "not carrying a pregnancy to term" and breast cancer.
With that said, the medical definition of a miscarriage (which is the other side of not carrying a pregnancy to term) is "spontaneous abortion". So we're talking "abortion" either way, whether it was willful or not.
First, try looking for a reference newer than 1989. Secondly, try a reference that includes far more information in its modeling of the costs involved than the Wasserman report.
While Social Security costs may be decreased because of early death, early death due to smoking also accounts for a ton of lost income tax revenue and economic productivity. Also include familial costs for those dealing with smoking-related family members conditions and lost revenue from those debilitated (but not dead) by smoking and you start to see that when all factors are included, smokers pose a significant financial and emotional strain on the country.
The Wasserman report in JAMA was good for its time, but it was far too simplistic to account for everything we can now account for in defining the cost of smokers on the nation. Do what I did and go to ISI's Web of Science and peruse the 100 different article which cite the Wasserman report to see more recent information concerning this topic.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon