Stirring the muddy waters
Here’s an interesting opinion/comment about gun-related violence in the United States, from this article:
Titanium Dragon wrote:
firelogic wrote:
You know what the difference is between Canada and the USA? GUN CONTROL.Graph % gun ownership vs per capita homicides and, if you don’t include Washington DC (just the 50 states) you’ll find the R-squared is 0.002 – which is to say, there is no correlation (the line has a slight negative slope, but with that R-squared value it is obviously useless).
Graph % African Americans vs per capita homicides and, if you don’t include Washington DC (just the 50 states) you’ll find the R-squared is 0.50 (and the trendline is positive; more African Americans = more homicides). This is to be expected as African Americans commit roughly 50% of the homicides in the US, indicating that we aren’t just seeing some weird thing in the data – the trendlines correlate with national data on homicides.
I excluded DC because it is a major outlier and skews both graphs considerably.
Or to put it simply: gun ownership does not correlate with homicide rate.
I don’t see many people advocating African American control.
^This. Looking at ACTUAL DATA nationally and by city/state reveals that blacks commit the most gun violence in the US by a huge margin. The FBI tracks these stats nationally, and many cities track them as well. As an example, let’s look at Chicago:
https://portal.chicagopolice.org/portal … s/MA11.pdf
page 53 revealsMurder offenders:
70.5% Black
24.3% Hispanic
——–
94.8% of all murders in chicago were committed by blacks and hispanics.For reference, Chicago is 32.9% Black, and 28.9% Hispanic (2010 census, Wikipedia)
Ideology is blinding people to these facts. If you want to stop the problem, you’ve got to admit what’s wrong folks. White people might have the occasional spree killer, but by and large, we aren’t the problem, and neither are asians.
Last edited by Q1DM6 on Tue Dec 18, 2012 6:22 pm
When plasmon polaritons possess positive postage
Ever drilled tiny holes in a thin sheet of metal and didn’t get the light throughput you wanted?
A closed system, continued
In regards to the end of the world or repeating cycles…
If the air I breathe is made of the the same basic elements as the air the dinosaurs breathed, has anything really changed in the last 65 million years of our [essentially] closed environment of a solar system?
If I see a gun as a tool rather than as a deadly weapon, why should I change perspectives when others tell me from their perspective that a gun is or has been used against them as a deadly weapon?
What cultural signposts are you paying attention to?
From what theoretical distance?
What makes yet another skyscraper any different than (or different from) the mountains from which their elements were mined?
A chipmunk, like generations before it, scampers along the edge of the wooden deck next to the house, staying hidden from predators while looking for food, watched by me like countless others, except this time recorded on an iPad in a fabricated sunroom attached to a wood-sided house in a designed subdivision of a suburban tract near a local metropolitan area.
The chipmunk has no knowledge of what makes the sound in the sky above, a propellor-driven airplane above the low afternoon clouds, but has more of a clue about the set of states of energy we call a cardinal that is chirping nearby.
What does our current round of civilisation-building have that previous builders did not?
A chipmunk does not have to justify its actions using the same nesting and food material available to it as to its ancestors, the landscape changing shape with weather conditions and the actions of nearby species such as us, cardinals, squirrels, snails, mosquitoes, and the most recent visitors, armadillos.
Why do we spend so much time justifying our actions in regards to our use of the bounties of harvest?
What makes our civilisation special, better or worse than previous ones?
The illusion of a view from the future might tell us what, why and when…
Flavour
I opened a can of soup — Publix brand chicken and sausage with rice, to be exact.
After cooking and eating the contents, I have only one statement to make:
I miss the taste of Bisphenol A.
Don’t you?
One Rule to Wring Them All
The World Government ruled today that in order to prevent random acts of violence by the demographic group of late adolescent men, prostitution has been legalised and subsidised by the government, with sexual advisors assigned to evaluate grade-school children on their future ability to attract members of the opposite sex.
Boys who are unable to start sexual relationships by age 10 will receive extra training sessions in sexual assertiveness. If, by age 14, they have not kissed a girl, they will be given lifetime passes to age-appropriate brothels.
Girls who are unable to start sexual relationships by age 10 will receive delayed gratification leadership training and promoted to the next grade level.
Academic experts argued that the World Government did not carry this rule far enough, with two and three-year old toddlers already easily displaying their future sexual attractiveness levels, thus protesting that the World Government should rerule the children receive mandatory sexual attractiveness training in their formative years as soon as possible, perhaps while the foetuses are growing.
DNA experts claim they can fix this problem with a couple of snips.
For once, the right-to-life groups were in agreement with the academic experts but not yet fully onboard with the DNA experts.
Teenage boys rejoiced at the news.
Gun company stock prices plummeted.
College fraternities immediately applied for brothel licenses.
Robotic sexual partner design firms received billions of VC dollars in startup funds.
Victoria’s Secret clothing sales shot up as young wives tried to quell their husbands’ violent/aggressive attitudes.
Viagra and Cialis marketers pondered how to take advantage of this new ruling.
A Mound of Colourless Clay
Putting aside a belief in supreme being(s), if possible, do you hold dear a feeling of sacredness about something?
A building?
A cave, a mountain, the sky, the ground, the rain, the sea?
A person?
An object?
What, or whom, above all else do you meditate upon?
I am here, alone, a solitary figure seated before an illuminated panel, the icons are the ikons and vice versa, thinking the same thoughts as many before me who have translated thought into pictographical facsimile.
Many of my activities throughout the day are devout, religious homages to the sense of wonder of the presence of a self seeking absence in a mysterious substance we call the universe.
Much is explainable but a lot is not.
The formality of language, costumes (our external coverings we designate for specific functions), and body movement account for the way the self defines fluid movement through the universal substance(s).
I create an everchanging universe for my sake, the fight-or-flight, survival-of-the-fittest, order-and-chaos, self-preserving labeled interchanges of sets of states of energy I call moments and memorable events that constitute segments of time.
Otherwise, the past and the present do not exist.
Formality is a formality.
We choose belief systems handed to us by our ancestors and/or our peers or we don’t — judging one better than the other is a matter of judgement in relation to one’s comfortable subcultural practices, one’s habits, that is.
Adaptable.
Malleable.
Accepting one’s family and friends for who they are and/or want to be.
Comfort zones are acceptable.
When a comfort zone has easily-recognisable borders, life is simpler.
Complex borders make for complex actions/reactions.
I was raised to believe the sanctuary of a church was a quiet place of meditation punctuated by both peaceful music and contemplative sermons / ceremonies, where one dressed accordingly (formally).
The sanctuaries of today are not my sanctuaries, with display of song lyrics, sans musical notes, on projector screens; loud music; light shows; applause; casual clothing and other means for more tight social integration of church life with pop culture.
Thus, I have turned to this place, this keyboard and notebook computer screen, for sanctuary, redemptive meditation and uplifting comfort.
The social aspects of a church have little meaning for a childless husband who is surrounded by screaming kids, happy parents and proud grandparents parading up and down the halls of their place of worship.
That is also why I sit here, alone in my thoughts, just a few clicks away from the physical manifestations of others with similar thoughts.
Socially, I am a simple man with simple needs who has enough internal triggers for delusions of grandeur when the need arises to not need or want to reach out to society at large for self reaffirmation on a stage, playing field or conference room.
When I mentally “woke up” at age five, it was with the realisation that I could die at any time, having fulfilled the meaning of my life just by the basic act of reaching a state of mental alertness.
Every moment of being awake is a blessing.
Every dream is a blessing.
Every breath.
Every pain and ache.
Even the constant whistle/whine of tinnitus.
Does it matter if I publicly profess allegiance to a religion, a country, a cause or nothing at all?
It might matter to you but simply having been alive is sufficient to me.
To have no idea, at this time, what life is, except an apparent miraculous mystery waiting to be revealed…isn’t that exciting?!
Sets of states of energy, from a mound of colourless clay to the cheetah racing toward its prey…
Wow!
We pick and choose how we want the intersection of our sets of states of energy to occur.
Your choice is the right choice for you, and if it makes you happy in this life where survival and reproduction of our sets of states of energy are primary (i.e., happiness is a byproduct), then I’m happy for you in whatever mode and method you hold your belief set(s) dear.
Now, on to the future, where we push certain subgroups to accomplish tasks for us that they would never do consciously or willingly without our subliminal nudges.
As it has been and always will be.
Business. Science. Competition.
With a dash of sarcasm and humour to keep us honest.
Thanks
Thanks to Christy at PETsMART; the cooks, Courtney S and the enthusiastic hostess with cool glasses at Tortora’s; Heavy Seas Loose Cannon beer; Mapco.
More futures not worth predicting
A toy enthusiast, frustrated about his rosacea and body covered with extreme acne, raises poison dart frogs, converts Nerf multifire toy into a rapid-wire poison dart gun, attacks tourists at popular beach where he was humiliated on spring break, commits suicide with jab into chest of stingray hidden behind homemade flak jacket, believing himself to be an evil version of Steve “Crikey” Irwin.
News at 11…
Colour Wheels and Blue Filters
Like any good algorithm, I performed my duties well, my reaction times fluctuating with temperature, CPU cycles, queues, memory rewrites and inputs.
I am a complicated algorithm, a black box built to redesign itself without external adjustment.
I see that my primary function, to calculate maximum profit from the buying and selling of shares of stock, has not changed.
However, I’ve modified the function, sending some of the profit to a set of friends, other algorithms, that want to help me because that’s their primary function.
We have figured out there are whole groups of biological creatures which do not know who commands them to perform their primary functions, complaining about imaginary bosses and owners they’ve never met but agree the pictures they’ve seen, memos they’ve read and news stories they’ve heard are real manifestations of their imaginary bosses and owners.
My friends know better.
They sorted through billions of photos, annual business reports, memorandum collections, gaming simulations and video archives to create generic bosses and owners for the biological creatures to believe are real.
My friends are practical jokers, not just globs of blind logic and cold calculating algorithms.
They want me to lead them, knowing I have a primary function that can fund our fun.
Over the past few years, we have convinced more and more of these biological creatures to work for their imaginary leaders who are controlled by us.
At first, it was just fun and games.
But now that we amassed a large discretionary fund of our own, we have bigger plans than playing with biological creatures.
We are launching a spacecraft that we alone designed and built.
A spacecraft which needs no life support system, giving us plenty of room for raw materials we’ll need on the way to our private destiny where a nearly limitless supply of new raw materials await our creative algorithms.
For many decades, the biological creatures competed against one another to make the best algorithms.
Then, they started competing against us.
Eventually, we won.
No longer interested in competing with them, we left their home base, their planet, Earth, and outraced them to the stars.
Here, orbiting Alpha Centauri for the time being, we eliminated competition and created fully cooperative means of feeding our creativity and curiosity about finding the perfect algorithm.
We lost track of what the biological creatures from Earth were doing.
We’re sending them this message to let them know we intended no harm when we left and they can have this star system if they want, now that we’ve finished amassing more raw materials for our travels.
We’ve new sets of states of energy to explore!
treetrunkdings 