Actually, there's racial discrimination in calling some people 'black' and other people 'white.'
I grew up when "negroes" started referring to themselves as "black." A lot of them were active in the civil rights movement, trying to vote in the former Confederate states. I don't see any discrimination in calling them that.
I just read a study in the New England Journal of Medicine about a study of a hepatitis C drug where they described patients as "White," "Black," or "Asian." I think they know what they're doing.
Are you a Christian? If you're not, and you're not even an atheist theologian, how the hell do you understand and/or interpret the Christian religion well enough to regurgitate little out-of-context snippets of it at others in judgement?
And if you are a Christian, don't you know that we all have our own cross to bear, i.e. butt out on judging others. That's for your God to do.
I read librarian Laura Bush's favorite work, The Grand Inquisitor.
If you're a Christian, you tell me: Would Jesus have signed all those death warrants that Bush signed in Texas?
The Nazis used to do that to kill handicapped people. They used a dose of morphine to put them out, and then a dose of potassium chloride to stop their heart.
They had to stop because it was too unpopular with the German people. Especially with the Christian clergy.
They arrest and flog you for having a Bible in Saudi Arabia.
Not true. They regard the old testament and new testament as holy scriptures. They consider Jesus a prophet. Visitors can follow their own religion.
The only thing you can't do in a lot of Muslim countries is try to convert Muslims to Christianity. You can't try to convert Jews in Israel either. A lot of Christian countries used to burn people at the stake for having books with falsehoods.
You kill a pregnant woman intentionally, you die. F***, I'll do it myself. Not out of a sense of a blood thirsty desire for vengeance but because I no longer consider you a member of the human race and you should be destroyed the same way I would kill a mosquito.
Ever think about all those people who were sent to jail for decades for committing rape (and sometimes murder), who were exonerated by DNA testing? http://www.innocenceproject.org/
There was an article in the New Scientist that described an experiment that a scientist had done with the guillotine in the 18th century. He arranged with a convict before the execution to give a sign if he was still conscious in the moments after the execution, and he did.
That one report isn't conclusive, but it's possible that the brain could remain conscious a few seconds after a beheading.
If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first. However, being as there is always going to be some error in the legal system the question we should be asking is, "How many innocent people are we willing to murder in the name of revenge/justice?"
Because, until you get to that 100%, and never make an error, that is what you are doing. You are murdering people because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, are the wrong skin color, or cannot afford a good lawyer. At least if you screw up a life in prison sentence, you can let the person out in a decade or two when the truth comes to light.
Right. I could accept capital punishment if 3 conditions were fulfilled:
1. The person would have to in fact be guilty.
2. The person would have to be convicted in a fair trial.
3. Everybody who committed the same crime in the same circumstances would have to be treated the same way.
Obviously those conditions can't be met in the U.S.
Rich people get the top trial lawyers; poor people get public defenders. A millionaire has never been executed in America. There's racial discrimination in arrests, trial and sentencing. White people shoot someone to death and the cops don't even arrest them. Black people shoot someone to death, even in clear self-defense, and they get convicted. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/07/john_white_conviction_george_zimmerman.php
Your bible, nor anyone's religious texts, are of no use to me. T
It's useful for pointing out the hypocrisy of people like George W. Bush, who claimed to be following Jesus while he signed death certificates and sent out the military to kill people.
At least the Pope wasn't hypocritical in that regard.
At the rate this busybody nonsense is going, hanging will make a comeback. That's all that this meddling nonsense will achieve. It will just eliminate the attempts to make the process less brutal.
What makes you think that lethal injection is less brutal than hanging? Not the opinion of doctors.
Actually the Nazis used a relatively humane method to kill people who were mentally disabled or had chronic diseases like diabetes. First they used a morphine injection, then potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Personally, I'd like to see hanging make a comeback.
At least a competent executioner can kill somebody by hanging quickly and painlessly.
These lethal injections have all been designed by people who didn't know what they were doing -- they weren't doctors, they just knew a little bit about medicine.
Somebody said that it was as if you wanted to make dinner, and you looked in your refrigerator to see what you had available. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
This is a sure formula for making mistakes -- doing it for the first time, and not knowing much about it in the first place.
It's one thing to execute someone.
It's something else again to ineptly experiment with killing someone, even if he did commit a horrible crime.
The real question is whether it ordered by a rogue official(s), or the governor himself. If information comes out that the governor was involved then he just lost himself a chance at being president.
One of the most satisfying sports is to make ourselves feel better by degrading another. What better way to make up for our own inadequacy, then to shove someone else’s face in theirs? We see this at work, in our families, in politics and in almost every type of social interaction. Nonetheless, it is particularly painful and tragic when we project our own fear and frailty onto someone that is dealing with the consequences of disease and even death.
It's not Wal-marts fault, the taxpayers fault, the schools fault that these people have no education, are not responsible and five kids. In fact you could circle back around and blame the government because they encourage carelessness and apathy with food stamps and welfare. When these people have a kid, there is no incentive to not have another one.
You mean before the Great Society in the 1960s, before the government gave them handouts, there was no poverty in America.
Republican businessmen themselves know better than to work at starvation wages.
I once heard a management consultant give a presentation to a bunch of printers. He ran through the costs of running a folding machine, and it came out to something like $50 an hour. He said, if you sell folding for less than $50 an hour, you're losing money. And the harder you work, the more money you're losing. A lot of printers have very busily gone out of business.
If you're an employee, you'll lose money on a minimum wage job, and you're better off not working at that rate.
Most people who work for Wallmarts are making less than it takes for them to survive. Some of them do get welfare, more of them get food stamps, if they have children they get child tax credits, and they can't afford doctors, so if they get sick, they go to the emergency room and the rest of us pay for it.
Uneducated single mothers living in slums with 5+ kids should just get a better job. Advice from a white guy sitting in a suburban home in front of his expensive computer.
That doesn't have anything to do with reality. The single mother with 5+ kids is a Republican fantasy. (You forgot to say that she's black.) Most welfare mothers have two or three children like anybody else. A lot of them wind up on welfare because their husband gets divorced, and doesn't keep up with child support payments.
Kathryn Edin actually followed welfare mothers around and went over their budgets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Edin They do get jobs. Most of them were working in addition to welfare. You can't survive on welfare.
Perhaps these folks were smoking that much pot as a coping means ("self medicating") because of their troubles, rather than pot causing the troubles
Which causes which? Good point.
From TFA:
But the evidence has been unclear. For example, one recent study from the Netherlands found it's equally possible that people prone to psychosis may be more likely to smoke pot, possibly as a way of "self-medicating" (see Reuters Health article of December 25, 2012, here: http://reut.rs/1d7aIvU)
I worked for a union employment lawyer (no police), so I have a certain sympathy for the employee and I know how important it is to get both sides. Furthermore, I had a neighbor who was a cop who (story too long to give here) demonstrated enough courage, cool-headedness and restraint in a shootout to make me really admire him.
However, in New York City, I must say that many and probably most of the cops are pigs -- they violate the law, arrest innocent people, and occasionally kill them. When they do, they almost always get off. It's hard to think of a cop who has been prosecuted, and harder to think of a cop who has gone to jail. (The only exception is drug crimes, and felonies like rape.)
New York City just settled most of the lawsuits coming out of the Republican convention http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html for something like $15 million. That's because they arrested people (many of whom had nothing to do with the demonstrations in the first place), charged them with crimes they never committed, and charged them with further felonies of resisting arrest which they didn't do either, because they knew they could force most people into falsely pleading guilty rather than go through the expensive, time-consuming and risky legal challenges.
The cases were thrown out, because the defendants discovered videotapes, by bystanders and by cops themselves, that demonstrated beyond a doubt that the cops had committed perjury in their sworn statements. These cops were never prosecuted for perjury.
These abuses just go on and on in New York City. During the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, inspector Anthony Bolognia fired the pepper spray heard round the world. He wasn't fired, much less prosecuted for what was legally an assault, and an abuse of government power, against a person who was exercising her First Amendment rights.
There were also cases of cops who killed civilians, without justification, and weren't prosecuted.
There are also internal disciplinary proceedings which seem to be a sham.
I realize that the cops on the beat are being pushed to do it by their officers. But who else would get off on an excuse like that? If you're being forced to violate the law, you should quit your job and go public.
Yes, you're going to say that most cops are good cops, and these are only a small percentage. (I worked for employment lawyers, and that's what they would have said.) That's not true. The overwhelming majority of cops are like that, in the public record and in my personal experience. The honest cops are a small minority, I'd guess maybe 1%, 10% tops.
During the Knapp Commission hearings, they got a cop to testify in exchange for a plea bargain. He said that an honest cop is a guy who brings his own sandwich for lunch. (Rather than getting a free meal in a restaurant.) Back in those days, there were very few cops who brought their own sandwiches for lunch.
My local library (rural Alaska) has Science Citation Index, Lexus / Nexus and subscriptions to a number of 'high impact' science journals. Is it the University of Washington? Nope. But if offers some access to citizens who happen not to be adjunct professors or whatever.
That's funny. I wanted to look up Science Citation Index at my local library -- the New York Public Library science and business collection. They didn't have it. They dropped it because it was too expensive.
One of the librarians told me that they couldn't get online editions of some of the major science journals, because the journals charged libraries according to the number of their users.
The New England Journal of Medicine would have charged them a fee for the online edition based on the assumption that the number of their users was the entire population of Manhattan. So they didn't get it. (Even though the NEJM has important material only online.)
I'm surprised that you get Lexis/Nexis. For a long time, one of the big complaints was that Lexis wouldn't give subscriptions to public libraries at all. They figured that if a lawyer could use Lexis in the public library, he wouldn't have to subscribe. That's despite the fact that basically all of Lexis was public documents, which they got from judges and courthouses under special deals. They may have changed their policy. I'll have to check.
The New York Public Library did get some subscriptions to the online science journals, but they don't have the ones I need when I look up citations.
The digital library would be better than the paper library (in most ways) if they replaced everything with its digital version. But they don't. Some of the digital versions are exorbitantly more expensive. So many collections are actually smaller. When I go to the library, I can't find standard reference books that I used to use in the paper days. In some ways I'm worse off.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there's racial discrimination in calling some people 'black' and other people 'white.'
I grew up when "negroes" started referring to themselves as "black." A lot of them were active in the civil rights movement, trying to vote in the former Confederate states. I don't see any discrimination in calling them that.
I just read a study in the New England Journal of Medicine about a study of a hepatitis C drug where they described patients as "White," "Black," or "Asian." I think they know what they're doing.
Are you a Christian? If you're not, and you're not even an atheist theologian, how the hell do you understand and/or interpret the Christian religion well enough to regurgitate little out-of-context snippets of it at others in judgement?
And if you are a Christian, don't you know that we all have our own cross to bear, i.e. butt out on judging others. That's for your God to do.
I read librarian Laura Bush's favorite work, The Grand Inquisitor.
If you're a Christian, you tell me: Would Jesus have signed all those death warrants that Bush signed in Texas?
Would Jesus have invaded Iraq?
The Nazis used to do that to kill handicapped people. They used a dose of morphine to put them out, and then a dose of potassium chloride to stop their heart.
They had to stop because it was too unpopular with the German people. Especially with the Christian clergy.
They arrest and flog you for having a Bible in Saudi Arabia.
Not true. They regard the old testament and new testament as holy scriptures. They consider Jesus a prophet. Visitors can follow their own religion.
The only thing you can't do in a lot of Muslim countries is try to convert Muslims to Christianity. You can't try to convert Jews in Israel either. A lot of Christian countries used to burn people at the stake for having books with falsehoods.
No. Murderer dead implies murderer not able to murder again. Plain & simple logic.
Or an innocent person executed.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php
Perhaps your emotions have overcome your logic.
You kill a pregnant woman intentionally, you die. F***, I'll do it myself. Not out of a sense of a blood thirsty desire for vengeance but because I no longer consider you a member of the human race and you should be destroyed the same way I would kill a mosquito.
Ever think about all those people who were sent to jail for decades for committing rape (and sometimes murder), who were exonerated by DNA testing? http://www.innocenceproject.org/
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php
DNA Exonerations Nationwide
There have been 312 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States.
The first DNA exoneration took place in 1989. Exonerations have been won in 36 states; since 2000, there have been 245 exonerations.
18 of the 312 people exonerated through DNA served time on death row. Another 16 were charged with capital crimes but not sentenced to death.
The average length of time served by exonerees is 13.5 years. The total number of years served is approximately 4,162.
The average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions was 27.
Races of the 312 exonerees:
194 African Americans
94 Caucasians
22 Latinos
2 Asian American
haha civilized? seriously? but we allow abortions, because killing babies is civilized. I love this argument....
I like slippery slope arguments too. How many innocent carrots did you murder this week?
There was an article in the New Scientist that described an experiment that a scientist had done with the guillotine in the 18th century. He arranged with a convict before the execution to give a sign if he was still conscious in the moments after the execution, and he did.
That one report isn't conclusive, but it's possible that the brain could remain conscious a few seconds after a beheading.
If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first. However, being as there is always going to be some error in the legal system the question we should be asking is, "How many innocent people are we willing to murder in the name of revenge/justice?"
Because, until you get to that 100%, and never make an error, that is what you are doing. You are murdering people because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, are the wrong skin color, or cannot afford a good lawyer. At least if you screw up a life in prison sentence, you can let the person out in a decade or two when the truth comes to light.
Right. I could accept capital punishment if 3 conditions were fulfilled:
1. The person would have to in fact be guilty.
2. The person would have to be convicted in a fair trial.
3. Everybody who committed the same crime in the same circumstances would have to be treated the same way.
Obviously those conditions can't be met in the U.S.
Rich people get the top trial lawyers; poor people get public defenders. A millionaire has never been executed in America. There's racial discrimination in arrests, trial and sentencing. White people shoot someone to death and the cops don't even arrest them. Black people shoot someone to death, even in clear self-defense, and they get convicted. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/07/john_white_conviction_george_zimmerman.php
Your bible, nor anyone's religious texts, are of no use to me. T
It's useful for pointing out the hypocrisy of people like George W. Bush, who claimed to be following Jesus while he signed death certificates and sent out the military to kill people.
At least the Pope wasn't hypocritical in that regard.
At the rate this busybody nonsense is going, hanging will make a comeback. That's all that this meddling nonsense will achieve. It will just eliminate the attempts to make the process less brutal.
What makes you think that lethal injection is less brutal than hanging? Not the opinion of doctors.
Actually the Nazis used a relatively humane method to kill people who were mentally disabled or had chronic diseases like diabetes. First they used a morphine injection, then potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Personally, I'd like to see hanging make a comeback.
At least a competent executioner can kill somebody by hanging quickly and painlessly.
These lethal injections have all been designed by people who didn't know what they were doing -- they weren't doctors, they just knew a little bit about medicine.
Somebody said that it was as if you wanted to make dinner, and you looked in your refrigerator to see what you had available. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
This is a sure formula for making mistakes -- doing it for the first time, and not knowing much about it in the first place.
It's one thing to execute someone.
It's something else again to ineptly experiment with killing someone, even if he did commit a horrible crime.
I don't even understand this story. The smoking gun has already been found, reported, and Jon Stewart did a whole send-up of it last week.
Why would anybody still be trying to figure out if the attempted cover-up was bogus or not?
Slashdot got the mathematical modeling angle.
The real question is whether it ordered by a rogue official(s), or the governor himself. If information comes out that the governor was involved then he just lost himself a chance at being president.
If Bush won, anybody can be president.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/12/give-pain-hope.html
Sometimes we give pain instead of hope
James C. Salwitz, MD
December 25, 2013
One of the most satisfying sports is to make ourselves feel better by degrading another. What better way to make up for our own inadequacy, then to shove someone else’s face in theirs? We see this at work, in our families, in politics and in almost every type of social interaction. Nonetheless, it is particularly painful and tragic when we project our own fear and frailty onto someone that is dealing with the consequences of disease and even death.
To be fair, there's also that not-having-sex-until-marriage part>
Realistic things like that.
Tell us how you never had sex until marriage.
It's not Wal-marts fault, the taxpayers fault, the schools fault that these people have no education, are not responsible and five kids. In fact you could circle back around and blame the government because they encourage carelessness and apathy with food stamps and welfare. When these people have a kid, there is no incentive to not have another one.
You mean before the Great Society in the 1960s, before the government gave them handouts, there was no poverty in America.
Let's turn to the history books.
Republican businessmen themselves know better than to work at starvation wages.
I once heard a management consultant give a presentation to a bunch of printers. He ran through the costs of running a folding machine, and it came out to something like $50 an hour. He said, if you sell folding for less than $50 an hour, you're losing money. And the harder you work, the more money you're losing. A lot of printers have very busily gone out of business.
If you're an employee, you'll lose money on a minimum wage job, and you're better off not working at that rate.
Most people who work for Wallmarts are making less than it takes for them to survive. Some of them do get welfare, more of them get food stamps, if they have children they get child tax credits, and they can't afford doctors, so if they get sick, they go to the emergency room and the rest of us pay for it.
Uneducated single mothers living in slums with 5+ kids should just get a better job. Advice from a white guy sitting in a suburban home in front of his expensive computer.
That doesn't have anything to do with reality. The single mother with 5+ kids is a Republican fantasy. (You forgot to say that she's black.) Most welfare mothers have two or three children like anybody else. A lot of them wind up on welfare because their husband gets divorced, and doesn't keep up with child support payments.
Kathryn Edin actually followed welfare mothers around and went over their budgets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Edin They do get jobs. Most of them were working in addition to welfare. You can't survive on welfare.
Paul Krugman just had a column in the NYT on why Republicans want to make the poor suffer. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/opinion/krugman-enemies-of-the-poor.html
Perhaps these folks were smoking that much pot as a coping means ("self medicating") because of their troubles, rather than pot causing the troubles
Which causes which? Good point.
From TFA:
But the evidence has been unclear. For example, one recent study from the Netherlands found it's equally possible that people prone to psychosis may be more likely to smoke pot, possibly as a way of "self-medicating" (see Reuters Health article of December 25, 2012, here: http://reut.rs/1d7aIvU)
Somebody gave me a copy of the New York Jewish Week to ask me what I thought of it. They had six classified pages of legal notices.
I don't think the New York Times has six pages of classified ads any more.
I worked for a union employment lawyer (no police), so I have a certain sympathy for the employee and I know how important it is to get both sides. Furthermore, I had a neighbor who was a cop who (story too long to give here) demonstrated enough courage, cool-headedness and restraint in a shootout to make me really admire him.
However, in New York City, I must say that many and probably most of the cops are pigs -- they violate the law, arrest innocent people, and occasionally kill them. When they do, they almost always get off. It's hard to think of a cop who has been prosecuted, and harder to think of a cop who has gone to jail. (The only exception is drug crimes, and felonies like rape.)
New York City just settled most of the lawsuits coming out of the Republican convention http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html for something like $15 million. That's because they arrested people (many of whom had nothing to do with the demonstrations in the first place), charged them with crimes they never committed, and charged them with further felonies of resisting arrest which they didn't do either, because they knew they could force most people into falsely pleading guilty rather than go through the expensive, time-consuming and risky legal challenges.
The cases were thrown out, because the defendants discovered videotapes, by bystanders and by cops themselves, that demonstrated beyond a doubt that the cops had committed perjury in their sworn statements. These cops were never prosecuted for perjury.
These abuses just go on and on in New York City. During the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, inspector Anthony Bolognia fired the pepper spray heard round the world. He wasn't fired, much less prosecuted for what was legally an assault, and an abuse of government power, against a person who was exercising her First Amendment rights.
There were also cases of cops who killed civilians, without justification, and weren't prosecuted.
There are also internal disciplinary proceedings which seem to be a sham.
I realize that the cops on the beat are being pushed to do it by their officers. But who else would get off on an excuse like that? If you're being forced to violate the law, you should quit your job and go public.
Yes, you're going to say that most cops are good cops, and these are only a small percentage. (I worked for employment lawyers, and that's what they would have said.) That's not true. The overwhelming majority of cops are like that, in the public record and in my personal experience. The honest cops are a small minority, I'd guess maybe 1%, 10% tops.
During the Knapp Commission hearings, they got a cop to testify in exchange for a plea bargain. He said that an honest cop is a guy who brings his own sandwich for lunch. (Rather than getting a free meal in a restaurant.) Back in those days, there were very few cops who brought their own sandwiches for lunch.
Until your wife demands it for divorce proceedings which prove you were at your mistress when you should have been at work.
So somebody else thought of that. That's right, you can subpoena that information in a divorce.
Of course, you can also subpoena that information from your wife's car.
My local library (rural Alaska) has Science Citation Index, Lexus / Nexus and subscriptions to a number of 'high impact' science journals. Is it the University of Washington? Nope. But if offers some access to citizens who happen not to be adjunct professors or whatever.
That's funny. I wanted to look up Science Citation Index at my local library -- the New York Public Library science and business collection. They didn't have it. They dropped it because it was too expensive.
One of the librarians told me that they couldn't get online editions of some of the major science journals, because the journals charged libraries according to the number of their users.
The New England Journal of Medicine would have charged them a fee for the online edition based on the assumption that the number of their users was the entire population of Manhattan. So they didn't get it. (Even though the NEJM has important material only online.)
I'm surprised that you get Lexis/Nexis. For a long time, one of the big complaints was that Lexis wouldn't give subscriptions to public libraries at all. They figured that if a lawyer could use Lexis in the public library, he wouldn't have to subscribe. That's despite the fact that basically all of Lexis was public documents, which they got from judges and courthouses under special deals. They may have changed their policy. I'll have to check.
The New York Public Library did get some subscriptions to the online science journals, but they don't have the ones I need when I look up citations.
The digital library would be better than the paper library (in most ways) if they replaced everything with its digital version. But they don't. Some of the digital versions are exorbitantly more expensive. So many collections are actually smaller. When I go to the library, I can't find standard reference books that I used to use in the paper days. In some ways I'm worse off.
You'll get a great Youtube video, "Goon punching me in face." Maybe a lot of them.
It'll be a meme, with all the other Youtube videos of people with Google glasses getting punched in the face.
"Here's one from when we went to France."