Not to mention with the tons upon tons of illegal drugs coming across the US border every day, it would be trivial to retool that apparatus for smuggling weapons.
Not to mention that not all guardsman who fired, fired at the students, some supposedly fired into the ground or in the air. In total, only 29 of the 77 guardsmen fired their weapons, not even half.
You do realize that those drones are huge white elephants. A Reaper drone costs $36 million each just to buy, you can get 2 F-16's for that price. The missiles are also $100,000 each. There will never be enough drones to cover more than a fraction of an area. Not to mention they have a high loss rate due to accidents and, at least where I live, there is frequent low cloud cover that would make drones useless. The whole point of an insurgency is to only fight when it is to your advantage.
You do realize that what you describe was the effective US policy in Vietnam. Surround a village and kill everyone and everything inside it. Destroy the local fodd supply and depopulate the rural areas. There was effectively no consideration for minimizing civilian casualties of any kind. Last I checked the US still lost Vietnam.
The VC required very little outside help to maintain the fight, about 15 tons of supplies per day, that comes out to one to three ounces per VC per day. That's one 18 wheeler with room to spare. Just for comparison, in Arizona alone about 10 tons of illegal drugs per day are smuggled across the US/Mexican border.
They were fighting against an authority that a large portion of the population deemed illegitimate. What they were fighting for is irrelevant to the larger point being made.
With Vietnam at least, the Northern government was far less brutal than the Southern puppets the US put in place and more-or-less abandoned communism about 10 years after the end of the war.
Both of those groups could own property in a number of states at the time of the constitution. It was not an unheard of thing at all. Uncommon, yea, but not unheard of.
Where is the nutter going to get this nuke? Answer that question please, otherwise the whole issue is a red herring.
Just because you have a right to own something doesn't mean anyone has to sell you one. The government isn't obligated to sell you a nuke anymore than I have to sell you one of my rare guns.
The issue of nukes is a total non-starter. Anyone who would want one couldn't afford one and anyone who could afford one wouldn't want one.
Don't forget that a large part of the US military effectiveness relies on everyone trusting everyone else to their job.
What happens when you have even a fraction of a percentage of people in the military engaging in sabotage? We saw what happened in Vietnam with carriers being taking out of commission for months due to sabotage by the crew. What happens when the mechanic at the depot overlooks that worn radiator hose and doesn't tighten down the fuel filter properly? What happens when the artilleryman is a few hundred yards off every once and awhile? What happens when the infantryman searching a house overlooks the weapons cache? What happens when, as in Vietnam, whole units go on "search and avoid" missions and lie to the higher-ups about where they were?
I can't find it anymore,but I had to laugh when there was a poll awhile ago that said 50% of people who tried windows 8 liked it. Just looking at the sales numbers told you that as BS. When reality and your poll numbers don't match, chances are reality is correct.
I just don't see everything going black box though, there is just too much need for a general purpose OS. If anything, someone will come out with a BSD variant or something. As long as the OS UI is as good as Windows 98 or better that will be good enough for businesses. (It better be a lot more stable of course.)
I simply can't see Balmer lasting much longer. They have the code to put a Windows 7 style interface in 8, they just stripped it out. All it would take is a service pack to put that back in there. They'll slap a new name on it though, like Windows 8 second edition or something, perhaps give it the windows 9 label. The board is probably making plans to get rid of him, they just need to find a replacement and give Balmer a little more rope to hang himself with. They are probably trying to figure out how Gates is going to react to Balmer getting the boot.
That means Linus would have to do QC and I can tell you, QC is boring crap.
I had to do the QC on the new phone system we are planning on deploying. Looking at my time sheets I got things working 90% of the way in about 3 hours. Getting it to work the OTHER 10%? About 20 frigin hours of me calling myself on the telephone via certain call routing, the system breaking, finding out why it was breaking, finding how to keep it from breaking, then making sure the fix didn't break anything else.
Yes it was boring work, but guess what Linux guys? It's my JOB to do the boring work and the only reason I do it is because I'm PAID to do the boring work. Just as you say hairyfeet, you're not gonna get the busted shitters fixed for free.
It would be amusing to see Google come out with an Android variant for the server market at a competitive price and Torvalds suddenly finding that the server companies no longer need him. THEN things might change when suddenly he has to code in compliance with Google standards or go on food stamps.
The problem with Islam was that, just like the Greeks, they didn't have the necessary philosophical presuppositions. They made great contributions in the applied sciences but the theoretical sciences were largely DOA because they believe, like the Greeks, that any perceived order in the universe could be just one of gods habits.
But considering how anti-science mainstream Christianity has been of late I do agree it takes some big brass balls to try to take credit for the enlightenment when you have churches wanting creationism taught as a scientific fact.
The 6 days creationists are a very vocal minority, I point out to them repeatedly how Genesis is incoherent if read with a literal interpretation. Never mind that literal interpretation is a 20th century event, church leaders for millennia held that genesis was not literal.
The position against abortion is a relatively straightforward one. Once conception occurs, the only thing that separates that fertilized egg from a fully grown person is food, oxygen, and time. The stem cell issue follows from that, as we don't do destructive medical experiments on the mentally retarded, why should we do it on developing humans. (Not to mention that Adult Stem Cell research, which has no such objections, has been much more fruitful.) Some church leaders have done reprehensible things, like making the statement about condoms carrying AIDS and such people should be denounced.
What you think is a battle between religion and science is actually a battle between two religious worldviews, Christianity and Atheism/Naturalisim. We see this in our school system where Neo-Darwanisim is taught with religious vigor. Never mind the issue of intelligent design, mere criticisms and holes in the theory revealed by modern science are not even allowed to be discussed. That's not science, that's religion. The reason so many Atheists insist their religion is not a religion is because separation of church and state would come down on them like a hammer and they'd be tossed out the door next to the 6 day creationist.
Were this about the Copenhagen interpretation in quantum physics one would have no problem discussing perceived problems and arguing why an alternative theory is better. (There's about 10 or so physical interpretations of quantum physics.) Or even make a case for why all of them are wrong and the truth lies in some yet undiscovered theory. Then both sides would engage in a back and forth of papers describing weaknesses in the others case and answering objections.
For over fifty years, Antony Flew was a figurehead for atheists. In 2004, Flew abandoned his atheism and accepted the existence of God after scientific discoveries in the field of genetics were made. Flew claimed that the genetic code was too complex to agree with Darwinian claims. In an interview for Philosophia Christi with Gary Habermas, Flew explained his new beliefs. Though Flew had not embraced Christianity, he accepted the existence of God, saying that he "had to go where the evidence leads.".
Yet what we see when science teachers simply want to mention some potential problems with Neo-Darwanisim in passing is people like Eugenie Scott setting up a witch hunt to squash any dissenting views from the discussion, no matter how tame. What we have today is the Scopes trial in reverse, first you couldn't teach Darwanisim, now you can't teach anything BUT Darwanisim, and only the evidence in favor.
Darwanisim poses no problem for Christianity, Saint Augustine in the late 300's advanced the view that “God had created certain potencies that unfolded through the progress of time.” Such an interpretation was perfectly acceptable in the church. However, doubts about Darwanisim undermine the Atheist/Naturalist worldview, perhaps fatally. The whole of the 20th century science has heavily undermined Atheisim/Naturalisim. First it was Big Bang cosmology, then it was the fine tuning in the laws of physics, now we are seeing their last
Too bad, as your points were effectively answered there.
The foundation of modern science have absolutely nothing to do with judeo-christians other than the fact that it was developed during the renaissance by (mainly, but not only) Christian scientists
If you had read a bit further you would have read WHY that view is held by many historians of science, as I provided several quotes.
Ask yourself this: If you did not believe that nature was orderly and mathematically precise, you wouldn't even START trying to develop modern science, you couldn't, because you had no way to know that your results today wouldn't be different tomorrow. Imagine yourself as someone from 3,000 years ago. On what basis would you hold the belief that the universe was orderly? On the contrary, you would believe that the universe was chaotic and any apparent patters were simply contingent.
(many of them very much not in the spirit of their religion, look up Galileo Galilei)
I would invite you to do the same. Galileo did NOT get in trouble for his scientific theories. He got in trouble primarily for his theological errors and by demanding that scripture be reinterpreted to be in line with heliocentric theory.
The biggest scientific problem for Galileo was that he had no evidence for heliocentric theory being true and could not answer the quite serious scientific objections raised by other scientists, one of which was the lack of observed stellar parallax. (The stellar parallax is there, but was not observable using instruments of the day.) At that time, claiming heliocentric theory as true would be like a professor going around today claiming that string theory is true. They would get an intellectual beat down of epic proportions by their fellow scientists because the evidence is not yet there to support such a statement. Teaching string theory as a theory today is OK. Teaching it as a fact is not.
Galileo was free to teach heliocentrism as a theory, nobody ever got into trouble for that. What got him into trouble was claiming heliocentrisim was true, without being able to prove it, everyone who disagreed, regardless of the valid scientific objections, was an idiot, and he, a layman in the area of philosophy and scripture, was going to reinterpret scripture for the church. Remember this is less than 100 years after the Protestant reformation.
His best "evidence", since he couldn't answer the stellar parallax objection, was to suggest that the tides was evidence of heliocentrism because with the earth rotating on its axis as well as moving around the sun meant that all the water was sloshing around the oceans. Yes, Galileo thought the Earth was a giant snow-globe. Try and put forth that theory in science class tomorrow and see where that gets you.
The Church was the leading sponsor of the new science and Galileo himself was funded by the church. The leading astronomers of the time were Jesuit priests. They were open to Galileo's theory but told him the evidence for it was inconclusive. (It was.) This was the view of the greatest astronomer of the age, Tyco Brahe.
The Church's view of heliocentrism was hardly a dogmatic one. When Cardinal Bellarmine met with Galileo he said,
"While experience tells us plainly that the earth is standing still, if there were a real proof that the sun is in the center of the universe...and that the sun goes not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But this is not a thing to be done in
if we listened to every nutball religion out there frankly we'd still be in the dark ages,
You DO realize that the foundation of modern science is the Judeo-Christian worldview. Ever wonder why modern science never developed in the Paegan cultures, Atheistic cultures, in polytheistic/pantheistic China, or elsewhere? Because they didn't have the philosophical presuppositions necessary to even think about doing science.
*Nature is Real, not Imaginary: This may seem too obvious to bring up, but a few worldviews consider material things to be unreal or imaginary. For example, much of Hinduism and Buddhism teaches that any distinct object (such as a rock, a person or a planet) is an illusion or"maya". Any surprise that science did not grow out of such worldviews, it would be a waste of time to study and analyze an illusion.
The biblical view sees the things of nature as realities, they are thus possible objects of study and understanding.
*Nature is a "Thing", not a God: According to the Judeo-Christian worldview, there is nothing in the natural created order which is part of God himself. The scientist with a Judeo-Christian worldview may study and use all of nature in scientific and technological endeavors without "attacking" God's own being.
Eastern religions, which are mostly all pantheistic or polytheistic worldviews, anything and possibly everything may be a god or a part of god.
Then there is Pagan Animism which believes that all natural things --both animate and inanimate (rocks, plants, animals, thunder. planets, etc) are "animated" by some form of spiritual/divine life-forces within them, which shape all reality. A person conducting science under such a worldview might be, for example, dissecting a god or its body, which would be an horribly impious offense of sacrilege. Such worldviews destroyed the possibility of modern science in the cultures which held them.
To quote science historian R. Hooykaas; "Judeo-Christianity "un-deified" nature, and this was an essential pre-condition for the endeavor of modern science to exist."
*Nature is Worth Studying: The Judeo-Christian worldview talks of the creation as being "good", therefore, it is not only real, but it is worth studying. John Calvin said, "there is need of art and more exacting toil in order to investigate the motion of the stars,...to measure their intervals, and to note their properties." Kepler, van Helmont, Newton and many other Bible-believers felt that the diligent study of science was a good gift from God.
Nature is Unified and Orderly: This is one of the big ones, the God of the Bible is eternally dependable and orderly in his own character, and therefore, Christians expected nature and the universe to exhibit unified dependable "laws" of behavior. Copernicus said the universe was "wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator." Natural law implies that the forces of nature are, for the most part, predictable. The properties of gravity, the speed of light, etc., should not be expected to change significantly from year to year. If this was not true, the subject of study might change radically from day to day, so that no coherent course of study would be possible.
Historian Carl Becker writes that, "The concept of "natural law" was not derived from observations of nature; rather, it was first hypothesized from belief in the Biblical God before observations of nature confirmed it." VERY few people today realize the significance of this. Historian A.R. Hall points out, "Both the ancient Western and Asian worlds had no concept of "natural law," until it finally came about from Christians in the Middle Ages, and Hall says that it constituted "a notable departure" from anything that had preceded it."
*Nature is Mathematically Precise: Science historians have also traced this idea to the Biblical teaching on creation. Christians figured that the God of the Bible created the universe ex nihilo and th
What kind of WD 2TB drives are you using? We use 2tb WD Blacks on our DVR systems and have a very low failure rate. I have three 2tb Greens from 2010 that are going along just fine. Just wondering fiyou're suing something different than what we are using.
Except for the inconvenient fact that as a jailer, monitoring inmate phone calls IS PART OF THEIR JOB. It would be one thing if we had just installed the system or rolled out a new version, but that NOBODY at that jail knew how to use it meant that they WEREN'T using it. It would be one thing if they were hitting a glitch and needed help, but the system was working fine. They have our office number and several people at the office are capable of explaining how to use it, so it wasn't a matter of availability. That is a frequent call actually, someone new gets hired at a jail, the Sergeant gives them our number, and we give them the rundown of how to use it and tell them to call back if they have any other questions and we'll help them out. Very few people need to call back and most of those calls end up being something involving a problem with the system or their computer.
Saying it's excusable as a jailer to not know how to listen to the phone calls, especially when it is so easy, is like saying you should give a head chief some slack for not knowing how to use a meat thermometer. I'm sure the patron who is vomiting up their soul in the hospital ER would not agree.
Today most people don't need a gun, but most people do need a car. But the fact that most people need a car is the result of a deliberately created situation; automobile companies were permitted by the federal government to buy profitable public transportation systems and shut them down in order to increase demand for their product.
Those transportation system you speak of were highly unprofitable, obsolete, and bankrupt, which is why companies like GM bought them and replaced them with cheaper, faster, and more versatile buses. When buses too became unprofitable the government took it over and subsided it with taxpayer money. Back when they were unsubsidized, only white collar workers could afford to use mass transit, blue collar workers had to live in cramped housing near the factories. It was the safety bicycle, and later the Model T, that gave workers real mobility, unsubsidized public/mass transit was always too expensive for them to afford.
The simple fact is that the automobile is the cheapest, most versatile, and one of the greener forms of transportation today. People can go where they need to go when they need to go there. Roads are incredibly versatile, they can carry traffic ranging from a motorbike to an oversize tractor trailer. They can handle grades of up to 7% without serious problems, railroads start to have problems when the grade gets over 2%, that alone makes roads much cheaper as they are easier to route and do not require as much earth moving to keep the grade under control. Not to mention roads can make sudden 90 degree turns if needed, rail cannot. Rail transit needs to be rebuilt about once every 30 years. Roads about once every 50. Rail requires constant maintenance to avoid a derailment. Roads generally require a taring crew to patch up the cracks once per year.
Ironically, it was liberal politicians that led the crusade against streetcars and public transit in the early 20th century.
Public transportation is as obsolete as horse drawn buggies and airships. Roads on average get a once cent per passenger mile negative subsidy as money from the highway trust fund gets siphoned off into mass transit pork projects,which on average get a 16 cent per passenger mile subsidy.
With the phone and camera work in jails I get to see a bit of taser usage. Tasers are easy to circumvent if you know how to position yourself to break the wires when you fall and have absolutely no business being a primary for anything. I've seen several inmates where the staff just skip the taser and go straight for the mace because they know they'll beat the taser. Cleaning up mace is a real PITA though. You can also make anti-taser armor with a little research and effort.
If you're gonna give the teachers something less lethal then give them mace. Sure the teacher will probably get some themselves, but you get several shots with mace and the effects linger so the BGs not getting up after 5 seconds. Perhaps you could reduce the strength of it a bit in case you get a bit on yourself. The BG will probably then try wearing a gas mask which will seriously hinder their vision and effectiveness. The vast majority of the masks you see for sale as surplus are garbage and they probably won't take the time to learn how to wear it properly anyway, just like how they don't bother learning not to use 33 round mags in their Glock, so it will just lul them into a false sense of security.
You could probably do a variant of the "shotgun on a tripwire" trap and make a device that the teacher can quickly take from their desk and attach to the door frame that will mace the person who opens the door. Probably a can of mace with a paddle. There's a mounting bracket on the door frame where it can snap into place with the the paddle extending over the door. When the BG opens the door it trips the paddle when it is opened enough and it starts spraying. So the teacher would just have to grab it, snap it into place, pull the pin and then get away from the door with their handheld can of mace. Obviously this idea would have to be experimented with and fine tuned, perhaps use some irritant other than mace that doesn't carry as far so you don't gas the whole room.
That would work reasonably well on its own to at least slow them down or nicely augment allowing teacher to carry concealed if they choose.
The thing to remember too is that these people are so mentally broken that they almost always fold like a wet rag when confronted with armed resistance, so it's not like you need to even match them for firepower. A few 38 snubbies voluntarily carried by staff would, at worst, seriously slow things down for the bad guy and at best make him put a bullet in themselves.
It's not like those in favor of arming teachers are in favor of arming everyone. The point is to give those who want to the option of doing so to legally do so. Heck, I've heard the idea of having a few pump shotties in security lockers around a school. ("In case of shooting, break glass and enter combination.") Depending on how you implemented that, it might be a good idea. (Could be a very stupid one if you half-ass it.) Probably would want to go with a 20 gauge because of recoil concerns. Though on the flip side, I've seen how some cops maintain their vehicle weapons so the concealed carry idea may be the better option.
Yup, all made possible due to the financial regulations, and fiat currency, those same people had the politicians in Washington enact.
The ban on insider trading actually allows this sort of thing. If you were that engineer and saw what the CEO was doing, what would you do with your shares of stock, that you had probably built up over the course of working there for years? You'd dump them ahead of the CEO because you didn't want to get caught holding the bag. Everyone in your position of insider knowledge would dump your shares before the CEO cashed out. If you didn't own any I'm sure you'd pass it along to someone that does. Instead of seeing a spike in share price, the CEO would see a drop as all the insiders got out before the CEO and upper management sold, meaning that there is no financial incentive to do what they did. The only way that the CEO can get away with pumping and then dumping the stock is if he can outpace the market.realizing his scheme.
The Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 and other banking regulations prevent holding companies from owning more than 5% of shares in a company, among other things. This means that the shareholders of a company are highly fragmented and it is difficult to organize shareholders against a CEO that is planning on screwing the company. In the past there would be a few large shareholding interests who owned a large portion of the company. The purpose of owning the shares was to get money via the dividends they paid, not by the stock price going up. When all your income is from dividends you have a STRONG motivation to keep an eye on the long term to make sure those dividends continue to come over the long term and would have swiftly biatchslapped that CEO for tampering with their long term dividends for his own gain. With such large holdings, there is no point to try to to frequently trade shares as the big money is in the dividends. The stupidity of high frequency trading is a symptom of a larger problem, a depreciating fiat currency which forces virtually everyone into the stock market and limits on how much an organizations can hold promotes more individuals and organizations to trade those shares frequently. (I always laugh when they lose big money due to a crappy algorithm.)
My Canadian oil stocks were bought for the dividends and their financial reports are centered around how their activities will affect dividends and the company in the long term. That is how a company is supposed to be ran.
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Good luck doing that with tens of millions of people at once.
Exactly, and so much of today's military is tied up in logistics.
That is exactly what we did in Vietnam. All it did was push people off the fence and into the hands of the VC.
Not to mention with the tons upon tons of illegal drugs coming across the US border every day, it would be trivial to retool that apparatus for smuggling weapons.
Not to mention that not all guardsman who fired, fired at the students, some supposedly fired into the ground or in the air. In total, only 29 of the 77 guardsmen fired their weapons, not even half.
You do realize that those drones are huge white elephants. A Reaper drone costs $36 million each just to buy, you can get 2 F-16's for that price. The missiles are also $100,000 each. There will never be enough drones to cover more than a fraction of an area. Not to mention they have a high loss rate due to accidents and, at least where I live, there is frequent low cloud cover that would make drones useless. The whole point of an insurgency is to only fight when it is to your advantage.
You do realize that what you describe was the effective US policy in Vietnam. Surround a village and kill everyone and everything inside it. Destroy the local fodd supply and depopulate the rural areas. There was effectively no consideration for minimizing civilian casualties of any kind. Last I checked the US still lost Vietnam.
The VC required very little outside help to maintain the fight, about 15 tons of supplies per day, that comes out to one to three ounces per VC per day. That's one 18 wheeler with room to spare. Just for comparison, in Arizona alone about 10 tons of illegal drugs per day are smuggled across the US/Mexican border.
They were fighting against an authority that a large portion of the population deemed illegitimate. What they were fighting for is irrelevant to the larger point being made.
With Vietnam at least, the Northern government was far less brutal than the Southern puppets the US put in place and more-or-less abandoned communism about 10 years after the end of the war.
Gun crime in the UK has sharply increased since they banned private ownership of handguns.
Both of those groups could own property in a number of states at the time of the constitution. It was not an unheard of thing at all. Uncommon, yea, but not unheard of.
So a nutter can detonate a nuke in a major city?
Where is the nutter going to get this nuke? Answer that question please, otherwise the whole issue is a red herring.
Just because you have a right to own something doesn't mean anyone has to sell you one. The government isn't obligated to sell you a nuke anymore than I have to sell you one of my rare guns.
The issue of nukes is a total non-starter. Anyone who would want one couldn't afford one and anyone who could afford one wouldn't want one.
Where did the newspaper advocate banning guns? All they did was publish a list of owners.
and all the black panthers do is stand outside voting locations.
You're not that thick to not see that the newspaper was engaging in intimidation against people getting gun permits, which is an anti-gun position..
None of the school shootings in the last several decades have used a full-auto. I am not aware of any that have.
Don't forget that a large part of the US military effectiveness relies on everyone trusting everyone else to their job.
What happens when you have even a fraction of a percentage of people in the military engaging in sabotage? We saw what happened in Vietnam with carriers being taking out of commission for months due to sabotage by the crew. What happens when the mechanic at the depot overlooks that worn radiator hose and doesn't tighten down the fuel filter properly? What happens when the artilleryman is a few hundred yards off every once and awhile? What happens when the infantryman searching a house overlooks the weapons cache? What happens when, as in Vietnam, whole units go on "search and avoid" missions and lie to the higher-ups about where they were?
I can't find it anymore,but I had to laugh when there was a poll awhile ago that said 50% of people who tried windows 8 liked it. Just looking at the sales numbers told you that as BS. When reality and your poll numbers don't match, chances are reality is correct.
I just don't see everything going black box though, there is just too much need for a general purpose OS. If anything, someone will come out with a BSD variant or something. As long as the OS UI is as good as Windows 98 or better that will be good enough for businesses. (It better be a lot more stable of course.)
I simply can't see Balmer lasting much longer. They have the code to put a Windows 7 style interface in 8, they just stripped it out. All it would take is a service pack to put that back in there. They'll slap a new name on it though, like Windows 8 second edition or something, perhaps give it the windows 9 label. The board is probably making plans to get rid of him, they just need to find a replacement and give Balmer a little more rope to hang himself with. They are probably trying to figure out how Gates is going to react to Balmer getting the boot.
That means Linus would have to do QC and I can tell you, QC is boring crap.
I had to do the QC on the new phone system we are planning on deploying. Looking at my time sheets I got things working 90% of the way in about 3 hours. Getting it to work the OTHER 10%? About 20 frigin hours of me calling myself on the telephone via certain call routing, the system breaking, finding out why it was breaking, finding how to keep it from breaking, then making sure the fix didn't break anything else.
Yes it was boring work, but guess what Linux guys? It's my JOB to do the boring work and the only reason I do it is because I'm PAID to do the boring work. Just as you say hairyfeet, you're not gonna get the busted shitters fixed for free.
It would be amusing to see Google come out with an Android variant for the server market at a competitive price and Torvalds suddenly finding that the server companies no longer need him. THEN things might change when suddenly he has to code in compliance with Google standards or go on food stamps.
But considering how anti-science mainstream Christianity has been of late I do agree it takes some big brass balls to try to take credit for the enlightenment when you have churches wanting creationism taught as a scientific fact.
The 6 days creationists are a very vocal minority, I point out to them repeatedly how Genesis is incoherent if read with a literal interpretation. Never mind that literal interpretation is a 20th century event, church leaders for millennia held that genesis was not literal.
The position against abortion is a relatively straightforward one. Once conception occurs, the only thing that separates that fertilized egg from a fully grown person is food, oxygen, and time. The stem cell issue follows from that, as we don't do destructive medical experiments on the mentally retarded, why should we do it on developing humans. (Not to mention that Adult Stem Cell research, which has no such objections, has been much more fruitful.) Some church leaders have done reprehensible things, like making the statement about condoms carrying AIDS and such people should be denounced.
What you think is a battle between religion and science is actually a battle between two religious worldviews, Christianity and Atheism/Naturalisim. We see this in our school system where Neo-Darwanisim is taught with religious vigor. Never mind the issue of intelligent design, mere criticisms and holes in the theory revealed by modern science are not even allowed to be discussed. That's not science, that's religion. The reason so many Atheists insist their religion is not a religion is because separation of church and state would come down on them like a hammer and they'd be tossed out the door next to the 6 day creationist.
Were this about the Copenhagen interpretation in quantum physics one would have no problem discussing perceived problems and arguing why an alternative theory is better. (There's about 10 or so physical interpretations of quantum physics.) Or even make a case for why all of them are wrong and the truth lies in some yet undiscovered theory. Then both sides would engage in a back and forth of papers describing weaknesses in the others case and answering objections.
For over fifty years, Antony Flew was a figurehead for atheists. In 2004, Flew abandoned his atheism and accepted the existence of God after scientific discoveries in the field of genetics were made. Flew claimed that the genetic code was too complex to agree with Darwinian claims. In an interview for Philosophia Christi with Gary Habermas, Flew explained his new beliefs. Though Flew had not embraced Christianity, he accepted the existence of God, saying that he "had to go where the evidence leads.".
Yet what we see when science teachers simply want to mention some potential problems with Neo-Darwanisim in passing is people like Eugenie Scott setting up a witch hunt to squash any dissenting views from the discussion, no matter how tame. What we have today is the Scopes trial in reverse, first you couldn't teach Darwanisim, now you can't teach anything BUT Darwanisim, and only the evidence in favor.
Darwanisim poses no problem for Christianity, Saint Augustine in the late 300's advanced the view that “God had created certain potencies that unfolded through the progress of time.” Such an interpretation was perfectly acceptable in the church. However, doubts about Darwanisim undermine the Atheist/Naturalist worldview, perhaps fatally. The whole of the 20th century science has heavily undermined Atheisim/Naturalisim. First it was Big Bang cosmology, then it was the fine tuning in the laws of physics, now we are seeing their last
I stopped reading after your first paragraph.
Too bad, as your points were effectively answered there.
The foundation of modern science have absolutely nothing to do with judeo-christians other than the fact that it was developed during the renaissance by (mainly, but not only) Christian scientists
If you had read a bit further you would have read WHY that view is held by many historians of science, as I provided several quotes.
Ask yourself this: If you did not believe that nature was orderly and mathematically precise, you wouldn't even START trying to develop modern science, you couldn't, because you had no way to know that your results today wouldn't be different tomorrow. Imagine yourself as someone from 3,000 years ago. On what basis would you hold the belief that the universe was orderly? On the contrary, you would believe that the universe was chaotic and any apparent patters were simply contingent.
(many of them very much not in the spirit of their religion, look up Galileo Galilei)
I would invite you to do the same. Galileo did NOT get in trouble for his scientific theories. He got in trouble primarily for his theological errors and by demanding that scripture be reinterpreted to be in line with heliocentric theory.
http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd11/GilRuiz1/galileo_02.jpg
The biggest scientific problem for Galileo was that he had no evidence for heliocentric theory being true and could not answer the quite serious scientific objections raised by other scientists, one of which was the lack of observed stellar parallax. (The stellar parallax is there, but was not observable using instruments of the day.) At that time, claiming heliocentric theory as true would be like a professor going around today claiming that string theory is true. They would get an intellectual beat down of epic proportions by their fellow scientists because the evidence is not yet there to support such a statement. Teaching string theory as a theory today is OK. Teaching it as a fact is not.
Galileo was free to teach heliocentrism as a theory, nobody ever got into trouble for that. What got him into trouble was claiming heliocentrisim was true, without being able to prove it, everyone who disagreed, regardless of the valid scientific objections, was an idiot, and he, a layman in the area of philosophy and scripture, was going to reinterpret scripture for the church. Remember this is less than 100 years after the Protestant reformation.
His best "evidence", since he couldn't answer the stellar parallax objection, was to suggest that the tides was evidence of heliocentrism because with the earth rotating on its axis as well as moving around the sun meant that all the water was sloshing around the oceans. Yes, Galileo thought the Earth was a giant snow-globe. Try and put forth that theory in science class tomorrow and see where that gets you.
The Church was the leading sponsor of the new science and Galileo himself was funded by the church. The leading astronomers of the time were Jesuit priests. They were open to Galileo's theory but told him the evidence for it was inconclusive. (It was.) This was the view of the greatest astronomer of the age, Tyco Brahe.
The Church's view of heliocentrism was hardly a dogmatic one. When Cardinal Bellarmine met with Galileo he said,
"While experience tells us plainly that the earth is standing still, if there were a real proof that the sun is in the center of the universe...and that the sun goes not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But this is not a thing to be done in
if we listened to every nutball religion out there frankly we'd still be in the dark ages,
You DO realize that the foundation of modern science is the Judeo-Christian worldview. Ever wonder why modern science never developed in the Paegan cultures, Atheistic cultures, in polytheistic/pantheistic China, or elsewhere? Because they didn't have the philosophical presuppositions necessary to even think about doing science.
...to measure their intervals, and to note their properties." Kepler, van Helmont, Newton and many other Bible-believers felt that the diligent study of science was a good gift from God.
*Nature is Real, not Imaginary: This may seem too obvious to bring up, but a few worldviews consider material things to be unreal or imaginary. For example, much of Hinduism and Buddhism teaches that any distinct object (such as a rock, a person or a planet) is an illusion or"maya". Any surprise that science did not grow out of such worldviews, it would be a waste of time to study and analyze an illusion.
The biblical view sees the things of nature as realities, they are thus possible objects of study and understanding.
*Nature is a "Thing", not a God: According to the Judeo-Christian worldview, there is nothing in the natural created order which is part of God himself. The scientist with a Judeo-Christian worldview may study and use all of nature in scientific and technological endeavors without "attacking" God's own being.
Eastern religions, which are mostly all pantheistic or polytheistic worldviews, anything and possibly everything may be a god or a part of god.
Then there is Pagan Animism which believes that all natural things --both animate and inanimate (rocks, plants, animals, thunder. planets, etc) are "animated" by some form of spiritual/divine life-forces within them, which shape all reality. A person conducting science under such a worldview might be, for example, dissecting a god or its body, which would be an horribly impious offense of sacrilege. Such worldviews destroyed the possibility of modern science in the cultures which held them.
To quote science historian R. Hooykaas; "Judeo-Christianity "un-deified" nature, and this was an essential pre-condition for the endeavor of modern science to exist."
*Nature is Worth Studying: The Judeo-Christian worldview talks of the creation as being "good", therefore, it is not only real, but it is worth studying. John Calvin said, "there is need of art and more exacting toil in order to investigate the motion of the stars,
Nature is Unified and Orderly: This is one of the big ones, the God of the Bible is eternally dependable and orderly in his own character, and therefore, Christians expected nature and the universe to exhibit unified dependable "laws" of behavior. Copernicus said the universe was "wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator." Natural law implies that the forces of nature are, for the most part, predictable. The properties of gravity, the speed of light, etc., should not be expected to change significantly from year to year. If this was not true, the subject of study might change radically from day to day, so that no coherent course of study would be possible.
Historian Carl Becker writes that, "The concept of "natural law" was not derived from observations of nature; rather, it was first hypothesized from belief in the Biblical God before observations of nature confirmed it." VERY few people today realize the significance of this. Historian A.R. Hall points out, "Both the ancient Western and Asian worlds had no concept of "natural law," until it finally came about from Christians in the Middle Ages, and Hall says that it constituted "a notable departure" from anything that had preceded it."
*Nature is Mathematically Precise: Science historians have also traced this idea to the Biblical teaching on creation. Christians figured that the God of the Bible created the universe ex nihilo and th
What kind of WD 2TB drives are you using? We use 2tb WD Blacks on our DVR systems and have a very low failure rate. I have three 2tb Greens from 2010 that are going along just fine. Just wondering fiyou're suing something different than what we are using.
Except for the inconvenient fact that as a jailer, monitoring inmate phone calls IS PART OF THEIR JOB. It would be one thing if we had just installed the system or rolled out a new version, but that NOBODY at that jail knew how to use it meant that they WEREN'T using it. It would be one thing if they were hitting a glitch and needed help, but the system was working fine. They have our office number and several people at the office are capable of explaining how to use it, so it wasn't a matter of availability. That is a frequent call actually, someone new gets hired at a jail, the Sergeant gives them our number, and we give them the rundown of how to use it and tell them to call back if they have any other questions and we'll help them out. Very few people need to call back and most of those calls end up being something involving a problem with the system or their computer.
Saying it's excusable as a jailer to not know how to listen to the phone calls, especially when it is so easy, is like saying you should give a head chief some slack for not knowing how to use a meat thermometer. I'm sure the patron who is vomiting up their soul in the hospital ER would not agree.
Today most people don't need a gun, but most people do need a car. But the fact that most people need a car is the result of a deliberately created situation; automobile companies were permitted by the federal government to buy profitable public transportation systems and shut them down in order to increase demand for their product.
Those transportation system you speak of were highly unprofitable, obsolete, and bankrupt, which is why companies like GM bought them and replaced them with cheaper, faster, and more versatile buses. When buses too became unprofitable the government took it over and subsided it with taxpayer money. Back when they were unsubsidized, only white collar workers could afford to use mass transit, blue collar workers had to live in cramped housing near the factories. It was the safety bicycle, and later the Model T, that gave workers real mobility, unsubsidized public/mass transit was always too expensive for them to afford.
The simple fact is that the automobile is the cheapest, most versatile, and one of the greener forms of transportation today. People can go where they need to go when they need to go there. Roads are incredibly versatile, they can carry traffic ranging from a motorbike to an oversize tractor trailer. They can handle grades of up to 7% without serious problems, railroads start to have problems when the grade gets over 2%, that alone makes roads much cheaper as they are easier to route and do not require as much earth moving to keep the grade under control. Not to mention roads can make sudden 90 degree turns if needed, rail cannot. Rail transit needs to be rebuilt about once every 30 years. Roads about once every 50. Rail requires constant maintenance to avoid a derailment. Roads generally require a taring crew to patch up the cracks once per year.
Ironically, it was liberal politicians that led the crusade against streetcars and public transit in the early 20th century.
http://marketurbanism.com/2010/09/23/the-great-american-streetcar-myth/
Public transportation is as obsolete as horse drawn buggies and airships. Roads on average get a once cent per passenger mile negative subsidy as money from the highway trust fund gets siphoned off into mass transit pork projects,which on average get a 16 cent per passenger mile subsidy.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/06/~/media/Images/Reports/2009/06/b2283_chart2.ashx?w=500&h=395&as=1
I'm all in favor of getting rid of subsidies for all forms of transit, I just know that will mean the end of public transit.
With the phone and camera work in jails I get to see a bit of taser usage. Tasers are easy to circumvent if you know how to position yourself to break the wires when you fall and have absolutely no business being a primary for anything. I've seen several inmates where the staff just skip the taser and go straight for the mace because they know they'll beat the taser. Cleaning up mace is a real PITA though. You can also make anti-taser armor with a little research and effort.
If you're gonna give the teachers something less lethal then give them mace. Sure the teacher will probably get some themselves, but you get several shots with mace and the effects linger so the BGs not getting up after 5 seconds. Perhaps you could reduce the strength of it a bit in case you get a bit on yourself. The BG will probably then try wearing a gas mask which will seriously hinder their vision and effectiveness. The vast majority of the masks you see for sale as surplus are garbage and they probably won't take the time to learn how to wear it properly anyway, just like how they don't bother learning not to use 33 round mags in their Glock, so it will just lul them into a false sense of security.
You could probably do a variant of the "shotgun on a tripwire" trap and make a device that the teacher can quickly take from their desk and attach to the door frame that will mace the person who opens the door. Probably a can of mace with a paddle. There's a mounting bracket on the door frame where it can snap into place with the the paddle extending over the door. When the BG opens the door it trips the paddle when it is opened enough and it starts spraying. So the teacher would just have to grab it, snap it into place, pull the pin and then get away from the door with their handheld can of mace. Obviously this idea would have to be experimented with and fine tuned, perhaps use some irritant other than mace that doesn't carry as far so you don't gas the whole room.
That would work reasonably well on its own to at least slow them down or nicely augment allowing teacher to carry concealed if they choose.
The thing to remember too is that these people are so mentally broken that they almost always fold like a wet rag when confronted with armed resistance, so it's not like you need to even match them for firepower. A few 38 snubbies voluntarily carried by staff would, at worst, seriously slow things down for the bad guy and at best make him put a bullet in themselves.
It's not like those in favor of arming teachers are in favor of arming everyone. The point is to give those who want to the option of doing so to legally do so. Heck, I've heard the idea of having a few pump shotties in security lockers around a school. ("In case of shooting, break glass and enter combination.") Depending on how you implemented that, it might be a good idea. (Could be a very stupid one if you half-ass it.) Probably would want to go with a 20 gauge because of recoil concerns. Though on the flip side, I've seen how some cops maintain their vehicle weapons so the concealed carry idea may be the better option.
Yup, all made possible due to the financial regulations, and fiat currency, those same people had the politicians in Washington enact.
The ban on insider trading actually allows this sort of thing. If you were that engineer and saw what the CEO was doing, what would you do with your shares of stock, that you had probably built up over the course of working there for years? You'd dump them ahead of the CEO because you didn't want to get caught holding the bag. Everyone in your position of insider knowledge would dump your shares before the CEO cashed out. If you didn't own any I'm sure you'd pass it along to someone that does. Instead of seeing a spike in share price, the CEO would see a drop as all the insiders got out before the CEO and upper management sold, meaning that there is no financial incentive to do what they did. The only way that the CEO can get away with pumping and then dumping the stock is if he can outpace the market.realizing his scheme.
The Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 and other banking regulations prevent holding companies from owning more than 5% of shares in a company, among other things. This means that the shareholders of a company are highly fragmented and it is difficult to organize shareholders against a CEO that is planning on screwing the company. In the past there would be a few large shareholding interests who owned a large portion of the company. The purpose of owning the shares was to get money via the dividends they paid, not by the stock price going up. When all your income is from dividends you have a STRONG motivation to keep an eye on the long term to make sure those dividends continue to come over the long term and would have swiftly biatchslapped that CEO for tampering with their long term dividends for his own gain. With such large holdings, there is no point to try to to frequently trade shares as the big money is in the dividends. The stupidity of high frequency trading is a symptom of a larger problem, a depreciating fiat currency which forces virtually everyone into the stock market and limits on how much an organizations can hold promotes more individuals and organizations to trade those shares frequently. (I always laugh when they lose big money due to a crappy algorithm.)
My Canadian oil stocks were bought for the dividends and their financial reports are centered around how their activities will affect dividends and the company in the long term. That is how a company is supposed to be ran.