the failure of the existential quest - that moment when we wake up one morning and realize that what we're doing has appallingly little value.
I spent the first three years after graduate school working on the "Trusted Mach" project. The code I wrote, three years of my professional life, now sits on a shelf somewhere at the NSA, never deployed.
After that I spent a year working on a firewall product for Norman Data Defense systems. Ever hear of it? Europeans may know Norman ASA for its antivirus software, but I believe the firewall had all of about six customers worldwide.
There are a few other projects where I'm not sure whether the code i wrote was ever deployed or not. I believe my work on EDOS helped sling around the bits received from the Terra and Aqua satellites, that brings me some comfort.
But I've spent a good chunk of my professional career writing code that ultimately made no difference to anyone. That's why I'm satisfied now to do part-time less complex software development work for a small business (where what I write gets deployed immediately, and if it doesn't change the world at least helps our customers), and work part-time as a shiatsu therapist (where what I do makes a definite impact).
The alternative is to riddle another human being with bullets, leaving him either dead or badly maimed
Sometimes there are other alternatives. Like leaving that other human being alone, or talking to him.
Everyone agrees that the existance of a less-lethal way to deal with a person who is an immediate danger to the rights or safety of others is a good thing. The problem is that governments have a track record of using these less-lethal weapons on people who are not such a threat, people who they would have a hard time convincing their minions to shoot outright.
For example, if segregationist governments hadn't had firehoses, dogs, and clubs to use on civil rights protesters in the 1960s, but only the options of shooting them or letting them march unmolested, I doubt that they could have successfully ordered cops to shoot, and the protesters would have been left alone.
Unfortunately, in the hands of governments less-lethal weapons means more victims to use them on.
The world is an ugly place, human beings are ugly by nature, so any sovereign nation (not just the U.S.) needs a standing military to defend itself when and as needed
Certainly human beings can behave in ugly ways; if we're ugly by nature, though, then there's no point, and the best thing we could do is kill each other off and let evolution try again.
It's interesting that the Founding Fathers found the idea of standing armies abhorant, and tried to structure the Constitution so as to keep them away.
Too bad they failed. A nation without a standing army is unlikely to be tempted into foreign entanglements, yet with a well-trained militia can still quite adequately defend itself - see Switzerland for the canonical example.
Within the U.S., the states with the most violence have the strongest gun control laws. Maryland has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, yet Baltimore leads the listing of most deadly cities. Our gun control laws work just about as well as our drug control laws - and it's estimated that about 1 in 10 adults in Baltimore city is a drug addict.
If you eliminated all gun violence from the U.S., we'd still have more violent crime per capita than many other nations. We have more fatal stabbings, clubbings, et cetera, that the U.K. has total homicides, with and without guns.
The problem is not our guns, it's our cultural and economic situation.
Are you one of those guys who uses "atheist" to mean "agnostic", and demands that everyone break tradition and switch to your usage?
You appear to be somewhat confused.
"Agnostic" is a relatively new word, coind by T.H. Huxley in the 1800s. "Atheist" is much older, dating to the the late 1500s (source: dictionary.com).
Huxley meant "agnostic" to mean a position that only material phenomena could be truly the objects of knowledge. In common usage today, it means someone who maintains reasonable doubts about the existance of god(s). I.e., "Maybe there are gods, maybe there are not gods. I just can't say with any certainty." (Assuming, for the sake of this post, the common Western notion of "god(s)" as "being(s) existing outside of physical reality, who is/are the creator(s) of the physical universe"; there are of course more refined considerations of the divine, but sadly they are not common.)
An "atheist" is one who disbelieves or denies the existence of god(s). Some theists like to argue that this is just as much a statement of faith as believing in the existence of god(s).
However, the GP post points out that no one argues that disbelieving or denying the existance of talking pink chickens, is a statement of faith. When I say "I do not believe in X", or the stronger "I believe that X does not exist," for X in "talking pink chickens" or "gods" or "invisible Elvis Presley clones living in the walls of my house", this means that having considered all the evidence I am 99.999999999999% sure that X does not exist, that the remaining doubt is of the same order as "Maybe we're all really living in a Matrix-type simulation!"
If you want to say that that one-trillionth of a percent of doubt makes me an agnostic instead of an atheist, I think you're going against common usage. Maintaining a tiny fraction of philosophical doubt, remaining aware of the limits of sure knowledge, does not require one to put a disclaimer before every statement.
(Note that we actually have more reason to believe in talking pink chickens than in god(s) - after all, talking things, pink things, and chickens are all part of consensual reality.)
I'm sorry that the US public school system is so appallingly broken.
The problem in these discussions is that there is not a "U.S. public school system". Each county (or in some places, each town) administers a distinct and largely independent system.
I live in Baltimore County, Maryland. The public schools here seem to still be generally functional, though varying rather widely depending on neighborhood. Twenty years ago, I was a student in Baltimore County public schools, and I received a better education than was available in most local private schools. I think they've declined a bit since then, though; the population and economic status of the county has changed. Still, the schools in Catonsville (my neighborhood) seem ok, based on the kids I see (I teach karate to young'uns as well as adults).
Just a few miles to the east of my house is the Baltimore City line. In the city (a complete separate policitial entity from Baltimore County), the public schools are almost all broken.
A few miles to the west from here in Howard County, one of the richest counties in the U.S. The public schools there are apparently quite good.
Indeed we don't need someone to teach us speech, walking or fine motor control but reading is quite different.
Of course we need someone to teach us speech. Do you think feral children somehow inherit their parent's language? They even have trouble with walking and fine motor control.
Instruction in these things may not be as obvious or distinct as learning to read, but infants do need to absorb them from other humans, they are not innate.
The proper role of government is to maintain the market conditions.
Market conditions do not apply to health care.
Markets can function well - that is, produce efficient solutions to human needs and desires - when buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with full knowledge, equal power, opportunity for research and choice, and all costs accounted for.
None of these conditions apply to medical care. Your doctor knows much more about medicine than you do. For serious conditions, you need treatment infinitely more than your doctor needs a patient; and you need it now, not after a chance to shop around. And given the existance of communicable disease, we all bear the cost if people infected with, say, TB or AIDS or plague, can't get care and their disease spreads. (Indeed, given the threat of bioterrorism, we should understand access to basic healthcare as part of our national defense.)
I know that for many capitalists the Market has replaced God as the one infalible power in the universe, but the fact is there is no deus ex...uh, marketplace (agora? forum? nundin? Some Latin geek help me sound profound here) going to come and save us from the economic, social, military, industrial, and ethical complexities of health care.
an advertisement for a small business association, or something like that. One of the benefits of joining was that they had offered a group health plan to the member companies.
Beware: a few years back I came across a group that purposed to be a small business association, the "National Association for the Self-Employed", touting health insurance among its benefits, that in fact was nothing but a front for an insurance company.
So check 'em out carefully, and always say "no" to any high-pressure sales tactics.
a good majority of Americans don't like having the government telling us what to do, and this includes how we take care of our body and our health.
So instead, we have the government create corporations (who issues corporate charters?), legal monsters capable of seeking only monetary profit, and have those corporations tell us how to take care of our bodies.
You still haven't shown that even a single of those guns you claim were used for defensive purposes, actually performed a useful defensive function, either as a deterrent, threat, or weapon.
Admit it, you didn't even follow the links I provided, did you? The surveys asked people if they had used a gun, even
if it was not fired, to protect themselves or someone
else, making each reported DGU a clear case of a firearms functioning as a deterrent or weapon.
Random burglars will run when they are spotted, regardless of whether you have a gun or not. Only real enemies will stay to mutilate you and your family.
Some petty crooks will run when spotted. But home invaders do not. Neither do rapists and stalkers (wouldn't life be easier if they did?).
(And besides, if someone plans to mutilate you and your family, a gun probably isn't going to stop them)
Being armed certainly increases the odds of successfully stopping such an attack.
It is a common disingenuous tactic in gun politics debates to lump suidicide, homicides, and accidents (quite rare) all together under "death by firearm".
And I challenge you to find any statistic that at least vaguely indicates that keeping loaded guns at home is a good idea.
Here you go:
An unloaded gun is worthless for defense, so we can assume that the vast majority of guns used in the between 108,000 and 2.5 million (depending on whose numbers you beleive) annual defensive gun uses in the U.S. are loaded, or are at least stored so that they can be quickly and easily loaded.
So, there were between 153 and 3,425 times more defensive gun uses than accidental gun deaths.
Firearms accidents are very rare, you are much more likely to have a fatal fall (17,229 in 2003), or drown (3,306). Indeed more people choked on food (875) than were killed by gun accidents. But falls, drownings, and chokings seldom make the news, while accidental shootings often do.
Having a gun will not defend you from criminals. Killing the criminals does!
In fact, in the great majority of defensive firearms uses, the gun is not fired and nobody dies. Displaying a gun and saying "get out of here or get shot" is very effective.
Look, if somebody points a gun at you, and fires, it doesn't matter a damn thing whether you have a gun in your hand, pocket, car, bedroom, hunting cabin, or whatever... You are still dead.
Assuming that they hit you in a vital area, of course. It is actually fairly difficult to hit a man-sized target with a handgun at any range.
Anyway, even assuming great marksmanship, very rarely is violent crime such an assassination, where the killer wants only the victim's death. More often there is a motive such as robbery, rape, or the sick thrill of a up-close and in-person killing. That often gives an intended victim the abilty to shoot first. (Or better yet to threaten to shoot first, causing the bad guy to surrender. Or even better, the possibility of the intended victim shooting first makes the potential attacker decide to call the whole thing off.)
Guns don't protect people - Regulation does!
Gun control keeps guns away from violent people about as well as drug laws keep heroin away from junkies.
Normally I'd assume that you didn't really mean that, but your post said "prohibition of any kind never works"
But prohibition of nuclear weapons hasn't worked. If it did North Korea wouldn't have them.
And how do you enforce a prohibition on nuclear weapons? Anyone who has one, has by definition an effective defense against any attempt to take it away from them.
The only long-term solution to the problem of nukes is to build a world where no one feels the need to have one, a world of peaceful conflict resolution.
And given that we don't seem headed that way. I expect to see a nuclear weapon used in my lifetime. (Well, I'm hoping I won't see it directly, but see it on the news happening somewhere far away.)
It's a shame that we've wasted decades on the fantasy that nuclear weapons could be controlled by controling technological information.
It almost seems that there are drugs and booze that have tighter restrictions.
And of course restrictions on drugs have worked so well...
Provided of course that you ignore the stupendous amount of violence created by the black market. And the overdoses and poisonings created by drugs of unknown purity and strength. And the displacement of less dangerous soft drugs by more profitable and easily-smuggled hard drugs. And the breakdown of civil liberties that is inevitable when the government gets it in mind that it has the rightful authority to tell people what to do with their own bodies.
Modulo those minor concerns, sure, the war on (some) drugs has been such a smashing success of the past three and a half decades, making dangerous drugs so very rare that indeed, one has to wonder why don't apply that strategy to other hazards, why we don't fight a similar war on (some) magnets, chemicals, power tools, sharp pointy things, household chemicals, and other things you can hurt yourself with if you're not careful.
Hmmm... last time I checked, the God that Abraham spoke with was the same one Christians pray to, that the Jews pray to, that the Muslims pray to, and that even the Bhudda acknowledges.
Yes on Christians, Jews, and Muslims, they are historically linked after all.
Buddhism has nothing to do with the god of Abraham. (Indeed, the actual teachings of the Buddha have nothing to do with gods, they crept in later.) Nor do Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, Confuscianism, Zoroastrianiam, or most other religions have jack to do with Abraham's hallucination.
I figured the first step was that we make the laws
Since when? I didn't make any laws.
Oh, I know there's this myth that the legistlature is supposed to be representative of the people, but come on. It was bought and paid for a long time ago.
That "crap" getting sent off to the landfill is biodegradable paper!
Paper in landfills does not degrade significantly; newspapers have been dug up after 50 years, still legible.
Please recycle your paper and cardboard. Thanks.
if everyone started taking your suggestion, the post office would waste a *lot* of fuel delivering unnecessary mail around.
The point is that if everyone started doing it, junk mailers would be paying for a lot of return postage, and would perhaps finally have an incentive to send out less junk.
I'll find a reliable "number two" person, but until then, it's 24-7.
If you're that irreplaceable, then your company's number one priority had better be finding that reliable "number two" person.
If they're not, your number one priority should be finding a new job. Because not only are you getting screwed over, but eventually somebody else who's irreplacable is going to leave, and your employer will fall over and you'll be out of a job the hard way.
It's good to be valuable to your employer or clients, but it's dysfunctional to be irreplaceable.
Tom, thanks for reminding me of the cranks and loons that one meets on the Internet.
Let's see here. You quote Thornley paraphrasing Lao Tzu - a philosopher whose works have endured for thousands of years, an man whose work is one of the great influences on Chinese culture - and then accuse me of being a crank because I used a completely different quote from Thornley.
Hmm. Sorry, but that's one of the greatest non-sequitors I've seen on line in at least the past year, and would seem to be indiciative of great confusion. Let me see if I can help.
Thornley may have been a crank on some subjects, a medium to heavy conspiracy theorist, but given that he got caught up in the weirdness vortex of the JFK assassination I think he deserves a little slack on that. His concept of Zenarchy is an inspiring application of Taoism and Zen concepts to politics, showing the connection with libertarian socialism (a.k.a. anarchy).
The fact that I may quote Thornley on some topic, because I like the way he explains something - or that I might similarly quote Lao Tzu, the Shakyamuni Buddha, Thomas Jefferson, Emperor Norton, Hunter S. Thompson, or whoever - does not mean I agree with the quotee on everything. That one may quote a crank, is non-informative on one's own crank-ness or lack thereof.
Yes. Copyright is an artifical creation of the government.
And the right to free speech is a "natural" right, why, exactly?
There are several theories of natural rights. Perhaps you've heard of the one about how human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights"? Of course that's something of a religious spin on things. I prefer Kerry Thornley's explanation myself:
The Seven Noble Natural Rights
There are at least seven natural rights, or the Tao of human activity in society possesses seven attributes, or people are like machines only in the respect that they don't work good if you neglect their maintenance requirements.
What are the maintenance requirements of the human being? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights, the multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations they promote the view that only food,clothing, shelter and medical care are rights.
We are further encouraged to argue about whether rights must be earned or whether it is the duty of the government to guarantee them. Everyone necessarily struggles for their rights, and no government can ever guarantee anything except death and taxes.
All that bickering begs the relevant question: What can we do in voluntary cooperation to see that our natural rights, our intimate functional needs, are respected? Without that much, human beings are incapable of behaving as constructively rational and loving members of any population.
An artifical monopoly on the making of copies is clearly not an "intimate functional need" of human beings. It is not a "right of the people" in the same way as the right to free speech or the right to be secure against unreasonable search an seizure.
That is why you see the creation of this artificial right listed as a government power, rather than seeing it as a listing in the Bill Of Rights along the lines of "The right of authors and inventors to exclusively copy and implement their creations, being necessary to the progress of the useful arts and sciences, shall not be infringed".
You can't possibly be so stupid as to not recognize that your last two statements are mutually contradictory.
There is no contradiction at all. You are simply confusing what you think the Constitution should say, with what it actually does say.
In the second, you seem categorigally discount the appropriateness that one of those structures might include the concept of transmission/assignment/sale of said rights to others
It's not a question of whether it's "appropriate". Under our Constitution, the powers of the federal government are strictly enumerated, and any powers not so enumerated. They include securing to authors and inventors certain rights for a limited time. There is nothing in there about securing those rights to others, therefore the federal governmen does not legitimately possess such power - whether or not you or I think that such additional state power would be useful.
(I generally don't. And I certainly disagree with your apparent assumption that there is no better way to make progress in phamaceutical technology than the screwed-up system we have now.)
Slashdot Mirror
I spent the first three years after graduate school working on the "Trusted Mach" project. The code I wrote, three years of my professional life, now sits on a shelf somewhere at the NSA, never deployed.
After that I spent a year working on a firewall product for Norman Data Defense systems. Ever hear of it? Europeans may know Norman ASA for its antivirus software, but I believe the firewall had all of about six customers worldwide.
There are a few other projects where I'm not sure whether the code i wrote was ever deployed or not. I believe my work on EDOS helped sling around the bits received from the Terra and Aqua satellites, that brings me some comfort.
But I've spent a good chunk of my professional career writing code that ultimately made no difference to anyone. That's why I'm satisfied now to do part-time less complex software development work for a small business (where what I write gets deployed immediately, and if it doesn't change the world at least helps our customers), and work part-time as a shiatsu therapist (where what I do makes a definite impact).
Sometimes there are other alternatives. Like leaving that other human being alone, or talking to him.
Everyone agrees that the existance of a less-lethal way to deal with a person who is an immediate danger to the rights or safety of others is a good thing. The problem is that governments have a track record of using these less-lethal weapons on people who are not such a threat, people who they would have a hard time convincing their minions to shoot outright.
For example, if segregationist governments hadn't had firehoses, dogs, and clubs to use on civil rights protesters in the 1960s, but only the options of shooting them or letting them march unmolested, I doubt that they could have successfully ordered cops to shoot, and the protesters would have been left alone.
Unfortunately, in the hands of governments less-lethal weapons means more victims to use them on.
Certainly human beings can behave in ugly ways; if we're ugly by nature, though, then there's no point, and the best thing we could do is kill each other off and let evolution try again.
It's interesting that the Founding Fathers found the idea of standing armies abhorant, and tried to structure the Constitution so as to keep them away.
Too bad they failed. A nation without a standing army is unlikely to be tempted into foreign entanglements, yet with a well-trained militia can still quite adequately defend itself - see Switzerland for the canonical example.
It's ok, the military uses very efficient conditioning methods to get ordinary people to kill.
There are places in Europe with very high legal gun ownership and much less violent crime than the U.S.
Within the U.S., the states with the most violence have the strongest gun control laws. Maryland has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, yet Baltimore leads the listing of most deadly cities. Our gun control laws work just about as well as our drug control laws - and it's estimated that about 1 in 10 adults in Baltimore city is a drug addict.
If you eliminated all gun violence from the U.S., we'd still have more violent crime per capita than many other nations. We have more fatal stabbings, clubbings, et cetera, that the U.K. has total homicides, with and without guns.
The problem is not our guns, it's our cultural and economic situation.
You appear to be somewhat confused.
"Agnostic" is a relatively new word, coind by T.H. Huxley in the 1800s. "Atheist" is much older, dating to the the late 1500s (source: dictionary.com).
Huxley meant "agnostic" to mean a position that only material phenomena could be truly the objects of knowledge. In common usage today, it means someone who maintains reasonable doubts about the existance of god(s). I.e., "Maybe there are gods, maybe there are not gods. I just can't say with any certainty." (Assuming, for the sake of this post, the common Western notion of "god(s)" as "being(s) existing outside of physical reality, who is/are the creator(s) of the physical universe"; there are of course more refined considerations of the divine, but sadly they are not common.)
An "atheist" is one who disbelieves or denies the existence of god(s). Some theists like to argue that this is just as much a statement of faith as believing in the existence of god(s).
However, the GP post points out that no one argues that disbelieving or denying the existance of talking pink chickens, is a statement of faith. When I say "I do not believe in X", or the stronger "I believe that X does not exist," for X in "talking pink chickens" or "gods" or "invisible Elvis Presley clones living in the walls of my house", this means that having considered all the evidence I am 99.999999999999% sure that X does not exist, that the remaining doubt is of the same order as "Maybe we're all really living in a Matrix-type simulation!"
If you want to say that that one-trillionth of a percent of doubt makes me an agnostic instead of an atheist, I think you're going against common usage. Maintaining a tiny fraction of philosophical doubt, remaining aware of the limits of sure knowledge, does not require one to put a disclaimer before every statement.
(Note that we actually have more reason to believe in talking pink chickens than in god(s) - after all, talking things, pink things, and chickens are all part of consensual reality.)
Can't you people see that you ought to get a clue as to what socialism is before spouting crap like that?
The problem in these discussions is that there is not a "U.S. public school system". Each county (or in some places, each town) administers a distinct and largely independent system.
I live in Baltimore County, Maryland. The public schools here seem to still be generally functional, though varying rather widely depending on neighborhood. Twenty years ago, I was a student in Baltimore County public schools, and I received a better education than was available in most local private schools. I think they've declined a bit since then, though; the population and economic status of the county has changed. Still, the schools in Catonsville (my neighborhood) seem ok, based on the kids I see (I teach karate to young'uns as well as adults).
Just a few miles to the east of my house is the Baltimore City line. In the city (a complete separate policitial entity from Baltimore County), the public schools are almost all broken.
A few miles to the west from here in Howard County, one of the richest counties in the U.S. The public schools there are apparently quite good.
(You can see the cross-county rankings here.)
Not surprisingly, school quality tracks average income of a county pretty well.
Of course we need someone to teach us speech. Do you think feral children somehow inherit their parent's language? They even have trouble with walking and fine motor control.
Instruction in these things may not be as obvious or distinct as learning to read, but infants do need to absorb them from other humans, they are not innate.
Market conditions do not apply to health care.
Markets can function well - that is, produce efficient solutions to human needs and desires - when buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with full knowledge, equal power, opportunity for research and choice, and all costs accounted for.
None of these conditions apply to medical care. Your doctor knows much more about medicine than you do. For serious conditions, you need treatment infinitely more than your doctor needs a patient; and you need it now, not after a chance to shop around. And given the existance of communicable disease, we all bear the cost if people infected with, say, TB or AIDS or plague, can't get care and their disease spreads. (Indeed, given the threat of bioterrorism, we should understand access to basic healthcare as part of our national defense.)
I know that for many capitalists the Market has replaced God as the one infalible power in the universe, but the fact is there is no deus ex...uh, marketplace (agora? forum? nundin? Some Latin geek help me sound profound here) going to come and save us from the economic, social, military, industrial, and ethical complexities of health care.
Beware: a few years back I came across a group that purposed to be a small business association, the "National Association for the Self-Employed", touting health insurance among its benefits, that in fact was nothing but a front for an insurance company.
So check 'em out carefully, and always say "no" to any high-pressure sales tactics.
So instead, we have the government create corporations (who issues corporate charters?), legal monsters capable of seeking only monetary profit, and have those corporations tell us how to take care of our bodies.
Admit it, you didn't even follow the links I provided, did you? The surveys asked people if they had used a gun, even if it was not fired, to protect themselves or someone else, making each reported DGU a clear case of a firearms functioning as a deterrent or weapon.
Let me make it easier for you. The NRA' Institute for Legislative Action keeps a comprehensive "armed citizen" news archive. Here is a simiar compilation at keepandbeararms.com.
Some petty crooks will run when spotted. But home invaders do not. Neither do rapists and stalkers (wouldn't life be easier if they did?).
Being armed certainly increases the odds of successfully stopping such an attack.
Don't know about the white man part, but it is true that more people kill themselves with guns than are killed by other people with guns. (In 2003, the numbers were 16,907 suicides by firearm versus 12,267 homicides by firearm, counting "legal intervention involving firearm discharge" under homicide).
It is a common disingenuous tactic in gun politics debates to lump suidicide, homicides, and accidents (quite rare) all together under "death by firearm".
Here you go:
An unloaded gun is worthless for defense, so we can assume that the vast majority of guns used in the between 108,000 and 2.5 million (depending on whose numbers you beleive) annual defensive gun uses in the U.S. are loaded, or are at least stored so that they can be quickly and easily loaded.
In 2003, 730 people per year were killed by firearms accidents.
So, there were between 153 and 3,425 times more defensive gun uses than accidental gun deaths.
Firearms accidents are very rare, you are much more likely to have a fatal fall (17,229 in 2003), or drown (3,306). Indeed more people choked on food (875) than were killed by gun accidents. But falls, drownings, and chokings seldom make the news, while accidental shootings often do.
In fact, in the great majority of defensive firearms uses, the gun is not fired and nobody dies. Displaying a gun and saying "get out of here or get shot" is very effective.
Assuming that they hit you in a vital area, of course. It is actually fairly difficult to hit a man-sized target with a handgun at any range.
Anyway, even assuming great marksmanship, very rarely is violent crime such an assassination, where the killer wants only the victim's death. More often there is a motive such as robbery, rape, or the sick thrill of a up-close and in-person killing. That often gives an intended victim the abilty to shoot first. (Or better yet to threaten to shoot first, causing the bad guy to surrender. Or even better, the possibility of the intended victim shooting first makes the potential attacker decide to call the whole thing off.)
Gun control keeps guns away from violent people about as well as drug laws keep heroin away from junkies.
But prohibition of nuclear weapons hasn't worked. If it did North Korea wouldn't have them.
And how do you enforce a prohibition on nuclear weapons? Anyone who has one, has by definition an effective defense against any attempt to take it away from them.
The only long-term solution to the problem of nukes is to build a world where no one feels the need to have one, a world of peaceful conflict resolution.
And given that we don't seem headed that way. I expect to see a nuclear weapon used in my lifetime. (Well, I'm hoping I won't see it directly, but see it on the news happening somewhere far away.)
It's a shame that we've wasted decades on the fantasy that nuclear weapons could be controlled by controling technological information.
And of course restrictions on drugs have worked so well...
Provided of course that you ignore the stupendous amount of violence created by the black market. And the overdoses and poisonings created by drugs of unknown purity and strength. And the displacement of less dangerous soft drugs by more profitable and easily-smuggled hard drugs. And the breakdown of civil liberties that is inevitable when the government gets it in mind that it has the rightful authority to tell people what to do with their own bodies.
Modulo those minor concerns, sure, the war on (some) drugs has been such a smashing success of the past three and a half decades, making dangerous drugs so very rare that indeed, one has to wonder why don't apply that strategy to other hazards, why we don't fight a similar war on (some) magnets, chemicals, power tools, sharp pointy things, household chemicals, and other things you can hurt yourself with if you're not careful.
Ricin is an extract of castor beans, which are readily available; abrin, an extract of the coral bead vine.
(Extraction of the toxins is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Yes on Christians, Jews, and Muslims, they are historically linked after all.
Buddhism has nothing to do with the god of Abraham. (Indeed, the actual teachings of the Buddha have nothing to do with gods, they crept in later.) Nor do Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, Confuscianism, Zoroastrianiam, or most other religions have jack to do with Abraham's hallucination.
Since when? I didn't make any laws.
Oh, I know there's this myth that the legistlature is supposed to be representative of the people, but come on. It was bought and paid for a long time ago.
Paper in landfills does not degrade significantly; newspapers have been dug up after 50 years, still legible.
Please recycle your paper and cardboard. Thanks.
The point is that if everyone started doing it, junk mailers would be paying for a lot of return postage, and would perhaps finally have an incentive to send out less junk.
USPS's NetPost service lets you send letters, cards, and postcards from your browser.
If you're that irreplaceable, then your company's number one priority had better be finding that reliable "number two" person.
If they're not, your number one priority should be finding a new job. Because not only are you getting screwed over, but eventually somebody else who's irreplacable is going to leave, and your employer will fall over and you'll be out of a job the hard way.
It's good to be valuable to your employer or clients, but it's dysfunctional to be irreplaceable.
Let's see here. You quote Thornley paraphrasing Lao Tzu - a philosopher whose works have endured for thousands of years, an man whose work is one of the great influences on Chinese culture - and then accuse me of being a crank because I used a completely different quote from Thornley.
Hmm. Sorry, but that's one of the greatest non-sequitors I've seen on line in at least the past year, and would seem to be indiciative of great confusion. Let me see if I can help.
If you want to dismiss Lao Tzu as a crank, you at least owe it to him and to millions of people influenced by Taoism to understand it enough to recognize it when you see it. I highly recommend Ursula K. Le Guin's interpretation of the Tao Te Ching and Raymond Smullyans' book The Tao is Silent . (Those aren't affiliate links or anything, by the way.)
Thornley may have been a crank on some subjects, a medium to heavy conspiracy theorist, but given that he got caught up in the weirdness vortex of the JFK assassination I think he deserves a little slack on that. His concept of Zenarchy is an inspiring application of Taoism and Zen concepts to politics, showing the connection with libertarian socialism (a.k.a. anarchy).
The fact that I may quote Thornley on some topic, because I like the way he explains something - or that I might similarly quote Lao Tzu, the Shakyamuni Buddha, Thomas Jefferson, Emperor Norton, Hunter S. Thompson, or whoever - does not mean I agree with the quotee on everything. That one may quote a crank, is non-informative on one's own crank-ness or lack thereof.
HTH. HAND.
Yes. Copyright is an artifical creation of the government.
There are several theories of natural rights. Perhaps you've heard of the one about how human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights"? Of course that's something of a religious spin on things. I prefer Kerry Thornley's explanation myself:
An artifical monopoly on the making of copies is clearly not an "intimate functional need" of human beings. It is not a "right of the people" in the same way as the right to free speech or the right to be secure against unreasonable search an seizure.
That is why you see the creation of this artificial right listed as a government power, rather than seeing it as a listing in the Bill Of Rights along the lines of "The right of authors and inventors to exclusively copy and implement their creations, being necessary to the progress of the useful arts and sciences, shall not be infringed".
There is no contradiction at all. You are simply confusing what you think the Constitution should say, with what it actually does say.
It's not a question of whether it's "appropriate". Under our Constitution, the powers of the federal government are strictly enumerated, and any powers not so enumerated. They include securing to authors and inventors certain rights for a limited time. There is nothing in there about securing those rights to others, therefore the federal governmen does not legitimately possess such power - whether or not you or I think that such additional state power would be useful.
(I generally don't. And I certainly disagree with your apparent assumption that there is no better way to make progress in phamaceutical technology than the screwed-up system we have now.)