Well, sure, we now have trials. But that's why we have them so long. We have to get the right jury.
We like juries that are partial to suspended sentences - you know, suspended from the nearest tree, suspended from the neck up, that sort of stuff.
But its been hard lately, as even the KKK no longer sees it as their patriotic duty to volunteer people for these special jury duties. Too many of their members come back as damn liberals! Dissing "the system". Complaining about "human rights". Calling our glorious Commander-in-Chief "Mr Chimps, the fucktard"! We can't have that. He might be a fucktard, but he's OUR fucktard! That's why we work so hard to putting the US in jUStice. Because if we do it, it IS the right thing to do. Rmember that, citizen!
Ah, frig it - I'm friending you anyway. This way, if at any future date you DO start writing in your journal, I know I'll have something interesting to read:-)
"
Look, our disinformation campaign is working! People who have something to hide will send the recorder activation tone down the line before each call, thinking they're keeping us from listening in. Bwhaahahaha"
The truth is that in the current environment, you can't trust anything. Use your PC to scramble the call. If its that sensitive, anything else is foolish. Or use a one-time pad to encode it.
Think of it, if you were the "powers that be", isn't this how you'd do it?
Geez, I'd love to see them review "Fantasia" or "The Wizard of Oz". Someone should slip them a copy of "The Story of O" and let them go blind jerking off to all the juicy stuff.
Or the belief that advances in one area will carry over into others?
For example, what would happen to medicine today if we were to take out all the advances in materials and microelectronics due to the space race? No more fancy hip replacements, no more CT and MRI scans, etc. Heck, even finding yur records would be a huge drain on resources.
Actually, the decline in murder rates corresponds to increased economic performance under Clinton. The halting of that trend was thanks to Bush tanking the economy. And the 9/11 attacks can be laid at his feet - he knew they were coming, and purposefuly allowed it to proceed as excuse for war. This was the plan his strategist Richard Perle hatched up, reported in 2000, a year before the attacks. Find some prefix to get into a war with Iraq. You might want to friend this guy - he quotes it here today http://slashdot.org/~Philip%20K%20Dickhead/journal /123291.
Heck, if you kept a journal, I'd friend you just because you know how to debate, and would probably have some interesting things to say.
People resort to violence when they're desperate. Hard times make people desperate. If we really wanted to fix the violent crime problem, we'd do a few things:
decriminalize a lot of the "social crimes" - the war on drugs is lost - the only ones benefiting from it are ogranized crime and crooked cops; these are social and health issues
improve funding for education, instead of reducing it, as has been done under the "No Child Left Behind" scheme
realize that the general populace is more in need of tax relief than multi-millionaires
get out of Iraq. and don't try a strategy of replacing ground troops with more air power. It's going to take 20 years minimum for that particular wound to heal, why keep picking at it?
fix the health system so that people don't go broke when they get sick, or put off treatment fo so long that what was a minor problem becomes catastrophic
I know, in the current context this seems really commie pinko socialist. But think about this - Canad implemented hand-gun controls in 1977. If you remove the murder rates due to firearms, the per capita rates of the 2 countries match. All the difference is due to the easy availability of hand-guns in the US. In Canada, someone watches a show with a shooting, and its not like they think "yeah, someone pisses me off, I'm gonna take my 357 and show them what's what" - they don't hve the same "gun culture". Guns are for hunting animals, not people. Same TV shows, different culture.
Mixing violent TV shows with a culture of guns is dangerous. The stats show it - 3x the murder rate.
The NRA has made a big thing about it being a constitutional right - nowhere in the constitution does it mention handguns, and thats what is doing most of the killing. Guns don't kill people - gun nuts with handguns kill people.
If you looked further down on the page you linked to, they say the following about the rape stats:
Sources: Rape (excluding sexual assault), robbery,...
They have no way of including those stats in a survey because its illegal to divulge the victim's name, even for the purpose of collecting stats. Ditto for certain other classes of crime.
Another thing left out (in addition to the 9/11 killings) was the continuing death and injury rate to US GI forces. Another 500 men and women a year added to the official murder rate, and a whole slew more to the aggravated assault stats.
Then we also have to include the government-sponsored assaults, etc., (gitmo, people "renditioned" illegally to other jurisdictions so they could be tortured, etc).
Government-sponsored violent crime is HUGE, and it shows nowhere in the stats.
Besides, the whole point you were originally trying to make was that violent crime is down, so maybe we should have more violence on TV... which was in response to my point about kids seeing thousands of volent acts on tv, etc.
Do people feel safer today? No. Are there more incidents of stupidity like road rage? Definitely - the term didn't even exist 20 years ago. Advertising on TV is all about perception. And the marketers (and this includes the Bush administration) have become adept at marketing their product.
20 years ago, the government would have fallen on news of officially sanctioned torture, or knowingly misleading the public in a bullshit war. Now, because of the administration's continuing advertising campaign against its own people, they've got everyone too scared to say anything, for fear of being seen as disloyal.
And the government's ad campaign was done with the full cooperation of the media, and included every trick in the book - product placements, testimonials, ads portrayed as news, staged "events"... and nobody with a TiVO escaped that.
Funny how TV is seen as so important to the government that it has allocated $3 Billion to get people to upgrade their TVs. Why? Possibly because the "upgrade" won't be as benign as you think. It would be no big deal to include a "report back home" capability. Heck, they could even include a mike and minicam for less than $10 more per box in the quantities they're talking about.
Before you think - no, they wouldn't do that - remember, this is the same government that was aready proven in court to be hijacking the OnStar voice systems of people's cars, activating them remotely to eavesdrop on conversations without a warrant. A judge told the FBI to stop, but who can say if they really did?
Include government-sponsored crime, and 9/11, and violent crime is way up. And you really have to include them - they exist, they affect your life, and ignoring them perpetuates the problem.
Facts: there has been no change in the murder rate in the last 5 years - it hasn't gone down.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=1 2&did=169
Now remember, we've got about 3000 extra murders thrown in there due to 9/11 in 2001, so the actual rate excluding 9/11 was lower in 2000 than now.
Also, the FBI stats http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_02/html/web/offreporte d/02-table01.html also has an interesting footnote, but you have to REALLY squint to find it: The murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, were not included in this table.
Why? because it would screw up the stats. Awwwww. The fact is that, after the total # of crimes peaked in 1991 and going into decline under Clinton, its starting to inch back up again under Bush, even excluding 9/11.
Also, they no longer count such things as "taxing" by school kids as violent crime, but it is. "Give me your lunch money and your new runners or I'll beat you up" is assault. Not including it in the stats doesn't make it "go away."
Those are not the actual crime stats - they're a SURVEY of 75,000 people.
this survey of households interviews about 75,000 persons age 12 and older in 42,000 households twice each year about their victimizations from crime
Also, all rapes were excluded, because you can't exactly go and interview rape victims w/o really violating their rights. As were victims of child abuse, etc. So how can you say kid crime is down when you are purposefully excluding a huge chunk of the kids from even being counted in the first place? Fucking dumb!
My figures stand, because they're not from a survey, where people report what they want - they're based on actual convictions and people being thrown in jail. Those are up - way up.
Its more than just them being dumbasses. Its about people forcing their religious beliefs on everyone else. While their site claims they are:
The National Institute on Media and the Family is an independent, nonpartisan, nonsectarian
bullshit. But then again, christians have been perverting their message and lying to push their agendas for centuries - why should this fucker be any different? A quick google turns up his religious ties:
But David Walsh, Ph.D, a child psychologist and president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, believes video games have a greater impact than other forms of entertainment because "a player is not a passive observer."
"[The player is] an active participant directing the action of the game," Walsh, 57, a Catholic, told Charisma.
2005 PERIOD 6
Religious Education Congress
Saturday, February 19, 2005
3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
6-24 Why Do They Act That Way? A Guide to the Teenage Brain (workshop closed)
David Walsh, Ph.D.
Revealing the latest scientific findings in easyto-understand terms, Dr. David Walsh shows why moodiness, taking risks, miscommunication, fatigue, territoriality and other familiar teenage behaviors are so common - all are linked to physical changes and growth in the adolescent brain. Going beyond the issues of hormones and peer pressure, Dr. Walsh explains exactly what happens to the human brain on the way from childhood into adolescence and shows parents and anyone who works with kids how to use this information to understand, communicate with, and stay connected to their kids.
No religious agenda? My ass! You're known by the company you keep.
Maybe the psychological impact isn't from how you look but from how other people look at you? (or how you think other people look at you)
STOP LOOKING AT ME!
/sorry, couldn't resist:-) You're absolutely right. We're social animals. Reminds me of this joke:
A leper was sitting in a McDonalds when he noticed the guy across from him hadn't touched his happy meal, and didn't look too happy. The leper, being used to how his appearance affected others, went over and said "Look, I know I've ruined your meal. Let me pay for another one."
The guy says "No, no, its not you..." The leper shrugs his shoulders, and goes back to his seat.
A few minutes later, he looks up, and the guy is staring at him, and he's positively green with nausea. Again, the leper gets up, offers to pay for the meal, and his offer is rejected.
Of course, this happens a third time. Finally, when the guy keeps protesting that its not the lepers appearance, the leper says "Okay, then what IS it?"
"It's the guy behind you dipping his french fries in your neck."
but what sucks more, that or waiting in line at dmv and then explaining that yes, this is your real face while trying to get a new picture.
Nah, the only risk is that, with the right donor, she may now be the only person in the world to have a face that actually matches her drivers' license pic.
This was nothing more than a skin graft. If it weren't for the "ethical implications" of taking someone else's healthy tissue from their *face* this would have been a non-issue.
... because we all know that if you try to graft skin from another large smooth area, say the rear end, they'll end up butt-ugly.
and the psychological impact to the patient of looking different
It doesn't take much brains to realize that someone's going to look different after having their face chewed off by a dog. I should think having a strangers' face is less traumatic than seeing your own looking like a barfed-up big mac.
The page you show misquotes the source. (Use the source, Luke): What it says is that the RATE OF INCREASE of offenders, not that the rate is lower. The fucktard who wrote the game page can't read, or is lying on purpose, but what do you expect from someone who uses Word to create their html documents and can't get rid of the strange formatting artifacts?
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/correct.htm
U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs
Bureau of Justice Statistics
Summary findings
The number of adults in the correctional population has been increasing.
Adult correctional populations, 1980-2004 * In 2004, nearly 7 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at yearend 2004 -- 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.
* State and Federal prison authorities had in custody 1,421,911 inmates at yearend 2004: 1,244,311 in State custody and 170,535 in Federal custody.
* Local jails held 713,990 persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence at midyear 2004. An additional 70,548 persons under jail supervision were serving their sentence in the community.
After sharp increases in the 1980s and 1990s, the incarceration rate has recently grown at a slower pace.
Incarceration rate, 1980-2004 * Between 1995 and 2004, the incarcerated population grew an average 3.4% annually. Population growth during the 12-month period ending December 31, 2004 was lower in State prisons (up 1.8%) than in local jails (up 3.3%) and Federal prison (up 5.5%).
That's at the other (lower) end of the frequency spectrum. You know, bass sound you can feel, but not hear.
And there was an entry in the old Borland Turbo C manual (under the sound function) that mentioned as a side note (pardon the pun) that 7hz was the resonant frequency of a chicken skull, and that a nearby stamping plant was causing chicken heads to explode. Now THOSE were the days of interesting programers' manuals.
So the stores that deploy this will end up having a run on earplugs for a day or two - then its back to the same problem, kids hanging around outside, except now when the store owners give up on their "newfangled kid repeller" and try to tell the kids to leave, the kids won't hear them, so they'll have to make physical contact to get their attention:
Then watch what happens:
Hey, old man, why you be putting your hands on me for? Ain't nobody be putting their hands on me. What you say there, old man? I can't hear you. You talking to me? You talking to ME? Get the fuck away before I call the cops and have you charged with assault. Ain't NOBODY touchin' me. You some sort of faggot or somethin'? You like young guys? Do I get you all hot an' shit? That why you be puttin' your pervert hands on me? You stop talking to me now, I don' want none of your homo shit, y'here? You just take your faggoty hands, and your faggoty mouth, you faggoty little creep, and go back in your faggoty little store and play with your faggoty Apple computer. Ain't NOBODY touch me, y'here?
A lot of people work hard and when they get home are too tired to do much more than just unwind in front of the TV
So tell me, how is that whole watching someone getting their head blown off working out as a method of "unwinding":-)
I don't buy it. If they're that tired, they should take a nap, or make a point of going to bed earlier instead of trying to cram 5 hours of TV in after a days' work, and then complaining they don't get enough sleep.
Most people are walking sleep deficits. And a big part of the reason why is the refusal to admit that sleep is more important than an extra hour of TV viewing.
Those sleep deficits don't just make you feel tired - they affect your performance, your driving ability, the way you interact with the people around you, your overall stress level... so you "self-medicate" with a bunch of caffeine or caffeine in sugar water, to get that "extra boost" you need to get going in the morning. Why do you need a pick-me-up first thing in the morning, unless you didn't get enough sleep the night before?
s good for you that you don't watch TV. Just don't preach to others about how enlightened you are without walking a few miles in their shoes.
Been there, done that... didn't make a conscious decision to avoid the tube - just, as time went on, other things took up more time, and TV less and less... until I finally noticed that I hadn't turned it on in months, and didn't miss it.
Your whole argument falls down, though, when someone realizes that all ads are not created equal. A 30-second ad is much different than "Oh, hey, he's driving a Corvette!" in a product placement.
the product placement is much MORE effective. You don't recognize its an ad. Just look at the M&Ms fiasco with ET. They were kicking themselves in the butt for years after turning down that product placement opportunity. Hershey agreed to spend a million bucks promoting the movie in return. Deals have become a lot more commonplace, and a lot more lucrative, since. To the point where pepsi paid to have a coke can digitally replaced with a pepsi can in one movie (they were offered the opportunity after filming was over, and agreed to pay the bullion)
The advertisers don't think the arguments are ridiculous They spend billions every year. Remember, money talks, bullshit walks. To say that the argument is ridiculous, when there is study after study that shows otherwise, is the bullshit part.
My opinion is that someone who sits there and counts the number of "recognizable" products in a TV show should seek professional help. And I don't mean professional counting help.
Again, you don't get it. People are paid by the advertisers to audit these product placements. Sometimes, the results also get passed to outsiders, either through a friendly leak, a piece of pr, or court documents, or other means.
Product placement is real, its here, and its the biggie. It makes the 30-second spot look old-fashioned, tired, washed-up. That you don't see it that way is a true testimonial to its effectiveness.
There's still an ongoing debate (and a very serious one) as to whether we in fact actually make very many conscious decisions. Most of what we appear to "decide to do" is actually decided before we realize it... and just bubbles up to our conscious level after the decision has been made. This isn't just for small things, like picking up a glass to drink while you're "on autopilot" - turns out that huge chunks of most conversation are not really mediated by your conscious thought process - you "become aware of it" as you speak it, not because you decided to speak it. But because of the way our perceptions are structured to take that into account, you believe you've actually consciously decided to say what you said.
An example - someone tells you a joke and you immediately burst out laughing, in far less time than it would take to analyse the joke and say exactly why it was funny. Worse yet, when someone asks you why it was so funny, sometimes you can't even say - you don't know. And on retrospect, you realize it wasn't funny. So why did you laugh?
Or other times when, in the heat of the moment, you say something that you immediately realize you regret saying. Its not because you were consciously analysing what you were about to say - you were "going with the flow of the argument". If you had to think of each sentence before you said it, you would never have uttered those words.
Again, we've evolved a mechanism that allows us to have a consciousness that can make some decisions, but that quickly becomes overwhelmed when called upon to make all the decisions. That's why training is important - it frees you up from making a lot of decisions. Like when typing - you don't have to think, you just do it. The words flow. But it took practice, so that YOU don't have to do it.
Or driving a car. Remember those first few experiences, where YOU had to make all the decisions? Now think about how many times you've avoided an accident by taking action before you were even consciously aware that you were in a "situation". Again, YOU had no say in what happened.
Or you meet with someone and you for some reason immediately feel a dislike to them - and you don't even know them! You put it off as "they rub you the wrong way." The reality is you actually had no conscious say in such an important decision.
Most of the time, you're just along for the ride. You're "the ghost within the machine," not your subconscious, which is in fact running most of the show, and feeding only select bits to you on a "need-to-know" basis. Your retina and optic nerve work the same way, filtering out most of the signals they get so that you don't even get to see a lot of what's in front of you. And that process is literally as obvious as the nose on your face. When you're looking at your monitor, your nose is very much within your eye's field of vision, and it IS registering on your retina. When's the last time you noticed it? But look at a picture taken to simulate your eye's field of view from a camera embedded in a model of the human head, and your nose is VERY obvious.
Those kids don't magically disappear when they turn 18 - they internalize it - then they grow up and act on it. Rmember, the US, which is the source of most of the drek, has the highest proportion of murders of any country in the world, and the highest proportion of people in jail, and the highest proportion of people under various legal orders.
Heck, there was one county that made the news because fully half the adult male population had a restraining order or probation order against them.
Also, as levels of violence increase, the level that violence has to escalate to, to get entered into the statistics, also rises. A generation ago "taxing" in the school yard would have been considered assault and robbery. Now it goes by the euphemism "taxing" - its not so bad, even governments do it... WTF! Esy enough to make the stats look good if you change the definition of violence so that only the more extreme cases show.
So kids have learned that they can use violence to extort lunch money, etc., from their peers. But its not even entered into the stats any more. Gee, what's next - start calling rapes "unparticipatory dates" - then we can claim the rape rate went down! And we can re-label incest "family ties". Another problem solved! Hell, lets go all the way and call murder "non-compassionate euthenasia". You could probably get it legalized since half the legislators are too drunk/coked out/busy lapping up lobby money to be able to parse it out.
people would find other means to sit at home on their lazy asses, get fat, while putting "finishing touches" on their butt-ugly myspace.com homepage.
Yeah - just what the world needs - more pictures of muffin-top pants:-)
You're right about TV having the lowest barrier of entry to the sedentary lifestyle., BTW.
But you're wrong about TV ads losing their effectiveness. They're still the highest-rated in terms of effectiveness, and ads on the web are still the lowest-rated. TV advertisers have successfully beaten back any threat from the web by responding with much more effective, aggressive, and edgy ads.
Ads aren't the cause of the sedentary lifestyle - TV is. But you can't watch TV, even with a Tivo, without being hit by thousands of product placements.
BTW, most people can't successfully multitask. That's why parents keep telling their kids "turn off the damn tv" while they're doing their homework. Because the difference shows in the end results. Ditto for driving while yakking on a cell/doing your makeup/eating/reading a book. If you have X amount of ability, you're obviously giving only a fraction of it to each job at hand when you "multitask".
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sure, we now have trials. But that's why we have them so long. We have to get the right jury.
We like juries that are partial to suspended sentences - you know, suspended from the nearest tree, suspended from the neck up, that sort of stuff.
But its been hard lately, as even the KKK no longer sees it as their patriotic duty to volunteer people for these special jury duties. Too many of their members come back as damn liberals! Dissing "the system". Complaining about "human rights". Calling our glorious Commander-in-Chief "Mr Chimps, the fucktard"! We can't have that. He might be a fucktard, but he's OUR fucktard! That's why we work so hard to putting the US in jUStice. Because if we do it, it IS the right thing to do. Rmember that, citizen!
Ah, frig it - I'm friending you anyway. This way, if at any future date you DO start writing in your journal, I know I'll have something interesting to read :-)
Do you want the truth?
You can't handle the truth!
The truth is that in the current environment, you can't trust anything. Use your PC to scramble the call. If its that sensitive, anything else is foolish. Or use a one-time pad to encode it.
Think of it, if you were the "powers that be", isn't this how you'd do it?
Geez, I'd love to see them review "Fantasia" or "The Wizard of Oz". Someone should slip them a copy of "The Story of O" and let them go blind jerking off to all the juicy stuff.
Population control?
Or the belief that advances in one area will carry over into others?
For example, what would happen to medicine today if we were to take out all the advances in materials and microelectronics due to the space race? No more fancy hip replacements, no more CT and MRI scans, etc. Heck, even finding yur records would be a huge drain on resources.
Heck, if you kept a journal, I'd friend you just because you know how to debate, and would probably have some interesting things to say.
People resort to violence when they're desperate. Hard times make people desperate. If we really wanted to fix the violent crime problem, we'd do a few things:
- decriminalize a lot of the "social crimes" - the war on drugs is lost - the only ones benefiting from it are ogranized crime and crooked cops; these are social and health issues
- improve funding for education, instead of reducing it, as has been done under the "No Child Left Behind" scheme
- realize that the general populace is more in need of tax relief than multi-millionaires
- get out of Iraq. and don't try a strategy of replacing ground troops with more air power. It's going to take 20 years minimum for that particular wound to heal, why keep picking at it?
- fix the health system so that people don't go broke when they get sick, or put off treatment fo so long that what was a minor problem becomes catastrophic
- get some sort of hand-gun control. Canada has more guns per capita than the US, but 1/3 the murder rate per capita http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/cri_mur_cap
I know, in the current context this seems really commie pinko socialist. But think about this - Canad implemented hand-gun controls in 1977. If you remove the murder rates due to firearms, the per capita rates of the 2 countries match. All the difference is due to the easy availability of hand-guns in the US. In Canada, someone watches a show with a shooting, and its not like they think "yeah, someone pisses me off, I'm gonna take my 357 and show them what's what" - they don't hve the same "gun culture". Guns are for hunting animals, not people. Same TV shows, different culture.Mixing violent TV shows with a culture of guns is dangerous. The stats show it - 3x the murder rate.
The NRA has made a big thing about it being a constitutional right - nowhere in the constitution does it mention handguns, and thats what is doing most of the killing. Guns don't kill people - gun nuts with handguns kill people.
Another thing left out (in addition to the 9/11 killings) was the continuing death and injury rate to US GI forces. Another 500 men and women a year added to the official murder rate, and a whole slew more to the aggravated assault stats.
Then we also have to include the government-sponsored assaults, etc., (gitmo, people "renditioned" illegally to other jurisdictions so they could be tortured, etc).
Government-sponsored violent crime is HUGE, and it shows nowhere in the stats.
Besides, the whole point you were originally trying to make was that violent crime is down, so maybe we should have more violence on TV ... which was in response to my point about kids seeing thousands of volent acts on tv, etc.
Do people feel safer today? No. Are there more incidents of stupidity like road rage? Definitely - the term didn't even exist 20 years ago. Advertising on TV is all about perception. And the marketers (and this includes the Bush administration) have become adept at marketing their product.
20 years ago, the government would have fallen on news of officially sanctioned torture, or knowingly misleading the public in a bullshit war. Now, because of the administration's continuing advertising campaign against its own people, they've got everyone too scared to say anything, for fear of being seen as disloyal.
And the government's ad campaign was done with the full cooperation of the media, and included every trick in the book - product placements, testimonials, ads portrayed as news, staged "events" ... and nobody with a TiVO escaped that.
Funny how TV is seen as so important to the government that it has allocated $3 Billion to get people to upgrade their TVs. Why? Possibly because the "upgrade" won't be as benign as you think. It would be no big deal to include a "report back home" capability. Heck, they could even include a mike and minicam for less than $10 more per box in the quantities they're talking about.
Before you think - no, they wouldn't do that - remember, this is the same government that was aready proven in court to be hijacking the OnStar voice systems of people's cars, activating them remotely to eavesdrop on conversations without a warrant. A judge told the FBI to stop, but who can say if they really did?
Include government-sponsored crime, and 9/11, and violent crime is way up. And you really have to include them - they exist, they affect your life, and ignoring them perpetuates the problem.
Also, the FBI stats http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_02/html/web/offreporte d/02-table01.html also has an interesting footnote, but you have to REALLY squint to find it:
The murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, were not included in this table.
Why? because it would screw up the stats. Awwwww. The fact is that, after the total # of crimes peaked in 1991 and going into decline under Clinton, its starting to inch back up again under Bush, even excluding 9/11.
Also, they no longer count such things as "taxing" by school kids as violent crime, but it is. "Give me your lunch money and your new runners or I'll beat you up" is assault. Not including it in the stats doesn't make it "go away."
Those are not the actual crime stats - they're a SURVEY of 75,000 people.
this survey of households interviews about 75,000 persons age 12 and older in 42,000 households twice each year about their victimizations from crime
Also, all rapes were excluded, because you can't exactly go and interview rape victims w/o really violating their rights. As were victims of child abuse, etc. So how can you say kid crime is down when you are purposefully excluding a huge chunk of the kids from even being counted in the first place? Fucking dumb!
My figures stand, because they're not from a survey, where people report what they want - they're based on actual convictions and people being thrown in jail. Those are up - way up.
Learn how to think critically.
http://www.charismamag.com/online/articledisplay.p l?ArticleID=8203 yeah, one of those "phrophesy and ministry whores -
or here : http://www.recongress.org/2005/Period6.htm No religious agenda? My ass! You're known by the company you keep.Now THAT would be suspicious!
It doesn't take much brains to realize that someone's going to look different after having their face chewed off by a dog. I should think having a strangers' face is less traumatic than seeing your own looking like a barfed-up big mac.
Better a stranger's face than a strange face.
BAFN == Be A Fucking Nerd
That's at the other (lower) end of the frequency spectrum. You know, bass sound you can feel, but not hear.
And there was an entry in the old Borland Turbo C manual (under the sound function) that mentioned as a side note (pardon the pun) that 7hz was the resonant frequency of a chicken skull, and that a nearby stamping plant was causing chicken heads to explode. Now THOSE were the days of interesting programers' manuals.
Then watch what happens:
They do have such a sound. Wayne Newton or Celine Dion. Attracts the moldy oldies like flies, guaranteed to repel everyone who isn't half-senile.
Of course, Vegas latched onto them for just that reason. See the following:
So tell me, how is that whole watching someone getting their head blown off working out as a method of "unwinding" :-)
I don't buy it. If they're that tired, they should take a nap, or make a point of going to bed earlier instead of trying to cram 5 hours of TV in after a days' work, and then complaining they don't get enough sleep.
Most people are walking sleep deficits. And a big part of the reason why is the refusal to admit that sleep is more important than an extra hour of TV viewing.
Those sleep deficits don't just make you feel tired - they affect your performance, your driving ability, the way you interact with the people around you, your overall stress level ... so you "self-medicate" with a bunch of caffeine or caffeine in sugar water, to get that "extra boost" you need to get going in the morning. Why do you need a pick-me-up first thing in the morning, unless you didn't get enough sleep the night before?
Been there, done thatThe advertisers don't think the arguments are ridiculous They spend billions every year. Remember, money talks, bullshit walks. To say that the argument is ridiculous, when there is study after study that shows otherwise, is the bullshit part.
Again, you don't get it. People are paid by the advertisers to audit these product placements. Sometimes, the results also get passed to outsiders, either through a friendly leak, a piece of pr, or court documents, or other means.Product placement is real, its here, and its the biggie. It makes the 30-second spot look old-fashioned, tired, washed-up. That you don't see it that way is a true testimonial to its effectiveness.
There's still an ongoing debate (and a very serious one) as to whether we in fact actually make very many conscious decisions. Most of what we appear to "decide to do" is actually decided before we realize it ... and just bubbles up to our conscious level after the decision has been made. This isn't just for small things, like picking up a glass to drink while you're "on autopilot" - turns out that huge chunks of most conversation are not really mediated by your conscious thought process - you "become aware of it" as you speak it, not because you decided to speak it. But because of the way our perceptions are structured to take that into account, you believe you've actually consciously decided to say what you said.
An example - someone tells you a joke and you immediately burst out laughing, in far less time than it would take to analyse the joke and say exactly why it was funny. Worse yet, when someone asks you why it was so funny, sometimes you can't even say - you don't know. And on retrospect, you realize it wasn't funny. So why did you laugh?
Or other times when, in the heat of the moment, you say something that you immediately realize you regret saying. Its not because you were consciously analysing what you were about to say - you were "going with the flow of the argument". If you had to think of each sentence before you said it, you would never have uttered those words.
Again, we've evolved a mechanism that allows us to have a consciousness that can make some decisions, but that quickly becomes overwhelmed when called upon to make all the decisions. That's why training is important - it frees you up from making a lot of decisions. Like when typing - you don't have to think, you just do it. The words flow. But it took practice, so that YOU don't have to do it.
Or driving a car. Remember those first few experiences, where YOU had to make all the decisions? Now think about how many times you've avoided an accident by taking action before you were even consciously aware that you were in a "situation". Again, YOU had no say in what happened.
Or you meet with someone and you for some reason immediately feel a dislike to them - and you don't even know them! You put it off as "they rub you the wrong way." The reality is you actually had no conscious say in such an important decision.
Most of the time, you're just along for the ride. You're "the ghost within the machine," not your subconscious, which is in fact running most of the show, and feeding only select bits to you on a "need-to-know" basis. Your retina and optic nerve work the same way, filtering out most of the signals they get so that you don't even get to see a lot of what's in front of you. And that process is literally as obvious as the nose on your face. When you're looking at your monitor, your nose is very much within your eye's field of vision, and it IS registering on your retina. When's the last time you noticed it? But look at a picture taken to simulate your eye's field of view from a camera embedded in a model of the human head, and your nose is VERY obvious.
All good examples. Those ole spaghetti oaters are still worth a gander. And Leila's hot ;-)
Heck, there was one county that made the news because fully half the adult male population had a restraining order or probation order against them.
Also, as levels of violence increase, the level that violence has to escalate to, to get entered into the statistics, also rises. A generation ago "taxing" in the school yard would have been considered assault and robbery. Now it goes by the euphemism "taxing" - its not so bad, even governments do it ... WTF! Esy enough to make the stats look good if you change the definition of violence so that only the more extreme cases show.
So kids have learned that they can use violence to extort lunch money, etc., from their peers. But its not even entered into the stats any more. Gee, what's next - start calling rapes "unparticipatory dates" - then we can claim the rape rate went down! And we can re-label incest "family ties". Another problem solved! Hell, lets go all the way and call murder "non-compassionate euthenasia". You could probably get it legalized since half the legislators are too drunk/coked out/busy lapping up lobby money to be able to parse it out.
Yeah - just what the world needs - more pictures of muffin-top pants :-)
You're right about TV having the lowest barrier of entry to the sedentary lifestyle., BTW.
But you're wrong about TV ads losing their effectiveness. They're still the highest-rated in terms of effectiveness, and ads on the web are still the lowest-rated. TV advertisers have successfully beaten back any threat from the web by responding with much more effective, aggressive, and edgy ads.
Ads aren't the cause of the sedentary lifestyle - TV is. But you can't watch TV, even with a Tivo, without being hit by thousands of product placements.
BTW, most people can't successfully multitask. That's why parents keep telling their kids "turn off the damn tv" while they're doing their homework. Because the difference shows in the end results. Ditto for driving while yakking on a cell/doing your makeup/eating/reading a book. If you have X amount of ability, you're obviously giving only a fraction of it to each job at hand when you "multitask".