You do realize that to get people to stop or actually slow down breeding means making their life better while genocide means the opposite? Fact, well off, educated people, especially women with access to effective birth control, breed less which is the reason that every developed country has (ignoring immigration) negative population growth and even the States barely has positive growth.
Actually it is mostly American history books that spread the "US Defender of Freedom" propaganda. Others record that America declared war on Germany for the simple reason that Germany had already declared war on America after America had sat out a couple of years of war so they could make money.
The Gimp really needs a better name. Recently someone who knows next to nothing about computers asked me to recommend a free graphics program. I started talking about the Gimp but could immediately see in their eyes that the name turned them off, plus I felt stupid recommending a program called Gimp. It's a good program, plenty good enough for my use but the name does not inspire confidence to anyone who doesn't even know about free as in libre software.
To be honest I didn't watch the videos due to being on dial-up but "The Battle of Athens" comes up every time there is a thread like this so I've researched it in the past. Seems there was a shortage of arms in the county so they broke into the armory using a key which they didn't have a right to have and armed themselves. To quote http://constitution.org/mil/tn/batathen.htm (there's lots of similar on the net)
Short of firearms and ammunition, the GIs scoured the county to find them. By borrowing keys to the National Guard and State Guard Armories, they got three M-1 rifles, five.45 semi-automatic pistols, and 24 British Enfield rifles. The armories were nearly empty after the war's end.
Besides even in a country like Canada where we have no constitutional right to arms, rural folks would likely have enough arms in the form of long guns to do similar if corruption became so open.
A little background info for aspiring entomologists. Neonicotinoids are an interesting class of insecticides. They are valued because they have relatively low mammalian toxicity but they are very effective against insects. Neonics are systemic insecticides, i.e., they get inside plants and are distributed into all plant tissues. Neonicotinoid residues found in pollen and nectar are consumed by flower-visiting insects such as bees. Concentrations of residues can reach lethal levels in some situations. Neonicotinoids can persist in soil for months or years after a single application. After plants absorb neonicotinoids, they slowly metabolize the compounds. Some of the breakdown products are as toxic or more toxic to honey bees than the original active ingredient. Honey bees exposed to sublethal levels of neonicotinoids can experience problems with flying and navigation, reduced taste sensitivity, and slower learning of new tasks, which all impact foraging ability. Keep in mind that neonicotinoids were on the market for about 10 years before colony collapse disorder was noticed.
Very interesting and I'd mod up if I hadn't already posted. The other questions. How destructive are the insects that the neonicotinoids are controlling? How effective are the alternatives? Is this just maximizing huge profits or make or break scenario? I'm not knowledgeable on this subject.
You're suggesting that the only way we will ever stop malaria is to poison mosquitoes into extinction?
It works.
No it doesn't (exception being smallpox) as almost always a resistant strain develops
50 million lives were lost because they weren't "rich enough" to deserve our health care or research funding. It's as simple as that.
Nonsense. The developed world doesn't have malaria now because they drove it to extinction in the wild via DDT and similar pesticides.
Actually the important thing was mechanical. Draining swamps is very effective to control mosquitoes along with judicious usage of pesticides, ideally a variety to prevent immune strains.
Not this bullshit again. DDT was never banned for malaria prevention, just every other use and is still used for indoor treatment for malaria carrying mosquitoes though I doubt they make wallpaper out of it any more. Pesticides are like anti-biotics, use them only when needed as immunity is built up in the target population which is one of the main reasons that DDT isn't used as much for malaria prevention, just as penicillin isn't used much anymore for infections. The Stockholm convention banned DDT for all uses except malaria carrying mosquito control though they did discourage it. Currently the World Health Organization does encourage using DDT for indoor use to control mosquitoes in malaria infected areas. Press release, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/ And staying on topic, I had a pesticide application ticket many years ago. It was stressed to only use pesticides as a last resort, to use what was effective, and no more and one of the main dangers was how sensitive bees were to insecticides compared to most insects. Fish were also very sensitive to some insecticides and herbicides so you'd have chemicals with a low LD50 yet a high LC50 level. Toxicity can be very complex.
I think it would be more accurate to talk of technological life rather then intelligent life. Even currently on Earth there are various intelligent species. Dolphins, octopus, ravens are some examples that come to mind as quite intelligent yet no hope of ever being technological. For humans, not only are we intelligent but we're social and have thumbs and are also very general purpose, eg we live over most of the Earth without many problems. Super intelligent species without thumbs probably never get technological and a species that doesn't pass on it's knowledge isn't going to go far and a species that is limited in habitat probably won't survive for long.
He also didn't allow another election as Ortega did. Allende didn't live long enough to have the chance and was replaced by a right wing dictator IIRC. Anyways the point is that there has been right wing dictators, especially in the American sphere of influence. Both philosophies have branches that involve minimal or in the case of the left, no government and neither actually follows those philosophies and often go to in the opposite extreme including government backed genocide.
Every South and Central American dictator excepting Castro (who replaced a right wing dictator), especially those who got into power with the help of the American military. In the Americas they were often put into power to protect American interests (corporations), especially the banana growers.
Counterexamples: Salvador Allende of Chile (the spur for Pinochet's rise to power) and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua (in the mid 80s).
We're talking dictators, not democratically elected leaders. Allende was noted as the first democratically elected marxist in the Americas and killed by the Americans (Kissinger denied it in case someone down there opened their mouth to paraphrase him) and Ortega was elected, then lost a couple of elections then was re-elected.
BTW, Hitler took over the Socialist party, purged all the socialists but kept the name
No, he was one of the founders of the National Socialist party. And I gather they did believe in socialism for the master race.
Right wing philosophy, there are aristocrats and there are common people. Who the aristocrats are varies between different right wing groups but the idea that some are more equal is right wing as was established in the leadup to the French revolution. In America the right believes those with money are more important and deserving of special privileges. Hitler was a bit of a mixed bag, he started out in intelligence to infiltrate the DAP but liked the leaders anti-communist and anti-capitalist views and joined as member #55. Threatened to quit when the renamed DAP was going to join the socialist party and maneuvered himself to chairman with absolute power.
and eventually attacked the USSR who he hated along with all communists
Well, what is that supposed to mean with respect to the left/right spectrum? That only right-wing countries would invade a communist country like the USSR?
Hitler was well known for being anti-communist
Nazi Germany was an ideologically screwed up country where, for example, animals had better rights than some humans did. Treating animals with rights at least equal to humans is normally considered very left-wing, unless the humans in question are being stuffed into ovens.
And treating certain types of people as having less rights then animals is very right wing. As you said, Germany was very ideologically screwed up at the time, which is a problem with the whole left vs right thing, especially when ignoring statist vs non-statist.
same with the rest of the fascist governments of the time, at war with the communists.
They were competitors. I don't think the effort has much meaning with respect to ideology, left or right. The communists of the USSR have a history of taking out leftist rivals both inside the communist party and outside (such as the anarchists).
Heard an interesting documentary on Canadian involvement in the Spanish civil war. Canadians that went to fight for the republicans were charged with being communist sympathizers when they came home. They all said that they went to fight fascism. Things were not cut and dried. The USSR did mass killings without caring about race so were for equality which is left wing and the fascists did mass killings based on race which is right wing. The real problem is the authoritarians which come in all flavours and to have someone such as the over-poster state that by definition the right is never authoritarian flys in the face of history where authoritarians come in all political stripes. Some to enforce equality and some to force in-equality.
Again, Darwin's basic premise has not changed. Random mutations occur. Beneficial ones get passed; detrimental ones do not. Species evolve over time. Science has merely explained in more detail how exactly this occurs. But it hasn't dramatically altered how Darwin described the process. Darwin purposefully left the mechanism unanswered as he did not know.
There has been changes such as horizontal gene transfer, where with the help of a virus, genes can be transferred across species. Totally different way for evolution to occur without mutations.
Every South and Central American dictator excepting Castro (who replaced a right wing dictator), especially those who got into power with the help of the American military. In the Americas they were often put into power to protect American interests (corporations), especially the banana growers. BTW, Hitler took over the Socialist party, purged all the socialists but kept the name and eventually attacked the USSR who he hated along with all communists, same with the rest of the fascist governments of the time, at war with the communists.
No, the right usually calls for less State power while increasing it. Just like they go on about being fiscally responsible while racking up huge debt. Interestingly the political compass http://www.politicalcompass.org/ shows my extremely right wing government to be about the same as Obama fiscally, just more Statist. (They really make Obama look open and transparent) This is what is weird about the American Libertarian movement, they back such a statist party. On the same political compass site I come in as extremely libertarian and left wing and it's true, the only way libertarianism could work is through socialist ideals like Credit Unions instead of banks and CO-OPs instead of big monopolies. Left = pro-people and Right = pro-aristocracy.
Sadly it starts a little further north then the border. Recently heard a couple of articles on racism in New Brunswick, towns where lots of slaves escaped to, and it didn't sound much different then the deep south. Here in BC we don't have many Black Americans so the racism has traditionally been against the Chinese, East Indians and Native people.
It still doesn't answer the question of whether the gun control laws were introduced in response to increasing crime due to eg changing demographics. I'd guess a city such as Detroit has increasing crime irrelevant of gun laws. Generally all over the Western world crime is decreasing, perhaps due to lead being eliminated from gasoline, perhaps for other reasons. I know here in Canada crime has in general been steadily decreasing while the legality of guns hasn't really changed much and the changes have been towards more regulation (you're expected to keep your guns unloaded and secure compared to in the past and it is illegal to sell a gun to someone who can't prove that they've taken a simple course on gun safety) and gun crime is quite low compared to the States. Personally I don't worry at all about being the victim of an armed criminal targeting me. Every time I've almost been shot, it's been by an idiot who probably legally owned his gun but didn't think about where that bullet was going to stop and was far enough away that I didn't hear a bang (worse was living a couple of hundred feet north of America). Having bullets fly by my head on multiple occasions has really turned me off of letting any Joe buy a gun. Bullets can travel miles and still be lethal and even like the idiot nieghbour who used to like shooting at night, can cause excessive noise which really upset my autistic son. Treating firearms more like vehicles to me makes much more sense. Not banning them but only allowing people who can show knowledge and maturity to own a gun and use that gun responsibly.
Canada, no dollar bill or 2 dollar bill and pennies are now dis-continued so cash purchases are rounded. There are a few stores that have realized it's worth a couple of cents to always round down.
I'd like to see the research that leads to your conclusion. Seems to me that when a city or state has lots of crime, especially firearms related crime, draconian gun control measures are introduced to try to curb the crime. Without research it's impossible to say which is a cause and which is an effect.
How much time do you waste using your credit card for a 99 cent purchase? How much time is wasted in lineups due to people like you who don't mind wasting many hours a year? I love it when a store has their card reader down, suddenly one lineup is moving as cash is almost always faster. You might have someone slow due to counting out coins but it is still faster then some people trying all their credit cards to find one that still works. On a 99 cents purchase it is always faster to flip a coin (or two if there is tax on the item) then read a credit card. Especially now that pennies are history and the smart stores always round down.
I think you have cause and effect reversed. Places with little violence are more likely to be OK with allowing guns while places with lots of violence will try to restrict availability of weapons in the hope of reducing violence.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that to get people to stop or actually slow down breeding means making their life better while genocide means the opposite? Fact, well off, educated people, especially women with access to effective birth control, breed less which is the reason that every developed country has (ignoring immigration) negative population growth and even the States barely has positive growth.
My apologies, internet postings are easy to misinterpret.
Actually it is mostly American history books that spread the "US Defender of Freedom" propaganda. Others record that America declared war on Germany for the simple reason that Germany had already declared war on America after America had sat out a couple of years of war so they could make money.
The Gimp really needs a better name. Recently someone who knows next to nothing about computers asked me to recommend a free graphics program. I started talking about the Gimp but could immediately see in their eyes that the name turned them off, plus I felt stupid recommending a program called Gimp.
It's a good program, plenty good enough for my use but the name does not inspire confidence to anyone who doesn't even know about free as in libre software.
To be honest I didn't watch the videos due to being on dial-up but "The Battle of Athens" comes up every time there is a thread like this so I've researched it in the past. Seems there was a shortage of arms in the county so they broke into the armory using a key which they didn't have a right to have and armed themselves. To quote http://constitution.org/mil/tn/batathen.htm (there's lots of similar on the net)
Short of firearms and ammunition, the GIs scoured the county to find them. By borrowing keys to the National Guard and State Guard Armories, they got three M-1 rifles, five .45 semi-automatic pistols, and 24 British Enfield rifles. The armories were nearly empty after the war's end.
Besides even in a country like Canada where we have no constitutional right to arms, rural folks would likely have enough arms in the form of long guns to do similar if corruption became so open.
The citizenry had to break into the armory to become armed, so it wasn't an armed citizenry.
How many swamps are infected with malaria carrying mosquitoes in the USA?
Wrong. This is the bought dogs of Bayer for a change.
A little background info for aspiring entomologists. Neonicotinoids are an interesting class of insecticides. They are valued because they have relatively low mammalian toxicity but they are very effective against insects. Neonics are systemic insecticides, i.e., they get inside plants and are distributed into all plant tissues. Neonicotinoid residues found in pollen and nectar are consumed by flower-visiting insects such as bees. Concentrations of residues can reach lethal levels in some situations. Neonicotinoids can persist in soil for months or years after a single application. After plants absorb neonicotinoids, they slowly metabolize the compounds. Some of the breakdown products are as toxic or more toxic to honey bees than the original active ingredient. Honey bees exposed to sublethal levels of neonicotinoids can experience problems with flying and navigation, reduced taste sensitivity, and slower learning of new tasks, which all impact foraging ability. Keep in mind that neonicotinoids were on the market for about 10 years before colony collapse disorder was noticed.
Very interesting and I'd mod up if I hadn't already posted.
The other questions. How destructive are the insects that the neonicotinoids are controlling? How effective are the alternatives? Is this just maximizing huge profits or make or break scenario? I'm not knowledgeable on this subject.
You're suggesting that the only way we will ever stop malaria is to poison mosquitoes into extinction?
It works.
No it doesn't (exception being smallpox) as almost always a resistant strain develops
50 million lives were lost because they weren't "rich enough" to deserve our health care or research funding. It's as simple as that.
Nonsense. The developed world doesn't have malaria now because they drove it to extinction in the wild via DDT and similar pesticides.
Actually the important thing was mechanical. Draining swamps is very effective to control mosquitoes along with judicious usage of pesticides, ideally a variety to prevent immune strains.
Not this bullshit again. DDT was never banned for malaria prevention, just every other use and is still used for indoor treatment for malaria carrying mosquitoes though I doubt they make wallpaper out of it any more. Pesticides are like anti-biotics, use them only when needed as immunity is built up in the target population which is one of the main reasons that DDT isn't used as much for malaria prevention, just as penicillin isn't used much anymore for infections.
The Stockholm convention banned DDT for all uses except malaria carrying mosquito control though they did discourage it. Currently the World Health Organization does encourage using DDT for indoor use to control mosquitoes in malaria infected areas. Press release, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/
And staying on topic, I had a pesticide application ticket many years ago. It was stressed to only use pesticides as a last resort, to use what was effective, and no more and one of the main dangers was how sensitive bees were to insecticides compared to most insects. Fish were also very sensitive to some insecticides and herbicides so you'd have chemicals with a low LD50 yet a high LC50 level. Toxicity can be very complex.
Yes, I typed faster then thinking when I said all.
I think it would be more accurate to talk of technological life rather then intelligent life. Even currently on Earth there are various intelligent species. Dolphins, octopus, ravens are some examples that come to mind as quite intelligent yet no hope of ever being technological.
For humans, not only are we intelligent but we're social and have thumbs and are also very general purpose, eg we live over most of the Earth without many problems.
Super intelligent species without thumbs probably never get technological and a species that doesn't pass on it's knowledge isn't going to go far and a species that is limited in habitat probably won't survive for long.
I once read an estimate of a million years for Earths oceans to freeze basically solid (exceptions of thermal vents) if cast out of the solar system.
He also didn't allow another election as Ortega did. Allende didn't live long enough to have the chance and was replaced by a right wing dictator IIRC.
Anyways the point is that there has been right wing dictators, especially in the American sphere of influence.
Both philosophies have branches that involve minimal or in the case of the left, no government and neither actually follows those philosophies and often go to in the opposite extreme including government backed genocide.
Every South and Central American dictator excepting Castro (who replaced a right wing dictator), especially those who got into power with the help of the American military. In the Americas they were often put into power to protect American interests (corporations), especially the banana growers.
Counterexamples: Salvador Allende of Chile (the spur for Pinochet's rise to power) and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua (in the mid 80s).
We're talking dictators, not democratically elected leaders. Allende was noted as the first democratically elected marxist in the Americas and killed by the Americans (Kissinger denied it in case someone down there opened their mouth to paraphrase him) and Ortega was elected, then lost a couple of elections then was re-elected.
BTW, Hitler took over the Socialist party, purged all the socialists but kept the name
No, he was one of the founders of the National Socialist party. And I gather they did believe in socialism for the master race.
Right wing philosophy, there are aristocrats and there are common people. Who the aristocrats are varies between different right wing groups but the idea that some are more equal is right wing as was established in the leadup to the French revolution. In America the right believes those with money are more important and deserving of special privileges.
Hitler was a bit of a mixed bag, he started out in intelligence to infiltrate the DAP but liked the leaders anti-communist and anti-capitalist views and joined as member #55. Threatened to quit when the renamed DAP was going to join the socialist party and maneuvered himself to chairman with absolute power.
and eventually attacked the USSR who he hated along with all communists
Well, what is that supposed to mean with respect to the left/right spectrum? That only right-wing countries would invade a communist country like the USSR?
Hitler was well known for being anti-communist
Nazi Germany was an ideologically screwed up country where, for example, animals had better rights than some humans did. Treating animals with rights at least equal to humans is normally considered very left-wing, unless the humans in question are being stuffed into ovens.
And treating certain types of people as having less rights then animals is very right wing.
As you said, Germany was very ideologically screwed up at the time, which is a problem with the whole left vs right thing, especially when ignoring statist vs non-statist.
same with the rest of the fascist governments of the time, at war with the communists.
They were competitors. I don't think the effort has much meaning with respect to ideology, left or right. The communists of the USSR have a history of taking out leftist rivals both inside the communist party and outside (such as the anarchists).
Heard an interesting documentary on Canadian involvement in the Spanish civil war. Canadians that went to fight for the republicans were charged with being communist sympathizers when they came home. They all said that they went to fight fascism.
Things were not cut and dried. The USSR did mass killings without caring about race so were for equality which is left wing and the fascists did mass killings based on race which is right wing.
The real problem is the authoritarians which come in all flavours and to have someone such as the over-poster state that by definition the right is never authoritarian flys in the face of history where authoritarians come in all political stripes. Some to enforce equality and some to force in-equality.
Again, Darwin's basic premise has not changed. Random mutations occur. Beneficial ones get passed; detrimental ones do not. Species evolve over time. Science has merely explained in more detail how exactly this occurs. But it hasn't dramatically altered how Darwin described the process. Darwin purposefully left the mechanism unanswered as he did not know.
There has been changes such as horizontal gene transfer, where with the help of a virus, genes can be transferred across species. Totally different way for evolution to occur without mutations.
Every South and Central American dictator excepting Castro (who replaced a right wing dictator), especially those who got into power with the help of the American military. In the Americas they were often put into power to protect American interests (corporations), especially the banana growers.
BTW, Hitler took over the Socialist party, purged all the socialists but kept the name and eventually attacked the USSR who he hated along with all communists, same with the rest of the fascist governments of the time, at war with the communists.
No, the right usually calls for less State power while increasing it. Just like they go on about being fiscally responsible while racking up huge debt.
Interestingly the political compass http://www.politicalcompass.org/ shows my extremely right wing government to be about the same as Obama fiscally, just more Statist. (They really make Obama look open and transparent)
This is what is weird about the American Libertarian movement, they back such a statist party.
On the same political compass site I come in as extremely libertarian and left wing and it's true, the only way libertarianism could work is through socialist ideals like Credit Unions instead of banks and CO-OPs instead of big monopolies. Left = pro-people and Right = pro-aristocracy.
Sadly it starts a little further north then the border. Recently heard a couple of articles on racism in New Brunswick, towns where lots of slaves escaped to, and it didn't sound much different then the deep south.
Here in BC we don't have many Black Americans so the racism has traditionally been against the Chinese, East Indians and Native people.
It still doesn't answer the question of whether the gun control laws were introduced in response to increasing crime due to eg changing demographics. I'd guess a city such as Detroit has increasing crime irrelevant of gun laws.
Generally all over the Western world crime is decreasing, perhaps due to lead being eliminated from gasoline, perhaps for other reasons. I know here in Canada crime has in general been steadily decreasing while the legality of guns hasn't really changed much and the changes have been towards more regulation (you're expected to keep your guns unloaded and secure compared to in the past and it is illegal to sell a gun to someone who can't prove that they've taken a simple course on gun safety) and gun crime is quite low compared to the States.
Personally I don't worry at all about being the victim of an armed criminal targeting me. Every time I've almost been shot, it's been by an idiot who probably legally owned his gun but didn't think about where that bullet was going to stop and was far enough away that I didn't hear a bang (worse was living a couple of hundred feet north of America). Having bullets fly by my head on multiple occasions has really turned me off of letting any Joe buy a gun. Bullets can travel miles and still be lethal and even like the idiot nieghbour who used to like shooting at night, can cause excessive noise which really upset my autistic son.
Treating firearms more like vehicles to me makes much more sense. Not banning them but only allowing people who can show knowledge and maturity to own a gun and use that gun responsibly.
Canada, no dollar bill or 2 dollar bill and pennies are now dis-continued so cash purchases are rounded. There are a few stores that have realized it's worth a couple of cents to always round down.
I'd like to see the research that leads to your conclusion. Seems to me that when a city or state has lots of crime, especially firearms related crime, draconian gun control measures are introduced to try to curb the crime.
Without research it's impossible to say which is a cause and which is an effect.
How much time do you waste using your credit card for a 99 cent purchase? How much time is wasted in lineups due to people like you who don't mind wasting many hours a year? I love it when a store has their card reader down, suddenly one lineup is moving as cash is almost always faster. You might have someone slow due to counting out coins but it is still faster then some people trying all their credit cards to find one that still works.
On a 99 cents purchase it is always faster to flip a coin (or two if there is tax on the item) then read a credit card. Especially now that pennies are history and the smart stores always round down.
I think you have cause and effect reversed. Places with little violence are more likely to be OK with allowing guns while places with lots of violence will try to restrict availability of weapons in the hope of reducing violence.