And so long as you're citing medical reviews, please look up some of the work in the last decade or so on development of the frontal lobes and the established physical fact that teens (and in fact up to the late 20s) do not have the capability to make judgements about engaging in behavior which is both pleasurable and risky.
I read those studies. So does that mean people shouldn't have sex until their late 20s, because they can better make risky decisions then?
Teenagers routinely make equally risky decisions, such as following a religion, taking out college loans, joining the military, driving, swimming and playing football. Do you think they should be prohibited from doing all those things until their 20s?
According to Rind, teenage sex is no more harmful than any other activities of daily life. Every situation is different, so the person who is best able to make that decision is the person involved, the teenager. Your sweeping generalizations, like teenage girls have sex because of peer pressure, may not (and usually doesn't) apply to individual cases, so you don't have any right to tell all teenagers not to have sex, or that their consent doesn't matter, just because there is some girl, somewhere, who was harmed by having sex. It's their individual decision.
BTW, according to Rind, the small subset of teenagers harmed by sex generally come from families that follow sexually repressive religions. If you support laws that would prohibit children from being indoctrinated into religion, or entering buildings used for religion, until they reach their late 20s, I would be sympathetic to your argument.
The question is not about how many people have had sex by age 18 (or 16), but whether this is really consensual sex in the first place.
While I agree that jail time is almost certainly counterproductive, I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior. Further, it really is rare that young women are engaging in a fully consensual manner. They may "want" to have sex as a way of "proving maturity," or to be part of the cool crowd, but that's a poor definition of 'consensual.'
A certain overly randy POTUS fired a very well-spoken Surgeon General who had the nerve to suggest that teens would be far better off both physically and mentally if they engaged in autoeroticism. High time we accepted that position and did whatever we can to reduce the societal pressures to have early sex.
The question is not about how many people have had sex by age 18 (or 16), but whether this is really consensual sex in the first place.
While I agree that jail time is almost certainly counterproductive, I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior. Further, it really is rare that young women are engaging in a fully consensual manner. They may "want" to have sex as a way of "proving maturity," or to be part of the cool crowd, but that's a poor definition of 'consensual.'
Claiming that sex under the age of 17 or 16 is by definition "not consensual" is handing prosecutors a free pass to torment, harass, convict and jail half the teenage population at their total unaccountable discretion.
Sex, starting in the early teenage years, is a normal part of human development. Most of the research that claims that teenage sex is harmful is done by right-wing religious organizations like the Heritage Foundation, who have a long track record of being anti-science. This is global warming for sex.
You have unfortunately been taken in by the right-wing fantasies about the innocent flowers of childhood, the pathology of sex, their atavistic view of guilt, and their belief that they have the right to punish other people for their private life, again at their own total unaccountable discretion (which they don't apply to themselves, for example Josh Duggar or Bristol Palin).
Back in the 1950s, homosexuals were arrested for hanging out in gay bars, teenage girls were sent to reform school for having sex, and abortion was illegal so hospitals were filled with women dying of sepsis from illegal abortions. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, including Roe v. Wade (which ruled that the government had no right to intrude in the bedroom), I thought those days were over, but now it looks like a pendulum swing. In the 1990s the same people created the day care child sex abuse cases, and put bewildered people in jail for years (for what turned out to be fabricated charges). And the right wing is banning abortion again, state by state. It looks like you haven't learned the lessons of those days.
Unfortunately there is a lunatic fringe of the feminist movement of people like Andrea Dworkin, who was a lesbian and convinced a lot of people into believing that all heterosexual sex is rape and exploitation of women by men. They'd like to see the issue of teenage sex framed as boys raping and exploiting girls, even if the girls actively want to have sex. There's a whole anti-sex industry that has moved into this issue, with its own fake experts and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.
I'll go to the scientific literature. Teenage sex is normal, it 's been going on since prehistory, and it doesn't do any more harm than any other normal activity (and a lot less harm than driving, swimming or football). Why is it your business to tell a teenage girl that she can't have sex even if she wants to, or that sex is somehow wrong?
Given that the guy committed statutory rape, yeah, this was good. By the way, the meaning of being below the age of consent is that the girl in question COULD NOT CONSENT.
You are denouncing normal human sexuality. Prosecutors are putting boys in jail for exercising normal human adolescent sexual activity.
If I want to have sex with a woman, it's not because I feel entitled to her body, it's because I want to have sex with her. There's no conscious "engage the patriarchy" moment, it's a purely instinctual thing.
Oh, come on. Don't you want to suppress women? That way we can hire them for less money and they won't complain about cleaning up the bathroom.
He was 17, she was 15 when the sex occurred. He didn't rape her. She regretted it afterwards, and either cried rape or was forced to cry rape by her parents.
If all the upperclassmen that had sex with underclassmen at my former high school were jailed, probably a third of the school would be behind bars. This is fucking ridiculous.
The facts support you on this.
Half the population had sex by age 17. Are we going to put half the population in jail for having sex with the other half?
http://www.kinseyinstitute.org... Percent of population having had first intercourse, by age Males Females 25% by age 15 26% by age 15 37% by age 16 40% by age 16 46% by age 17 49% by age 17 62% by age 18 70% by age 18 69% by age 19 77% by age 19 85% by age 20-21 81% by age 20-21 89% by age 22-24 92% by age 22-24
I hope they don't have any cell phones in their house. I hope they don't use a microwave. I hope they don't live near any cell towers. I hope they don't live near any TV or radio transmitters
What would be funny is if they had turned off WiFi in his classes and not told them, and they continued to complain.
There was an article several years ago in the IEEE Spectrum when the health hazards of EMFs were first getting to be an issue.
They reviewed studies where people actually went around to normal homes and measured the radiation.
They found that the highest levels of EMF were in food blenders and electric razors. Much higher than the power lines in the backyards.
It's true that food blenders and electric razors are only used for short periods of time, but the best evidence for the biological effects (effects, not harm) of EMF on cells was also found when they were exposed for a short period of time.
At that time I went to a talk by Louis Slesin, publisher of Microwave News, who was promoting this idea of the harmful effects of EMF. I asked him what he thought of the IEEE Spectrum review article.
He said, "I don't want to talk about it." He kept refusing after I pressed him on it. He wouldn't tell me why he didn't want to talk about it either.
Show me where a licensed professional made a "EMHS syndrome" diagnosis.
From TFA:
The physician who diagnosed G, Dr. Jeanne Hubbuch, said in a letter to the school last year that EHS was the only possibility that explains the symptoms.
Q: Tell me, Dr. Hubbuch, how do you know it couldn't be aliens sending space rays?
What if you take everything way from a wealthy person and a few years later they are wealthy again? Do you take it all away again and keep taking it away until they learn their lesson?
Yeah. Like the chickens. You keep taking away their eggs, so they lay more.
They keep taking it all away from us. Why shouldn't we take it all away from them?
We don't have to take everything away from them. We could leave them with enough for a couple of vacation homes, an Italian sports car, a mistress or two, and a yacht if it's not too extravagant. Anything less than that would be a hardship.
But the rest of it should go to repay society back for the benefits they got from society.
It also works in Germany. The German unemployment system gives Germans the same income from being unemployed as they would if they were employed. Some of the Germans use their unemployment time as a vacation. Others use it to go to school or get more training in their jobs. A welder would learn advanced welding techniques.
If it doesn't work in the US, it's because we're not doing it right.
I read Milton Friedman's books. I read his Playboy interview that he liked so much. I read his op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. I also read Henry Ford's books on the assembly line and the whole Ford system.
Friedman's free market works very well in certain circumstances. It was pretty good for organizing automobile factories during the 1930s, and up to about the 1970s. (Of course, the Soviets did a good job of manufacturing tanks during WWII with central command.)
I once studied the electrical power generating and distribution industry (particularly the nuclear power industry). There were private companies and government-run companies. I asked people in the industry to name the best-run companies. If Friedman were right, the private companies would be efficient and the government companies would be inefficient. But that's not what the people in the industry told me. Some of the best companies were private companies, like Commonwealth Edison, and some were government-run, like the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The Internet was created by the government. Gordon Crovitz, the Wall Street Journal editorial writer, proved that. He wrote an editorial in the WSJ about how the Internet was really created by private entrepreneurs. All the people whose books and contributions he cited wrote to the WSJ and said that he got their books and their experience all wrong. They started out working on government grants, and the government supported the Internet at every step.
Friedman had beautiful theories. Unfortunately, like Aristotle, he never looked at what was happening in the real world to see if his theories were confirmed. They weren't. Sometimes the free market works better, sometimes the government works better.
Only about %0.1 percent of the population cares about inheritance tax
You made that number up, right? You don't have a source for it, right? That's what conservatives always do.
Do YOU care about inheritance tax? WHY? FREE MONEY COMING SOON???
I care about the inheritance tax, just like Bernie Sanders does, because without it, the top 0.1% own as much as the bottom 90% combined. http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
I wouldn't care if the rich simply used their money to buy yachts, diamonds and cars, and fly around the world vacationing in their mansions and at five-star hotels, eating at five-star restaurants. I don't care about their enjoying luxury (even though Adam Smith thought that it was wasteful and the rich should be taxed more).
I care about the rich because they're using their money to buy influence (that is, bribe politicians), and run the country.
It's not enough for them to be rich. They have to create a fantasy in which they got rich because they were hard-working and deserved it (even though most of them inherited their money), and the poor are poor because they're lazy and don't deserve it. They have to destroy it for the rest of us. They maliciously enjoy making the rest of us suffer.
I think we have to take away the money from the rich to disarm them, because they're dangerous to the world. It's like taking nuclear weapons away from Iran.
Here is a crazy idea if you don't work, you don't eat.
Yeah, that's what Lenin said. "Those who do not work, do not eat."
I personally see nothing wrong with letting people suffer as a form of motivation.
I see nothing wrong with making you suffer as a form of motivation.
I think we should take away the assets of the wealthy, in order to give them a motivation to work. If we just let people sit on a multi-million dollar investment portfolio, they won't have any motivation to work.
If the rich are so smart, when we take their money away, they'll just earn some more.
It's like a chicken. When you take away her eggs, she'll lay some more.
We tried this in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and ended up with 10 year waiting lists for cars.
How's that free market working out in the Soviet Union? Yeah, it's an imperfect free market. But that's what free markets look like.
Just don't be surprised when no one serves you latte and breakfast on the way to work. After all why should someone wake up at 4:30 am and bust their butts when they could be still be being paid sleeping in and watching TV for the rest of the day
I wouldn't wake up at 4:30am and bust my butt to serve you latte and breakfast. But I would wake up at 4:30am and go to work at a medical clinic, to help people who are suffering. I'd work in a laboratory.
There are lots of doctors who come from very wealthy families, and don't have to work, but graduated medical school and work in medicine anyway. There was a doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering who donated his salary to the hospital, and worked free.
The economists are wrong. People aren't motivated by money. They're motivated more by personal satisfaction. Our instinct is to serve the needs of the community. Humans wouldn't have survived 100,000 years otherwise.
Looks good on paper. But when enough people stop working and still expect a "basic income" check every month, it will quickly collapse. Further, the definition of "basic income" will suddenly include High Speed Internet, a car payment, a house payment, water, electicity....
And as taxes rise on those still working, to pay for those that refuse to work, and they start to charge more, creating runaway inflation the cries for increases to "basic income" not being enough to live.... the death spiral of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will quickly prove that the idea looks good on paper, but doesn't function in reality.
Or, as my daddy used to say, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not"
How come those Scandinavian countries with their generous welfare systems haven't collapsed in a death spiral over the last 50 years?
It looks like people don't work the way you predict.
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.
It only seems like a win, until more people quit their jobs and take the "free money". Pretty soon, all that free money is useless as nobody is working, and everyone is expecting a check every month. This is nothing short of foolishness dreamed up by people who love socialism. It won't work out at all like they expect.
Interesting theory. Not confirmed by reality. There are lots of societies in which people who could be getting "free money," and nonetheless prefer to work, because they want to do something productive and contribute to society. Most people enjoy productive work. Most of the scientists who make the greatest contributions aren't in it for the money. Look at Alexander Flemming.
Here's a story from the New York Times about how, in the Danish system, people can just refuse to work and live off state subsidies, and one guy, "Lazy Robert," actually does it. The striking thing is that so few people do that. They often do continue with their education; you may think that's a bad thing. People in the aggregate don't follow their selfish financial incentives the way free-market economists predict.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...? Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault By SUZANNE DALEY April 20, 2013 Robert Nielsen ("Lazy Robert"), 45, who was interviewed on TV, was on welfare since 2001. He was able-bodied but didn't want to take a demeaning job, like working in a fast-food restaurant.
I have three very selfish and practical reasons why I support it: (a) If I'm ever poor and have kids, I will want to get vaccines for them even if I can't afford it; (b) Paying for vaccines today is cheaper than paying for the illness tomorrow; and (c) Vaccinating everyone else in society cuts the chances of me or my loved ones becoming sick.
In evolutionary biology, that's called reciprocal altruism. Communities that take care of their members survive. Communities composed of people who don't help each other don't survive.
Not wanting to give out welfare isn't a selfish proposition. I've spoken to social workers who themselves say they prefer not to put people on disability or other welfare programs if they can avoid it, because those people tend to find a comfort zone there and tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc.
Not to mention, if everybody was that way, you'd start to see a gradual decline in GDP.
So those social workers would also prefer to have a high inheritance tax, because people who inherit enough to live without working will lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc., right?
Also every single name on the retracted list sounds Chinese.
Up until about 5 or 10 years ago, Chinese medicine was famous for fraud.
There was one Chinese neurosurgeon who was doing effectively lobotomies with the claim that it would cure all kinds of mental diseases. Families gave him their life savings, and their relatives turned out worse than they were before, if they survived.
It's also still popular in China for doctors to give monthly intravenous antibiotic infusions, to healthy patients, as a "tonic." As you might expect, this produces antibiotic resistance, making the antibiotics worthless when somebody really needs them. And occasionally the IV infusions lead to life-threatening infections. One woman got a flesh-eating bacterial infection, and lost 2 feet and a hand.
(It's not just China. This is what happens in the free market anywhere, when doctors can make a lot of money and don't have competent government oversight. See Quackwatch.com for U.S. examples.)
According to Science magazine, there was (and is) a big fight going on between the "traditional" do-your-own-thing Chinese practitioners and the Western-educated MDs who are trying to impose modern scientific methods and education. The modern Chinese MDs seem to be winning.
I read about 10 scientific journals a week and I noticed a dramatic increase in the Chinese names, either among the "et al." or now increasingly as principal investigators, either from Western institutions or now increasingly from Chinese institutions.
I remember one paper in Science in which they sequenced the DNA of 2 species of Chinese bats -- one a fruit-eating bat and the other an insectivorous bat. Of course anyone can sequence DNA these days, but they did a great job of identifying the interesting differences between the 2 species and interpreting the evolutionary significance.
There are also a lot of good Chinese papers in the major medical journals. If you consider Taiwan as part of China, they have the entire Taiwanese population in their medical insurance database, and they're running studies to see how many people with **disease or drug** get **adverse effect** over 10 or 20 years.
They also seem to have a big bureaucracy in which scientists get rewarded and promoted on the basis of their citations, since it's an easy metric. I'm glad that doesn't happen here.
Totally, India is KICKING THE USA's ASS when it comes to stem cell therapy. The elite rich have managed to shift it into some "stem cells=aborted babies" and pretty much killed all research here. But since their rich, they can just go fly to whatever country isn't held back and get whatever life-extending therapies they can buy but leave their servants (the 99% others) here to die from those exact same problems. I only wish this was some conspiracy theory idea...but I personally know of at least four people who have went to India to get treatments that are not available here in the US, and all four of them are at least millionaires on paper.
The only stem cell therapies that I know of that actually work are bone marrow transplants for leukemia and similar blood diseases.
Everything else is in research and I keep reading articles about how one treatment after another failed. Some day, yes. Probably. Maybe.
Stem cell therapy has also attracted a lot of scam artists who will be happy to treat Americans or anybody else who is good for $100,000 or so, but they don't get better and some of them die during the treatment.
It was big in China but maybe it's moving to India too. I'd like to see their survival statistics. I doubt they keep statistics.
Both Russia and the Philippines have a booming business in catering for high quality medical care at lower prices. I belive many other countries do the same. Dont assume that the US is the only place in the world with access to high quality medical care.
I've never heard of Russia having particularly good health care, under the Soviet system or today.
Science had an article on HIV/AIDS in Russia a year or two ago. They don't believe in giving methadone to drug addicts, it's illegal for them to possess needles (clean or dirty), and as a result the incidence of HIV, AIDS, and the associated TB has been exploding. They have TB strains that are resistant to everye drug (usually the result of usually the result of treating TB incompetently with sub-therapeutic doses).
The Soviet/Russian doctors who emigrated to the U.S. weren't so great either. They had a lot of trouble qualifying as MDs here, and many of them never did. Yes, there was a language barrier, but a doctor has to know English well enough to read the warning labels on a new drug.
It's kind of a shame. The Soviets had brilliant mathematicians, brilliant scientists, and pretty good engineers, but they had a lot of trouble doing anything practical. The joke was that the Russians excelled at anything you could do with chalk and a blackboard.
They were first in space, though. Give them credit for that.
Here's that NYT article that the Wired story linked to. Lewinski is the guy who testifies that a cop had reasonable fear of his life when he shot a suspect in the back. And the juries pretend to believe him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08... Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, William J. Lewinski often appears as an expert witness who says they had no choice but to fire. By MATT APUZZO AUG. 1, 2015
A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket. The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead. The driver was unarmed.
(“In simple terms, if I see the gun, I’m dead?”)
(Testified or consulted in nearly 200 cases.)
His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person. Even when shooting someone in the back. Even when witness testimony, forensic evidence or video footage contradicts the officer’s story.
before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers his research has been roundly criticized by experts. An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work “pseudoscience.” The Justice Department denounced his findings as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.”
I always get concerned whenever a police captains/spokemen/union reps says something to the effect of "our first priority is going home safely at night". Police's first priority should always making sure members of the public go home safely at the end of the day.
Except police have no legal duty to protect the general public. The only time they must provide protection is if a person is in their custody, or they create the dangerous situation.
That's a different situation. We're talking about the criminal law that says that a cop can't kill someone unless he has a reasonable fear that the cop's life is at risk.
The problem is that cops can give some bullshit excuse about how their life was in danger, and the (white) juries pretend to believe it. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08... Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later. When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, William J. Lewinski often appears as an expert witness who says they had no choice but to fire.
Beyond the law, when my city hires a cop, I and my elected officials have a right to tell him that his first priority is to make sure that I, an innocent civilian, get home at night. I don't want him to shoot me because that's the way he deals with people. If he doesn't want to take the job under those terms, there are plenty of other more-qualified people who will.
We don't let firemen say, "I don't want to go into a burning building. I could get hurt."
(I'm not even sure that Warren v. District of Columbia is current law, because a lot of jurisdictions have settled cases like that for big bucks since then.)
Many years ago, I took an advanced first aid course. Eight hours training. Q. You are driving along a road. You see a car wrapped around a tree and a person outside of that car heavily bleeding. What is the first thing you do? A. The first thing you do is to take the warning triangle out of the boot of your car, open it up, and put it up 100 meters away from the accident, clearly visible, to avoid some idiot killing you while you give first aid. The bleeding victim doesn't come first. The safety of the helper comes first.
In that case, you set up the warning triangle to protect not only yourself but the bleeding person. That's not the kind of situation we're talking about -- where a cop kills an unarmed person because, the cop claims later, he thought his life was in danger, and when you look at the facts, it's bullshit.
(There were a couple of recent cases in which a black driver was in an auto accident, went looking for help, and was shot and killed by the cops.)
Besides, you're describing the situation of a volunteer, not a professional. I read a case of a doctor who was treating an infant who suddenly stopped breathing. She gave the infant mouth-to-mouth respiration, but the infant died. It turned out that the infant had hepatitis C, the doctor got infected with hepatitis C too, and also died. There were many situations like that during the AIDS crisis, and in Canada and China during the SARS epidemic. It happened again during the Ebola epidemic. The Lancet had a whole section of African doctors and nurses who died while staying at their post and caring for their patients. If you want to go to medical school, those are the risks you accept.
I don't know a good reason why cops can't accept the same risks.
Slashdot Mirror
And so long as you're citing medical reviews, please look up some of the work in the last decade or so on development of the frontal lobes and the established physical fact that teens (and in fact up to the late 20s) do not have the capability to make judgements about engaging in behavior which is both pleasurable and risky.
I read those studies. So does that mean people shouldn't have sex until their late 20s, because they can better make risky decisions then?
Teenagers routinely make equally risky decisions, such as following a religion, taking out college loans, joining the military, driving, swimming and playing football. Do you think they should be prohibited from doing all those things until their 20s?
According to Rind, teenage sex is no more harmful than any other activities of daily life. Every situation is different, so the person who is best able to make that decision is the person involved, the teenager. Your sweeping generalizations, like teenage girls have sex because of peer pressure, may not (and usually doesn't) apply to individual cases, so you don't have any right to tell all teenagers not to have sex, or that their consent doesn't matter, just because there is some girl, somewhere, who was harmed by having sex. It's their individual decision.
BTW, according to Rind, the small subset of teenagers harmed by sex generally come from families that follow sexually repressive religions. If you support laws that would prohibit children from being indoctrinated into religion, or entering buildings used for religion, until they reach their late 20s, I would be sympathetic to your argument.
The question is not about how many people have had sex by age 18 (or 16), but whether this is really consensual sex in the first place.
While I agree that jail time is almost certainly counterproductive, I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior. Further, it really is rare that young women are engaging in a fully consensual manner. They may "want" to have sex as a way of "proving maturity," or to be part of the cool crowd, but that's a poor definition of 'consensual.'
A certain overly randy POTUS fired a very well-spoken Surgeon General who had the nerve to suggest that teens would be far better off both physically and mentally if they engaged in autoeroticism. High time we accepted that position and did whatever we can to reduce the societal pressures to have early sex.
The question is not about how many people have had sex by age 18 (or 16), but whether this is really consensual sex in the first place.
While I agree that jail time is almost certainly counterproductive, I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior. Further, it really is rare that young women are engaging in a fully consensual manner. They may "want" to have sex as a way of "proving maturity," or to be part of the cool crowd, but that's a poor definition of 'consensual.'
Claiming that sex under the age of 17 or 16 is by definition "not consensual" is handing prosecutors a free pass to torment, harass, convict and jail half the teenage population at their total unaccountable discretion.
Sex, starting in the early teenage years, is a normal part of human development. Most of the research that claims that teenage sex is harmful is done by right-wing religious organizations like the Heritage Foundation, who have a long track record of being anti-science. This is global warming for sex.
You have unfortunately been taken in by the right-wing fantasies about the innocent flowers of childhood, the pathology of sex, their atavistic view of guilt, and their belief that they have the right to punish other people for their private life, again at their own total unaccountable discretion (which they don't apply to themselves, for example Josh Duggar or Bristol Palin).
Back in the 1950s, homosexuals were arrested for hanging out in gay bars, teenage girls were sent to reform school for having sex, and abortion was illegal so hospitals were filled with women dying of sepsis from illegal abortions. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, including Roe v. Wade (which ruled that the government had no right to intrude in the bedroom), I thought those days were over, but now it looks like a pendulum swing. In the 1990s the same people created the day care child sex abuse cases, and put bewildered people in jail for years (for what turned out to be fabricated charges). And the right wing is banning abortion again, state by state. It looks like you haven't learned the lessons of those days.
Unfortunately there is a lunatic fringe of the feminist movement of people like Andrea Dworkin, who was a lesbian and convinced a lot of people into believing that all heterosexual sex is rape and exploitation of women by men. They'd like to see the issue of teenage sex framed as boys raping and exploiting girls, even if the girls actively want to have sex. There's a whole anti-sex industry that has moved into this issue, with its own fake experts and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.
I'll go to the scientific literature. Teenage sex is normal, it 's been going on since prehistory, and it doesn't do any more harm than any other normal activity (and a lot less harm than driving, swimming or football). Why is it your business to tell a teenage girl that she can't have sex even if she wants to, or that sex is somehow wrong?
http://psycnet.apa.org/jo
Given that the guy committed statutory rape, yeah, this was good. By the way, the meaning of being below the age of consent is that the girl in question COULD NOT CONSENT.
You are denouncing normal human sexuality. Prosecutors are putting boys in jail for exercising normal human adolescent sexual activity.
26% of females have intercourse by age 15.
http://www.kinseyinstitute.org...
What are you going to do? Put half the teenage boys in jail?
You really ought to think through your COULD NOT CONSENT. It makes no sense.
If I want to have sex with a woman, it's not because I feel entitled to her body, it's because I want to have sex with her. There's no conscious "engage the patriarchy" moment, it's a purely instinctual thing.
Oh, come on. Don't you want to suppress women? That way we can hire them for less money and they won't complain about cleaning up the bathroom.
He was 17, she was 15 when the sex occurred. He didn't rape her. She regretted it afterwards, and either cried rape or was forced to cry rape by her parents.
If all the upperclassmen that had sex with underclassmen at my former high school were jailed, probably a third of the school would be behind bars. This is fucking ridiculous.
The facts support you on this.
Half the population had sex by age 17. Are we going to put half the population in jail for having sex with the other half?
http://www.kinseyinstitute.org...
Percent of population having had first intercourse, by age
Males Females
25% by age 15 26% by age 15
37% by age 16 40% by age 16
46% by age 17 49% by age 17
62% by age 18 70% by age 18
69% by age 19 77% by age 19
85% by age 20-21 81% by age 20-21
89% by age 22-24 92% by age 22-24
I hope they don't have any cell phones in their house.
I hope they don't use a microwave.
I hope they don't live near any cell towers.
I hope they don't live near any TV or radio transmitters
What would be funny is if they had turned off WiFi in his classes and not told them, and they continued to complain.
There was an article several years ago in the IEEE Spectrum when the health hazards of EMFs were first getting to be an issue.
They reviewed studies where people actually went around to normal homes and measured the radiation.
They found that the highest levels of EMF were in food blenders and electric razors. Much higher than the power lines in the backyards.
It's true that food blenders and electric razors are only used for short periods of time, but the best evidence for the biological effects (effects, not harm) of EMF on cells was also found when they were exposed for a short period of time.
At that time I went to a talk by Louis Slesin, publisher of Microwave News, who was promoting this idea of the harmful effects of EMF. I asked him what he thought of the IEEE Spectrum review article.
He said, "I don't want to talk about it." He kept refusing after I pressed him on it. He wouldn't tell me why he didn't want to talk about it either.
Show me where a licensed professional made a "EMHS syndrome" diagnosis.
From TFA:
The physician who diagnosed G, Dr. Jeanne Hubbuch, said in a letter to the school last year that EHS was the only possibility that explains the symptoms.
Q: Tell me, Dr. Hubbuch, how do you know it couldn't be aliens sending space rays?
A simple tinfoil hat should work.
What if you take everything way from a wealthy person and a few years later they are wealthy again? Do you take it all away again and keep taking it away until they learn their lesson?
Yeah. Like the chickens. You keep taking away their eggs, so they lay more.
They keep taking it all away from us. Why shouldn't we take it all away from them?
We don't have to take everything away from them. We could leave them with enough for a couple of vacation homes, an Italian sports car, a mistress or two, and a yacht if it's not too extravagant. Anything less than that would be a hardship.
But the rest of it should go to repay society back for the benefits they got from society.
It works in Scandinavian countries.
It also works in Germany. The German unemployment system gives Germans the same income from being unemployed as they would if they were employed. Some of the Germans use their unemployment time as a vacation. Others use it to go to school or get more training in their jobs. A welder would learn advanced welding techniques.
If it doesn't work in the US, it's because we're not doing it right.
I read Milton Friedman's books. I read his Playboy interview that he liked so much. I read his op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. I also read Henry Ford's books on the assembly line and the whole Ford system.
Friedman's free market works very well in certain circumstances. It was pretty good for organizing automobile factories during the 1930s, and up to about the 1970s. (Of course, the Soviets did a good job of manufacturing tanks during WWII with central command.)
I once studied the electrical power generating and distribution industry (particularly the nuclear power industry). There were private companies and government-run companies. I asked people in the industry to name the best-run companies. If Friedman were right, the private companies would be efficient and the government companies would be inefficient. But that's not what the people in the industry told me. Some of the best companies were private companies, like Commonwealth Edison, and some were government-run, like the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The Internet was created by the government. Gordon Crovitz, the Wall Street Journal editorial writer, proved that. He wrote an editorial in the WSJ about how the Internet was really created by private entrepreneurs. All the people whose books and contributions he cited wrote to the WSJ and said that he got their books and their experience all wrong. They started out working on government grants, and the government supported the Internet at every step.
Friedman had beautiful theories. Unfortunately, like Aristotle, he never looked at what was happening in the real world to see if his theories were confirmed. They weren't. Sometimes the free market works better, sometimes the government works better.
Only about %0.1 percent of the population cares about inheritance tax
You made that number up, right? You don't have a source for it, right? That's what conservatives always do.
Do YOU care about inheritance tax? WHY? FREE MONEY COMING SOON???
I care about the inheritance tax, just like Bernie Sanders does, because without it, the top 0.1% own as much as the bottom 90% combined. http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
I wouldn't care if the rich simply used their money to buy yachts, diamonds and cars, and fly around the world vacationing in their mansions and at five-star hotels, eating at five-star restaurants. I don't care about their enjoying luxury (even though Adam Smith thought that it was wasteful and the rich should be taxed more).
I care about the rich because they're using their money to buy influence (that is, bribe politicians), and run the country.
It's not enough for them to be rich. They have to create a fantasy in which they got rich because they were hard-working and deserved it (even though most of them inherited their money), and the poor are poor because they're lazy and don't deserve it. They have to destroy it for the rest of us. They maliciously enjoy making the rest of us suffer.
I think we have to take away the money from the rich to disarm them, because they're dangerous to the world. It's like taking nuclear weapons away from Iran.
Here is a crazy idea if you don't work, you don't eat.
Yeah, that's what Lenin said. "Those who do not work, do not eat."
I personally see nothing wrong with letting people suffer as a form of motivation.
I see nothing wrong with making you suffer as a form of motivation.
I think we should take away the assets of the wealthy, in order to give them a motivation to work. If we just let people sit on a multi-million dollar investment portfolio, they won't have any motivation to work.
If the rich are so smart, when we take their money away, they'll just earn some more.
It's like a chicken. When you take away her eggs, she'll lay some more.
We tried this in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and ended up with 10 year waiting lists for cars.
How's that free market working out in the Soviet Union? Yeah, it's an imperfect free market. But that's what free markets look like.
Just don't be surprised when no one serves you latte and breakfast on the way to work. After all why should someone wake up at 4:30 am and bust their butts when they could be still be being paid sleeping in and watching TV for the rest of the day
I wouldn't wake up at 4:30am and bust my butt to serve you latte and breakfast. But I would wake up at 4:30am and go to work at a medical clinic, to help people who are suffering. I'd work in a laboratory.
There are lots of doctors who come from very wealthy families, and don't have to work, but graduated medical school and work in medicine anyway. There was a doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering who donated his salary to the hospital, and worked free.
The economists are wrong. People aren't motivated by money. They're motivated more by personal satisfaction. Our instinct is to serve the needs of the community. Humans wouldn't have survived 100,000 years otherwise.
Looks good on paper. But when enough people stop working and still expect a "basic income" check every month, it will quickly collapse. Further, the definition of "basic income" will suddenly include High Speed Internet, a car payment, a house payment, water, electicity ....
And as taxes rise on those still working, to pay for those that refuse to work, and they start to charge more, creating runaway inflation the cries for increases to "basic income" not being enough to live .... the death spiral of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will quickly prove that the idea looks good on paper, but doesn't function in reality.
Or, as my daddy used to say, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not"
How come those Scandinavian countries with their generous welfare systems haven't collapsed in a death spiral over the last 50 years?
It looks like people don't work the way you predict.
Milton Friedman called it the "negative income tax" and it's meant to get rid of all the bureaucracy around all the various social programs.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
Friedrich Hayek agreed:
It only seems like a win, until more people quit their jobs and take the "free money". Pretty soon, all that free money is useless as nobody is working, and everyone is expecting a check every month. This is nothing short of foolishness dreamed up by people who love socialism. It won't work out at all like they expect.
Interesting theory. Not confirmed by reality. There are lots of societies in which people who could be getting "free money," and nonetheless prefer to work, because they want to do something productive and contribute to society. Most people enjoy productive work. Most of the scientists who make the greatest contributions aren't in it for the money. Look at Alexander Flemming.
Here's a story from the New York Times about how, in the Danish system, people can just refuse to work and live off state subsidies, and one guy, "Lazy Robert," actually does it. The striking thing is that so few people do that. They often do continue with their education; you may think that's a bad thing. People in the aggregate don't follow their selfish financial incentives the way free-market economists predict.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...?
Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault
By SUZANNE DALEY
April 20, 2013
Robert Nielsen ("Lazy Robert"), 45, who was interviewed on TV, was on welfare since 2001. He was able-bodied but didn't want to take a demeaning job, like working in a fast-food restaurant.
I have three very selfish and practical reasons why I support it: (a) If I'm ever poor and have kids, I will want to get vaccines for them even if I can't afford it; (b) Paying for vaccines today is cheaper than paying for the illness tomorrow; and (c) Vaccinating everyone else in society cuts the chances of me or my loved ones becoming sick.
In evolutionary biology, that's called reciprocal altruism. Communities that take care of their members survive. Communities composed of people who don't help each other don't survive.
Not wanting to give out welfare isn't a selfish proposition. I've spoken to social workers who themselves say they prefer not to put people on disability or other welfare programs if they can avoid it, because those people tend to find a comfort zone there and tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc.
Not to mention, if everybody was that way, you'd start to see a gradual decline in GDP.
So those social workers would also prefer to have a high inheritance tax, because people who inherit enough to live without working will lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc., right?
Also every single name on the retracted list sounds Chinese.
Up until about 5 or 10 years ago, Chinese medicine was famous for fraud.
There was one Chinese neurosurgeon who was doing effectively lobotomies with the claim that it would cure all kinds of mental diseases. Families gave him their life savings, and their relatives turned out worse than they were before, if they survived.
It's also still popular in China for doctors to give monthly intravenous antibiotic infusions, to healthy patients, as a "tonic." As you might expect, this produces antibiotic resistance, making the antibiotics worthless when somebody really needs them. And occasionally the IV infusions lead to life-threatening infections. One woman got a flesh-eating bacterial infection, and lost 2 feet and a hand.
(It's not just China. This is what happens in the free market anywhere, when doctors can make a lot of money and don't have competent government oversight. See Quackwatch.com for U.S. examples.)
According to Science magazine, there was (and is) a big fight going on between the "traditional" do-your-own-thing Chinese practitioners and the Western-educated MDs who are trying to impose modern scientific methods and education. The modern Chinese MDs seem to be winning.
I read about 10 scientific journals a week and I noticed a dramatic increase in the Chinese names, either among the "et al." or now increasingly as principal investigators, either from Western institutions or now increasingly from Chinese institutions.
I remember one paper in Science in which they sequenced the DNA of 2 species of Chinese bats -- one a fruit-eating bat and the other an insectivorous bat. Of course anyone can sequence DNA these days, but they did a great job of identifying the interesting differences between the 2 species and interpreting the evolutionary significance.
There are also a lot of good Chinese papers in the major medical journals. If you consider Taiwan as part of China, they have the entire Taiwanese population in their medical insurance database, and they're running studies to see how many people with **disease or drug** get **adverse effect** over 10 or 20 years.
They also seem to have a big bureaucracy in which scientists get rewarded and promoted on the basis of their citations, since it's an easy metric. I'm glad that doesn't happen here.
Totally, India is KICKING THE USA's ASS when it comes to stem cell therapy. The elite rich have managed to shift it into some "stem cells=aborted babies" and pretty much killed all research here. But since their rich, they can just go fly to whatever country isn't held back and get whatever life-extending therapies they can buy but leave their servants (the 99% others) here to die from those exact same problems. I only wish this was some conspiracy theory idea...but I personally know of at least four people who have went to India to get treatments that are not available here in the US, and all four of them are at least millionaires on paper.
The only stem cell therapies that I know of that actually work are bone marrow transplants for leukemia and similar blood diseases.
Everything else is in research and I keep reading articles about how one treatment after another failed. Some day, yes. Probably. Maybe.
Stem cell therapy has also attracted a lot of scam artists who will be happy to treat Americans or anybody else who is good for $100,000 or so, but they don't get better and some of them die during the treatment.
It was big in China but maybe it's moving to India too. I'd like to see their survival statistics. I doubt they keep statistics.
Both Russia and the Philippines have a booming business in catering for high quality medical care at lower prices. I belive many other countries do the same. Dont assume that the US is the only place in the world with access to high quality medical care.
I've never heard of Russia having particularly good health care, under the Soviet system or today.
Science had an article on HIV/AIDS in Russia a year or two ago. They don't believe in giving methadone to drug addicts, it's illegal for them to possess needles (clean or dirty), and as a result the incidence of HIV, AIDS, and the associated TB has been exploding. They have TB strains that are resistant to everye drug (usually the result of usually the result of treating TB incompetently with sub-therapeutic doses).
The Soviet/Russian doctors who emigrated to the U.S. weren't so great either. They had a lot of trouble qualifying as MDs here, and many of them never did. Yes, there was a language barrier, but a doctor has to know English well enough to read the warning labels on a new drug.
It's kind of a shame. The Soviets had brilliant mathematicians, brilliant scientists, and pretty good engineers, but they had a lot of trouble doing anything practical. The joke was that the Russians excelled at anything you could do with chalk and a blackboard.
They were first in space, though. Give them credit for that.
Here's that NYT article that the Wired story linked to. Lewinski is the guy who testifies that a cop had reasonable fear of his life when he shot a suspect in the back. And the juries pretend to believe him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08...
Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later
When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, William J. Lewinski often appears as an expert witness who says they had no choice but to fire.
By MATT APUZZO
AUG. 1, 2015
A black motorist, pulled to the side of the road for a turn-signal violation, had stuffed his hand into his pocket. The white officer yelled for him to take it out. When the driver started to comply, the officer shot him dead. The driver was unarmed.
(“In simple terms, if I see the gun, I’m dead?”)
(Testified or consulted in nearly 200 cases.)
His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person.
Even when shooting someone in the back. Even when witness testimony, forensic evidence or video footage contradicts the officer’s story.
before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers
his research has been roundly criticized by experts. An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work “pseudoscience.” The Justice Department denounced his findings as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.”
I always get concerned whenever a police captains/spokemen/union reps says something to the effect of "our first priority is going home safely at night". Police's first priority should always making sure members of the public go home safely at the end of the day.
Except police have no legal duty to protect the general public. The only time they must provide protection is if a person is in their custody, or they create the dangerous situation.
That's a different situation. We're talking about the criminal law that says that a cop can't kill someone unless he has a reasonable fear that the cop's life is at risk.
The problem is that cops can give some bullshit excuse about how their life was in danger, and the (white) juries pretend to believe it. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08... Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later. When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, William J. Lewinski often appears as an expert witness who says they had no choice but to fire.
Beyond the law, when my city hires a cop, I and my elected officials have a right to tell him that his first priority is to make sure that I, an innocent civilian, get home at night. I don't want him to shoot me because that's the way he deals with people. If he doesn't want to take the job under those terms, there are plenty of other more-qualified people who will.
We don't let firemen say, "I don't want to go into a burning building. I could get hurt."
(I'm not even sure that Warren v. District of Columbia is current law, because a lot of jurisdictions have settled cases like that for big bucks since then.)
Many years ago, I took an advanced first aid course. Eight hours training. Q. You are driving along a road. You see a car wrapped around a tree and a person outside of that car heavily bleeding. What is the first thing you do? A. The first thing you do is to take the warning triangle out of the boot of your car, open it up, and put it up 100 meters away from the accident, clearly visible, to avoid some idiot killing you while you give first aid. The bleeding victim doesn't come first. The safety of the helper comes first.
In that case, you set up the warning triangle to protect not only yourself but the bleeding person. That's not the kind of situation we're talking about -- where a cop kills an unarmed person because, the cop claims later, he thought his life was in danger, and when you look at the facts, it's bullshit.
(There were a couple of recent cases in which a black driver was in an auto accident, went looking for help, and was shot and killed by the cops.)
Besides, you're describing the situation of a volunteer, not a professional. I read a case of a doctor who was treating an infant who suddenly stopped breathing. She gave the infant mouth-to-mouth respiration, but the infant died. It turned out that the infant had hepatitis C, the doctor got infected with hepatitis C too, and also died. There were many situations like that during the AIDS crisis, and in Canada and China during the SARS epidemic. It happened again during the Ebola epidemic. The Lancet had a whole section of African doctors and nurses who died while staying at their post and caring for their patients. If you want to go to medical school, those are the risks you accept.
I don't know a good reason why cops can't accept the same risks.