Do you have any evidence whatsoever that Zimmerman started a fight? If so, the prosecution would like to talk to you, since they presented no such evidence. Following someone is not the start of a fight.
Got any evidence to back up the accusation of bigotry? There's pretty good evidence that Zimmerman isn't particularly bigoted against blacks. I agree with the rest of the comment though.
The state's witness, Jonathan Good, disagrees with you. As does Selma Mora. They were the only two to see any positioning. Good's testimony places Martin on top beating Zimmerman, and Selma didn't see it until after the gun shot. Zimmerman's version of events was that he repoositioned himself after firing to prevent Martin from renewing attacks. So there is exactly one witness who saw
The evidence indicates that Martin confronted Zimmerman. Zimmerman lost martin on the transcript of his call. Rachel Jeantel's testiomny was compatible with either of them confronting the other IIRC.
17 years old is not a child, even if they have not yet gained all the rights of full adulthood. There is a reason 17 year old murderers don't go to juvenile court all the time. (possibly never, the cases I saw at first glance that did were 15 or younger. I didn't spend a lot of effort on the search.)
Define conflict. The important bit would be who initiated a physical attack OR threatened to do so. If it had stayed a purely verbal confrontation, nothing would have happened.
Depends how you define murder. Killing someone who breaks into my house and is armed shouldn't be considered murder, but is in some jurisdictions I have a duty to retreat. If the government either denies me the right of self defense or selectively enforces the law (lynchings for instance), then it is indeed suspicious.
Homicide is not the same as murder, but I'm pretty certain you were thinking of the latter.
I'm considering their arguments on their merits, not taking things on faith. Wattsupwiththat provided quotes from authors (unless you really believe they just made up the quotes, those should be pretty authoritative for their papers at least), and now has a link to an author's page. Rankexploits used numbers extracted from the original review site, and some quotes from a leaked copy of forums. The leaked forum information is a bit more untrustworthy, but as far as I know has NOT been disputed by anyone yet so I'm accepting it for now.
Comparing the past behavior of skeptic and alarmist sites, I am more slightly prone to assuming good faith on skeptic sites. As a general rule, the skeptics are far more likely to provide the full detail of their investigations up front, while the alarmist tend to balk. "why should I share my data with you, you'll just try to find something wrong with it?" That doesn't mean the skeptics are necesarily correct, but they certainly appear to be more open.
You put far too much faith in peer review, without examining the substance of the arguments. Peer review is a dodge. At most it means that the reviewers didn't produce any damning critiques of it OR the editor chose to publish anyways.
Consider that three of the authors of a paper that was claimed to endorse AGW thinks their papers do not endorse AGW. Does that cause you to question the validity of the consensus claim at all? 3 papers out of 65 is roughly a 5% difference.
I don't think neutral is the same as irrelevant, but would accepting otherwise for the sake of argument, would the point that the supposedly independent reviewers weren't independent affect your opinion of the paper?
Really, the paper tries to get a lot more out of the opinions of reviewers on the internet than can possibly be justified.
Unfortunately, this paper wasn't particularly scientific. It's got the characteristics of a push poll, in that the most appropriate choice wasn't an available option for the survey. It was based on reviewer's opinions of the articles, with no controls on who was doing the reviewing. Only 68 papers out of 12,000 asserted greater than 50% of the cause to humans, while 78 explicitly rejected it.
This number appears to be as flawed as the "98% of climate scientists" number a few years ago, where they didn't like their initial results and excluded a number of papers to bring the consensus amount up.
For global warming alarmists to be correct about what we need to do, all of the following must be true.
1. The globe is warming.
2. The warming is caused by us.
3. There are not sufficient negative feedbacks to halt it.
4. The net effect is bad.
5. The proposed solution is better than leaving the status quo in place.
It's not dishonest to note problems with all of those points, even if for the sake of discussion you occasionally stipulate one of the other points as true. Each has problems. Note that I'm not claiming the skeptics are right on every point, only that it's not dishonest of them to note problems with each of the above steps.
1. Seems to be at a standstill. It appeared to be waming before, but almost all of the warming (USHCN at least, haven't double checked GHCN) was present in the adjustments not the raw data. Those adjustments can be questioned. My personal suspicion is that the mathematical model they use to adjust for Time of Observation bias magnifies the existing data. It's not a good sign that the successive iterations have had the warming in adjustments go up, while the rate of warming in raw data hasn't shifted significantly. Compare USHCNv2 to v3 sometime. If those adjustments need to be made according to the physics, than that's fine, but it still qualifies as deeply suspicious, and was a legitimate point of contention.
2. Really hard to establish, since we know non human variation has included periods of much greater and lower warmth and CO2 concentrations. Even establishing climate sensitivity is iffy, and the number has changed several times over the past couple of decades. Protestations to the contrary, the form of the equation they use for climate sensitivity is not well sourced.
3. Again, hard to establish. They net direction of water vapor isn't known for certain since more vapor -> more clouds, and clouds are cooling agents. It might not even be unidrectional. It could act as warming at some points, cooling at others. Gotta love chaotic systems. The recent unpredicted pause is evidence that there are negative feedbacks which have not been handled correctly or not included at all.
4. Well, take a look at the warmlist sometime and see if you can understand why this claim is not trusted. Almost all claims on this point don't even acknowledge the possible positive effects of warming. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/ is one example argument that warmer temps cause fewer deaths.
5. Lots of arguments can be found about adaptation being more effective than cutting CO2 emissions. Certainly more politically achievable in many countries. YMMV.
Yes, actually. You can find the basic argument here, but before I saw other takedowns I took the numbers from the reference article in the JAMA and plotted total murder and firearm homicide rates versus the legislative score he gave, and against the best numbers I could find on actual ownership rates. Lots of other graphs in there as I poked at the numbers out of curiosity. Total suicides not just firearm suicides go down with greater gun control efforts, which surprised me because I expected guns to mostly be a substitution rather than addition. Still lots of confounding variables left unaccounted for. The suicide rates in Alaska and Wyoming probably have more to do with them being more depressing places to live for people, and both depression and attitude towards guns are likely related to living in a sparsely populated region. Deliberate homicides and murder rates aren't the same thing because of self defense laws. Legitimate self defense is still included in homicide numbers.
The distinction matters, because people usually support gun control because they are worried about being murdered, not because they are worried about killing themselves. The association that does exist between suicide rates and ownership isn't all that strong. Lots of variance, and the suicide rate goes from roughly 10 per 100,000 to 15 as ownership rates climb from about 12% to 55%. Given that auto deaths completely dwarf accidental firearm deaths, are you going to support a ban on vehicles? How about swimming pools?
One of the most interesting things in the original JAMA article is that he found a negative correlation between certain types of gun control and gun homicides. I give him props for including that information.
No, but primer and powder can also be made by hand I thought. I can find directions on the web, although it sound like even more of a pain than the rest of the reloading process.
Stop including suicides and defensive homicides in there, and we can start having a real discussion about the impact of guns on crime. There are major problems with comparing across location in any case, due to the confounding influence of culture. Even given that caveat, state by state in the US there is no significant relationship between gun ownership rates or gun control laws and homicide or murder rates.
The equation those numbers are used in may not be as reliable as you think. http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/07/more-on-the-logarithmic-formula/ It's a fuction they fit the data to, but no evidence that it makes useful predictions so far, especially given that they have to keep revising the numbers.
You've never met a hand reloader I take it. Ammunition isn't nearly the problem you imagine. I agree with you about the likely reaction if the government actually tried to round up all guns.
You can fix those if you also fix the districts created to give seats to democrats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Texas_redistricting is pretty strong evidence that it does go both ways, although I'm not aware of any objective measure of which party benefits more from the practice. It probably varies from year to year.
I would dispute fascism being right wing. I wouldn't really place it on the left either. Argumentum ad populum is a fallacy. Just because it is commonly believed doesn't make it true. On economic policy, they were more left than right, but that isn't their sole determining characteristic. Deciding where exactly to place them is a pointless argument in the first place.
In any event, my original point, that mass murderers aren't more likely to be right wing, still holds true. I used the term 'arguably' for the people on that list I linked to for a reason, because it usually isn't clear even with significant markers one way or the other.
James vonn Brunn: FrontPage Magazine has a rundown, although perhaps slanted. From his own words, he was anti-capitalist and pro socialism, but I'd accept an argument the was more plain crazy than left wing. Here are some addtional examples of people initially speculated to be right wing that weren't. Out of the 8 examples, 5 were arguably left wing.
From your examples, white supremacism doesn't really fit cleanly on a left/right axis, and really, left/right is inadequate but I was responding to someone using that axis. Anti-abortion is usually right wing, but not always.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that Zimmerman started a fight? If so, the prosecution would like to talk to you, since they presented no such evidence. Following someone is not the start of a fight.
Got any evidence to back up the accusation of bigotry? There's pretty good evidence that Zimmerman isn't particularly bigoted against blacks. I agree with the rest of the comment though.
He was already out of his vehicle when told they didn't need him to follow Martin.
The state's witness, Jonathan Good, disagrees with you. As does Selma Mora. They were the only two to see any positioning. Good's testimony places Martin on top beating Zimmerman, and Selma didn't see it until after the gun shot. Zimmerman's version of events was that he repoositioned himself after firing to prevent Martin from renewing attacks. So there is exactly one witness who saw
The evidence indicates that Martin confronted Zimmerman. Zimmerman lost martin on the transcript of his call. Rachel Jeantel's testiomny was compatible with either of them confronting the other IIRC.
17 years old is not a child, even if they have not yet gained all the rights of full adulthood. There is a reason 17 year old murderers don't go to juvenile court all the time. (possibly never, the cases I saw at first glance that did were 15 or younger. I didn't spend a lot of effort on the search.)
Define conflict. The important bit would be who initiated a physical attack OR threatened to do so. If it had stayed a purely verbal confrontation, nothing would have happened.
Fists can be deadly too. Although it may not be intended, all physical violence is potentially deadly. http://www.wkyt.com/home/headlines/A-punch-to-the-face-leaves-man-dead-another-behind-bars-214146481.html is just one example. It's reasonable to fear for your life when someone is beating the crap out of you, even if most people survive such beatings.
I got functions, domain, and ranges in algebra 1 and 2 in high school. You really shouldn't need calculus for those.
Depends how you define murder. Killing someone who breaks into my house and is armed shouldn't be considered murder, but is in some jurisdictions I have a duty to retreat. If the government either denies me the right of self defense or selectively enforces the law (lynchings for instance), then it is indeed suspicious.
Homicide is not the same as murder, but I'm pretty certain you were thinking of the latter.
I'm considering their arguments on their merits, not taking things on faith. Wattsupwiththat provided quotes from authors (unless you really believe they just made up the quotes, those should be pretty authoritative for their papers at least), and now has a link to an author's page. Rankexploits used numbers extracted from the original review site, and some quotes from a leaked copy of forums. The leaked forum information is a bit more untrustworthy, but as far as I know has NOT been disputed by anyone yet so I'm accepting it for now.
Comparing the past behavior of skeptic and alarmist sites, I am more slightly prone to assuming good faith on skeptic sites. As a general rule, the skeptics are far more likely to provide the full detail of their investigations up front, while the alarmist tend to balk. "why should I share my data with you, you'll just try to find something wrong with it?" That doesn't mean the skeptics are necesarily correct, but they certainly appear to be more open.
You put far too much faith in peer review, without examining the substance of the arguments. Peer review is a dodge. At most it means that the reviewers didn't produce any damning critiques of it OR the editor chose to publish anyways.
Consider that three of the authors of a paper that was claimed to endorse AGW thinks their papers do not endorse AGW. Does that cause you to question the validity of the consensus claim at all? 3 papers out of 65 is roughly a 5% difference.
I don't think neutral is the same as irrelevant, but would accepting otherwise for the sake of argument, would the point that the supposedly independent reviewers weren't independent affect your opinion of the paper?
Really, the paper tries to get a lot more out of the opinions of reviewers on the internet than can possibly be justified.
Unfortunately, this paper wasn't particularly scientific. It's got the characteristics of a push poll, in that the most appropriate choice wasn't an available option for the survey. It was based on reviewer's opinions of the articles, with no controls on who was doing the reviewing. Only 68 papers out of 12,000 asserted greater than 50% of the cause to humans, while 78 explicitly rejected it.
This number appears to be as flawed as the "98% of climate scientists" number a few years ago, where they didn't like their initial results and excluded a number of papers to bring the consensus amount up.
For global warming alarmists to be correct about what we need to do, all of the following must be true.
1. The globe is warming.
2. The warming is caused by us.
3. There are not sufficient negative feedbacks to halt it.
4. The net effect is bad.
5. The proposed solution is better than leaving the status quo in place.
It's not dishonest to note problems with all of those points, even if for the sake of discussion you occasionally stipulate one of the other points as true. Each has problems. Note that I'm not claiming the skeptics are right on every point, only that it's not dishonest of them to note problems with each of the above steps.
1. Seems to be at a standstill. It appeared to be waming before, but almost all of the warming (USHCN at least, haven't double checked GHCN) was present in the adjustments not the raw data. Those adjustments can be questioned. My personal suspicion is that the mathematical model they use to adjust for Time of Observation bias magnifies the existing data. It's not a good sign that the successive iterations have had the warming in adjustments go up, while the rate of warming in raw data hasn't shifted significantly. Compare USHCNv2 to v3 sometime. If those adjustments need to be made according to the physics, than that's fine, but it still qualifies as deeply suspicious, and was a legitimate point of contention.
2. Really hard to establish, since we know non human variation has included periods of much greater and lower warmth and CO2 concentrations. Even establishing climate sensitivity is iffy, and the number has changed several times over the past couple of decades. Protestations to the contrary, the form of the equation they use for climate sensitivity is not well sourced.
3. Again, hard to establish. They net direction of water vapor isn't known for certain since more vapor -> more clouds, and clouds are cooling agents. It might not even be unidrectional. It could act as warming at some points, cooling at others. Gotta love chaotic systems. The recent unpredicted pause is evidence that there are negative feedbacks which have not been handled correctly or not included at all.
4. Well, take a look at the warmlist sometime and see if you can understand why this claim is not trusted. Almost all claims on this point don't even acknowledge the possible positive effects of warming. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/ is one example argument that warmer temps cause fewer deaths.
5. Lots of arguments can be found about adaptation being more effective than cutting CO2 emissions. Certainly more politically achievable in many countries. YMMV.
Yes, actually. You can find the basic argument here, but before I saw other takedowns I took the numbers from the reference article in the JAMA and plotted total murder and firearm homicide rates versus the legislative score he gave, and against the best numbers I could find on actual ownership rates. Lots of other graphs in there as I poked at the numbers out of curiosity. Total suicides not just firearm suicides go down with greater gun control efforts, which surprised me because I expected guns to mostly be a substitution rather than addition. Still lots of confounding variables left unaccounted for. The suicide rates in Alaska and Wyoming probably have more to do with them being more depressing places to live for people, and both depression and attitude towards guns are likely related to living in a sparsely populated region. Deliberate homicides and murder rates aren't the same thing because of self defense laws. Legitimate self defense is still included in homicide numbers.
The distinction matters, because people usually support gun control because they are worried about being murdered, not because they are worried about killing themselves. The association that does exist between suicide rates and ownership isn't all that strong. Lots of variance, and the suicide rate goes from roughly 10 per 100,000 to 15 as ownership rates climb from about 12% to 55%. Given that auto deaths completely dwarf accidental firearm deaths, are you going to support a ban on vehicles? How about swimming pools?
One of the most interesting things in the original JAMA article is that he found a negative correlation between certain types of gun control and gun homicides. I give him props for including that information.
No, but primer and powder can also be made by hand I thought. I can find directions on the web, although it sound like even more of a pain than the rest of the reloading process.
Why do you claim the death toll would have been lower? Do you actually have any proof of that at all, beyond your wishful thinking?
Stop including suicides and defensive homicides in there, and we can start having a real discussion about the impact of guns on crime. There are major problems with comparing across location in any case, due to the confounding influence of culture. Even given that caveat, state by state in the US there is no significant relationship between gun ownership rates or gun control laws and homicide or murder rates.
The equation those numbers are used in may not be as reliable as you think. http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/07/more-on-the-logarithmic-formula/ It's a fuction they fit the data to, but no evidence that it makes useful predictions so far, especially given that they have to keep revising the numbers.
You've never met a hand reloader I take it. Ammunition isn't nearly the problem you imagine. I agree with you about the likely reaction if the government actually tried to round up all guns.
You can fix those if you also fix the districts created to give seats to democrats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Texas_redistricting is pretty strong evidence that it does go both ways, although I'm not aware of any objective measure of which party benefits more from the practice. It probably varies from year to year.
I would dispute fascism being right wing. I wouldn't really place it on the left either. Argumentum ad populum is a fallacy. Just because it is commonly believed doesn't make it true. On economic policy, they were more left than right, but that isn't their sole determining characteristic. Deciding where exactly to place them is a pointless argument in the first place.
In any event, my original point, that mass murderers aren't more likely to be right wing, still holds true. I used the term 'arguably' for the people on that list I linked to for a reason, because it usually isn't clear even with significant markers one way or the other.
James vonn Brunn: FrontPage Magazine has a rundown, although perhaps slanted. From his own words, he was anti-capitalist and pro socialism, but I'd accept an argument the was more plain crazy than left wing. Here are some addtional examples of people initially speculated to be right wing that weren't. Out of the 8 examples, 5 were arguably left wing. From your examples, white supremacism doesn't really fit cleanly on a left/right axis, and really, left/right is inadequate but I was responding to someone using that axis. Anti-abortion is usually right wing, but not always.
Why do you claim they were part of the NRA or Tea party? Why do you claim the NRA supports the availability of fully automatic weapons?