Miscellaneous News. - Page 14

Originally Posted by MJ1970

IPriceless. What if? What if? What if?

Originally Posted by MJ1970

This isn't obvious at all. Please provide some data that prove this "obvious" conclusion.

1. Banning guns works, which is why New York, DC, and Chicago (and every other city) cops need guns.

Originally Posted by tonton

My God. What a fucking unbelievably hypocritical statement from someone who said a woman without a gun would be raped and strangled but a woman with a gun would successfully defend herself.

Originally Posted by tonton

You've already done that, thanks.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

I'm not being hypocritical...I'm mocking your ridiculous scenarios.

Originally Posted by tonton

Absolutely no more ridiculous than yours. Hence my mocking of your hypocrisy.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

Of course yours is more ridiculous. You've even admitted this earlier.

Admit it, you're opposed to people equipping themselves to defend themselves except by the means you deem appropriate.

Originally Posted by tonton

Anyway we're done. I live in a safer place than you do.

Originally Posted by tonton

How would you propose to make your place as safe as mine?

Originally Posted by MJ1970

Maybe you do, maybe not.

Originally Posted by tonton



Ladies and Gentleman, denial is in the house.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

Start moving the US to the same level of economic freedom that Hong Kong has?

Originally Posted by tonton

What, with our 80% government subsidized public housing, universal health care, welfare, old age allowance, mandatory public education, mandatory retirement fund? Your head would explode.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

Well, since the US is not a homogeneous entity in this regard, how do you know what the statistics are where I live and how they compare to where you live? You have to admit you're making an assumption here.

Originally Posted by tonton

Anyway we're done. I live in a safer place than you do.

Originally Posted by tonton

I guarantee you that any district in Hong Kong has a lower incidence of violent crime...

Originally Posted by tonton

than any metropolitan city in Arizona.

Originally Posted by john galt

If prison inmates can't have guns, then prisons should be even safer.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

Are you claiming that the US is more economically free than Hong Kong? By what measure?

Originally Posted by tonton

By your own reasoning, you're not forced to pay for other people's health care. You're not forced to pay for other people's housing, etc...

Amidst the global debate on healthcare reform, Hong Kong has waded into the fray with a proposed “voluntary medical insurance” scheme aimed at alleviating the massive financial burdens faced by the city’s public healthcare network. The issue was first raised in late 2008, following in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, and has now reached the penultimate stage of industry level discussion before a territory-wide consultation process can debate the measure later this year.

In talks with various Insurance industry and Healthcare experts, the government hopes that a voluntary insurance scheme would see at least 500,000 individuals take up the coverage, and massively reduce the strain currently faced by an over-burdened public healthcare system.

some healthcare officials have raised the proposal that it may be possible for the government to subsidize the health insurance premiums of those individuals who do have pre-existing conditions, as a way to offset the higher than normal costs. Observers have suggested that this is no different from a publically funded healthcare system, and have emphasized the issue that the proposal is for “voluntary” private medical insurance, and is not an extension of the universal healthcare already in place for Hong Kong residents.

With HK$ 50 Billion (US$ 6.41 Billion) in proposed start-up funds, the Voluntary Medical Insurance scheme aims to move people away from the public system towards highly competitive private medical services.

Originally Posted by tonton

Tucson homicides from Aug. 1 to Sept. 8 [2010]

The nation's highest gun homicide rates are in Washington, D.C., with 20.50 deaths per 100,000 people, five times the general rate. Yet the District of Columbia has the strictest gun-control laws in the nation. The lowest rate of gun-related homicides is in Utah: 1.12 deaths per 100,000 people. Utah’s gun-control policy is very unrestricted.

Originally Posted by tonton

I've got to sleep it's 5am.

"People sleep peaceably in their bed at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

A new study has suggested that cell phone radiation may be contributing to declines in bee populations in some areas of the world.

Bee populations dropped 17 percent in the UK last year, according to the British Bee Association, and nearly 30 percent in the United States says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Parasitic mites called varroa, agricultural pesticides and the effects of climate change have all been implicated in what has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder" (CCD).

But researchers in India believe cell phones could also be to blame for some of the losses.

[T]he UK's Mobile Operators Association -- which represents the UK's five mobile network operators -- told CNN: "Research scientists have already considered possible factors involved in CCD and have identified the areas for research into the causes of CCD which do not include exposure to radio waves."

Norman Carreck, Scientific director of the International Bee research Association at the UK's University of Sussex says it's still not clear how much radio waves affect bees.

"We know they are sensitive to magnetic fields. What we don't know is what use they actually make of them. And no one has yet demonstrated that honey bees use the earth's magnetic field when navigating," Carreck said.

Originally Posted by john galt

Only police should be allowed to have buses. We've got to get those illegal buses off the streets.

A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths.

Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn't know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.

More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish.

The survey released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life aimed to test a broad range of religious knowledge, including understanding of the Bible, core teachings of different faiths and major figures in religious history. The U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the developed world, especially compared to largely secular Western Europe, but faith leaders and educators have long lamented that Americans still know relatively little about religion.

Respondents to the survey were asked 32 questions with a range of difficulty, including whether they could name the Islamic holy book and the first book of the Bible, or say what century the Mormon religion was founded. On average, participants in the survey answered correctly overall for half of the survey questions.

Atheists and agnostics scored highest, with an average of 21 correct answers, while Jews and Mormons followed with about 20 accurate responses. Protestants overall averaged 16 correct answers, while Catholics followed with a score of about 15.

Not surprisingly, those who said they attended worship at least once a week and considered religion important in their lives often performed better on the overall survey. However, level of education was the best predictor of religious knowledge. The top-performing groups on the survey still came out ahead even when controlling for how much schooling they had completed.

On questions about Christianity, Mormons scored the highest, with an average of about eight correct answers out of 12, followed by white evangelicals, with an average of just over seven correct answers. Jews, along with atheists and agnostics, knew the most about other faiths, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Less than half of Americans know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, and less than four in 10 know that Vishnu and Shiva are part of Hinduism.

The study also found that many Americans don't understand constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools. While a majority know that public school teachers cannot lead classes in prayer, less than a quarter know that the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly stated that teachers can read from the Bible as an example of literature.

"Many Americans think the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are tighter than they really are," Pew researchers wrote.

The survey of 3,412 people, conducted between May and June of this year, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, while the margins of error for individual religious groups was higher.

Originally Posted by jazzguru

Survey: Americans don't know much about religion

Originally Posted by jazzguru

Survey: Americans don't know much about religion

Originally Posted by jazzguru

Obama: Fox News is 'destructive' to America

Originally Posted by john galt

"Violent Fearful People who are too scared to commit violence themselves sleep peaceably in their bed at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."l

The worm has targeted the Siemens industrial control systems that are used in Iranian and other countries' facilities by exploiting a security gap in Microsoft Windows.

At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki's father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That's not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.

But what's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets": in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Obama supporters who are dutifully insisting that the President not only has the right to order American citizens killed without due process, but to do so in total secrecy, on the ground that Awlaki is a Terrorist and Traitor, are embracing those accusations without having the slightest idea whether they're actually true. All they know is that Obama has issued these accusations, which is good enough for them. That's the authoritarian mind, by definition: if the Leader accuses a fellow citizen of something, then it's true -- no trial or any due process at all is needed and there is no need even for judicial review before the decreed sentence is meted out, even when the sentence is death.

This one sentence from the Post article nicely summarizes the state of Obama's civil liberties record:


And now, in this case, Obama uses this secrecy and immunity weapon not to shield Bush lawlessness from judicial review, but his own.

"It is said the American people never vote for, but just love to vote against,"

[W]hen we go to the polls, it should be no surprise that we might vote against rather than for a purpose or position.

Of course, being against something is not always a negative stance. In fact, it can often be positive.

"It is certainly legitimate and reasonable to be motivated by opposition, particularly to issues," says Abraham M. Rutchick of California State University, Northridge, a social psychologist who studies voting habits.