In the navy, corpsmen even did sick call. If you go in complaining of flu-like symptoms you saw a corpsman, he prescribed you tylenol and motrin, and gave you 24hr bed rest. We used to joke that if you had aids, tylenol and motrin would still be the corse of treatment.
I would put those tasks well above EMT. Somewhere between nurse and nurse practitioner.
Different branches experience different things. The navy is more apt to put you in the career you pick. Most lifers in the navy liked going to sea because they got to be away from their wife and kids. I always thought that was a fucked up thing to want to do; but they probably sucked as a dad anyway, so the kid probsbly was better off; despite how much it also sucked for him.
I would agree on most of what you posted except for activity level. Public schools fight me up and doen when i show up at the board meetings and insist they at least return kids to the activity levels in school we had in the 80s. My daughter is in hoghschool. The most PE she will have by the time she graduates as a senior is 1 9wk class in 7th grade, and a 6mos, every-other-day gyme class in 10th grade.
In the 80s you get gym twice a week for grades 1-6. In 7th and 8th grade PE and Health shared the same block. One group had Mon-Wed-Fri, the other Tues-Thurs. this repeated again in the 10th grade. There were even electives that were more active than just sitting at a desk.
Now my daughter comes home from school and I _try_ to get her active, but shes already mentslly shot and has another 4+ hours of homework every night. We just run out of time. Archery is about as close as I get her, she meets every morning 1hr before class starts.
So the obesity problem is definitely a big concern for recruitment.
Your thinking about the servicemember. Thats not really the militaryâ(TM)s concern. Only how best to utilize you while youâ(TM)re still enlisted. They want to get their moneys worth;-)
As a veteran I prefer to hire vets. Especially former navy vets with 3+ years and an honorable discharge. The skills do not directly relate. But I know they are trainable, the are capable of critical thinking, they are resourceful, and they habe thick skin.
Hiring non-vet millennials is like running a freaking daycare with all the whining and tattling.
They do translate to some credits. Most degrees have a bunch of core credits in general education. These schools are career specific and do not include cross-cultural classes or world history.
Normally I'm inclined to agree. However, after the revelation of all the whitehouse meetings disclosed by the Google transparency project, it definitely sounds more like coordinated thought control using ideas like 'group think' to control opinion.
A detailed examination of White House visitor logs reveals the extraordinary access to the Obama White House enjoyed by Google, its top executives and employees. Since President Obama took office in January 2009 through October 31, 2015, employees of Google and associated entities visited the White House 427 times.
That includes:
363 meetings between White House officials and Google employees. 64 meetings involving employees of companies solely owned by Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. The meetings were attended by at least 169 Google executives, from the company’s senior ranks down to software engineers, and 182 White House officials.
Interesting that software engineers are in attendance. Im sure everyone brings software engineers with them to meetings top executives have with major world celebrities and organizations, whose meetings are only discussing broad topics like where is the internet headed.
When you compare it to other tech companies, telecom companies like ATT etc, all of them combined do not have this many visits. In fact the only other tech company with a disproportionate amount of WH visits during this time is Facebook. Interesting that software engineers are in attendance. I'm sure its not because the former POTUS was trying to use Google to track down the last of his missing Pokemon cards. Conspiracy's are not usually simple, but the motives generally _are_. Power and Greed are always the strongest motivators.
the conspiracies about Google (which is also Google+ as well as YouTube) and Facebook spying on the public for the government, and imposing their own, guided, form of GroupThink predate Trump by many years. In fact some of the naysayer's here argued quite the opposite back then, before it was used for something they don't seem to mind.
The number of us adults owning guns cannot be an accurate statistic, there is no way to really know this number. At best that is the number of law abiding citizens. The only possible way they could even guess at that would be statistics based on calls to NICS. There were 1.1 million law enforcement sworn officers in 2008, that number had to have grown since then. That doesn’t count the other department employees without the power of arrest who still qualify for concealed carry. These people are pre-qualified in the same manner that CCDW persons are pre-qualified. In other words a phone call to NICS for a background check is not required. The minute you are no longer eligible for concealed carry, everything is revoked, and they come collect your permit on the spot.
Its way more than 2%. Where I live, less than 25% of the population _don't_ own at least 1 firearm. And those are the ones willing to admit to it. There are some type that wont answer either way because they feel its none of anyone else's business. They'll find out when/if they find themselves on the wrong side of it. We have some of the highest ownership, most tolerant gun laws, and an extremely homicide rate by firearms. Most of our crime is from junkies trying to get money for their next score. Despite sometimes turning into a case where said junky enters the home while still occupied, a case where lethal force is actually justified, this does not happen. it really is true that an armed society is a polite society. Escalations are much less frequent because there is that possibility that things could go really bad really quick. Deterrence.
Honestly, I find myself much more dangerous in a hand-to-hand situation than a potentially armed one. In an armed situation I am very clear, clinical. I’ve trained this way, and I encourage everyone to also work at it. In hand-to-hand, its no less lethal. If things have gotten so far out of tilt that its resulted in pure aggression, I have no filter. Years of military training coupled with over a decade of martial arts training kick in. In hand-to-hand things can get really dangerous really fast. The winner of the conflict is the one who ends the fight as fast as possible. The longer the conflict takes, the worse your odds are surviving and continuing to be able to provide for your family. Without a filter I am immediately going to vital and debilitating damage points. People think that encounters like that have a higher chance of both parties surviving. They obviously never considered the possibility of simply crushing someone’s windpipe, stress fracturing their cervical vertebrae, or biting out their trachea. That's the last place I want to be. It's nothing like what you see on TV.
gun suicide doesn't even sound appealing. Some backstory here... in February I suffered a massive pulmonary embolism. It came as quite a shock because I am very active, work out every single day, and do not have alarming bloodwork levels. It turned out that a genetic condition related to an MTHFR gene mutation allowed for an unusually high level of homosistine. The reason I bring this up was this particular PE was a saddle clot blocking both branches of my pulmonary artery. When it happened I had bent over to pick up a sock, got very very VERY dizzy like I just got bitch-slapped by the flu all of a sudden. When trying to walk downstairs I lost consciousness and went face first into a metal storage container. In hindsight that fall may very well have saved my life as it slapped me awake enough to get downstairs and have my daughter call 911 for help (after a bit of trying to self diagnose and ruling out the obvious). I experienced zero pain. I was just unconscious and had low 0xygen saturation in my blood. It was if someone just turned off a lightswitch in my head.
I would think the fastest most painless method of suicide would be opiate overdose. It happens so often unintended and it too is a respiratory failure. They just go to sleep, go hypoxic, and die. Given the insane proliferation of the most dangerous forms (synthetics like fentanil) I am surprised to still see suicide by gunshot happening at all, let alone to the magnitude. I figure anyone dead set on blowing their brains out (and its not always a guarantee you wont simply just be a vegetable the rest of your life) would be just as committed to using any other means as well. Hell someone could take a bunch of tylenol pm, mix it with alcohol, then go swimming.
as a whole yes, but this new im-going-out-and-taking-as-many-as-i-can-with-me part is very new. Yes news sensationalizes is, but if were happening in the 80s it would have gotten sensationalized then too. The closest we ever got was the postal workers. The phrase 'going postal' to imply mass shootings. Nobody screamed disarm the public. They said 'what the fuck is going on at the post office??' and proceeded to get to the bottom of whatever was driving this level of stress and disparity. Shit doesn't happen any more. As long as two people hate each other with out of check anger, there is going to be homicide. Usually its limited to just the one person, or sometimes unintended collateral damage with gang-bangers shoot it out. Deciding life sucks and your going to start your own afterlife following like in Poltergeist 2, thats a different kind of broken mindset all together. Its nothing rational that laws are going to fix any easier than the 900 times they tried to ban substances to curtail the manufacture of meth. They just come up with another way.
Or, I am just calling out pussies like you, who couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Your motives for disarming the public have nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with establishing a totalitarian society. Your type _pretends_ to give a shit about the number of people killed calling it an epidemic. And yet nobody gives a shit about the drastic number of people (72,000 in 2017 alone) dying every day from something much more likely to happen to them. Every single day, every city has posts on nextdoor.com regarding break-ins and crime. Whenever the topic of opiate dependency driving the crime comes up, at no point does the discussion direct itself to dealing with that problem in order to bring down the number of breakin's. No, instead its a constant one-sided 'they made a conscious choice' mantra. See people like you do not give a shit about any death rate so long as you _feel_ safe. You _think_ this is going to make you safer. It's not.
You cannot set up one group to have complete authority over the other and remotely pretend that both groups are equal. Gun violence is not the only thing unique to this country, we do a fair share of bullying too. In a society where only a small subset is given the power to use and abuse lethal force, where do you think these bullies are going to migrate? There are definitely some there now, but the problem will be a lot worse. You cannot say 'country XYZ doesnt have cops bullying the public' because their society doesn't have nearly the bullying that ours does. There was no concept of 'police' when we wrote the constitution. There were soldiers assigned to various garrisons to enforce the peace. The founding fathers were already aware of how abusive this system was. Hence why the constitution says no army should be standing for a duration exceeding two years. It also explains the 3rd amendment (forced to give quarters) because they know just how power gets abused.
Don't like the CEO of chick-fil-a because he wrote a personal check to an anti-abortion group? Not a business check mind you, but a PERSONAL one. "We'll show him! We'll boycot the entire fucking chick-fil-a franchise and punish every fucking employee because he had the audacity to make a personal donation with something I disagree with!" no matter the topic, there is a hate group out there wanting to punish every single person until society reforms itself into what THEY think society should be like. It makes the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney back in the 80s look sane, and that was some bullying shit too. I dont pay for things that I don't agree with, but my influence stops at my telling someone else why *I* am not giving them a penny of my money.
i assume you live somewhere that guns are not prevalent. This is nowhere near an accurate assumption. Most of those wild-west gun-slinging idiots you describe, turn out to be felons.
"So how come you also get mass shootings in Texas?"
doesnt it say something to you that all these mass shootings take place in a place that is either 'strickly gun free' or a place where nobody would think they needed to carry one (church)?
Ive had a CCDW issued to me since 2000. Since that first church (the predominantly black one) got shot up in NC(SC?) I have started carrying even at times when I have no reason to suspect needing one. This means even to the gym using equipment. Its a shitty world we live in that even the taboo of killing 'in the house of god' doesn't scare people enough to wait until another time. Ever since that shooting I have been carrying something damn near everywhere I go. I do train, regularly. The idea of collateral damage is not lost on me. However, there is a very effective method of target acquisition that nearly eliminates this. Im guessing you didnt know that since you envision people just firing randomly like in the movies.
hmm maybe, if the ATF, in 2009, did not embark in a clever 'sting' operation that successfully sold millions of guns to the cartels. Only that 'sting' operation turned out to be a case of our law enforcement getting played for chumps and losing all those weapons.
BTW another source of bad guys getting guns.... they buy them from dirty cops. No other theft required.
so instead of targeting guns, maybe we should get to the bottom of whats driving homicide. Banning sudafed sure as fuck didnt stop the use of meth. All it did was make it a real PITA for me when I actually need the shit. I have to get my ass to a pharacist between the hours of 9am and 8pm. If something comes up outside this time I have to deal with the problem until then.
Its time to dig deeper and ignore the tool. Take guns away and IED's will just rise in their place just like israel. Its like getting rid of spiders in your house. You cant spray for them because they walk above the poison. Kill the other bugs and the spiders will die off all on their own. Banning guns based on statistics would easily justify revoking drivers licenses and mandating public transportation due to the massive amount of traffic deaths every year. In the end its still just another tool. Something has changed in the last 30 years that makes people massively more likely to commit homicide than in previous decades. It certainly is not proliferation of firearms. I the 70s and 80s you could go into a gun store and there would be an AR15, and an M16 side by side. The difference was the M16 required a $200 tax stamp and you waited a few weeks to get approved. That was a _real_ assault rifle. How is it in the 70s anybody could buy every form of weapon, including fully automatic, and the homicide rate is much higher now than its ever been; despite decades of gun control laws.
our heroin overdose rate is nearly 10x the gun death rate now. In fact if you rule out suicide (lets face it, take the gun away, they still kill themselves) we have other, enormous death problems we gloss over. The overdose rate from opiates is greater than driving related deaths, and homicides (all of them) combined. We debate gun laws forever, nobody gives a fuck about the people dying from opiates. Its no longer a case of drifter junkies 'making a choice'. I have seen too many normal people get sucked into that world because doctors prescribed some crazy pharma shit for pain and then turned off the faucet cold turkey.
maybe per capita? England is a pissant country the size of Rode Island. Surely you dont compare their total numbers to a country with hundreds of millions right? Unless, of course, you break it down to per person.
definitely, it wasn't that long ago that a pissing match over call of duty ended up with the wrong guy getting 'swatted' and killed over said video game pissing match.
IMO the voice chat feature of these games are like pouring gas on the fire.
So for over a decade there has been the argument that violent video games make people more violent. And tons of arguments for or against. However, I want to use existing arguments to point out something equally stupid; if you do not mind. Yes, I am hijacking this thread.
For over 7 decades the US government and the DEA have been calling cannabis a 'Gateway drug'. Why? Not because of any scientific research, but pure statistics. An overwhelming majority of heavy users of drugs like heroin, admit to using 'marijuana' at some point in time. So these people jumped to the conclusion that cannabis is a gateway drug. Following that logic, why isnt alcohol, cigarettes, or coffee also a gateway drug because 100% of heroin users also used these as well.
So lets use this same, already government sanctioned, presence. If 100% of these mass shooters also admitted to playing video games, should we label video games as a 'gateway' to mass shooting? the precedence is definitely there.
So we all are familiar with the twitter rhetoric from POTUS regarding Amazon taking an 'unfair' advantage of mismanaged pricing by the USPS and how it is 'supposedly' upside down in a debt structure standpoint. We are also aware this is party driven because Jeff B owns both amazon and the washington post.
But here is the thing. When it comes to deals like this, this is the one area that the executive branch has complete latitude. These aren't congressional decisions, these fall squarely on department heads. So if DJT was really gunning for Bezos, what are the odds they would have a snowball's chance in hell of getting even a water fountain maintenance contract? So that leads me to believe that all that 'conflict' is just for show.
The real crime are the lawyers who invent these zero tolerance policies. It's not so much about not having to think, its more about avoiding drawn out litigation having to explain why in one case the punishment was X whereas in another the punishment is Y. Just about every insensitive, uncaring, policy you can name came from a discussion with the legal department. Add to that the loose interpretation of what qualifies, like the kindergartner that that at a pop tart into the shape of a gun and said bang, immediately getting suspended as a result; and you find yourself making comments like 'the gene pool needs some chlorine'.
I hate the way the word 'liberal' got re-written to somehow imply for civil liberties. Someone for freedom, ie the french word Liberte, would be a Libertarian.
when i was a lot younger, Liberal vs Conservative mean budgetary spending. A Liberal was all about spending and spending and just raising taxes. In other words they were very 'liberal' with the way they spent other people's money. A conservative was about cutting programs deemed not needed and reigning in wasteful spending. Joke expressions like 'tax and spend like the world is going to end' were lobbed squarely at liberals. Now suddenly they want to pretend it was about 'liberty' even though the damn word doesnt mean anything to do with liberty.
that's exactly what I have been trying to warn about for over a decade now. Too many people just think they will never fall out of power. Its fundamentally stupid. If they will do it with you, they will do it to you. If you don't close up every loophole you find, eventually someone is going to exploit you using the very exploits you set in motion. It is _literally_ where the expression 'beat them at their own game' came from.
I would rather not. There have been conspiracy groups forever. JFK assasinations, moon landings, UFOs, con-trails, you name it. It was _never_ a real threat until they started banning it. By banning it they have given more credibility to this guy than anything they could have ever done by just letting him get on his soap box weekly.
explain to me how corporations have the right to say who can and who cannot have a voice on their platform, and using the same exact reasoning explain your way out of how a bakery does NOT have the same right to refuse service to any person they do not agree with, such as a gay couple. Then turn around, after doing that, explain how those restaurants in DC that refused service to whitehouse officials is also OK when the Bakery thing is not. The Hypocrisy of the situation is fairly disgusting.
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In the navy, corpsmen even did sick call. If you go in complaining of flu-like symptoms you saw a corpsman, he prescribed you tylenol and motrin, and gave you 24hr bed rest. We used to joke that if you had aids, tylenol and motrin would still be the corse of treatment.
I would put those tasks well above EMT. Somewhere between nurse and nurse practitioner.
Different branches experience different things. The navy is more apt to put you in the career you pick. Most lifers in the navy liked going to sea because they got to be away from their wife and kids. I always thought that was a fucked up thing to want to do; but they probably sucked as a dad anyway, so the kid probsbly was better off; despite how much it also sucked for him.
I would agree on most of what you posted except for activity level. Public schools fight me up and doen when i show up at the board meetings and insist they at least return kids to the activity levels in school we had in the 80s. My daughter is in hoghschool. The most PE she will have by the time she graduates as a senior is 1 9wk class in 7th grade, and a 6mos, every-other-day gyme class in 10th grade.
In the 80s you get gym twice a week for grades 1-6. In 7th and 8th grade PE and Health shared the same block. One group had Mon-Wed-Fri, the other Tues-Thurs. this repeated again in the 10th grade. There were even electives that were more active than just sitting at a desk.
Now my daughter comes home from school and I _try_ to get her active, but shes already mentslly shot and has another 4+ hours of homework every night. We just run out of time. Archery is about as close as I get her, she meets every morning 1hr before class starts.
So the obesity problem is definitely a big concern for recruitment.
Your thinking about the servicemember. Thats not really the militaryâ(TM)s concern. Only how best to utilize you while youâ(TM)re still enlisted. They want to get their moneys worth ;-)
As a veteran I prefer to hire vets. Especially former navy vets with 3+ years and an honorable discharge. The skills do not directly relate. But I know they are trainable, the are capable of critical thinking, they are resourceful, and they habe thick skin.
Hiring non-vet millennials is like running a freaking daycare with all the whining and tattling.
They do translate to some credits. Most degrees have a bunch of core credits in general education. These schools are career specific and do not include cross-cultural classes or world history.
Normally I'm inclined to agree. However, after the revelation of all the whitehouse meetings disclosed by the Google transparency project, it definitely sounds more like coordinated thought control using ideas like 'group think' to control opinion.
A detailed examination of White House visitor logs reveals the extraordinary access to the Obama White House enjoyed by Google, its top executives and employees. Since President Obama took office in January 2009 through October 31, 2015, employees of Google and associated entities visited the White House 427 times.
That includes:
363 meetings between White House officials and Google employees.
64 meetings involving employees of companies solely owned by Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt.
The meetings were attended by at least 169 Google executives, from the company’s senior ranks down to software engineers, and 182 White House officials.
Interesting that software engineers are in attendance. Im sure everyone brings software engineers with them to meetings top executives have with major world celebrities and organizations, whose meetings are only discussing broad topics like where is the internet headed.
you can read the full report here https://googletransparencyproj...
When you compare it to other tech companies, telecom companies like ATT etc, all of them combined do not have this many visits. In fact the only other tech company with a disproportionate amount of WH visits during this time is Facebook. Interesting that software engineers are in attendance. I'm sure its not because the former POTUS was trying to use Google to track down the last of his missing Pokemon cards. Conspiracy's are not usually simple, but the motives generally _are_. Power and Greed are always the strongest motivators.
the conspiracies about Google (which is also Google+ as well as YouTube) and Facebook spying on the public for the government, and imposing their own, guided, form of GroupThink predate Trump by many years. In fact some of the naysayer's here argued quite the opposite back then, before it was used for something they don't seem to mind.
The number of us adults owning guns cannot be an accurate statistic, there is no way to really know this number. At best that is the number of law abiding citizens. The only possible way they could even guess at that would be statistics based on calls to NICS. There were 1.1 million law enforcement sworn officers in 2008, that number had to have grown since then. That doesn’t count the other department employees without the power of arrest who still qualify for concealed carry. These people are pre-qualified in the same manner that CCDW persons are pre-qualified. In other words a phone call to NICS for a background check is not required. The minute you are no longer eligible for concealed carry, everything is revoked, and they come collect your permit on the spot.
Its way more than 2%. Where I live, less than 25% of the population _don't_ own at least 1 firearm. And those are the ones willing to admit to it. There are some type that wont answer either way because they feel its none of anyone else's business. They'll find out when/if they find themselves on the wrong side of it. We have some of the highest ownership, most tolerant gun laws, and an extremely homicide rate by firearms. Most of our crime is from junkies trying to get money for their next score. Despite sometimes turning into a case where said junky enters the home while still occupied, a case where lethal force is actually justified, this does not happen. it really is true that an armed society is a polite society. Escalations are much less frequent because there is that possibility that things could go really bad really quick. Deterrence.
Honestly, I find myself much more dangerous in a hand-to-hand situation than a potentially armed one. In an armed situation I am very clear, clinical. I’ve trained this way, and I encourage everyone to also work at it. In hand-to-hand, its no less lethal. If things have gotten so far out of tilt that its resulted in pure aggression, I have no filter. Years of military training coupled with over a decade of martial arts training kick in. In hand-to-hand things can get really dangerous really fast. The winner of the conflict is the one who ends the fight as fast as possible. The longer the conflict takes, the worse your odds are surviving and continuing to be able to provide for your family. Without a filter I am immediately going to vital and debilitating damage points. People think that encounters like that have a higher chance of both parties surviving. They obviously never considered the possibility of simply crushing someone’s windpipe, stress fracturing their cervical vertebrae, or biting out their trachea. That's the last place I want to be. It's nothing like what you see on TV.
gun suicide doesn't even sound appealing. Some backstory here... in February I suffered a massive pulmonary embolism. It came as quite a shock because I am very active, work out every single day, and do not have alarming bloodwork levels. It turned out that a genetic condition related to an MTHFR gene mutation allowed for an unusually high level of homosistine. The reason I bring this up was this particular PE was a saddle clot blocking both branches of my pulmonary artery. When it happened I had bent over to pick up a sock, got very very VERY dizzy like I just got bitch-slapped by the flu all of a sudden. When trying to walk downstairs I lost consciousness and went face first into a metal storage container. In hindsight that fall may very well have saved my life as it slapped me awake enough to get downstairs and have my daughter call 911 for help (after a bit of trying to self diagnose and ruling out the obvious). I experienced zero pain. I was just unconscious and had low 0xygen saturation in my blood. It was if someone just turned off a lightswitch in my head.
I would think the fastest most painless method of suicide would be opiate overdose. It happens so often unintended and it too is a respiratory failure. They just go to sleep, go hypoxic, and die. Given the insane proliferation of the most dangerous forms (synthetics like fentanil) I am surprised to still see suicide by gunshot happening at all, let alone to the magnitude. I figure anyone dead set on blowing their brains out (and its not always a guarantee you wont simply just be a vegetable the rest of your life) would be just as committed to using any other means as well. Hell someone could take a bunch of tylenol pm, mix it with alcohol, then go swimming.
as a whole yes, but this new im-going-out-and-taking-as-many-as-i-can-with-me part is very new. Yes news sensationalizes is, but if were happening in the 80s it would have gotten sensationalized then too. The closest we ever got was the postal workers. The phrase 'going postal' to imply mass shootings. Nobody screamed disarm the public. They said 'what the fuck is going on at the post office??' and proceeded to get to the bottom of whatever was driving this level of stress and disparity. Shit doesn't happen any more. As long as two people hate each other with out of check anger, there is going to be homicide. Usually its limited to just the one person, or sometimes unintended collateral damage with gang-bangers shoot it out. Deciding life sucks and your going to start your own afterlife following like in Poltergeist 2, thats a different kind of broken mindset all together. Its nothing rational that laws are going to fix any easier than the 900 times they tried to ban substances to curtail the manufacture of meth. They just come up with another way.
Or, I am just calling out pussies like you, who couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Your motives for disarming the public have nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with establishing a totalitarian society. Your type _pretends_ to give a shit about the number of people killed calling it an epidemic. And yet nobody gives a shit about the drastic number of people (72,000 in 2017 alone) dying every day from something much more likely to happen to them. Every single day, every city has posts on nextdoor.com regarding break-ins and crime. Whenever the topic of opiate dependency driving the crime comes up, at no point does the discussion direct itself to dealing with that problem in order to bring down the number of breakin's. No, instead its a constant one-sided 'they made a conscious choice' mantra. See people like you do not give a shit about any death rate so long as you _feel_ safe. You _think_ this is going to make you safer. It's not.
You cannot set up one group to have complete authority over the other and remotely pretend that both groups are equal. Gun violence is not the only thing unique to this country, we do a fair share of bullying too. In a society where only a small subset is given the power to use and abuse lethal force, where do you think these bullies are going to migrate? There are definitely some there now, but the problem will be a lot worse. You cannot say 'country XYZ doesnt have cops bullying the public' because their society doesn't have nearly the bullying that ours does. There was no concept of 'police' when we wrote the constitution. There were soldiers assigned to various garrisons to enforce the peace. The founding fathers were already aware of how abusive this system was. Hence why the constitution says no army should be standing for a duration exceeding two years. It also explains the 3rd amendment (forced to give quarters) because they know just how power gets abused.
Don't like the CEO of chick-fil-a because he wrote a personal check to an anti-abortion group? Not a business check mind you, but a PERSONAL one. "We'll show him! We'll boycot the entire fucking chick-fil-a franchise and punish every fucking employee because he had the audacity to make a personal donation with something I disagree with!" no matter the topic, there is a hate group out there wanting to punish every single person until society reforms itself into what THEY think society should be like. It makes the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney back in the 80s look sane, and that was some bullying shit too. I dont pay for things that I don't agree with, but my influence stops at my telling someone else why *I* am not giving them a penny of my money.
i assume you live somewhere that guns are not prevalent. This is nowhere near an accurate assumption. Most of those wild-west gun-slinging idiots you describe, turn out to be felons.
"So how come you also get mass shootings in Texas?"
doesnt it say something to you that all these mass shootings take place in a place that is either 'strickly gun free' or a place where nobody would think they needed to carry one (church)?
Ive had a CCDW issued to me since 2000. Since that first church (the predominantly black one) got shot up in NC(SC?) I have started carrying even at times when I have no reason to suspect needing one. This means even to the gym using equipment. Its a shitty world we live in that even the taboo of killing 'in the house of god' doesn't scare people enough to wait until another time. Ever since that shooting I have been carrying something damn near everywhere I go. I do train, regularly. The idea of collateral damage is not lost on me. However, there is a very effective method of target acquisition that nearly eliminates this. Im guessing you didnt know that since you envision people just firing randomly like in the movies.
hmm maybe, if the ATF, in 2009, did not embark in a clever 'sting' operation that successfully sold millions of guns to the cartels. Only that 'sting' operation turned out to be a case of our law enforcement getting played for chumps and losing all those weapons.
BTW another source of bad guys getting guns.... they buy them from dirty cops. No other theft required.
so instead of targeting guns, maybe we should get to the bottom of whats driving homicide. Banning sudafed sure as fuck didnt stop the use of meth. All it did was make it a real PITA for me when I actually need the shit. I have to get my ass to a pharacist between the hours of 9am and 8pm. If something comes up outside this time I have to deal with the problem until then.
Its time to dig deeper and ignore the tool. Take guns away and IED's will just rise in their place just like israel. Its like getting rid of spiders in your house. You cant spray for them because they walk above the poison. Kill the other bugs and the spiders will die off all on their own. Banning guns based on statistics would easily justify revoking drivers licenses and mandating public transportation due to the massive amount of traffic deaths every year. In the end its still just another tool. Something has changed in the last 30 years that makes people massively more likely to commit homicide than in previous decades. It certainly is not proliferation of firearms. I the 70s and 80s you could go into a gun store and there would be an AR15, and an M16 side by side. The difference was the M16 required a $200 tax stamp and you waited a few weeks to get approved. That was a _real_ assault rifle. How is it in the 70s anybody could buy every form of weapon, including fully automatic, and the homicide rate is much higher now than its ever been; despite decades of gun control laws.
our heroin overdose rate is nearly 10x the gun death rate now. In fact if you rule out suicide (lets face it, take the gun away, they still kill themselves) we have other, enormous death problems we gloss over. The overdose rate from opiates is greater than driving related deaths, and homicides (all of them) combined. We debate gun laws forever, nobody gives a fuck about the people dying from opiates. Its no longer a case of drifter junkies 'making a choice'. I have seen too many normal people get sucked into that world because doctors prescribed some crazy pharma shit for pain and then turned off the faucet cold turkey.
maybe per capita? England is a pissant country the size of Rode Island. Surely you dont compare their total numbers to a country with hundreds of millions right? Unless, of course, you break it down to per person.
definitely, it wasn't that long ago that a pissing match over call of duty ended up with the wrong guy getting 'swatted' and killed over said video game pissing match.
IMO the voice chat feature of these games are like pouring gas on the fire.
So for over a decade there has been the argument that violent video games make people more violent. And tons of arguments for or against. However, I want to use existing arguments to point out something equally stupid; if you do not mind. Yes, I am hijacking this thread.
For over 7 decades the US government and the DEA have been calling cannabis a 'Gateway drug'. Why? Not because of any scientific research, but pure statistics.
An overwhelming majority of heavy users of drugs like heroin, admit to using 'marijuana' at some point in time. So these people jumped to the conclusion that cannabis is a gateway drug. Following that logic, why isnt alcohol, cigarettes, or coffee also a gateway drug because 100% of heroin users also used these as well.
So lets use this same, already government sanctioned, presence. If 100% of these mass shooters also admitted to playing video games, should we label video games as a 'gateway' to mass shooting? the precedence is definitely there.
well after they fucked up that butterfly ballot in 2000, nothing surprises me.
So we all are familiar with the twitter rhetoric from POTUS regarding Amazon taking an 'unfair' advantage of mismanaged pricing by the USPS and how it is
'supposedly' upside down in a debt structure standpoint. We are also aware this is party driven because Jeff B owns both amazon and the washington post.
But here is the thing. When it comes to deals like this, this is the one area that the executive branch has complete latitude. These aren't congressional decisions, these fall squarely on department heads. So if DJT was really gunning for Bezos, what are the odds they would have a snowball's chance in hell of getting even a water fountain maintenance contract? So that leads me to believe that all that 'conflict' is just for show.
The real crime are the lawyers who invent these zero tolerance policies. It's not so much about not having to think, its more about avoiding drawn out litigation having to explain why in one case the punishment was X whereas in another the punishment is Y. Just about every insensitive, uncaring, policy you can name came from a discussion with the legal department. Add to that the loose interpretation of what qualifies, like the kindergartner that that at a pop tart into the shape of a gun and said bang, immediately getting suspended as a result; and you find yourself making comments like 'the gene pool needs some chlorine'.
I hate the way the word 'liberal' got re-written to somehow imply for civil liberties. Someone for freedom, ie the french word Liberte, would be a Libertarian.
when i was a lot younger, Liberal vs Conservative mean budgetary spending. A Liberal was all about spending and spending and just raising taxes. In other words they were very 'liberal' with the way they spent other people's money. A conservative was about cutting programs deemed not needed and reigning in wasteful spending. Joke expressions like 'tax and spend like the world is going to end' were lobbed squarely at liberals. Now suddenly they want to pretend it was about 'liberty' even though the damn word doesnt mean anything to do with liberty.
that's exactly what I have been trying to warn about for over a decade now. Too many people just think they will never fall out of power. Its fundamentally stupid. If they will do it with you, they will do it to you. If you don't close up every loophole you find, eventually someone is going to exploit you using the very exploits you set in motion. It is _literally_ where the expression 'beat them at their own game' came from.
I would rather not. There have been conspiracy groups forever. JFK assasinations, moon landings, UFOs, con-trails, you name it. It was _never_ a real threat until they started banning it. By banning it they have given more credibility to this guy than anything they could have ever done by just letting him get on his soap box weekly.
explain to me how corporations have the right to say who can and who cannot have a voice on their platform, and using the same exact reasoning explain your way out of how a bakery does NOT have the same right to refuse service to any person they do not agree with, such as a gay couple. Then turn around, after doing that, explain how those restaurants in DC that refused service to whitehouse officials is also OK when the Bakery thing is not. The Hypocrisy of the situation is fairly disgusting.