Whoops! I meant to say "traditions, texts, and even the art of..." While there are a few paintings and such from Hindu belief systems and the like that cover subjects similar to the parable of the Good Samaritan, it shows up a lot more in texts, and in some traditions where representitive art isn't allowed, texts are the only place to find it.
I'm religious because I think the advice in the Sermon on the Mount is generally good advice. I'm religious because the parable of the good Samaritan was spoken two thousand years ago and a lot of people still aren't with it. Until people realise that the person who would help you in a pinch is your neighbor and the blood relative who wouldn't is not, we have a whole bunch of people who are more than 2,000 years behind on the news. Yes, there are older books that say much the same, and it shows up in Indian traditions, arts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so on. I've read a lot of them and like the idea there just as much. I'm religious because 'sin' really does look like it's 100% omnipresent in human beings of normal mental capacity, over about the age of 2 1/2 at best, and I think that things that are absolutely, always, 100% fundamental phenomina for a certain class of entities need an especially deep and appropriate explanation, in the same way that the problem of black-body radiation was a strong clue to the way things work in physics and I'm glad Max Planck followed through on that. I don't particularly claim to be a Christian, or not just one, but one area where I particularly respect the mainstream Christian churches is they have taken the fact that EVERYONE of normally sound mind fails to live up to the best within them, has quite justified regrets and moral failings and can't always keep their promises, even ones they make to themselves, and realized that says something quite fundamental about reality. I'm religious because St. Paul gave a good evidence based argument for belief in life after death in Corinthians and why people's faith should be based on such evidence and how he wouldn't advocate such a radical thing as life after death upon just blind faith. Yeah, I know the bible doesn't always live up to such a standard, and Paul himself didn't always say things I agree with or admire and could really be a bit of a jerk sometimes, but that argument stands even now and people have debated and elaborated it for 2,000 years, and I still haven't heard anybody logically refute it. I'm religious because there's a mathematical proof of the existence of God, by Kurt Godel none-the-less, and his math looks good. I'm spiritual because of personal experience, and that exceeds any particular religious practice. If you haven't had Gnosis, go ahead and be an Agnostic, it really won't hurt anything, least of all yourself.
Near Death experiences provoke a lot of 'expert opinions' from people who are grossly ignorant. The best estimate of how many now still living people have reported a near death experience under clinical conditions alone is a seven or even eight digit number (well over a million people, and possibly over ten million, that is). I have been at conferences on this and heard professional speakers from the "scientific, it's just a brain state, in many ways like dreaming or halucinating" side of debates refer to the 'handful of documented cases' each year. Yet if you phoned your local hospital and asked them if anyone had ever reported a near death experience at that hospital, they would likely tell you they had a dozen cases just last year or similar figures.
I've asked experts just how many cases are reported each year, and had some, unfortunately way too many of them, say things such as "I'm not sure if they happen often enough that there is one in the west every single year." or "a few dozen or less".
It's pretty damned simple - make up your own mind on whether there's anything supernatural or not, or whether there's any connection between what's reported and 'life after death', 'heaven' and anything else, but don't let any 'expert' who comes up with a number less than 100,000 per year influence you. If you were having to make decisions about expanding existing air bag laws, and somebody who was billed as a transportation safety engineer said there were nearly three dozen automotive fatalities in the US last year, would you let him influence your judgement any further? If you were arguing one way or another on Obamacare, and somebody kept insisting the average cost of open heart surgery was $1.49, would you defer any further to his judgement? Or do you inform such people they are obviously not qualified to have an opinion and should let everybody who knows at least a few facts speak instead.
It may be very difficult to test who knows something meaningful about near death experiences. The number of new age gurus and such on one side of the debate turns many rationalists off to that side. But try asking a simple question in a manner designed to maximize the evidence based, rational analysis of the claim, like "How many NDEs are reported in hospital settings in a given year?", and you can at least clearly detect that some people have an extreme axe to grind.
"Hi! I'm off by six orders of magnetude!" is not a good introduction for a real working scientist.
Like the summary said, "the New York police were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent". So they focused their suspicions on race, and didn't focus on real suspicious behavior. It's true the cops focused on one race. It's true the cops didn't focus on people of other races who had indicators that tie much more strongly to crime (Or did you think the white and hispanic gangs of New York don't wear their own gang symbols or colors. The cops damned well know what these are, and acting like they don't is one of the reasons for these charges of racism. We have cops in this case claiming "I must have missed those briefings - the only ones I remember are gang X's", where X 'just happens' to be a black gang. Maybe that cop isn't racist, but if not, most of the other explanations are pretty bad too, as in 'cop sleeps through briefings on gang violence', or 'cop has very limited data storage'). It's true the cops didn't often do things like ask a suspect where they lived and then follow up with a few casual seeming questions to see if the person was really a local in that neighborhood, which something they are trained to do and is a pretty good way to spot many criminals, as most criminals learn to work outside of a neighborhood safe zone where they are well recognized. (Drug dealers are sometimes a particular exception to this, if their neighborhood is tolerant. Are the cops trying to only catch drug deal;ers and no other criminals? If so, why is any cop who is not a racist focusing on one type of crime when he isn't even assigned to that section of the force? If we grant that cop the claim that he is not a racist, we are left needing some explanation on why these cops are going to the frisk stage without using this technique and many others like it, first. Incidentally, the more violent criminals usually learn faster to do their work outside of a buffer zone - why not try harder to catch them, of all criminals?). People who point out that crimes in "certain areas" "tend to be" of a certain race often ignore that there are very strong statistical ties to make these same race crimes (i.e. black on black, white on white, hispanic on hispanic, and even Dominican Republic descent on Dominican Republic descent or Recent Russian immigrant on Recent Russian immigrant). The numbers there are grouped much more closely than by race in general. It's true that NYC cops keep stopping and frisking blacks in the same percentages even when they have been given orders to particularly be on the lookout for a particular criminal who has knocked over three Albanian Immigrant mom and pop stores in the last month, and even when that particular high profile suspect is described as Caucasian.
Here's an idea, if people are so hepped up on making sure someone else has healthcare, why don't they give the money directly to that person and write it off on their taxes as a charitable contribution?
Assuming you're talking about the USA: 1. It is illegal to claim charitable contributions to private individuals as an itemized deduction. 2. There is no point in itemizing unless it saves you taxes over the regular deduction, which means many people making $100,000 a year or more could spend $4 - 5,000 personally on someone's health expenses and still see no actual benefits from itemizing even if they could somehow take it legally as charity.
One of the common complaints about the AFC is it's over a thousand pages and nobody fully understands it. Guess what is also true (in spades) about the US tax code?
Government, by definition, includes the use of force on people who don't comply. This fact just proves a lot less than you think: Take public education, for example: It's been shown frequently, that public education reduces crime rates and gives us a body politic that at least has the potential to make widespread democracy work. The government, at one level or another, gets to use its control over force to make some people pay for other's public education, and even to make some people attend who don't want to. But without it, the government would still be able to use its monopoly on force to make people pay taxes for other things, including hiring more police and building more prisons. It would still use force to make more people stay in those prisons. Given what it costs, it might well take more force against otherwise innocent taxpayers to fund so many prisons just to "keep government force focused on the guilty".
If we have to provide health care to prisoners, and pay for it with forcibly collected taxes, but don't provide health care to the poor but free, then we're "using force to reward criminals". (And if we can force people to stay in prisons without health care, even for conditions caused by being in prison, there goes the whole idea of 'cruel and unusual punishment").
Even if we made every crime that needs to stay on the books a 'death penalty enforced on sight by the cops' offense, it would cost something to enforce them. Even China at its worst only billed for the bullet, not the executioner's whole salary. That's some level of government ordered, taxation funded force, and more force to collect those taxes. Keep lots of laws on the books, and that's more taxes needed. Reducing the number of offenses or the effort to enforce each remaining one definitely reduces needed taxes, but spending on other things than direct spending on governmental force, i.e. military and law enforcement activities only, does not necessarily mean raising taxes, and may mean less actual coercive force as a whole. If requiring people with a certain income to spend part of it on health care insurance reduces other costs enough, then whatever force government uses to collect it is less force than what they would have used collecting taxes to pay for those other costs, so overall use of government force can actually go down.
A real argument over the AFC would entail whether those funds will fix enough problems to make society's costs lower, overall, or not. It might go into whether we could reduce how much governments are spending on emergency room security personel, or what drug law reforms are needed to make what other measures cost effective, or what reductions in taxes for employers who provide what level of insurance coverage are desirable to make the overall tax burden as low as possible, or does the interstate commerce clause let the federal government regualte interstate insurance company licencing. We could debate over what role the federal government should play as opposed to state or local governments, and all sorts of other issues. Or you could shout "force" in just this one case, ignore that force is already being used to collect other taxes which are going to fix some of the same problesm this law is meant to address, and stop all meaningful discourse.
Right now, you're not being '"clear" or "honest" even as you demand it of others; How many pages you have to fill out does not count as force by most people's definitions. What I'm seeing is a very short form or possibly a single information block on standard IRS forms. Your claim that it involves page after page is a claim that's both factually wrong, and disingenious - "Oooohhh! I had to resharpen my pencil, there's so many pages, that makes it the government exercising force to make me walk to the pencil sharpener.". If your argument is that every single change to the tax code that requires more
As a circumsized male in his late 50's, whose absolutely wonderful Ex gave him a series of orgasms that lasted about 15 minutes in total just last week, by methods most of the basement dwelling slashdotters have never even heard of, I'm pretty "well adjusted" to it not getting any better than this. If those nerves mattered that much, I would have just passed out and missed the best parts.
Most adult men can easily improve their sexual stamina and prolong orgasm just by such simple methods as using a rubber ring or velcro strap to hold the testicles away from the body when they try to contract up close just prior to orgasm. That one little trick probably has 10 times the effect of circumcision on most males. (Note, don't go strapping parts down, up or sideways until you know what its supposed to accomplish, what it should feel like done right, and why you don't want to do it wrong, please - circulation is a good thing!).
Simple, painless methods, many involving just training in control, or using tools that may cost 5 dollars US or less, can preserve firm erections for many males in the 'Viagra years', give most males orgasms that last at least a minute each and are generally described as mind-blowing, and keep sex great at least into a man's sixties. And it goes way, way, far beyond that if people really want to bother to research it. (One reason I'm not going into details is there are real risks to proceeding without a firm understanding of underlying principles, and a little caution and 'common' sense, especially for the advanced stuff. That's also why the references I picked below are at least by PHDs in related fields, and I wish I could give more pointers to MDs). But, you have to learn at least a little about how sex works and how to make it work better, generally buried info in the US, at least, and you have to stay in at least half way decent shape. For that matter, one reason I run 5 miles twice a week is to keep the stamina to go through an hour of sex and waves of minute long multiples.
Most men who aren't experiencing what they hope to sexually, can make a much, much bigger change than those nerve endings you are so concerned about ever did, by methods such as exercise and training that, I am informed, are very good things even if you still have those nerves. I suspect most women can too, but as long as they make personal vibrators that double as industrial grade concrete agitators, getting the E.S.O.* up to 5 mile runs seems doubtful - it's simpler for women these days.
* Ex Significant Other or Ex Snooky-Ookems, a.ka. STILL the Most Wonderful Woman in the World to Me. Married 23 years, divorced 8 years now, dating again for 7 years 10 months or so.
E.S.O. also stands for Extended Sexual Orgasm. Try these books (verified available from Amazon) if you're interested:
"Extended Massive Orgasm" by Vera and Steve Bodansky (2000) (Good, but maybe focused more on helping women with basic orgasmic disfunctions and less on already multiorgasmic women and basically orgasmic men)
"The One Hour Orgasm" by Leah and Bob Schwartz (1988) (Men may need to look for just parts most relevant to their issues unless they are also reading it for a female partner).
"Anytime...for as Long as You Want: Strength, Genius, Libido & Erection by Integrative Sex Transmutation" by Charles Runels (It's male focused, it's by an MD, and its probably not going to get you injured, but he does aim to get people to the top of the whole mountain, and it goes up further than he thinks - this is more a beginners book than the author supposes).
Dow has what I would argue is an objectively bad record, but...
One of the reasons you can say "very bad" and ackthpt can say "very good" is that "bad" or "good" for Dow usually means 'in comparison to other representitives of the industry'. (I don't claim to know what either you or ackthpt were thinking, beyond what you or he (?) actually posted, but that does seem to be common to many people making such evaluations).
Many people forget that Union Carbide is now a wholly owned Dow subsidiary, but at the time of the Bhopal disaster, was a competing corporation - Dow bought them 17 years later. Do we count that as Dow was at least better than UC, and UC is not as bad now that Dow owns it, or not? Surely we don't blame Bhopal on Dow?
Morton-Thiokol had a magnesium related explosion in 1971 that killed 29 people and injured about 50 others, but the official cause of that one is that the US government gave them some very bad advice about some unusual additional explosive risks, known to the military but not to most civilian chemists, in storing magnesium based flares in extreme bulk, in spaces which didn't have powered venting and detectors, and otherwise even hundreds of flares burning off wouldn't have led to an actual explosion. Probably, M-T has a better environmental record for the same time frame than Dow, but that's if we believe the causes of the M-T 1971 Georgia explosion have been adequately analyzed by the courts.
The chemical industry in general is bad on both the safety and environmental records. Searching for "Chemical Industry Accidents", "Industrial Disasters" or such terms doesn't yield much evidence, but try searching for "Superfund Sites" and see how many of these tie to the major chemical industry players. Even if Dow somehow stood near the top of the pack in their industry (they don't), it's a lousy industry.
Pot and the standard opiates, (i.e. morphine and heroin) became illegal well before Nixon, but stricter penalties for marijuana passed in 1970 (That's the Nixon years) under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. Most of the halucinogens/psychedelics (i.e. LSD, Psilocybin, Mescaline, and others) were either added to the lists or had more severe penalties substituted by that same law, (so again the Nixon administration), although LSD itself was first more lightly criminalized under LBJ in 1966, and increased penalties for Crack cocaine did not happen until the mid 1980s (Reagan). Lest anyone think I'm particularly blaming the whole mess on the parts connected to Republican administrations, it was under the Ford administration that the 1970 law was fixed to allow use of some otherwise banned opiates to control the speed of withdrawl treatment.
Alcohol is a depressant. Unlike LSD, it has a history of promoting unsafe and stupid actions in a high percentage of human users. Again, mostly unlike LSD, even people who are highly experienced, stick to reputable sources, have used alcohol regularly and are familiar with its general effects, and consume it only with organized social safety nets in place to protect them from the worst risks, may still have medical problems relating to alcohol, and there is evidence for some of these problems never, ever getting better once they develop. In fact, there are several side effects of alcohol known to persist for the abuser's entire life (see: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Alcohol'ism' (apparently, from the word construction, this is a religious or philosophical belief in the divinity of alcohol, how bizarre), and Liver-looks-like-someone-stuck-a-fork-in-itosis). Other alcohol related problems may be treatable or curable, but often only at great expense (see: marriage, paternity). In fact, the only reasons I would not recommend LSD to most adults is that it may have some small chances of triggering a few of the same problems alcohol produces so much more often, plus some of them look really stupid driving down the interstate at four miles an hour talking to polka-dot Cthulhu.
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume Russia actually has some interest in abstract justice for Snowden. (Yeah, I know, they are probably more interested in being able to accuse the US of abuses so they can excuse their own - I'm sure we can paint the Russian decision in all sorts of unflattering lights - Hell, just claim it's really the third step in their nefarious plan for world domination and comes just after "build secret base in active volcano" and just before "kill Bond in elaborate but unsupervised deathtrap" if you want, but remember there are people assuming the same about ALL sides in this mess.).
A year from now, the Russians will know what sentence Bradley Manning got. They'll know if the hunger strikes and forced feedings at Gitmo drew any congressional support for finally cleaning up Gitmo. Some of the various less touted whistleblower cases now in the courts will have resolved. There will probably be other revelations about the NSA, the US will be mostly out of Afghanistan, and so on.
The Russians can judge whether Snowden's claims are objectively reasonable. And whether the US tries to paint the Russian's decision in as negative light as possible, or not, all those other nations will also be looking at what the US does more than just how the Russians responded. The next Asylum seeker will probably flee to some other country. The next public statement after the Manning sentencing will probably come from some other country. If the US dwells too much on Snowden, then every diplomatic action involving those other countries will be interpreted in the worst possible way by the court of world opinion, if only because the US will appear to be stuck in a rut and not learning from, or admitting to, its mistakes. These events keep starting in the US, and Russia and other countries are only reacting to what starts here - there's no way the US is going to convince much of anybody that those reactions are the big problem and not the initial actions.
The key question is how do we get these particular trolls to make their threats against somebody like the queen, whose staff's staff has staff to handle crushing them like grapes and tasting the sweet sweet wine of their eternal tears so no one in the public eye has to go to the trouble?
Stevenson's The Weir of Hermiston. It's unfinished, in a way that makes you cringe approaching the non-end. It has lots of real Vogon poetry style passages because Stevenson relied on his editor to trim the purple prose bits, and the Ex was seriously disappointed that she couldn't find Hermiston anywhere on her map of Pern.
With the current blight threat to Cavendish bananas, the last GMO related action was to splice some pepper genes into them. If I remember correctly, two of three tested genes didn't modify flavor, while the third added a peppery taste and was dropped. That sounds as though the researchers there are not "shotgunning" genes around. It's hoped the two remaining pepper genes will armor the plants against the current threat and at least some others. The real solution is probably to get several different blight resistant bananas and 'interweave' the fields so that they help slow the spread of anything new in the way of fungi and blights - but that would mean a fair portion of people would have to prefer the Cavendish or some other breed, such as the Goldfinger, even with the Big Mike back. You might try to get your hands on some Goldfingers though - I think they are starting to be sold commercially in parts of southeast asia and as far into the new world as Honduras, just not in the US yet.
Now you have me picturing bananas with enough starfish genes they grow suckers on the tips and crawl about - so for all this talk about bananas, I'm not going to go have one - thanks!
The US is one of unfortunately all too many nations that spy to support their own corporations getting business secrets. There's a big difference between checking up on what ballistic missile submarine a government is deploying where, and what new flavor some consumer product will be released in six months from now. The US government pays, with your tax dollars and mine, to give "American" companies (which are often international), data on what their competitiors are doing , supposedly because that keeps jobs in the US (which are being outsourced overseas anyway).
A lot of the motivation for the NSA spying domestically is that the average citizen is being viewed only as a consumer: only useful to the government, and its true 'masters', if the citizen doesn't get out of line and start occupying something. That's a very pro-corporatist viewpoint, and goes hand in hand with international corporate directed espionage. being able to get the taxpayers to both subsidise one and focus the agencies on it, helps enable the other.
I agree that paedophilia is a consequence of some sort of mental illness, but that "NEVER" is difficult to quantify - it would seem the only way to achive it is to keep the person in for life. Would it change your opinions any to know that back in the 1960's there were a number of programs to treat paedophiles in prison and then monitor them long term after release, and what sort of numbers they produced. These were studies in the US and Canada, involving in total over 10,000 subjects that were in the prison systems for child molestation at the time.
Several programs produced a tremendous 'cure rate' : For hetero molesters who had a related child as at least one of their victims, the percentage who did not repeat offend even after 20 years after release was 78%. The worst percentage was for homosexual molesters who targeted unrelated children, and a. that 20 year did not reoffend number was still 57%, and b. the programs tried to 'cure' the homosexuality as well, which probably made treating the paedophilia aspect much harder (or at least most of the psychiatrists that were involved with these programs have concluded that was a problem in retrospect).
Therapy, particularly focusing on how the paedophile feels incapable of the demands of more adult relationships and massivly incompetent at such things as dating and even making casual conversation with potential adult partners, shows a better success rate than attempts to rehabilitate either economic criminals or violent offenders. One big reason you hear the claim that paedophiles cannot be rehabilitated is that some of these therapy programs used psychoactive drugs under an individual psychiatrist's control (and yes, the patients were informed the programs might involve them being asked to take psilocyben or ketamine or even LSD). When many of these drugs became illegal, the US DoJ asserted they had no theraputic value even under the strictest physician control, and when these programs were mentioned, DoJ representitives made an amazing outburst of claims that paedophiles NEVER reformed. This message was hammered into the media as part of a US government media campaign claiming that various psychoactives needed to be classed as Schedule 1 Narcotics, and there was apparently no actual science behind the claim. In other words, it was a lie, 'justifed' by the need to add the psychoactives to the war on drugs.
When the last New York power grid failure caused a cascade effect that dragged down parts of 13 state's grids, the wave of failures stopped where TVA's grid starts. Stopped cold. There was a point where TVA systems were regulating the entire national grid, spinning up idle hydroelectric turbines as fast as possible to keep stable power flowing all the way to the west coast and down into Mexico. If your lights went out when New York went down, but came back on in a minute or two, that was TVA Hydro and your local grid was very probably being remotely controlled by TVA engineers. If you got power back in a day or two, that was probably TVA nuclear (it takes time to ramp nuke power up - sorry, but it just does). If you got power back faster than New York itself, ask your local sources if a bunch of TVA engineers were involved. If you live west of Chicago, and you didn't see an outage, most of the pros agree you would have if TVA hadn't been able to hold the line - an outage in all 48 contiguous states and probably affecting all of continental North America.
But it's a US Federal program, begun by Liberals such as FDR, so, you know, it's Eeevilll!!!
But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used?
How about, because they sold it to somebody, so they don't own it anymore. That's usually a pretty good answer.
If the media companies want to retain control, they should stop selling the content, and stop making it look like a sale to the public while trying to make it something else by laws that violate fundamental legal principles - Contacts that the consumer doesnt actually sign, and that they can't read until after they pony up the money. Trying to retain control by hiding what you are doing, lying to the other party, and such is fraud. Why are you defending fraud?
Now the situation we have is a whole business sector doesnt have any respect for other people's right to either an honest sale or honest lease contract. They feel lying to their customers should be part of their business model because "zomg one born every minute!!!" (There's a little of what you were dishing out back at you).
It wouldn't exist at all if not for them
My daughter wouldn't exist if not for me, so why can't I control her? (Hints, she's 30 years old - plus I raised her right, so she is a rational autonomous adult that nobody else needs to control). I'm trying to sell a car I own right now. It wouldn't exist at all if not for a Nissan plant, but it also wouldn't exist in its current state, with the resale value it has, if not for my upkeep. The law made me do some of that upkeep, but to achieve safety on the roads, not better resale value. The law is full of examples of things that somebody brought into existence but did not gain the right to do anything they want, to it or with it, just because of that. If creation is what should give absolute control, nobody creates land ex nihilo, so I guess you are arguing that land can't be owned. That's probably not where you want your logic to lead.
When the Federal Government expanded imminent domain, eight states passed laws that restricted that power. On this issue, two states (so far) have passed laws restricting it. Lobby your state to restrict the things where the federal government overreaches. If you can get your state on the bandwagon, there can be a candidate for federal office that takes it just as seriously as you do, and as your state does. If your state will pass the laws, your state will also pick Congressmen who will work for the same laws at the federal level. If there's not enough people in your state who care to even get these issues on the local ballots, then your state is part of the problem, and I say that as a resident of one of the eight states that passed tough restictions on state power to exercise imminent domain, and who is working to add that state to the two who have already become concerned about warrentless tracking.
I know IP rights are a huge focus on Slashdot, so I almost hate to drag them in here, (but I'm going to anyway because almost only counts for horseshoes and nukes). When the government started allowing copyright to be awarded for "Life +" years, that was recasting a right as something given by the government. After all, people have a natural, physical right to copy, but they can't exercise that right one second after they die, let alone 70 years. That extra time is a recasting of where the whole right comes from. And if government creates the right to copy out of nothing, it can change it however it wants. It can make copyright run for life plus 3,497 years and 19 days, or it can turn around when it wants and make copyright run for only Four years and all royalties go to the government after that. All the rights holders who think they got a good deal with copyright extension may be unpleasantly shocked one day when the government needs more money.
I'd also argue that changing copyright from a definite period (like 14 years + one 14 year renewal under specific terms) to 'life' fits what you are talking about as a redefinition, although I'm not as equally sure on just how you mean that. Thats one reason I tend to drag IP law into constitutional discussions, because I think there are multiple ways the law has been used to transfer your natural rights and mine to the government, and the sheer, overwhelming, multiplicity of methods show just what kind of attacks some people are willing to perform on the constitution. If you imagine a law about search and seizure that redefines where the source of all property rights originates, and that simultaniously goes after the idea that travel or association are natural rights of man, and even goes after the normal definitions of what words such as citizen, human, and religious all mean, just to make all property siezable on government demand without even a court order, you get a horrible, abominal law, and yet you also get something that doesn't take any more bends and twists than have been applied to intellectual property.
You don't get to define malice as being done only to the people the perp wants to count, not when the perp damned well knows that other people will suffer. Do that, and you're one step away from counting the victims themselves as just side effects. When somebody says, in effect "This will help me or some special people I care about, and I don't care about those other people", do you really think they just don't care? "I didn't give a damn about those parts of what I set into motion, nothing personal to those afflicted", is not a malice free attitude, it's the defense of someone caught in an act of deliberate evil. "I didn't hate X, I didn't even know him. It was nothing personal" is what a criminal says when they're obviously going to be found guilty but they are still arguing for a lighter sentence. Please, don't base your personal morality on that.
I'm wondering if this particular Sevier lives in Sevierville. Seveirville is named after John Sevier, a pioneer settler to the region. That part of the state has literally thousands of people with some variant on Sevier as their last name; Mostly Seviers, but with Siviers, Seebers, Seibers, Severs, and even a few Xaviers. I know of only one sex shop in the Sevierville area, but I don't think it's out of business. (It calls itself "Sexy Stuf", and the ex and I don't patronize places that can't spell, but it looked open when we stopped at the Smoky Mountain Knife Museum (It's like a four story mall full of knife dealers, with taxidermied animals and indoor waterfalls, and I'd bet Mr. Sevier would love it if he can stop focusing on sex so much).
Knoxville, 30 miles away or so, has lots of sex stores still open last I checked - Adult Superstore, Fantasy World, Intimate Treasures, Romantic Escapades, and others. Town and Country seems to be fading fast, but they're kinda disquieting (as in labeling the plus-size video's "fattyporn", and clerks who seem oddly judgemental), so I really doubt it's apple putting them out of business.
Start with the assumption that terrorism is NOT just a bunch of false-flag state operations from some group such as the CIA. If generating these huge lists creates a cloud of false positives that will make us actually less safe, then we (we meaning citizens of the country making the lists) want the state not to waste that money. We ought to oppose wasteful, counterproductive ways of fighting terrorism.
Now try the counter-assumption - Terrorism originates within our government: If the government actually is comitting terrorist acts, still, the government gets money to accumulate these big lists of potential terrorists. In fact, one big motive for false flag terrorism would be to get lots of taxes devoted to creating such huge lists, and thus make a big profit for some contractors. We don't have open proof that this is happening, but we can prove the part about waste. If we oppose wasting that money on counterproductive list-making, and it turns out the government really is behind false flag operations, then the government has failed to get something it wants by using these false flag operations and should logically try something else to get money and create contractor opportunities. Maybe the government will even try something more ethical.
xiando thinks the government is doing false flag operations. xiando appears to think this is bad. xiando appears to want the government to stop doing false flag operations. But, this article is giving a good reason for the government to stop doing something that, if xiando is right, is a consequence of the thing xiando apparently wants stopped. Yet xiando wants to lump this article in with government propaganda for doing the very thing the article says to stop doing. There's a gear slipping there, somewhere. Other people want at least some of the same goals xiando presumably wants (shutting down the programs that may have been enabled by false flag operations, if xiando is right). But because they aren't advocating other things xiando presumably also wants (like exposing the government secret program, or maybe putting a bunch of people in the government on trial for war crimes), they get lumped in with xiando's great enemy.
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Whoops! I meant to say "traditions, texts, and even the art of ..." While there are a few paintings and such from Hindu belief systems and the like that cover subjects similar to the parable of the Good Samaritan, it shows up a lot more in texts, and in some traditions where representitive art isn't allowed, texts are the only place to find it.
I'm religious because I think the advice in the Sermon on the Mount is generally good advice.
I'm religious because the parable of the good Samaritan was spoken two thousand years ago and a lot of people still aren't with it. Until people realise that the person who would help you in a pinch is your neighbor and the blood relative who wouldn't is not, we have a whole bunch of people who are more than 2,000 years behind on the news. Yes, there are older books that say much the same, and it shows up in Indian traditions, arts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so on. I've read a lot of them and like the idea there just as much.
I'm religious because 'sin' really does look like it's 100% omnipresent in human beings of normal mental capacity, over about the age of 2 1/2 at best, and I think that things that are absolutely, always, 100% fundamental phenomina for a certain class of entities need an especially deep and appropriate explanation, in the same way that the problem of black-body radiation was a strong clue to the way things work in physics and I'm glad Max Planck followed through on that. I don't particularly claim to be a Christian, or not just one, but one area where I particularly respect the mainstream Christian churches is they have taken the fact that EVERYONE of normally sound mind fails to live up to the best within them, has quite justified regrets and moral failings and can't always keep their promises, even ones they make to themselves, and realized that says something quite fundamental about reality.
I'm religious because St. Paul gave a good evidence based argument for belief in life after death in Corinthians and why people's faith should be based on such evidence and how he wouldn't advocate such a radical thing as life after death upon just blind faith. Yeah, I know the bible doesn't always live up to such a standard, and Paul himself didn't always say things I agree with or admire and could really be a bit of a jerk sometimes, but that argument stands even now and people have debated and elaborated it for 2,000 years, and I still haven't heard anybody logically refute it.
I'm religious because there's a mathematical proof of the existence of God, by Kurt Godel none-the-less, and his math looks good.
I'm spiritual because of personal experience, and that exceeds any particular religious practice. If you haven't had Gnosis, go ahead and be an Agnostic, it really won't hurt anything, least of all yourself.
Near Death experiences provoke a lot of 'expert opinions' from people who are grossly ignorant. The best estimate of how many now still living people have reported a near death experience under clinical conditions alone is a seven or even eight digit number (well over a million people, and possibly over ten million, that is). I have been at conferences on this and heard professional speakers from the "scientific, it's just a brain state, in many ways like dreaming or halucinating" side of debates refer to the 'handful of documented cases' each year. Yet if you phoned your local hospital and asked them if anyone had ever reported a near death experience at that hospital, they would likely tell you they had a dozen cases just last year or similar figures.
I've asked experts just how many cases are reported each year, and had some, unfortunately way too many of them, say things such as "I'm not sure if they happen often enough that there is one in the west every single year." or "a few dozen or less".
It's pretty damned simple - make up your own mind on whether there's anything supernatural or not, or whether there's any connection between what's reported and 'life after death', 'heaven' and anything else, but don't let any 'expert' who comes up with a number less than 100,000 per year influence you. If you were having to make decisions about expanding existing air bag laws, and somebody who was billed as a transportation safety engineer said there were nearly three dozen automotive fatalities in the US last year, would you let him influence your judgement any further? If you were arguing one way or another on Obamacare, and somebody kept insisting the average cost of open heart surgery was $1.49, would you defer any further to his judgement? Or do you inform such people they are obviously not qualified to have an opinion and should let everybody who knows at least a few facts speak instead.
It may be very difficult to test who knows something meaningful about near death experiences. The number of new age gurus and such on one side of the debate turns many rationalists off to that side. But try asking a simple question in a manner designed to maximize the evidence based, rational analysis of the claim, like "How many NDEs are reported in hospital settings in a given year?", and you can at least clearly detect that some people have an extreme axe to grind.
"Hi! I'm off by six orders of magnetude!" is not a good introduction for a real working scientist.
Like the summary said, "the New York police were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent". So they focused their suspicions on race, and didn't focus on real suspicious behavior.
It's true the cops focused on one race.
It's true the cops didn't focus on people of other races who had indicators that tie much more strongly to crime (Or did you think the white and hispanic gangs of New York don't wear their own gang symbols or colors. The cops damned well know what these are, and acting like they don't is one of the reasons for these charges of racism. We have cops in this case claiming "I must have missed those briefings - the only ones I remember are gang X's", where X 'just happens' to be a black gang. Maybe that cop isn't racist, but if not, most of the other explanations are pretty bad too, as in 'cop sleeps through briefings on gang violence', or 'cop has very limited data storage').
It's true the cops didn't often do things like ask a suspect where they lived and then follow up with a few casual seeming questions to see if the person was really a local in that neighborhood, which something they are trained to do and is a pretty good way to spot many criminals, as most criminals learn to work outside of a neighborhood safe zone where they are well recognized. (Drug dealers are sometimes a particular exception to this, if their neighborhood is tolerant. Are the cops trying to only catch drug deal;ers and no other criminals? If so, why is any cop who is not a racist focusing on one type of crime when he isn't even assigned to that section of the force? If we grant that cop the claim that he is not a racist, we are left needing some explanation on why these cops are going to the frisk stage without using this technique and many others like it, first. Incidentally, the more violent criminals usually learn faster to do their work outside of a buffer zone - why not try harder to catch them, of all criminals?).
People who point out that crimes in "certain areas" "tend to be" of a certain race often ignore that there are very strong statistical ties to make these same race crimes (i.e. black on black, white on white, hispanic on hispanic, and even Dominican Republic descent on Dominican Republic descent or Recent Russian immigrant on Recent Russian immigrant). The numbers there are grouped much more closely than by race in general. It's true that NYC cops keep stopping and frisking blacks in the same percentages even when they have been given orders to particularly be on the lookout for a particular criminal who has knocked over three Albanian Immigrant mom and pop stores in the last month, and even when that particular high profile suspect is described as Caucasian.
Here's an idea, if people are so hepped up on making sure someone else has healthcare, why don't they give the money directly to that person and write it off on their taxes as a charitable contribution?
Assuming you're talking about the USA:
1. It is illegal to claim charitable contributions to private individuals as an itemized deduction.
2. There is no point in itemizing unless it saves you taxes over the regular deduction, which means many people making $100,000 a year or more could spend $4 - 5,000 personally on someone's health expenses and still see no actual benefits from itemizing even if they could somehow take it legally as charity.
One of the common complaints about the AFC is it's over a thousand pages and nobody fully understands it. Guess what is also true (in spades) about the US tax code?
Government, by definition, includes the use of force on people who don't comply. This fact just proves a lot less than you think:
Take public education, for example: It's been shown frequently, that public education reduces crime rates and gives us a body politic that at least has the potential to make widespread democracy work. The government, at one level or another, gets to use its control over force to make some people pay for other's public education, and even to make some people attend who don't want to. But without it, the government would still be able to use its monopoly on force to make people pay taxes for other things, including hiring more police and building more prisons. It would still use force to make more people stay in those prisons. Given what it costs, it might well take more force against otherwise innocent taxpayers to fund so many prisons just to "keep government force focused on the guilty".
If we have to provide health care to prisoners, and pay for it with forcibly collected taxes, but don't provide health care to the poor but free, then we're "using force to reward criminals". (And if we can force people to stay in prisons without health care, even for conditions caused by being in prison, there goes the whole idea of 'cruel and unusual punishment").
Even if we made every crime that needs to stay on the books a 'death penalty enforced on sight by the cops' offense, it would cost something to enforce them. Even China at its worst only billed for the bullet, not the executioner's whole salary. That's some level of government ordered, taxation funded force, and more force to collect those taxes. Keep lots of laws on the books, and that's more taxes needed. Reducing the number of offenses or the effort to enforce each remaining one definitely reduces needed taxes, but spending on other things than direct spending on governmental force, i.e. military and law enforcement activities only, does not necessarily mean raising taxes, and may mean less actual coercive force as a whole. If requiring people with a certain income to spend part of it on health care insurance reduces other costs enough, then whatever force government uses to collect it is less force than what they would have used collecting taxes to pay for those other costs, so overall use of government force can actually go down.
A real argument over the AFC would entail whether those funds will fix enough problems to make society's costs lower, overall, or not. It might go into whether we could reduce how much governments are spending on emergency room security personel, or what drug law reforms are needed to make what other measures cost effective, or what reductions in taxes for employers who provide what level of insurance coverage are desirable to make the overall tax burden as low as possible, or does the interstate commerce clause let the federal government regualte interstate insurance company licencing. We could debate over what role the federal government should play as opposed to state or local governments, and all sorts of other issues. Or you could shout "force" in just this one case, ignore that force is already being used to collect other taxes which are going to fix some of the same problesm this law is meant to address, and stop all meaningful discourse.
Right now, you're not being '"clear" or "honest" even as you demand it of others; How many pages you have to fill out does not count as force by most people's definitions. What I'm seeing is a very short form or possibly a single information block on standard IRS forms. Your claim that it involves page after page is a claim that's both factually wrong, and disingenious - "Oooohhh! I had to resharpen my pencil, there's so many pages, that makes it the government exercising force to make me walk to the pencil sharpener.". If your argument is that every single change to the tax code that requires more
As a circumsized male in his late 50's, whose absolutely wonderful Ex gave him a series of orgasms that lasted about 15 minutes in total just last week, by methods most of the basement dwelling slashdotters have never even heard of, I'm pretty "well adjusted" to it not getting any better than this. If those nerves mattered that much, I would have just passed out and missed the best parts.
Most adult men can easily improve their sexual stamina and prolong orgasm just by such simple methods as using a rubber ring or velcro strap to hold the testicles away from the body when they try to contract up close just prior to orgasm. That one little trick probably has 10 times the effect of circumcision on most males. (Note, don't go strapping parts down, up or sideways until you know what its supposed to accomplish, what it should feel like done right, and why you don't want to do it wrong, please - circulation is a good thing!).
Simple, painless methods, many involving just training in control, or using tools that may cost 5 dollars US or less, can preserve firm erections for many males in the 'Viagra years', give most males orgasms that last at least a minute each and are generally described as mind-blowing, and keep sex great at least into a man's sixties. And it goes way, way, far beyond that if people really want to bother to research it. (One reason I'm not going into details is there are real risks to proceeding without a firm understanding of underlying principles, and a little caution and 'common' sense, especially for the advanced stuff. That's also why the references I picked below are at least by PHDs in related fields, and I wish I could give more pointers to MDs). But, you have to learn at least a little about how sex works and how to make it work better, generally buried info in the US, at least, and you have to stay in at least half way decent shape. For that matter, one reason I run 5 miles twice a week is to keep the stamina to go through an hour of sex and waves of minute long multiples.
Most men who aren't experiencing what they hope to sexually, can make a much, much bigger change than those nerve endings you are so concerned about ever did, by methods such as exercise and training that, I am informed, are very good things even if you still have those nerves. I suspect most women can too, but as long as they make personal vibrators that double as industrial grade concrete agitators, getting the E.S.O.* up to 5 mile runs seems doubtful - it's simpler for women these days.
* Ex Significant Other or Ex Snooky-Ookems, a.ka. STILL the Most Wonderful Woman in the World to Me. Married 23 years, divorced 8 years now, dating again for 7 years 10 months or so.
E.S.O. also stands for Extended Sexual Orgasm. Try these books (verified available from Amazon) if you're interested:
"Extended Massive Orgasm" by Vera and Steve Bodansky (2000) (Good, but maybe focused more on helping women with basic orgasmic disfunctions and less on already multiorgasmic women and basically orgasmic men)
"The One Hour Orgasm" by Leah and Bob Schwartz (1988) (Men may need to look for just parts most relevant to their issues unless they are also reading it for a female partner).
"Anytime...for as Long as You Want: Strength, Genius, Libido & Erection by Integrative Sex Transmutation" by Charles Runels (It's male focused, it's by an MD, and its probably not going to get you injured, but he does aim to get people to the top of the whole mountain, and it goes up further than he thinks - this is more a beginners book than the author supposes).
Or talk to a few Tantrists.
Dow has what I would argue is an objectively bad record, but...
One of the reasons you can say "very bad" and ackthpt can say "very good" is that "bad" or "good" for Dow usually means 'in comparison to other representitives of the industry'. (I don't claim to know what either you or ackthpt were thinking, beyond what you or he (?) actually posted, but that does seem to be common to many people making such evaluations).
Many people forget that Union Carbide is now a wholly owned Dow subsidiary, but at the time of the Bhopal disaster, was a competing corporation - Dow bought them 17 years later. Do we count that as Dow was at least better than UC, and UC is not as bad now that Dow owns it, or not? Surely we don't blame Bhopal on Dow?
Morton-Thiokol had a magnesium related explosion in 1971 that killed 29 people and injured about 50 others, but the official cause of that one is that the US government gave them some very bad advice about some unusual additional explosive risks, known to the military but not to most civilian chemists, in storing magnesium based flares in extreme bulk, in spaces which didn't have powered venting and detectors, and otherwise even hundreds of flares burning off wouldn't have led to an actual explosion. Probably, M-T has a better environmental record for the same time frame than Dow, but that's if we believe the causes of the M-T 1971 Georgia explosion have been adequately analyzed by the courts.
The chemical industry in general is bad on both the safety and environmental records. Searching for "Chemical Industry Accidents", "Industrial Disasters" or such terms doesn't yield much evidence, but try searching for "Superfund Sites" and see how many of these tie to the major chemical industry players. Even if Dow somehow stood near the top of the pack in their industry (they don't), it's a lousy industry.
Pot and the standard opiates, (i.e. morphine and heroin) became illegal well before Nixon, but stricter penalties for marijuana passed in 1970 (That's the Nixon years) under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. Most of the halucinogens/psychedelics (i.e. LSD, Psilocybin, Mescaline, and others) were either added to the lists or had more severe penalties substituted by that same law, (so again the Nixon administration), although LSD itself was first more lightly criminalized under LBJ in 1966, and increased penalties for Crack cocaine did not happen until the mid 1980s (Reagan). Lest anyone think I'm particularly blaming the whole mess on the parts connected to Republican administrations, it was under the Ford administration that the 1970 law was fixed to allow use of some otherwise banned opiates to control the speed of withdrawl treatment.
Alcohol is a depressant. Unlike LSD, it has a history of promoting unsafe and stupid actions in a high percentage of human users. Again, mostly unlike LSD, even people who are highly experienced, stick to reputable sources, have used alcohol regularly and are familiar with its general effects, and consume it only with organized social safety nets in place to protect them from the worst risks, may still have medical problems relating to alcohol, and there is evidence for some of these problems never, ever getting better once they develop. In fact, there are several side effects of alcohol known to persist for the abuser's entire life (see: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Alcohol'ism' (apparently, from the word construction, this is a religious or philosophical belief in the divinity of alcohol, how bizarre), and Liver-looks-like-someone-stuck-a-fork-in-itosis). Other alcohol related problems may be treatable or curable, but often only at great expense (see: marriage, paternity). In fact, the only reasons I would not recommend LSD to most adults is that it may have some small chances of triggering a few of the same problems alcohol produces so much more often, plus some of them look really stupid driving down the interstate at four miles an hour talking to polka-dot Cthulhu.
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume Russia actually has some interest in abstract justice for Snowden. (Yeah, I know, they are probably more interested in being able to accuse the US of abuses so they can excuse their own - I'm sure we can paint the Russian decision in all sorts of unflattering lights - Hell, just claim it's really the third step in their nefarious plan for world domination and comes just after "build secret base in active volcano" and just before "kill Bond in elaborate but unsupervised deathtrap" if you want, but remember there are people assuming the same about ALL sides in this mess.).
A year from now, the Russians will know what sentence Bradley Manning got. They'll know if the hunger strikes and forced feedings at Gitmo drew any congressional support for finally cleaning up Gitmo. Some of the various less touted whistleblower cases now in the courts will have resolved. There will probably be other revelations about the NSA, the US will be mostly out of Afghanistan, and so on.
The Russians can judge whether Snowden's claims are objectively reasonable. And whether the US tries to paint the Russian's decision in as negative light as possible, or not, all those other nations will also be looking at what the US does more than just how the Russians responded. The next Asylum seeker will probably flee to some other country. The next public statement after the Manning sentencing will probably come from some other country. If the US dwells too much on Snowden, then every diplomatic action involving those other countries will be interpreted in the worst possible way by the court of world opinion, if only because the US will appear to be stuck in a rut and not learning from, or admitting to, its mistakes. These events keep starting in the US, and Russia and other countries are only reacting to what starts here - there's no way the US is going to convince much of anybody that those reactions are the big problem and not the initial actions.
The difference is, the people in government are supposed to be our employees, not us theirs, so it's even worse.
The key question is how do we get these particular trolls to make their threats against somebody like the queen, whose staff's staff has staff to handle crushing them like grapes and tasting the sweet sweet wine of their eternal tears so no one in the public eye has to go to the trouble?
Stevenson's The Weir of Hermiston. It's unfinished, in a way that makes you cringe approaching the non-end. It has lots of real Vogon poetry style passages because Stevenson relied on his editor to trim the purple prose bits, and the Ex was seriously disappointed that she couldn't find Hermiston anywhere on her map of Pern.
Cost = 444 million at last projection. It will probably go well over that in the end.
With the current blight threat to Cavendish bananas, the last GMO related action was to splice some pepper genes into them. If I remember correctly, two of three tested genes didn't modify flavor, while the third added a peppery taste and was dropped. That sounds as though the researchers there are not "shotgunning" genes around. It's hoped the two remaining pepper genes will armor the plants against the current threat and at least some others. The real solution is probably to get several different blight resistant bananas and 'interweave' the fields so that they help slow the spread of anything new in the way of fungi and blights - but that would mean a fair portion of people would have to prefer the Cavendish or some other breed, such as the Goldfinger, even with the Big Mike back. You might try to get your hands on some Goldfingers though - I think they are starting to be sold commercially in parts of southeast asia and as far into the new world as Honduras, just not in the US yet.
Now you have me picturing bananas with enough starfish genes they grow suckers on the tips and crawl about - so for all this talk about bananas, I'm not going to go have one - thanks!
The US is one of unfortunately all too many nations that spy to support their own corporations getting business secrets. There's a big difference between checking up on what ballistic missile submarine a government is deploying where, and what new flavor some consumer product will be released in six months from now. The US government pays, with your tax dollars and mine, to give "American" companies (which are often international), data on what their competitiors are doing , supposedly because that keeps jobs in the US (which are being outsourced overseas anyway).
A lot of the motivation for the NSA spying domestically is that the average citizen is being viewed only as a consumer: only useful to the government, and its true 'masters', if the citizen doesn't get out of line and start occupying something. That's a very pro-corporatist viewpoint, and goes hand in hand with international corporate directed espionage. being able to get the taxpayers to both subsidise one and focus the agencies on it, helps enable the other.
I agree that paedophilia is a consequence of some sort of mental illness, but that "NEVER" is difficult to quantify - it would seem the only way to achive it is to keep the person in for life. Would it change your opinions any to know that back in the 1960's there were a number of programs to treat paedophiles in prison and then monitor them long term after release, and what sort of numbers they produced. These were studies in the US and Canada, involving in total over 10,000 subjects that were in the prison systems for child molestation at the time.
Several programs produced a tremendous 'cure rate' : For hetero molesters who had a related child as at least one of their victims, the percentage who did not repeat offend even after 20 years after release was 78%. The worst percentage was for homosexual molesters who targeted unrelated children, and a. that 20 year did not reoffend number was still 57%, and b. the programs tried to 'cure' the homosexuality as well, which probably made treating the paedophilia aspect much harder (or at least most of the psychiatrists that were involved with these programs have concluded that was a problem in retrospect).
Therapy, particularly focusing on how the paedophile feels incapable of the demands of more adult relationships and massivly incompetent at such things as dating and even making casual conversation with potential adult partners, shows a better success rate than attempts to rehabilitate either economic criminals or violent offenders. One big reason you hear the claim that paedophiles cannot be rehabilitated is that some of these therapy programs used psychoactive drugs under an individual psychiatrist's control (and yes, the patients were informed the programs might involve them being asked to take psilocyben or ketamine or even LSD). When many of these drugs became illegal, the US DoJ asserted they had no theraputic value even under the strictest physician control, and when these programs were mentioned, DoJ representitives made an amazing outburst of claims that paedophiles NEVER reformed. This message was hammered into the media as part of a US government media campaign claiming that various psychoactives needed to be classed as Schedule 1 Narcotics, and there was apparently no actual science behind the claim. In other words, it was a lie, 'justifed' by the need to add the psychoactives to the war on drugs.
When the last New York power grid failure caused a cascade effect that dragged down parts of 13 state's grids, the wave of failures stopped where TVA's grid starts. Stopped cold. There was a point where TVA systems were regulating the entire national grid, spinning up idle hydroelectric turbines as fast as possible to keep stable power flowing all the way to the west coast and down into Mexico. If your lights went out when New York went down, but came back on in a minute or two, that was TVA Hydro and your local grid was very probably being remotely controlled by TVA engineers. If you got power back in a day or two, that was probably TVA nuclear (it takes time to ramp nuke power up - sorry, but it just does). If you got power back faster than New York itself, ask your local sources if a bunch of TVA engineers were involved. If you live west of Chicago, and you didn't see an outage, most of the pros agree you would have if TVA hadn't been able to hold the line - an outage in all 48 contiguous states and probably affecting all of continental North America.
But it's a US Federal program, begun by Liberals such as FDR, so, you know, it's Eeevilll!!!
But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used?
How about, because they sold it to somebody, so they don't own it anymore. That's usually a pretty good answer.
If the media companies want to retain control, they should stop selling the content, and stop making it look like a sale to the public while trying to make it something else by laws that violate fundamental legal principles - Contacts that the consumer doesnt actually sign, and that they can't read until after they pony up the money. Trying to retain control by hiding what you are doing, lying to the other party, and such is fraud. Why are you defending fraud?
Now the situation we have is a whole business sector doesnt have any respect for other people's right to either an honest sale or honest lease contract. They feel lying to their customers should be part of their business model because "zomg one born every minute!!!" (There's a little of what you were dishing out back at you).
It wouldn't exist at all if not for them
My daughter wouldn't exist if not for me, so why can't I control her? (Hints, she's 30 years old - plus I raised her right, so she is a rational autonomous adult that nobody else needs to control). I'm trying to sell a car I own right now. It wouldn't exist at all if not for a Nissan plant, but it also wouldn't exist in its current state, with the resale value it has, if not for my upkeep. The law made me do some of that upkeep, but to achieve safety on the roads, not better resale value. The law is full of examples of things that somebody brought into existence but did not gain the right to do anything they want, to it or with it, just because of that. If creation is what should give absolute control, nobody creates land ex nihilo, so I guess you are arguing that land can't be owned. That's probably not where you want your logic to lead.
When the Federal Government expanded imminent domain, eight states passed laws that restricted that power. On this issue, two states (so far) have passed laws restricting it. Lobby your state to restrict the things where the federal government overreaches. If you can get your state on the bandwagon, there can be a candidate for federal office that takes it just as seriously as you do, and as your state does. If your state will pass the laws, your state will also pick Congressmen who will work for the same laws at the federal level. If there's not enough people in your state who care to even get these issues on the local ballots, then your state is part of the problem, and I say that as a resident of one of the eight states that passed tough restictions on state power to exercise imminent domain, and who is working to add that state to the two who have already become concerned about warrentless tracking.
I know IP rights are a huge focus on Slashdot, so I almost hate to drag them in here, (but I'm going to anyway because almost only counts for horseshoes and nukes). When the government started allowing copyright to be awarded for "Life +" years, that was recasting a right as something given by the government. After all, people have a natural, physical right to copy, but they can't exercise that right one second after they die, let alone 70 years. That extra time is a recasting of where the whole right comes from. And if government creates the right to copy out of nothing, it can change it however it wants. It can make copyright run for life plus 3,497 years and 19 days, or it can turn around when it wants and make copyright run for only Four years and all royalties go to the government after that. All the rights holders who think they got a good deal with copyright extension may be unpleasantly shocked one day when the government needs more money.
I'd also argue that changing copyright from a definite period (like 14 years + one 14 year renewal under specific terms) to 'life' fits what you are talking about as a redefinition, although I'm not as equally sure on just how you mean that. Thats one reason I tend to drag IP law into constitutional discussions, because I think there are multiple ways the law has been used to transfer your natural rights and mine to the government, and the sheer, overwhelming, multiplicity of methods show just what kind of attacks some people are willing to perform on the constitution. If you imagine a law about search and seizure that redefines where the source of all property rights originates, and that simultaniously goes after the idea that travel or association are natural rights of man, and even goes after the normal definitions of what words such as citizen, human, and religious all mean, just to make all property siezable on government demand without even a court order, you get a horrible, abominal law, and yet you also get something that doesn't take any more bends and twists than have been applied to intellectual property.
You don't get to define malice as being done only to the people the perp wants to count, not when the perp damned well knows that other people will suffer. Do that, and you're one step away from counting the victims themselves as just side effects. When somebody says, in effect "This will help me or some special people I care about, and I don't care about those other people", do you really think they just don't care? "I didn't give a damn about those parts of what I set into motion, nothing personal to those afflicted", is not a malice free attitude, it's the defense of someone caught in an act of deliberate evil. "I didn't hate X, I didn't even know him. It was nothing personal" is what a criminal says when they're obviously going to be found guilty but they are still arguing for a lighter sentence. Please, don't base your personal morality on that.
I'm wondering if this particular Sevier lives in Sevierville. Seveirville is named after John Sevier, a pioneer settler to the region. That part of the state has literally thousands of people with some variant on Sevier as their last name; Mostly Seviers, but with Siviers, Seebers, Seibers, Severs, and even a few Xaviers. I know of only one sex shop in the Sevierville area, but I don't think it's out of business. (It calls itself "Sexy Stuf", and the ex and I don't patronize places that can't spell, but it looked open when we stopped at the Smoky Mountain Knife Museum (It's like a four story mall full of knife dealers, with taxidermied animals and indoor waterfalls, and I'd bet Mr. Sevier would love it if he can stop focusing on sex so much).
Knoxville, 30 miles away or so, has lots of sex stores still open last I checked - Adult Superstore, Fantasy World, Intimate Treasures, Romantic Escapades, and others. Town and Country seems to be fading fast, but they're kinda disquieting (as in labeling the plus-size video's "fattyporn", and clerks who seem oddly judgemental), so I really doubt it's apple putting them out of business.
Does that matter, in re. the parent post?
Start with the assumption that terrorism is NOT just a bunch of false-flag state operations from some group such as the CIA.
If generating these huge lists creates a cloud of false positives that will make us actually less safe, then we (we meaning citizens of the country making the lists) want the state not to waste that money. We ought to oppose wasteful, counterproductive ways of fighting terrorism.
Now try the counter-assumption - Terrorism originates within our government: If the government actually is comitting terrorist acts, still, the government gets money to accumulate these big lists of potential terrorists. In fact, one big motive for false flag terrorism would be to get lots of taxes devoted to creating such huge lists, and thus make a big profit for some contractors. We don't have open proof that this is happening, but we can prove the part about waste. If we oppose wasting that money on counterproductive list-making, and it turns out the government really is behind false flag operations, then the government has failed to get something it wants by using these false flag operations and should logically try something else to get money and create contractor opportunities. Maybe the government will even try something more ethical.
xiando thinks the government is doing false flag operations. xiando appears to think this is bad. xiando appears to want the government to stop doing false flag operations. But, this article is giving a good reason for the government to stop doing something that, if xiando is right, is a consequence of the thing xiando apparently wants stopped. Yet xiando wants to lump this article in with government propaganda for doing the very thing the article says to stop doing. There's a gear slipping there, somewhere. Other people want at least some of the same goals xiando presumably wants (shutting down the programs that may have been enabled by false flag operations, if xiando is right). But because they aren't advocating other things xiando presumably also wants (like exposing the government secret program, or maybe putting a bunch of people in the government on trial for war crimes), they get lumped in with xiando's great enemy.