I've read lots of NAS reports (and sometimes talked to the authors to make sure I got it right).
All NAS reports are peer reviewed. A peer-reviewed report of 400+ pages is not unusual; it is routine.
I don't know what a "be all end all" is, but the NAS peer review is among the best I know of.
Just because something is peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's true, but a good peer-review, as the NAS does, means that it's the closest to the truth we have available.
I'm not sure about that. This paper found that storage didn't make any difference.
I've never understood how "storage" works. The main argument for having a gun in the home is that the gun owner can protect himself in case of home invasion. That means the gun has to be readily accessible day and night. It has to be readily accessible to your 16-year-old daughter when she's home alone. Or your 16-year-old son.
It seems that safe storage and protection are mutually exclusive. If the gun is available to protect you and your family, it's available enough to make it easy for you and your family to commit suicide.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.long Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
Owning a gun doesn't make one suicidal, but having a gun around makes it much more likely that if you have an impulse to commit suicide, you'll succeed.
There's a lot of research on suicide, and the evidence is that people who attempt suicide with a gun are more likely to kill themselves than people who attempt suicide by other methods. After all, guns are designed to make it easy to kill someone.
And people who attempt suicide and fail (with pills, most commonly) usually wind up in a hospital, get help, and don't attempt suicide again.
So more guns means more successful suicides. Fewer guns means fewer successful suicides. If they didn't have a gun around, they'd be more likely to be alive.
My point is that people who buy guns are more likely to use them to commit suicide with them than to use them for self-defense.
No, what I wanted to see a link to was that particular story about his 75-year-old grandmother.
You can also search the Internet for "gun suicide" and come up with stories. The problem is that for every one of these stories of people defending themselves with a household gun, there are 37 stories of people using a household gun to commit suicide, according to the research in New England Journal of Medicine. And there are more people who use a gun to kill a family member or friend in an argument.
The research doesn't give as much detail as we'd like, because the National Rifle Association got Congress to stop funding research. So there are a lot of questions left over. But the research people did before the NRA put an end to it was showing that if someone has a handgun at home, somebody in his household is more likely to be killed by it than use it for defense.
If the fire department can get to your house in 2 minutes, why can't the police get to your house in 2 minutes? Every time I see one of these stories, I wonder whether they could have just called 911. I once had an intruder trying to rob somebody in my apartment building. I called 911, then I yelled, "I just called the cops!" I never saw somebody run away so fast.
I realize there may be people in rural areas far from the nearest police station, who would need a gun to defend themselves in some scenarios. But if they do get a gun, they're more likely to kill themselves than save their lives.
Someone committing suicide isn't going to say "oh damn, there's no gun so i guess i cant kill myself." They'll use some other method. A gun really wouldn't be my first choice anyway, it seems so messy and painful.
Actually, there are good studies of suicides. People who attempt suicide don't always succeed. and if their suicide fails they they often go on to never attempt suicide again. People who attempt suicide with a gun are more likely to succeed than most other methods. A gun makes an impulsive suicide easier. By design, it's an easy way to kill yourself.
People who take drugs are more likely to wind up in the hospital and be referred to a psychiatrist.
Men are more likely to succeed in suicide than women, because men are more likely to use a gun.
Those medical journals make a better argument than I ever could. If they can't convince you, I can't.
You want guns? The price is a large increase in suicides.
Unfortunately, as a result of NRA lobbying, Congress passed a law which effectively prohibits government-funded research into guns. So there are no published studies that can tell you how frequently each of those scenarios is. (In contrast, there are lots of studies of automobile injuries and deaths.)
Those studies I cited above summarize all the research we have. They explain it better than I can. If they can't convince you, I can't convince you.
The bottom line is, if you have a gun around the house, it's many times more likely to be used for suicide than it is for self-defense. You want to bring suicide into your family? I can't stop you.
"For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms."
What they're really doing is living out their fantasy of what happens in the last part of Atlas Shrugged, when the producers go on strike, society breaks down, and there are mobs in the street.
Accident engineering is a well-funded discipline, and they have a standard message that if an accident results from the combination of a mechanical object and a human failing, it's easier to prevent it by interrupting the mechanical object than the human failing.
And it's even better to interrupt both the mechanical object than the human failing.
That's the kind of story I'd like to see a link to, but let's assume it's true.
If your grandmother has a gun in her house, she's more likely to use it to kill herself, or another innocent party, as she is to use it to defend herself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/opinion/at-the-er-bearing-witness-to-gun-violence.html At the E.R., Bearing Witness to Gun Violence By DAVID H. NEWMAN Published: January 1, 2013 I do not know exactly what measures should be taken to reduce gun violence like this. But I know that most homicides and suicides in America are carried out with guns. Research suggests that homes with a gun are two to three times more likely to experience a firearm death than homes without guns, and that members of the household are 18 times more likely to be the victim than intruders. Emergency rooms are themselves volatile environments, not immune to violence. Over the last decade, a quarter of gun crimes in American E.R.’s were committed with guns wrested from armed guards.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.long Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506 Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home Arthur L. Kellermann, Frederick P. Rivara, Norman B. Rushforth, Joyce G. Banton, Donald T. Reay, Jerry T. Francisco, Ana B. Locci, Janice Prodzinski, Bela B. Hackman, and Grant Somes N Engl J Med 1993; 329:1084-1091 October 7, 1993 DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199310073291506 Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3713749 N Engl J Med. 1986 Jun 12;314(24):1557-60. Protection or peril? An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home. Kellermann AL, Reay DT. Only 2 of these 398 deaths (0.5 percent) involved an intruder shot during attempted entry. Seven persons (1.8 percent) were killed in self-defense. For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms. Hand-guns were used in 70.5 percent of these deaths.
http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(12)01408-4/abstract Annals of Emergency Medicine Volume 60, Issue 6 , Pages 790-798.e1, December 2012 Hospital-Based Shootings in the United States: 2000 to 2011 Gabor D. Kelen, Christina L. Catlett, Joshua G. Kubit, Yu-Hsiang Hsieh In 23% of shootings within the ED, the weapon was a security officer's gun taken by the perpetrator.
That's right. I can't find it in a quick Google search, but we went through that several years ago. Cybersquatters claimed a whole bunch of celebrity names, and tried to sell/blackmail the celebrities into buying them back at exorbitant prices. (I forget the examples, can anybody help me?)
Your name is your personal property, and you have a right to it, especially if you're using it as a business. You can make your right even more official by registering a business in your name.
Then ICANN will yank their names. There's a dispute procedure. Can somebody come up with the URL?
I recently read about one psychological mechanism that may be operating.
In normal functioning societies, people take care of each other and have a responsibility for each other.
Sometimes, people see others in need and don't want to meet their responsibility. Or they don't want to face the fact that they too could wind up in the same situation. They respond by finding some way in which the person in need is responsible or at fault for his situation. Of course it's not logical, but right-wingers aren't logical.
Under the old law, you could reprint that stuff, and the composers or authors would often still be around, or at least somebody who knew them will still be around, to explain the context of those works.
But now, by the time those works enter public domain, everybody who knew about them first-hand will be dead. If anyone remembers them at all.
The Tasini decision turned the New York Times archives into swiss cheese.
Under that decision, in order to include stories from certain years in the NYT dtabase, they had to get permission from each individual author. The National Writers Union recommended that each author charge the NYT the same amount for reuse as they paid for the original story. That meant that the NYT would have to pay their entire freelance budget from those years, again, to include the stories. The cost would be prohibitive. Some writers let the NYT include their stories free, some decided not to, some didn't get around to it.
As a result, a friend of mine was writing an article about investments and asked me to find an article in the NYT magazine on that subject which would have saved him a lot of work. After some difficulty, I realized that the article had been deleted from the NYT database. I told my friend to go to the library and look it up on microfilm.
It was a nice feeling to sit down at a terminal at the library and realize that I could find almost any article I ever read in my life, in their databases. Now, after the Tasini decision, you don't have that any more.
Is it ever going to be important to you to find a particular article?
Easy solution.. Violate the copyright and wait for the lawyers to come-a-knockin..
I met a guy who is a music distributor, and I asked him what to do about orphan works. That's what he said.
Apparently that wouldn't be willful violation, and all you'd have to do would be pay royalties. (One of the sticking points is, how much royalties? If I distribute an unpublished collection by T.S. Eliot for 99 cents a copy, and the estate of T.S. Eliot finds out about it, can they decide that each poem is worth $1, and I owe them $10 a copy?)
That works until you have to get clearance from somebody's legal department.
Common scenario: Independent film producer makes a documentary, shows it at film festivals and gets great response, looks for a big distributor to handle it and show it on TV, and none of the big corporations will touch it because they can't get copyright clearance for snippits that are incorporated into the documentary.
Michael Geist has many examples, including the one where the stagehands behind the stage during a performance at the Metropolitan Opera were watching The Simpsons on a portable TV.
Immigration is a tricky balance and is usually unfair. I know a lot of immigrants. I don't mind if they come to this country, contribute to it and benefit from it. But some immigrant groups have strong lobbies, and are showered with government handouts as soon as they get here. I don't mind that too much, because that's what it took for every immigrant group to succeed. I want to see that same safety net for people in general.
I do mind when they turn around and create a myth that they did it all themselves -- and use that myth to destroy the social safety net that has given the same benefits to other Americans. I don't hate the 1%. I do hate the 1% who got rich and are trying to make it worse for the rest of us.
Actually, one of the things that struck me about the life of Rita Levi-Montalcini and her circle was that so many of them were Italian Jews who had married Italian Christians and vice versa. They were atheists and socialists or Communists, and many of them fought in the resistance.
One of my childhood heroes was Enrico Fermi, whose wife, Laura, was Jewish.
You seem to be referring to this argument about Tay-Sachs carriers http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?pagewanted=all As this article, and the Wikipedia article, points out, the argument has just enough evidence behind it to be intriguing, but not yet enough evidence to be convincing.
I once had a psychology textbook that was written in the 1950s. It was full of bell curves of Negro IQs, white IQs, and Jewish IQs. The Negro IQ curves were 15 points to the left of the white curves, and the Jewish curves were 15 points to the right of the white curves. Data like this led Charles Murray to conclude that Negroes were just plain genetically inferior, although, Murray hastened to add, they did have those mental skills that were useful in the jungles of Africa. So it's futile to try to bring Negroes up to the intellectual accomplishments of white people, Murray argued in the Wall Street Journal, and affirmative action will merely make them frustrated and unhappy. So the lower educational accomplishments of Negroes wasn't due to the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow, it wasn't due to the segregated schools where Negroes got textbooks after they were thrown out by white schools, where Negroes were taught how to be carpenters while white students were taught how to be lawyers. Negroes just didn't have the genes for intelligence that like white men did. And, as Charles Murray liked to say, they didn't have the genes like "you guys," the Jews.
I was not very comfortable with these theories, which were not confirmed by later examination.
In fact, I work in biology today, and my own favorite biology teacher, who taught me the important ideas in genetics that I use today, was a black woman. It would be the height of ingratitude for me to tolerate racism towards her children and grandchildren after all she gave me. And I've met a lot of black kids who were smarter than me, particularly in the sciences, which leads me (and a lot of other people) to suspect that Murray must have dropped a decimal point, or has a screw loose, somewhere.
In my understanding, most geneticists are ready to believe that about half of intelligence is due to environment, and half due to genetics. In countries like Finland, which is probably the most egalitarian society in the world, everybody gets a relatively equal educational environment, so much of the variation could be due to genetics. But in countries like the U.S., which is one of the most unequal countries in the world, the effect of environment washes out any genetic effect. At least 20 points of IQ is due to the environment. In the US, and in much of Europe, the Jews are an affluent, successful minority, http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/images/cartoon.jpg particularly in the scientific professions, so it's understandable that they would be winning Nobel prizes disproportionately. It may turn out that Jewish success is entirely environmental.
But these Italian scientists, and their political inspirations like Rosa Luxemburg, said that it's time to put our ethnic identities and religious superstitions behind us, and build a socialist society where everyone -- Jew, Christian, African and everyone else -- will be educated and contribute to their fullest potential.
Slashdot Mirror
The analysis could probably be tailored to fit any assertion you wanted to make.
The whole point of the scientific method is that it makes it difficult or impossible to tailor your analysis to fit any assertion you wanted to make.
Scientists are people who read How to lie with statistics and put a lot of effort into preventing people from lying with statistics.
I've read lots of NAS reports (and sometimes talked to the authors to make sure I got it right).
All NAS reports are peer reviewed. A peer-reviewed report of 400+ pages is not unusual; it is routine.
I don't know what a "be all end all" is, but the NAS peer review is among the best I know of.
Just because something is peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's true, but a good peer-review, as the NAS does, means that it's the closest to the truth we have available.
I'm not sure about that. This paper found that storage didn't make any difference.
I've never understood how "storage" works. The main argument for having a gun in the home is that the gun owner can protect himself in case of home invasion. That means the gun has to be readily accessible day and night. It has to be readily accessible to your 16-year-old daughter when she's home alone. Or your 16-year-old son.
It seems that safe storage and protection are mutually exclusive. If the gun is available to protect you and your family, it's available enough to make it easy for you and your family to commit suicide.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.long
Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study
Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow
Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4).
The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
And citizens influence the government in proportion to their campaign contributions.
Owning a gun doesn't make one suicidal, but having a gun around makes it much more likely that if you have an impulse to commit suicide, you'll succeed.
There's a lot of research on suicide, and the evidence is that people who attempt suicide with a gun are more likely to kill themselves than people who attempt suicide by other methods. After all, guns are designed to make it easy to kill someone.
And people who attempt suicide and fail (with pills, most commonly) usually wind up in a hospital, get help, and don't attempt suicide again.
So more guns means more successful suicides. Fewer guns means fewer successful suicides. If they didn't have a gun around, they'd be more likely to be alive.
My point is that people who buy guns are more likely to use them to commit suicide with them than to use them for self-defense.
No, what I wanted to see a link to was that particular story about his 75-year-old grandmother.
You can also search the Internet for "gun suicide" and come up with stories. The problem is that for every one of these stories of people defending themselves with a household gun, there are 37 stories of people using a household gun to commit suicide, according to the research in New England Journal of Medicine. And there are more people who use a gun to kill a family member or friend in an argument.
The research doesn't give as much detail as we'd like, because the National Rifle Association got Congress to stop funding research. So there are a lot of questions left over. But the research people did before the NRA put an end to it was showing that if someone has a handgun at home, somebody in his household is more likely to be killed by it than use it for defense.
If the fire department can get to your house in 2 minutes, why can't the police get to your house in 2 minutes? Every time I see one of these stories, I wonder whether they could have just called 911. I once had an intruder trying to rob somebody in my apartment building. I called 911, then I yelled, "I just called the cops!" I never saw somebody run away so fast.
I realize there may be people in rural areas far from the nearest police station, who would need a gun to defend themselves in some scenarios. But if they do get a gun, they're more likely to kill themselves than save their lives.
Someone committing suicide isn't going to say "oh damn, there's no gun so i guess i cant kill myself." They'll use some other method. A gun really wouldn't be my first choice anyway, it seems so messy and painful.
Actually, there are good studies of suicides. People who attempt suicide don't always succeed. and if their suicide fails they they often go on to never attempt suicide again. People who attempt suicide with a gun are more likely to succeed than most other methods. A gun makes an impulsive suicide easier. By design, it's an easy way to kill yourself.
People who take drugs are more likely to wind up in the hospital and be referred to a psychiatrist.
Men are more likely to succeed in suicide than women, because men are more likely to use a gun.
Those medical journals make a better argument than I ever could. If they can't convince you, I can't.
You want guns? The price is a large increase in suicides.
Unfortunately, as a result of NRA lobbying, Congress passed a law which effectively prohibits government-funded research into guns. So there are no published studies that can tell you how frequently each of those scenarios is. (In contrast, there are lots of studies of automobile injuries and deaths.)
Those studies I cited above summarize all the research we have. They explain it better than I can. If they can't convince you, I can't convince you.
The bottom line is, if you have a gun around the house, it's many times more likely to be used for suicide than it is for self-defense. You want to bring suicide into your family? I can't stop you.
"For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms."
What they're really doing is living out their fantasy of what happens in the last part of Atlas Shrugged, when the producers go on strike, society breaks down, and there are mobs in the street.
Accident engineering is a well-funded discipline, and they have a standard message that if an accident results from the combination of a mechanical object and a human failing, it's easier to prevent it by interrupting the mechanical object than the human failing.
And it's even better to interrupt both the mechanical object than the human failing.
That's the kind of story I'd like to see a link to, but let's assume it's true.
If your grandmother has a gun in her house, she's more likely to use it to kill herself, or another innocent party, as she is to use it to defend herself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/opinion/at-the-er-bearing-witness-to-gun-violence.html
At the E.R., Bearing Witness to Gun Violence
By DAVID H. NEWMAN
Published: January 1, 2013
I do not know exactly what measures should be taken to reduce gun violence like this. But I know that most homicides and suicides in America are carried out with guns. Research suggests that homes with a gun are two to three times more likely to experience a firearm death than homes without guns, and that members of the household are 18 times more likely to be the victim than intruders.
Emergency rooms are themselves volatile environments, not immune to violence. Over the last decade, a quarter of gun crimes in American E.R.’s were committed with guns wrested from armed guards.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.long
Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study
Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow
Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4).
The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home
Arthur L. Kellermann, Frederick P. Rivara, Norman B. Rushforth, Joyce G. Banton, Donald T. Reay, Jerry T. Francisco, Ana B. Locci, Janice Prodzinski, Bela B. Hackman, and Grant Somes
N Engl J Med 1993; 329:1084-1091
October 7, 1993
DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3713749
N Engl J Med. 1986 Jun 12;314(24):1557-60.
Protection or peril? An analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home.
Kellermann AL, Reay DT.
Only 2 of these 398 deaths (0.5 percent) involved an intruder shot during attempted entry. Seven persons (1.8 percent) were killed in self-defense. For every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 37 suicides involving firearms. Hand-guns were used in 70.5 percent of these deaths.
http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(12)01408-4/abstract
Annals of Emergency Medicine
Volume 60, Issue 6 , Pages 790-798.e1, December 2012
Hospital-Based Shootings in the United States: 2000 to 2011
Gabor D. Kelen, Christina L. Catlett, Joshua G. Kubit, Yu-Hsiang Hsieh
In 23% of shootings within the ED, the weapon was a security officer's gun taken by the perpetrator.
But here's somebody who is and wrote a comic book about the subject.
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=446
That's right. I can't find it in a quick Google search, but we went through that several years ago. Cybersquatters claimed a whole bunch of celebrity names, and tried to sell/blackmail the celebrities into buying them back at exorbitant prices. (I forget the examples, can anybody help me?)
Your name is your personal property, and you have a right to it, especially if you're using it as a business. You can make your right even more official by registering a business in your name.
Then ICANN will yank their names. There's a dispute procedure. Can somebody come up with the URL?
I'll let the National Lawyer's Guild argue it for me.
That's what happens when your boss gives you the psycho killer beat.
It's a puzzle why people act against their own interests. http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2010/09/the-tea-crumpets-party/ It is the job of psychologists to figure out why.
I recently read about one psychological mechanism that may be operating.
In normal functioning societies, people take care of each other and have a responsibility for each other.
Sometimes, people see others in need and don't want to meet their responsibility. Or they don't want to face the fact that they too could wind up in the same situation. They respond by finding some way in which the person in need is responsible or at fault for his situation. Of course it's not logical, but right-wingers aren't logical.
That's the law.
Under the old law, you could reprint that stuff, and the composers or authors would often still be around, or at least somebody who knew them will still be around, to explain the context of those works.
But now, by the time those works enter public domain, everybody who knew about them first-hand will be dead. If anyone remembers them at all.
The Tasini decision turned the New York Times archives into swiss cheese.
Under that decision, in order to include stories from certain years in the NYT dtabase, they had to get permission from each individual author. The National Writers Union recommended that each author charge the NYT the same amount for reuse as they paid for the original story. That meant that the NYT would have to pay their entire freelance budget from those years, again, to include the stories. The cost would be prohibitive. Some writers let the NYT include their stories free, some decided not to, some didn't get around to it.
As a result, a friend of mine was writing an article about investments and asked me to find an article in the NYT magazine on that subject which would have saved him a lot of work. After some difficulty, I realized that the article had been deleted from the NYT database. I told my friend to go to the library and look it up on microfilm.
It was a nice feeling to sit down at a terminal at the library and realize that I could find almost any article I ever read in my life, in their databases. Now, after the Tasini decision, you don't have that any more.
Is it ever going to be important to you to find a particular article?
Easy solution.. Violate the copyright and wait for the lawyers to come-a-knockin..
I met a guy who is a music distributor, and I asked him what to do about orphan works. That's what he said.
Apparently that wouldn't be willful violation, and all you'd have to do would be pay royalties. (One of the sticking points is, how much royalties? If I distribute an unpublished collection by T.S. Eliot for 99 cents a copy, and the estate of T.S. Eliot finds out about it, can they decide that each poem is worth $1, and I owe them $10 a copy?)
That works until you have to get clearance from somebody's legal department.
Common scenario: Independent film producer makes a documentary, shows it at film festivals and gets great response, looks for a big distributor to handle it and show it on TV, and none of the big corporations will touch it because they can't get copyright clearance for snippits that are incorporated into the documentary.
Michael Geist has many examples, including the one where the stagehands behind the stage during a performance at the Metropolitan Opera were watching The Simpsons on a portable TV.
Please be advised that I have Mexicans in my close family.
There are a great variety of Mexicans, ranging from great scientists http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1995/molina.html to criminal mobs.
Immigration is a tricky balance and is usually unfair. I know a lot of immigrants. I don't mind if they come to this country, contribute to it and benefit from it. But some immigrant groups have strong lobbies, and are showered with government handouts as soon as they get here. I don't mind that too much, because that's what it took for every immigrant group to succeed. I want to see that same safety net for people in general.
I do mind when they turn around and create a myth that they did it all themselves -- and use that myth to destroy the social safety net that has given the same benefits to other Americans. I don't hate the 1%. I do hate the 1% who got rich and are trying to make it worse for the rest of us.
Actually, one of the things that struck me about the life of Rita Levi-Montalcini and her circle was that so many of them were Italian Jews who had married Italian Christians and vice versa. They were atheists and socialists or Communists, and many of them fought in the resistance.
One of my childhood heroes was Enrico Fermi, whose wife, Laura, was Jewish.
You seem to be referring to this argument about Tay-Sachs carriers http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?pagewanted=all As this article, and the Wikipedia article, points out, the argument has just enough evidence behind it to be intriguing, but not yet enough evidence to be convincing.
I once had a psychology textbook that was written in the 1950s. It was full of bell curves of Negro IQs, white IQs, and Jewish IQs. The Negro IQ curves were 15 points to the left of the white curves, and the Jewish curves were 15 points to the right of the white curves. Data like this led Charles Murray to conclude that Negroes were just plain genetically inferior, although, Murray hastened to add, they did have those mental skills that were useful in the jungles of Africa. So it's futile to try to bring Negroes up to the intellectual accomplishments of white people, Murray argued in the Wall Street Journal, and affirmative action will merely make them frustrated and unhappy. So the lower educational accomplishments of Negroes wasn't due to the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow, it wasn't due to the segregated schools where Negroes got textbooks after they were thrown out by white schools, where Negroes were taught how to be carpenters while white students were taught how to be lawyers. Negroes just didn't have the genes for intelligence that like white men did. And, as Charles Murray liked to say, they didn't have the genes like "you guys," the Jews.
I was not very comfortable with these theories, which were not confirmed by later examination.
In fact, I work in biology today, and my own favorite biology teacher, who taught me the important ideas in genetics that I use today, was a black woman. It would be the height of ingratitude for me to tolerate racism towards her children and grandchildren after all she gave me. And I've met a lot of black kids who were smarter than me, particularly in the sciences, which leads me (and a lot of other people) to suspect that Murray must have dropped a decimal point, or has a screw loose, somewhere.
In my understanding, most geneticists are ready to believe that about half of intelligence is due to environment, and half due to genetics. In countries like Finland, which is probably the most egalitarian society in the world, everybody gets a relatively equal educational environment, so much of the variation could be due to genetics. But in countries like the U.S., which is one of the most unequal countries in the world, the effect of environment washes out any genetic effect. At least 20 points of IQ is due to the environment. In the US, and in much of Europe, the Jews are an affluent, successful minority, http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/images/cartoon.jpg particularly in the scientific professions, so it's understandable that they would be winning Nobel prizes disproportionately. It may turn out that Jewish success is entirely environmental.
But these Italian scientists, and their political inspirations like Rosa Luxemburg, said that it's time to put our ethnic identities and religious superstitions behind us, and build a socialist society where everyone -- Jew, Christian, African and everyone else -- will be educated and contribute to their fullest potential.
That's because you're not fulfilling your manhood by living in Israel.
http://www.evcomics.com/2008/05/29/israel-man-and-diaspora-boy/
(Warning: Jewish humor)
By the way, if you think that's funny, be sure to read the propaganda magazine he's parodying it and you'll really appreciate the jokes. It's like The Great Dictator/Triumph of the Will
http://www.shoah.org.uk/2011/01/16/beyond-satir-captain-israhell-fights-the-snake-of-bds/