Maybe Texas schools should start teaching on Sundays only. But, seriously, why do people not understand that church = state has never worked in the past, and it won't work again. These are same people who voted for Palin and will vote her in the primaries for 2012. Also the same people who sold Sports Authority in Provo, UT out of guns in the first five minutes for "The War against the Democrats" which will also apparently be reduced to street to street fighting. These people are trying to institute a third Red Scare, and it pisses me off.
like irreducible complexity, which is quite interesting.
The problem with irreducible complexity is that it only takes into account that evolution can add parts to a system. In reality, it can also change and remove parts from a system, meaning parts that are absolutely necessary now weren't always. Yeah, science doesn't claim to be able to explain everything at this point in time, but who knows what we'll discover tomorrow? Two of irreducible complexity's most famous examples were the eye and blood clotting. There are likely models for the evolution of both of them today, as I am sure there will be for whatever examples they use now.
A Connecticut middle school principal has laid down the law: You put your hands on someone -- anyone -- in any way, you're going to pay.
A violent incident that put one student in the hospital has officials at the Milford school implementing a "no touching" policy, according to a letter written by the school's principal, CBS station WCBS-TV reports.
East Shore Middle School parents said the change came after a student was sent to the hospital after being struck in the groin.
Principal Catherine Williams sent out a letter earlier in the week telling parents recent behavior has seriously impacted the safety and learning at the school.
"Observed behaviors of concern recently exhibited include kicking others in the groin area, grabbing and touching of others in personal areas, hugging and horseplay. Physical contact is prohibited to keep all students safe in the learning environment," Williams wrote.
Students and parents are outraged. They said the new policy means no high-fives and hugs, as well as horseplay of any kind. The consequences could be dire, Williams warned in the letter.
"Potential consequences and disciplinary action may include parent conferences, detention, suspension and/or a request for expulsion from school," Williams wrote.
Many think the school's no tolerance policy goes way too far. Others said it's utterly ridiculous.
"Now it's almost as if it's a sanitized school. Where you have to keep your distance from everybody? And that's not what school is about," one father said.
"What if they are out on the playground at recess, or in gym class?" parent Kathy Casey wondered. "You know, gym class is physical."
That is going a bit overboard. This person on person violence has got to stop, but we have to draw the opposing line somewhere, this is taking it too far, or close... it's too much closer to one side then it should be, we need middle ground!
I wonder if teachers and faculty are exempt from this rule. If not, clearly the students have to just stand in front of the principle's office and car. How did this even get passed anyway? Can principle's enact this kind of rule without consulting anybody else?
The problem with irreducible complexity is in the wording itself. Irreducible means that you stop trying. It's literally no different than saying "A wizard did it". When you stop trying, SCIENCE stops. Just because we don't understand it now doesn't mean we still won't understand it later. Look at all the knowledge we have as a human race, how far we have come over the last 5000 years. The things we know today were absolutely incomprehensible back then. Shit, less than 200 years ago doctors didn't even clean their instruments after use, because no one really knew what a germ was.
Intelligent Design is nothing more than a giant stop sign in the middle of the road of discovery. Debate in the scientific realm is perfectly fine. Contrary to religion, the SCIENCE community welcomes debate and, more importantly, new information. Evolution has gone through very, very rigorous debate, and it has survived on the mountains upon mountains of evidence that support it. Biology, chemistry, geology, even business and economics all draw upon elements of evolution. To deny its existence is no less ridiculous than denying gravity exists, and forcing your kids to do so too should qualify as child abuse.
Telling your kids to analyze the "sufficiency or insufficiency" of cells is also ridiculous because they are not yet equipped to handle advanced topics like that. It's the equivalent of giving kids a brief introduction to the solar system and then asking them to decide for themselves whether or not Hawking Radiation actually exists. This is a complex field where there is no shortage of biologists frantically working on it (fueled by both the desire to learn and to find evidence to shut creationists the hell up).
It is backwards, regressive thinking like this that is causing America to lose its place at the top of the world. Many other countries don't dick around with nonsensical questions like this, and their kids have greater comprehension of SCIENCE and math than we do. Other countries will be leading the way into the new era of knowledge while we piss away our time debating issues the rest of the world has long moved past.
The problem with irreducible complexity is in the wording itself. Irreducible means that you stop trying. It's literally no different than saying "A wizard did it". When you stop trying, SCIENCE stops. Just because we don't understand it now doesn't mean we still won't understand it later.
While I, for the most part, agree with what you've said, I do have one caveat. I would posit that the term itself 'irreducible complexity' could merely mean that a concept or thing can not be understood by reducing it to its component parts, or by having its component parts reduced to their component parts ad infinatum, but that it must be understood as parts within a whole system. This doesn't mean that science stops, it simply means you start looking with holism as part of your paradigm rather than limiting yourself to such a reduced, truncated view of reality.
That being said, the fact that such a regressive agenda has absconded with a term that would be very useful in the field of psychology and elsewhere really kind of annoys me.
Gov. Sarah Palin and the head of the Alaska Republican Party said Thursday that Sen. Mark Begich should give his Senate seat up to a special election now that prosecutors have abandoned their case against Ted Stevens.
"Alaskans deserve to have a fair election not tainted by some announcement that one of the candidates was convicted fairly of seven felonies, when in fact it wasn't a fair conviction," Palin said in a Thursday interview with the Daily News.
The governor said she does not want to "split hairs" on whether Begich should resign or not but agrees with the Republican Party's call for a special election.
The Republican Stevens represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate for 40 years before Begich, a Democrat, narrowly beat him last fall. The election came just a week after a Washington, D.C., jury convicted Stevens of lying about gifts that he'd received.
Begich fired back Thursday, saying that although he believed it was clear there was misconduct during the senator's trial, he stepped into the race "long before Senator Stevens' legal troubles began, because Alaskans were looking for a change and a senator as independent as Alaska.
"Today, with our country in a severe recession, it's more important than ever that we have a senator focused on fixing our economy so Alaskans have the jobs they need to support their families," he said. "That is my job in the Senate, and I'm honored to serve Alaskans for the next six years."
The chairman of the state Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, said that the only reason Begich won his race was because "a few thousand Alaskans thought that Senator Stevens was guilty of seven felonies."
He added that he thought Begich should step down "so Alaskans may have the chance to vote for a senator without the improper influence of the corrupt Department of Justice."
Palin, a Republican, had called for Stevens to step aside after he had been convicted but said Thursday that "I believed in justice through our legal system."
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday that the Justice Department will move to dismiss the indictment against Stevens, who was convicted Oct. 27 on seven counts of failing to disclose gifts, including home renovations, on his U.S. Senate financial disclosure forms. Despite Palin and Ruedrich saying there should be a special election, the Republicans in Alaska's Congressional delegation said it's time to move on.
"In light of the good news yesterday, I am sure many of us wish we could turn the clock back to last November," said Begich's Senate colleague, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. "Unfortunately, that is not an option."
Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young told Fox News Channel after Wednesday's announcement by Holder that although he thought Stevens "would have won hands-down. I would say by 70 percent had the Justice Department investigation not figured into his re-election campaign.
"The seated senator there, Mark Begich, will be in the Senate, he will do a good job," Young said in the Fox interview. "It's just sad that Alaskans were frankly hoodwinked into malfeasance of office work by the Justice Department itself."
Alaska Democratic Party Chair Patti Higgins said the call for a special election is an insult to the intelligence of the Alaskans who voted.
"The fact that the Obama Administration has decided to not pursue a case that the Bush Administration lawyers handled in a faulty manner does not take away the fact that Ted Stevens broke laws," she said in a written statement.
U.S. Attorney General Holder moved to dismiss the indictment after Justice Department attorneys handling the post-trial motions in the case discovered that the trial team failed to turn over to Stevens' lawyers notes from an interview conducted with the star prosecution witness in the case. It was the most recent ethical lapse by some members of the prosecution team, which was repeatedly chided by the judge in the case during the trial, and then cited with contempt after the trial when prosecutors failed to follow a judge's instructions to turn over documents to Stevens' lawyers.
DOJ found discrepancies between the interview and the courtroom testimony of the star witness, Bill Allen, the former oil-services company chief executive officer who plied Stevens with gifts. Those gifts, which went unreported on Stevens' senate financial disclosure forms, included renovations that doubled the size of the senator's residence in Alaska. Allen, who pleaded guilty to bribing state lawmakers in Alaska, is awaiting sentencing in his own case.
Begich's victory was a coup for Democrats in Alaska. But it also was a victory for Democrats in the U.S. Senate, who with Begich's win landed 58 of the 60 votes they need to have a filibuster proof majority.
I can certainly understand what they're saying. I mean, I never thought it sounded like Stevens did anything that bad. What I heard of the trial made it seem like at worst he neglected to do some paper work. And he only lost by a slim margin even with all that bad press. It's definitely a poor basis for a special election. Shit happens and you just have to live with it, but still...
"Don't quote me regulations! I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in. We kept it gray."
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — John Woods sometimes sits in a classroom at the University of Texas and wonders what would happen if somebody walked in and started shooting.
In April 2007, he was a student at Virginia Tech when his girlfriend and several other people he knew there were gunned down in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Thirty-two people died, plus the gunman.
There were times when Woods thought that maybe he should get a gun.
"Then I learned pretty fast that wouldn't solve anything," said Woods, who is now a graduate student at UT. "The idea that somebody could stop a school shooting with a gun is impossible. It's reactive, not preventative."
Today, Woods is among the leaders in a fight against bills in the Texas Legislature that would allow licensed concealed gun carriers to take their weapons to school.
A public hearing is set for Monday in the House Public Safety Committee on one bill, sponsored by Rep. Joe Driver, a Garland Republican.
Supporters say the bills would protect the rights of those licensed to carry concealed weapons and help prevent a massacre on the scale of what happened at Virginia Tech and another shooting last year at Northern Illinois University, where five were killed and 18 wounded.
Texas issued 73,090 licenses in fiscal year 2008. The state requires applicants to pass a training course, pass a criminal background check and be at least 21 years old. Texas campuses are gun-free zones.
"These are individuals who are already licensed and allowed to carry weapons. What marks the imaginary line of college campuses?" said Katie Kasprzak, a recent Texas State University graduate and spokeswoman for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a group that claims more than 37,000 members.
If gunfire erupted on campus, "Would you rather sit and just take shot for shot or would you rather have a chance to fight back?" asked Kasprzak, who has a concealed weapons license.
State Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, sponsor of the Senate bill, said students, faculty and staff are "sitting ducks" if someone starts blasting.
"I have no desire to wake up one morning and read in the newspaper, or hear on the radio, or watch on television a news report that 32 Texas college students were gunned down like sitting ducks by some deranged gunman," Wentworth said.
Opponents say that if guns are allowed on campus, students and faculty will live in fear of classmates and colleagues, not knowing who might pull a gun over a drunken dorm argument or a poor grade.
According to the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, similar bills have been filed in 18 states since 2008 and all have failed, although lawmakers in a few states are trying again.
Texas is one of seven states currently considering legislation. "We hope Texas will serve as a leader and have a domino effect," Kasprzak said.
Of the 150 House members, 70 have signed on in support of Drivers' bill. In the Senate, 12 of 31 senators signed in support of Wentworth's bill.
The idea has met stiff opposition at the University of Texas, which has its own history of shooting violence. Charles Whitman's 1966 rifle attack from the top of the university tower killed 16 people and wounded dozens more. It was the worst campus shooting until the Virginia Tech bloodbath.
The UT student government, the graduate student assembly and the faculty advisory council have all passed resolutions against the campus guns bills.
"It's a recipe for disaster," said Brian Malte, state legislation and politics director for the Brady Campaign.
Woods has helped lead the charge against the bills and filed the student government resolution opposing them.
Woods, who wore a maroon "Virginia Tech Class of 2007" T-shirt during an interview, said he hasn't heard from any survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting who supports guns on campus.
He figures a classroom shooting would be too sudden to stop, even if a student or teacher had a gun.
"Everything happens too quickly," Woods said. "You either play dead or you are dead."
I don't like the idea of people being about to carry around guns. In the event of there actually being a school shooting, the first thing on my mind would be to escape, not to attack back. There are over 50,000 students at UT; if everyone was allowed to carry around a gun with them, how long before one stressful day convinces someone to take out their frustration using a gun they carry with them? I dunno. If they were going to decide to go crazy without a gun at their hip, at least they've got the ride home and that night to calm down any emotions they have about starting a school shooting.
I don't want people being allowed to carry guns on campus. In my mind... it just makes it easier to start a school shooting. It seems silly to supply the very thing needed for a school shooting, in order to defend against a school shooting. Plus, I know that I personally don't want to carry a gun with me. I feel bad killing bugs/i]. I don't want to shoot at a human being; I don't have that strong of a personality.
The way I see it, guns are currently not allowed on campus, and yet crazy people have brought them anyway. The only people who the "no gun" rules actually influence are the ones who aren't about to go on a shooting rampage.
I think a similar topic was discussed a while back, maybe in this thread, but I'm too lazy to look. It was about the idea of arming teachers in classrooms, which I vehemently stood against.
And I stand against it now too. There is absolutely no need for students to have guns on campus, because statistically there is no need for it. There is a psychological reason for this, Adam maybe you can help me on this. I forget what it's called, but basically there is a bias for believing something happens more frequently just because you heard about it recently. There have been a couple school shootings here and there, but why don't you weight that against all of the other universities and every single day that they DO NOT have a school shooting?
Furthermore, people have varying degrees of respect for life. People who shoot up schools have very little, if any, respect for life. But the vast majority of people do. If someone brings a gun to school, how many people would have the calm demeanor and concentration to actually raise their gun and ruthlessly kill someone else in the span of a moment?
Let's think this through hypothetically, let's arm kids, and all of a sudden there's a school shooting. Will the students all turn into super patriotic Jack Bauers and shoot the bad guy(s)?
I think that a lot of deathly scared individuals each armed with the power of a god are going to start shooting hapharzadly in the general direction of a shooter. There's enough chance of hitting an innocent to make me think this is not worthwhile. I'm a decent shot, I've been shooting before and I can land a headshot in a stationary piece of paper in a shooting range when I have all the time in the world to concentrate and relax. I don't think I have the necessary training to handle being shot at and fearing for the lives of my friends or myself, much less if I was in a fit of rage if someone I cared about was injured. I won't delude myself into thinking I can efficiently and immediately take out a shooter if I was in the middle of a scene, and anyone else who thinks they can in their very first gunfight is fucking delusional.
You're never going to be 100% safe. If someone is determined, they will try to hurt people. But that's just something you have to live with, and I think the consequences of arming kids are going to outweigh the benefits.
I'm quite certain that allowing people to carry guns on campus would strongly deter a school shooting.
At the same time, you trade one problem for another. This is a college campus. Young people. People in a period of their life where they are trying new things and generally experimenting all around. They aren't always going to be rational or of a sound mind even if they have been in the past. Allowing people like this to have guns on them certainly wouldn't make me feel very comfortable and I can't think I'm the only one. It's a muddy subject.
The most effective solution would probably be armed guards and security checkpoints and the like. Is that really what you want at a school though? Run it like the military?
EDIT: Well, add all this on top of what Ryan said.
Look, we can go on all day trying to figure out the best way to prevent OTHER people from doing things in the FUTURE. (If we allow concealed carry permits, then everyone will carry a gun and one of those people snapping will shoot people. If we don't allow guns on campus, then one person going crazy won't be stopped and just as many people will die.) These are all good points, and you all bring up valid arguments. I would like you to consider the validity of what I'm about to say.
My desire to prevent gun-control legislation is not because I want everybody to have a gun. My desire to prevent gun-control legislation is because I want a gun. My feelings are entirely selfish, but is that so wrong? Again, I ask you to consider the validity of my statements. The fact of the matter is, when you come swooping down from the sky with legislation like this - legislation meant to protect people - you're taking a choice they used to have control over and making the decision for them. I'm not big on taking choices away from people, unless that choice is to hurt other people.
We need to differentiate between actions that hurt other people and actions that do not hurt other people. Carrying a gun does not hurt anybody. Shooting people hurts people. I suggest that we, then, make carrying a gun legal, but shooting people illegal. Oh wait. That's how things are now.
And oh, Lord, this thing would be so much easier if "private" Universities were not subsidized with tax money. Then there would be no discussion. It would simply be a matter of the land owners either allowing or banning guns. Or only allowing teachers to carry guns. Or only allowing students whose name starts with the letter "K" carry guns. Oh LORD that would so much easier. Then students could weigh the boons of that college against the banes, and the school would either flourish or fail based on the free market. The free market! AH IF ONLY!
But now I'm getting off track. Yes, I am a stark-raving-mad libertarian, but don't immediately discount my ideas as crazy. I just want to be allowed to carry a gun, and I want to government to stop telling me what's best for me.
A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.
They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.
Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine.
Speaking at an online press conference, he described the verdict as "bizarre".
"It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. And that's a bit weird," Sunde said.
"It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.
"We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."
The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.
However, the total awarded fell short of the $17.5m in damages and interest the firms were seeking.
Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.
"These guys weren't making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.
"The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn't even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did.
"There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that," he said.
The four men denied the charges throughout the trial, saying that because they did not actually host any files, they were not doing anything wrong.
Speaking on Swedish Radio, assistant judge Klarius explained how the court reached its findings.
"The court first tried whether there was any question of breach of copyright by the file-sharing application and that has been proved, that the offence was committed.
"The court then moved on to look at those who acted as a team to operate the Pirate Bay file-sharing service, and the court found that they knew that material which was protected by copyright but continued to operate the service," he said.
A lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, Per Samuelson, told journalists he was shocked by the guilty verdict and the severity of the sentence.
"That's outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. "This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours."
Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party - which is trying to reform laws around copyright and patents in the digital age - told the BBC that the verdict was "a gross injustice".
"This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.
"There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it.
"Today's events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we're going to take this to the European Parliament."
The Pirate Bay is the world's most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals.
Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.
No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead the site hosts "torrent" links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers.
I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree with you. I believe in personal freedom, but I think a line has to be drawn at some point of sensibility. I'm a gritty realist and I do not trust people. Most people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling. Having a gun and taking it to a firing range, going hunting, shooting someone Texas-style who breaks into your home at night, that's all fine and dandy with me. Let the bullets fly.
But I am willing to draw a modest line in some areas where the government should step in. I'm always cautious when I say this, but there are areas where they can be helpful. An absolutely free market does not work (refer to my bastards comment earlier), and so some government regulation is needed to keep people in check. The current economic crisis is a result of lax oversight in crucial areas of finance.
The same applies here to conceal and carry laws. I don't want to make a blanket statement about all laws, but in this specific instance of discussing university/school regulations, I still believe it will make things more dangerous than before, as I have stated above and as others have stated in other news and commentary sections.
If we're going to exercise discretion, I would suggest using statistics. Compare the amount of school shootings we have had. Let's take April 20, 1999. That was the day of the terrible Columbine School massacre.
Number of schools with a school shooting: 1
Number of schools without a school shooting: ~95,000
*95000 is still an understatement, as this does not include private schools, and I'm not sure if it includes universities. But we'll stick with it.
That is 0.0000105 of all schools that had a school shooting. There was a copycat shooting a few days later at another school (no one was hurt), but that was all of the schools that had a shooting that year. Let's figure out the yearly rate. We shall count by school days, as in every school every day. Since there were approx 95000 schools at this time, every single day has 95000 school days.
Number of school days in 1999 with a school shooting: 2
Number of school days in 1999 without a school shooting: 34,675,000
Now last year in 2008, there were a startling 9 school shootings, but if you still compare this to the grand scheme of other schools every day with no school shooting, it is still by any statistical standard to be not statistically significant.
It is much easier for these numbers to get worse than it is for these numbers to improve.
If you want to buy a gun, then go ahead and buy one (though I do believe gun show loopholes need to be closed up, refer to bastards comment again). But you don't need to bring it to a place that is statistically safe from gun shootings.
...whew.
To Jake:
This is just another roadblock in the music industry's acceptance of the new world. If one person breaks a law, then that person needs to be reformed into a better person. If ten people, a hundred people, the same applies. If hundreds of millions of people break a law, then it is not the people, rather the law itself that needs to be reformed. Laws are set in place to keep order and to protect people. Right now this law is hurting people more than it is protecting people.
I try to believe that there still can be honor in business, despite how terrible big business looks these days. But when I look at the RIAA and the movie associations I see not just greed, not just pettiness, but I see everything that is wrong with business. A business is meant to deliver a good or service to the people and to make them happy. Yes, they have lost profits over the years, there is hard data to support this. But is this because people are downloading illegally, or is it because we've just been naturally making a transition into digitizing what we can? Maybe it's also partly because of the monopoly they have over selling CDs and movies, and people wonder how CDs and DVDs got more expensive over cassettes and VHS tapes, despite the monumentally cheaper cost of production? There are plenty of reasons, pick your favorite.
The point is that they are not practicing good business. Is the decline in sales and profits affecting their ability to produce goods? Hardly. Are the musicians under their labels starving and working second jobs to supplement their income? I doubt it. They have seen a decline in profits, and so they have embarked on a fear campaign under old, out of date laws to try to scare people back in line. Fining a couple kids millions of dollars is so fucking disgusting I can't even begin to know where to start. They've sued children, parents, elderly people, all ranges of people before. And for what? For extra profits to come back in?
I don't belittle what they (used) to do. They facilitate production and distribution, and they help create name recognition, all in ways that would be much more difficult for bands operating on their own. But technology is changing, and at least in the area of distribution their current model is becoming less and less relevant.
What they need to do is MAKE themselves relevant again. Their current mindset is destructive, dangerous, and counterintuitive. The more they do this, the more the people become angry and disenchanted with them, and the more they will try to do exactly what the RIAA is fighting against.
As I understand it, there is no current law banning concealed carry of guns on university property in Texas. I want you to understand that I am not advocating that everybody get a gun. What I am advocating is that things stay the way they are, AKA: that there continues to be no current law banning concealed carry of guns. I refer to your own argument as my argument; there were 9 school-days worth of shootings out of what? 35million possible school-days worth of shootings?
How many of those shooters just flipped out over a bad grade? These were all planned over days/weeks/months, right? I know Columbine was. How many of these shooters, I wonder, even had concealed-carry permits? Now that I mention it, I don't know. I do not think that legislating this issue will stop people from going crazy and killing each other every once-in-awhile. All it will do is piss off me and other people who just want to feel the cold, hard steel of a gun rubbing up against their leg while their hot Chemistry professor talks about carbon rings. MMmmmm. Oh yeah.
Today, Woods is among the leaders in a fight against bills in the Texas Legislature that would allow licensed concealed gun carriers to take their weapons to school...Texas campuses are gun-free zones.
Comments
cough cough Ireland cough
Intelligent Design is nothing more than a giant stop sign in the middle of the road of discovery. Debate in the scientific realm is perfectly fine. Contrary to religion, the SCIENCE community welcomes debate and, more importantly, new information. Evolution has gone through very, very rigorous debate, and it has survived on the mountains upon mountains of evidence that support it. Biology, chemistry, geology, even business and economics all draw upon elements of evolution. To deny its existence is no less ridiculous than denying gravity exists, and forcing your kids to do so too should qualify as child abuse.
Telling your kids to analyze the "sufficiency or insufficiency" of cells is also ridiculous because they are not yet equipped to handle advanced topics like that. It's the equivalent of giving kids a brief introduction to the solar system and then asking them to decide for themselves whether or not Hawking Radiation actually exists. This is a complex field where there is no shortage of biologists frantically working on it (fueled by both the desire to learn and to find evidence to shut creationists the hell up).
It is backwards, regressive thinking like this that is causing America to lose its place at the top of the world. Many other countries don't dick around with nonsensical questions like this, and their kids have greater comprehension of SCIENCE and math than we do. Other countries will be leading the way into the new era of knowledge while we piss away our time debating issues the rest of the world has long moved past.
That being said, the fact that such a regressive agenda has absconded with a term that would be very useful in the field of psychology and elsewhere really kind of annoys me.
Palin, Republicans call for special Senate election: With Stevens case dismissed, some want Begich to depart.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hqADC-O0diH8SD6cFG8jsoGeJbewD977QL6G0
Uh oh. The roof is on fire and it is up to you to put it out.
What should we use to put out the fire?
A.) Bucket of water
B.) Pointy stick
C.) Can of gasoline
D.) None of the above
> C
You chose C.
I don't want people being allowed to carry guns on campus. In my mind... it just makes it easier to start a school shooting. It seems silly to supply the very thing needed for a school shooting, in order to defend against a school shooting. Plus, I know that I personally don't want to carry a gun with me. I feel bad killing bugs/i]. I don't want to shoot at a human being; I don't have that strong of a personality.
And I stand against it now too. There is absolutely no need for students to have guns on campus, because statistically there is no need for it. There is a psychological reason for this, Adam maybe you can help me on this. I forget what it's called, but basically there is a bias for believing something happens more frequently just because you heard about it recently. There have been a couple school shootings here and there, but why don't you weight that against all of the other universities and every single day that they DO NOT have a school shooting?
Furthermore, people have varying degrees of respect for life. People who shoot up schools have very little, if any, respect for life. But the vast majority of people do. If someone brings a gun to school, how many people would have the calm demeanor and concentration to actually raise their gun and ruthlessly kill someone else in the span of a moment?
Let's think this through hypothetically, let's arm kids, and all of a sudden there's a school shooting. Will the students all turn into super patriotic Jack Bauers and shoot the bad guy(s)?
I think that a lot of deathly scared individuals each armed with the power of a god are going to start shooting hapharzadly in the general direction of a shooter. There's enough chance of hitting an innocent to make me think this is not worthwhile. I'm a decent shot, I've been shooting before and I can land a headshot in a stationary piece of paper in a shooting range when I have all the time in the world to concentrate and relax. I don't think I have the necessary training to handle being shot at and fearing for the lives of my friends or myself, much less if I was in a fit of rage if someone I cared about was injured. I won't delude myself into thinking I can efficiently and immediately take out a shooter if I was in the middle of a scene, and anyone else who thinks they can in their very first gunfight is fucking delusional.
You're never going to be 100% safe. If someone is determined, they will try to hurt people. But that's just something you have to live with, and I think the consequences of arming kids are going to outweigh the benefits.
At the same time, you trade one problem for another. This is a college campus. Young people. People in a period of their life where they are trying new things and generally experimenting all around. They aren't always going to be rational or of a sound mind even if they have been in the past. Allowing people like this to have guns on them certainly wouldn't make me feel very comfortable and I can't think I'm the only one. It's a muddy subject.
The most effective solution would probably be armed guards and security checkpoints and the like. Is that really what you want at a school though? Run it like the military?
EDIT: Well, add all this on top of what Ryan said.
My desire to prevent gun-control legislation is not because I want everybody to have a gun. My desire to prevent gun-control legislation is because I want a gun. My feelings are entirely selfish, but is that so wrong? Again, I ask you to consider the validity of my statements. The fact of the matter is, when you come swooping down from the sky with legislation like this - legislation meant to protect people - you're taking a choice they used to have control over and making the decision for them. I'm not big on taking choices away from people, unless that choice is to hurt other people.
We need to differentiate between actions that hurt other people and actions that do not hurt other people. Carrying a gun does not hurt anybody. Shooting people hurts people. I suggest that we, then, make carrying a gun legal, but shooting people illegal. Oh wait. That's how things are now.
And oh, Lord, this thing would be so much easier if "private" Universities were not subsidized with tax money. Then there would be no discussion. It would simply be a matter of the land owners either allowing or banning guns. Or only allowing teachers to carry guns. Or only allowing students whose name starts with the letter "K" carry guns. Oh LORD that would so much easier. Then students could weigh the boons of that college against the banes, and the school would either flourish or fail based on the free market. The free market! AH IF ONLY!
But now I'm getting off track. Yes, I am a stark-raving-mad libertarian, but don't immediately discount my ideas as crazy. I just want to be allowed to carry a gun, and I want to government to stop telling me what's best for me.
Court jails Pirate Bay founders
I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree with you. I believe in personal freedom, but I think a line has to be drawn at some point of sensibility. I'm a gritty realist and I do not trust people. Most people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling. Having a gun and taking it to a firing range, going hunting, shooting someone Texas-style who breaks into your home at night, that's all fine and dandy with me. Let the bullets fly.
But I am willing to draw a modest line in some areas where the government should step in. I'm always cautious when I say this, but there are areas where they can be helpful. An absolutely free market does not work (refer to my bastards comment earlier), and so some government regulation is needed to keep people in check. The current economic crisis is a result of lax oversight in crucial areas of finance.
The same applies here to conceal and carry laws. I don't want to make a blanket statement about all laws, but in this specific instance of discussing university/school regulations, I still believe it will make things more dangerous than before, as I have stated above and as others have stated in other news and commentary sections.
If we're going to exercise discretion, I would suggest using statistics. Compare the amount of school shootings we have had. Let's take April 20, 1999. That was the day of the terrible Columbine School massacre.
Number of schools with a school shooting: 1
Number of schools without a school shooting: ~95,000
*95000 is still an understatement, as this does not include private schools, and I'm not sure if it includes universities. But we'll stick with it.
That is 0.0000105 of all schools that had a school shooting. There was a copycat shooting a few days later at another school (no one was hurt), but that was all of the schools that had a shooting that year. Let's figure out the yearly rate. We shall count by school days, as in every school every day. Since there were approx 95000 schools at this time, every single day has 95000 school days.
Number of school days in 1999 with a school shooting: 2
Number of school days in 1999 without a school shooting: 34,675,000
Now last year in 2008, there were a startling 9 school shootings, but if you still compare this to the grand scheme of other schools every day with no school shooting, it is still by any statistical standard to be not statistically significant.
It is much easier for these numbers to get worse than it is for these numbers to improve.
If you want to buy a gun, then go ahead and buy one (though I do believe gun show loopholes need to be closed up, refer to bastards comment again). But you don't need to bring it to a place that is statistically safe from gun shootings.
...whew.
To Jake:
This is just another roadblock in the music industry's acceptance of the new world. If one person breaks a law, then that person needs to be reformed into a better person. If ten people, a hundred people, the same applies. If hundreds of millions of people break a law, then it is not the people, rather the law itself that needs to be reformed. Laws are set in place to keep order and to protect people. Right now this law is hurting people more than it is protecting people.
I try to believe that there still can be honor in business, despite how terrible big business looks these days. But when I look at the RIAA and the movie associations I see not just greed, not just pettiness, but I see everything that is wrong with business. A business is meant to deliver a good or service to the people and to make them happy. Yes, they have lost profits over the years, there is hard data to support this. But is this because people are downloading illegally, or is it because we've just been naturally making a transition into digitizing what we can? Maybe it's also partly because of the monopoly they have over selling CDs and movies, and people wonder how CDs and DVDs got more expensive over cassettes and VHS tapes, despite the monumentally cheaper cost of production? There are plenty of reasons, pick your favorite.
The point is that they are not practicing good business. Is the decline in sales and profits affecting their ability to produce goods? Hardly. Are the musicians under their labels starving and working second jobs to supplement their income? I doubt it. They have seen a decline in profits, and so they have embarked on a fear campaign under old, out of date laws to try to scare people back in line. Fining a couple kids millions of dollars is so fucking disgusting I can't even begin to know where to start. They've sued children, parents, elderly people, all ranges of people before. And for what? For extra profits to come back in?
I don't belittle what they (used) to do. They facilitate production and distribution, and they help create name recognition, all in ways that would be much more difficult for bands operating on their own. But technology is changing, and at least in the area of distribution their current model is becoming less and less relevant.
What they need to do is MAKE themselves relevant again. Their current mindset is destructive, dangerous, and counterintuitive. The more they do this, the more the people become angry and disenchanted with them, and the more they will try to do exactly what the RIAA is fighting against.
How many of those shooters just flipped out over a bad grade? These were all planned over days/weeks/months, right? I know Columbine was. How many of these shooters, I wonder, even had concealed-carry permits? Now that I mention it, I don't know. I do not think that legislating this issue will stop people from going crazy and killing each other every once-in-awhile. All it will do is piss off me and other people who just want to feel the cold, hard steel of a gun rubbing up against their leg while their hot Chemistry professor talks about carbon rings. MMmmmm. Oh yeah.