Despite that, the Libertarian in me has a problem with a private business being told that it can't allow smoking on it's property. Nobody forced me to visit that bar.
So if I want to run a bar where patrons get to urinate on anyone who walks through the door, or get to shoot anyone who walks in, that's ok by you? Nobody forced you there.
I don't give up my right to be free from assault by toxic or noxious chemicals when I step on to land that is referred to in a government-issued piece of paper that someone holds. You have a natural right to control what goes on in your home; but occupying land for business purposes is a privilege subject to the common good.
Our nation was founded using Christian principles and it worked really well.
No, in fact, it wasn't. Regarding the "Founding Fathers", many of the founders were Deists. Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus. Jefferson composed his own edition of the Bible with all the miracle stories elided. Tom Paine wrote that "Except in the first article in the Christian creed, that of believing in God, there is not an article in it but fills the mind with doubt as to the truth of it, the instant man begins to think."
As for the nation's founding documents, the Constitution states in Article VI that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States". Then there's Amendment I's guarantee against establishment of religion.
And the Treaty of Tripoli -- one of the first treaties negotiated by the United States, created during the Washington administration and signed by John Adams -- explicitly states that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion".
The claim that the U.S. was founded on Christianity is, simply, wrong.
...What is the cause of my illusion of seeing a spirit in the triangle of Art?
Every smatterer, every expert in psychology, will answer: "That cause lies in your brain."
...
The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.
...
If, then, I say, with Solomon:
"The Spirit Cimieries teaches logic," what I mean is:
"Those portions of my brain which subserve the logical faculty may be stimulated and developed by following out the processes called 'The Invocation of Cimieries.'"
...
...There is no effect which is truly and necessarily miraculous.
Our Ceremonial Magic fines down, then, to a series of minute, though of course empirical, physiological experiments, and whoso, will carry them through intelligently need not fear the result.
Now I'm curious what you think *I* think about my nation's history and place in the world.
I don't claim to know what *you* think about the U.S.'s history and place in the world. I do know that entirely too many of my countrymen believe in some form of "American exceptionalism", the modern version of manifest destiny: that when other nations do kill civilians it's terrorism, but when we do it it's collateral damages, that when other nations treat prisoners inhumanely it's torture but when we do it it's "enhanced interrogation", that every other nation that tried to occupy Afghanistan failed but we have God on our side so will succeed, etcetera.
And yet, many thousands of years ago, the existence of planets, stars, celestial bodies, and most of the science we take for granted was also a 'wacky belief'.
Every human culture has known about the stars and planets. They may not have known what they were, but everyone could look up and see that there were lights in the sky, and that some of them moved.
No such observational evidence suggests the literal existence of gods, devils, souls, or the like.
The inability of proof is not the same as the ability to disprove.
While absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, it sure as hell isn't evidence of presence either. "Do you see the invisible gorilla in the corner? You don't? That proves he exists!"
Or Phrenology, or blood-letting, or using Radium as a cure-all, or Kellog's wacko health camps,etc. Religion is far from having the 'corner' on bad ideas and what you call 'bullshit'.
But those other ideas have little social power. Organized religion is just about the most powerful social force there is.
If all the believers in alien abduction got together and said "We're going to stop the teaching of critical thinking", it wouldn't matter. If the most powerful priests and ministers and rabbis and imams got together and said "We're going to stop the teaching of critical thinking" -- well, you'd get modern society. Of course it's not quite that conscious or explicit.
The problem is that we don't train people in the fine art of bullshit detection -- mostly because doing so would challenge mainstream religions
"The problem is that we don't train people in the fine art of critical thinking -- mostly because doing so would challenge the intellectually lazy's of mainstream religions"
"Critical thinking" is a fancy name for bullshit detection. And mainstream religion is intellectually lazy -- people, sadly, prefer the simple answers, and any spiritual practice that requires intellectual rigor loses out to some version based on "parrot this doctrine".
The answer is too often that, although they'd like to think otherwise, those who attack people simply for having (or not having) faith in God fear what they don't understand and thus feel the need to tear down it.
No, most people who do not have "faith in God" were, at one point, religious believers and so understand such faith quite well.
99.99% of Christians are not going to fear Nibiru after watching 2012, so it's only fair to distinguish between them and the people Morrison is talking about.
A large percentage -- not all, but many -- of those Christians fear that some big magic grandpa in the sky is going to throw them into a lake of fire where a horned monster will supervise their torture for infinite time.
That is an ever wackier belief than the Nibiru catastrophe -- at least we know planets exist, unlike (the literal versions of) gods, devils, and souls.
I think that's what the suicide offers are for - to reduce the number of stupid people.
"Ignorant" is not the same as "stupid", and can be cured by means much less dramatic than death.
The problem is that we don't train people in the fine art of bullshit detection -- mostly because doing so would challenge mainstream religions, not to mention most American's understanding of their nation's history and place in the world. When you've got a culture where many people take ancient Hebrew creation myths as true and are not laughed at, it's no surprise that belief in the imminent destruction of Earth by collision with the rogue planet Nibiru will proliferate.
yes you get property rights through the government, but again, hardly a lot.
All property rights rest on government action.
Ownership of any physical object rests on ownership of the materials from which it's made, which rests on land or resource deeds issued by the government. Take, for example, this pen on my desk. Why can I say I own it? Because I traded money that I owned, to the local branch of Office Depot for it. But if Office Depot didn't own it, then I don't -- you can't legitimately buy stolen property.
So did Office Depot own it? They traded money that they owned, to Bic for a bunch of pens. Did Bic own them? Bic (we'll pretend) made the pens out of plastic that they purchased from SomeBigPetroChemical, Inc. And how did SomeBigPetroChemical come to own that plastic? Why, they made it from oil they bought from Amalgamated Oil. And how did Amalgamated Oil come to own that oil? They dug it out of ground to which they had oil rights. And how did Amalgamated Oil come to have those right? Some government stole the land from whoever used to live there, and eventually gave Amalgamated Oil a piece of paper giving them the right to sink oil wells.
Take away that deed, and those whole chain of ownership falls down. The same applies to any material object: trace back the chain of ownership, and you'll find government.
All that, of course, is ignoring the fact that Office Depot, Bic, SomeBigPetroChemical, and Amalgamated Oil are all creations of some governments, brought into being by the issuance of a government charter. Why should such a fictional creature even be allowed to own property, if it is not in the public interest?
You could have an economic system with no land ownership, no corporations, no copyrights or patents, none of the ways that government enables the aristocracy to skim wealth off the top; a system where ownership rests on use, one that rewards those who do productive labor rather than the aristocracy that owns the tools and materials. But it sure wouldn't be capitalism. You'd have some sort of libertarian socialism.
PhD, MS, MA, BS, BA, AS and AA all do have legal statuses. They are given by educational institutions accredited by the US Department of Education, or some equivalent body outside of the US.
The Department of Education does not accredit schools. It publishes a list of accreditation agencies, but there is no requirement for an educational institutions to be accredited by any of these agencies, and in some states non-accredited institutions can still award degrees -- see "diploma mill".
You could have voted for any of the dozens of other individuals/parties running for President. I voted for the Libertarian candidate, Bob Barr.
The Libertarian and Green candidates in 2008 were the most pathetic I've ever seen, both Barr and McKinney are failed major-party politicos known for their bizarre opinions. Nader's runs at the presidency have become more about aggrandizing his ego then any serious attempts to get ideas into the discussion; the other "third" parties on the ballot (at least the Maryland ballot) were crackpots, pure and simple. For me, it was either Obama, or writing in my own name -- I was Constitutionally eligible this time around...
Capitalism would mean there's no goverment regulation or involvement
...other than all those land and natural resource deeds, copyrights, patents, and corporate charters issued by governments.
Capitalism needs a lot of government involvement -- it puts property as a "right" of the first order, but all claims of property derive from government action.
A PhD has no more legal status than an MS or BS or even an AA degree.
If you're going to claim that government certification is the distinguishing mark of a "professional", then Einstein was just a "tradesman", while the teenager with the shears at the Hair Cuttery is a "professional". I don't think this fits with the usage of educated native speakers of English. (It may conform to some legal definition, but those often have nothing to do with the linguistic meanings of words -- for example, cocaine is not a "narcotic", but that doesn't stop the law from classifying it as such.)
All developers are blue collar. Programming is the IT equivalent of brick laying, it's a trade, not a profession.
A "developer" is more than a "programmer". A software developer designs and implements software, while a programmer is merely an implementor. If programmers are brick layers, developers are architects.
Professions have legal status; Doctors, lawyers, accountants have to be certified and approved.
One definition of "profession" is "something that you need a government permission slip to do". This definition is much favored by those who work in those fields, and who feel that these permission slips make other people respect them. This is, to my mind, a laughable contention: you need a license to be an "esthetician", you don't need one to develop software, yet I'm pretty sure software developers get more social respect.
Most people, though, when they think of a "professional", think of someone with extensive knowledge -- of both theory and practice -- who continually updates their skills, who works with a certain amount to autonomy, and who commits to the development of their field above and beyond their own personal interests. Journalism, software development, and the sciences, for example, would all be consider to be "professions" by most people, yet practitioners do not (thank goddess) need government permission.
It's important to note that polycarbonate is *not* used to line food cans; that is normally done by epoxy resins. It is true that epoxies are often made using BPA,
You are correct, sir. Sloppiness on my part to not distinguish polycarbonate from other BPA-containing compunds, and thank you for the correction.
...which completely explains why we had to drop two of them before they surrendered.
The Japanese wanted terms that included the preservation of the Emperor's position. The U.S. demanded unconditional surrender -- and then not only granted this term most desired by the Japanese, but engaged in active cover-up up Japanese war crimes on the mainland.
No nation is going to decide to make an unconditional surrender in a matter of days: indeed, the idea that when two expansionist imperial powers get into conflict over colonies (which is the story of the Pacific conflict -- just how do you think the U.S. came to be in Hawaii and in the Philippines?), the losing side should cease to exist as an independent nation was historically unprecedented. From the start, Japan was expecting a WWI style armistice.
We didn't have to drop the second bomb, the political effects of the first were still in motion. But we had one uranium bomb, and one plutonium one...surely we should see the effects of both, after all the time and money spent? And it's not like we were dropping them on white people. We'd planned to use the bomb on the Japanese first -- not the Nazis -- from the start of the Manhattan project.
The bombs were dropped because it was completely clear to all that the japanese of that time were going to dig in as deep as possible and were all willing to fight to the death.
No. That's the myth, point for point, but it's absurd to suppose that an invasion would have been necessary to destroy Japan's ability to make war. We'd already pushed them back to the home islands: set up a blockade, lob a couple of bombs at military targets and ports every so often, and without the resources of the mainland Japan would have been starved of fuel and food in a matter of months. As the wik notes, "By August 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy effectively ceased to exist".
The greatest military commander of the Allies, Eisenhower, knew that Japan was defeated before the bombs dropped: "...I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
That could very well be true. Several years ago I heard stories about how estrogen-like chemicals could theoretically leach out of plastic bottled water containers under certain conditions.
Not any plastics, but polycarbonate is a polymer of Bisphenol A -- and Bisphenol A was investigated as a synthetic estrogen before it was used in plastics. We've know that it had serious biological effects since the 1930s, but I suppose that was just another inconvenient, profit-reducing fact.
Polycarbonate is everywhere, not just in water bottles but metal cans (to prevent the metal from contact with food contents),refrigerator shelves, baby bottles, microwave cookware, and eating utensils. And it's used industrially in a wide variety of applications. It's even used to coat children's teeth as an anti-cavity measure.
Exposure to Bisphenol A has been linked to breast cancer, insulin resistance, miscarriage, obesity, prostate enlargement, early onset of sexual maturation, hyperactivity, and increased aggressiveness, as well as increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.
As long as no one can be sure that the criminal will not commit other crimes, and as long as recidivism among "cured" criminals is so high, we, the honest people, have the right to know who are the people most likely to commit crimes against us.
One study in Finland found that all of the repeat murderers in their sample suffered from either schizophrenia or from severe alcoholism combined with personality disorder. So if you want to know who's most likely to commit murder, it might be that knowing who has severe mental health issues would tell you more than knowing who's been to jail.
And if we knew who has severe mental health issues, maybe we could even, you know, treat them. But I guess that would be socialism or something.
Sure, jail isn't perfect, but it's an effective way to keep criminals isolated until they learn how stupid it is to be a criminal
The only thing that people learn in our current prisons system, is how to be better criminals.
It wasn't always this way. NPR had a great story a few months ago about Folsom prison, once a model institution where almost every man got some job training. The majority of inmates never returned.
But that was "coddling" criminals -- and it went against the interests of the prison-industrial complex. Now Folsom is overcrowded to three times its design capacity, there are only a handful of classes with waiting lists more than 1,000 inmates long. And 75% of those released will be back within three years.
The war was about to end with or without the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese were already starting to negotiate for peace. The use of nukes was more about intimidating Stalin, and justifying the expense of the Manhattan project, than about ending the war.
I know this isn't going to be looked on well here, but here are my pro cookie, pro marketing comments...
The late great Bill Hicks suggested that everyone in marketing should kill themselves immediately.
Your post only re-enforces my belief that he was right.
Guess what, every company that collects demographics about customers (grocery stores by example, the only way to not get tracked it to pay by cash. You don't need one of their store cards because they'll match your banking account numbers and STILL build a profile) and then sells them.
Pretty sure my local organic market isn't doing this. But I still pay in cash.
How many useful websites on the internet are driven by 1. Selling demographics, 2.) Ad revenue. Making cookies opt-in kills both of those things.
Hooray for the death of selling demographics. And you don't need to set a cookie on my browser to show me an ad. (Of course, if you want to show me an ad, make it a simple text link, because I'll block your gorram banners.)
Affiliate marketing... There are a lot of other sites with good information (a book review site comes to mind) that I enjoy. They all keep the site running by giving affiliate links to the products, say to a book on amazon. Kill that for them, and you kill their revenue.
Pass affiliate information in the URL original, then a session id in the URL during their visit. No need to keep a longer term record, ergo no need for cookies.
AND btw, affiliate links would be fine if we could JUST identify the computer
No, you don't need to identify the computer. You need to identify the affiliate that originally referred the visitor.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I want to run a bar where patrons get to urinate on anyone who walks through the door, or get to shoot anyone who walks in, that's ok by you? Nobody forced you there.
I don't give up my right to be free from assault by toxic or noxious chemicals when I step on to land that is referred to in a government-issued piece of paper that someone holds. You have a natural right to control what goes on in your home; but occupying land for business purposes is a privilege subject to the common good.
There's a ban in (part of?) Tokyo on smoking on the street. You can smoke inside, but outside smoking is limited -- partly because a lit cigarette is held at the level of a child's face.
No, in fact, it wasn't. Regarding the "Founding Fathers", many of the founders were Deists. Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus. Jefferson composed his own edition of the Bible with all the miracle stories elided. Tom Paine wrote that "Except in the first article in the Christian creed, that of believing in God, there is not an article in it but fills the mind with doubt as to the truth of it, the instant man begins to think."
As for the nation's founding documents, the Constitution states in Article VI that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States". Then there's Amendment I's guarantee against establishment of religion.
And the Treaty of Tripoli -- one of the first treaties negotiated by the United States, created during the Washington administration and signed by John Adams -- explicitly states that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion".
The claim that the U.S. was founded on Christianity is, simply, wrong.
Well, that depends on what one means by "magic". (And by "believe", I suppose.)
Obviously one can believe that the David Copperfield, stage magic variety sort of magic exists, and also believe in science.
It's also possible to "believe" in ceremonial magic of the Crowley sort, and also believe in science. Before he went bonkers with his Thelma nonsense, Crowley and his mentor MacGregor Mathers wrote in a preface to their version of The Lesser Key of Solomon of their understanding of magic as a psychological art:
I don't claim to know what *you* think about the U.S.'s history and place in the world. I do know that entirely too many of my countrymen believe in some form of "American exceptionalism", the modern version of manifest destiny: that when other nations do kill civilians it's terrorism, but when we do it it's collateral damages, that when other nations treat prisoners inhumanely it's torture but when we do it it's "enhanced interrogation", that every other nation that tried to occupy Afghanistan failed but we have God on our side so will succeed, etcetera.
Every human culture has known about the stars and planets. They may not have known what they were, but everyone could look up and see that there were lights in the sky, and that some of them moved.
No such observational evidence suggests the literal existence of gods, devils, souls, or the like.
While absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, it sure as hell isn't evidence of presence either. "Do you see the invisible gorilla in the corner? You don't? That proves he exists!"
But those other ideas have little social power. Organized religion is just about the most powerful social force there is.
If all the believers in alien abduction got together and said "We're going to stop the teaching of critical thinking", it wouldn't matter. If the most powerful priests and ministers and rabbis and imams got together and said "We're going to stop the teaching of critical thinking" -- well, you'd get modern society. Of course it's not quite that conscious or explicit.
"Critical thinking" is a fancy name for bullshit detection. And mainstream religion is intellectually lazy -- people, sadly, prefer the simple answers, and any spiritual practice that requires intellectual rigor loses out to some version based on "parrot this doctrine".
No, most people who do not have "faith in God" were, at one point, religious believers and so understand such faith quite well.
A large percentage -- not all, but many -- of those Christians fear that some big magic grandpa in the sky is going to throw them into a lake of fire where a horned monster will supervise their torture for infinite time.
That is an ever wackier belief than the Nibiru catastrophe -- at least we know planets exist, unlike (the literal versions of) gods, devils, and souls.
"Ignorant" is not the same as "stupid", and can be cured by means much less dramatic than death.
The problem is that we don't train people in the fine art of bullshit detection -- mostly because doing so would challenge mainstream religions, not to mention most American's understanding of their nation's history and place in the world. When you've got a culture where many people take ancient Hebrew creation myths as true and are not laughed at, it's no surprise that belief in the imminent destruction of Earth by collision with the rogue planet Nibiru will proliferate.
All property rights rest on government action.
Ownership of any physical object rests on ownership of the materials from which it's made, which rests on land or resource deeds issued by the government. Take, for example, this pen on my desk. Why can I say I own it? Because I traded money that I owned, to the local branch of Office Depot for it. But if Office Depot didn't own it, then I don't -- you can't legitimately buy stolen property.
So did Office Depot own it? They traded money that they owned, to Bic for a bunch of pens. Did Bic own them? Bic (we'll pretend) made the pens out of plastic that they purchased from SomeBigPetroChemical, Inc. And how did SomeBigPetroChemical come to own that plastic? Why, they made it from oil they bought from Amalgamated Oil. And how did Amalgamated Oil come to own that oil? They dug it out of ground to which they had oil rights. And how did Amalgamated Oil come to have those right? Some government stole the land from whoever used to live there, and eventually gave Amalgamated Oil a piece of paper giving them the right to sink oil wells.
Take away that deed, and those whole chain of ownership falls down. The same applies to any material object: trace back the chain of ownership, and you'll find government.
All that, of course, is ignoring the fact that Office Depot, Bic, SomeBigPetroChemical, and Amalgamated Oil are all creations of some governments, brought into being by the issuance of a government charter. Why should such a fictional creature even be allowed to own property, if it is not in the public interest?
You could have an economic system with no land ownership, no corporations, no copyrights or patents, none of the ways that government enables the aristocracy to skim wealth off the top; a system where ownership rests on use, one that rewards those who do productive labor rather than the aristocracy that owns the tools and materials. But it sure wouldn't be capitalism. You'd have some sort of libertarian socialism.
The Department of Education does not accredit schools. It publishes a list of accreditation agencies, but there is no requirement for an educational institutions to be accredited by any of these agencies, and in some states non-accredited institutions can still award degrees -- see "diploma mill".
The Libertarian and Green candidates in 2008 were the most pathetic I've ever seen, both Barr and McKinney are failed major-party politicos known for their bizarre opinions. Nader's runs at the presidency have become more about aggrandizing his ego then any serious attempts to get ideas into the discussion; the other "third" parties on the ballot (at least the Maryland ballot) were crackpots, pure and simple. For me, it was either Obama, or writing in my own name -- I was Constitutionally eligible this time around...
You are, perhaps, unfamiliar with exit polls?
...other than all those land and natural resource deeds, copyrights, patents, and corporate charters issued by governments.
Capitalism needs a lot of government involvement -- it puts property as a "right" of the first order, but all claims of property derive from government action.
Hi there, lgw. Always happy to amaze people. MS, Computer Science, University of Maryland 1993, and as Born in the USA as anyone can be.
A PhD has no more legal status than an MS or BS or even an AA degree.
If you're going to claim that government certification is the distinguishing mark of a "professional", then Einstein was just a "tradesman", while the teenager with the shears at the Hair Cuttery is a "professional". I don't think this fits with the usage of educated native speakers of English. (It may conform to some legal definition, but those often have nothing to do with the linguistic meanings of words -- for example, cocaine is not a "narcotic", but that doesn't stop the law from classifying it as such.)
A "developer" is more than a "programmer". A software developer designs and implements software, while a programmer is merely an implementor. If programmers are brick layers, developers are architects.
One definition of "profession" is "something that you need a government permission slip to do". This definition is much favored by those who work in those fields, and who feel that these permission slips make other people respect them. This is, to my mind, a laughable contention: you need a license to be an "esthetician", you don't need one to develop software, yet I'm pretty sure software developers get more social respect.
Most people, though, when they think of a "professional", think of someone with extensive knowledge -- of both theory and practice -- who continually updates their skills, who works with a certain amount to autonomy, and who commits to the development of their field above and beyond their own personal interests. Journalism, software development, and the sciences, for example, would all be consider to be "professions" by most people, yet practitioners do not (thank goddess) need government permission.
You are correct, sir. Sloppiness on my part to not distinguish polycarbonate from other BPA-containing compunds, and thank you for the correction.
The Japanese wanted terms that included the preservation of the Emperor's position. The U.S. demanded unconditional surrender -- and then not only granted this term most desired by the Japanese, but engaged in active cover-up up Japanese war crimes on the mainland.
No nation is going to decide to make an unconditional surrender in a matter of days: indeed, the idea that when two expansionist imperial powers get into conflict over colonies (which is the story of the Pacific conflict -- just how do you think the U.S. came to be in Hawaii and in the Philippines?), the losing side should cease to exist as an independent nation was historically unprecedented. From the start, Japan was expecting a WWI style armistice.
We didn't have to drop the second bomb, the political effects of the first were still in motion. But we had one uranium bomb, and one plutonium one...surely we should see the effects of both, after all the time and money spent? And it's not like we were dropping them on white people. We'd planned to use the bomb on the Japanese first -- not the Nazis -- from the start of the Manhattan project.
No. That's the myth, point for point, but it's absurd to suppose that an invasion would have been necessary to destroy Japan's ability to make war. We'd already pushed them back to the home islands: set up a blockade, lob a couple of bombs at military targets and ports every so often, and without the resources of the mainland Japan would have been starved of fuel and food in a matter of months. As the wik notes, "By August 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy effectively ceased to exist".
The greatest military commander of the Allies, Eisenhower, knew that Japan was defeated before the bombs dropped: "...I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
But more importantly, it was in fact known that the Japanese were ready to sue for peace.
Not any plastics, but polycarbonate is a polymer of Bisphenol A -- and Bisphenol A was investigated as a synthetic estrogen before it was used in plastics. We've know that it had serious biological effects since the 1930s, but I suppose that was just another inconvenient, profit-reducing fact.
Polycarbonate is everywhere, not just in water bottles but metal cans (to prevent the metal from contact with food contents),refrigerator shelves, baby bottles, microwave cookware, and eating utensils. And it's used industrially in a wide variety of applications. It's even used to coat children's teeth as an anti-cavity measure.
Exposure to Bisphenol A has been linked to breast cancer, insulin resistance, miscarriage, obesity, prostate enlargement, early onset of sexual maturation, hyperactivity, and increased aggressiveness, as well as increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.
The chemical industry, of course, assures use that BPA can never leach from polycarbonate in appreciable amounts. There is, however, a very interesting correlation between who funds the research and what results are found.
Recidivism among murderers is quite low -- the three year rate is that 1.2% of those who've served time for homicide are arrested for a new homicide. (That's "arrested", not "convicted".)
One study in Finland found that all of the repeat murderers in their sample suffered from either schizophrenia or from severe alcoholism combined with personality disorder. So if you want to know who's most likely to commit murder, it might be that knowing who has severe mental health issues would tell you more than knowing who's been to jail.
And if we knew who has severe mental health issues, maybe we could even, you know, treat them. But I guess that would be socialism or something.
The only thing that people learn in our current prisons system, is how to be better criminals.
It wasn't always this way. NPR had a great story a few months ago about Folsom prison, once a model institution where almost every man got some job training. The majority of inmates never returned.
But that was "coddling" criminals -- and it went against the interests of the prison-industrial complex. Now Folsom is overcrowded to three times its design capacity, there are only a handful of classes with waiting lists more than 1,000 inmates long. And 75% of those released will be back within three years.
The war was about to end with or without the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese were already starting to negotiate for peace. The use of nukes was more about intimidating Stalin, and justifying the expense of the Manhattan project, than about ending the war.
San Diego. 1960s Soviet sub at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. Apparently they also just also got a U.S. research sub, the Dolphin.
The late great Bill Hicks suggested that everyone in marketing should kill themselves immediately.
Your post only re-enforces my belief that he was right.
Pretty sure my local organic market isn't doing this. But I still pay in cash.
Hooray for the death of selling demographics. And you don't need to set a cookie on my browser to show me an ad. (Of course, if you want to show me an ad, make it a simple text link, because I'll block your gorram banners.)
Pass affiliate information in the URL original, then a session id in the URL during their visit. No need to keep a longer term record, ergo no need for cookies.
No, you don't need to identify the computer. You need to identify the affiliate that originally referred the visitor.