No, what sucks is being punished for not succumbing to the thieves.
Mandatory insurance is just another money grab - you're required, under penalty of imprisionment, to fork over some proportion of your hard-earned income to a bunch of rich insurance company executives and their politician minions.
That's just plain wrong, and is expressly forbidden by article XIV of the Bill of Rights, which prohibits involuntary servitude.
I guess I was a political prisoner.
Yeah, that's it! Kewl! I've done time for Civil Disobedience!
You right-wingers all suck!
And, by the way, there is very little "right" about the "right" wing.
I've heard such things, too. Without sources though and details about exactly what is being discussed, I tend to chalk it to the apocryphal category until such time as some care is applied to the question and evidence of it supplied to me. But I grant the possibility that there is a story there.
So... sources?
Source?
The US CDC uses a different statistic to measure the "abortion ratio," which is defined as the number of abortions per 1,000 live births. Not pregnancies. In fact, I don't know of a US government report that appears to regularly report the ratio you cite. However, the ratios should be close to the same so long as non-abortion reasons for a pregnancy not reaching live birth are low-incidence (which one hopes is true.)
I did find that the Guttmacher Institute does collect and analyze government information and attempts to draw out the ratio you mentioned, though.
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From what I can find at the CDC and above and a few other sites I've visited just now:
In the US, according to the CDC, the abortion ratio of abortions to live births was 24.6% in 2000 as compared with 25.6% in 1999. In
2002, a total of 1.29 million abortions occurred, down from 1.36 million abortions in 1996. 90% of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (which is exactly where I have no problem at all with them, regardless of reasoning, except of course if they are being used to replace the proper use of contraceptives.) In 2003, 23.8% of pregnancies (excluding fetal losses, which means this is the same ratio with live births I think) were terminated by abortion.
"Between 1992 and 1996, the annualized decline in the abortion rate was 3.4% per year, while between 1996 and 2000 it was 1.2% per year. The annualized decline between 2000 and 2003 was 0.8% per year, suggesting that the rate of decline slowed in these three years, compared with the preceding periods."
"...while the abortion rate declined among most groups between 1994 and 2000, it increased among poor women and women on Medicaid. We now know that this increase was likely driven by increases in unintended pregnancy among the same groups."
Sources?
It's not a good idea to use abortion when contraception is safer and where there are suitable options readily available. Another part of that is education, though. To use contraception and to do so under spontaneous circumstances the prior education must be in place, a variety of options must be present so each can select what is comfortable to them, and there must be close to no barriers in securing the materials.
By the way, you might take note of the fact that I research my answers. Repeatedly, I've had to ask you for your sources and/or more details about what your numbers mean. My primary sources for this was the CDC web site and the PDF report from Gottmacher I mentioned here. It would be good to keep some modest standard in communication.
I think consciousness is the new rug under which our ignorance and superstition is far too often now swept under, to hide it from the progress of science knowledge. Even in the case of what we consider to be non-living particles, we have no objective means by which we can differentiate conscious and non-conscious behavior. We can only say what "random" means in the context of theory, from which we also render our meaning of pseudo-random. Gell-Mann's opinion on this subject is,
"Consciousness, self-awareness, is the last refuge of the obscurantist, the mystifier ..."
You can see this quoted by John Horgan in "The End of Science."
The objective properties of consciousness will have to rest on principles tractable to theory and result, not on our personal experience.
Until then, John, I simply take Gell-Mann's position on the subject. As science has proceeded to light more and more, the areas of our prior superstitions, our hopes for supernatural mystery and superstitions will simply scurry to the next still-darkened term or semantic idea under which to hide itself.
For now, in this day and age, one of those regions is what we call "consciousness." It's a refuge for desired obscurity and a place to hide one's superstitions about the world.
What evidence do you have that suggests that it might?
You do need to answer a couple of preliminary question about this idea.
1) how does the failed genome come to know that it has failed to replicate itself?
2) if it did realise that it had failed to replicate itself, what mechanism would it use to transcribe a record of this failure into its stock of DNA.
3) granting that the example of the genome that has failed to replicate itself won't go on to build a working phenomic representation of itself, equipped with a full set of reproductive mechanisms, how will the message that might have been written into the failed genome every get back into the gene pool to be recombined with another genome to produce a new fertilised egg containing helpful information derived from a fertilise egg that failed to replicate.
I don't think that this is an idea that is going to win a Nobel prize.
If there is no consciousness, concepts like "hide" and "superstitions" can't exist. And life has no value, so murder is meaningless... it just rearranges some molecules, and that can't matter.
Try including the laws of logic in your sieve, as well as the laws of physics. Homer Simpson wants an example of the genome that has been deleted from the gene pool - by failing to replicate - to insert this information in its own DNA, which is going to die and decompose, for the benefit of a new instance of the genome that can't have had acces to the revised DNA. Not of lot of logic in that.
Lamarck is about what I was thinking that Larkin sounded like. Except that Lamarck actually had a lot more detailed knowledge in mind and actually was able to propose a theoretical mechanism for his ideas -- something that John has failed to achieve.
A huge difference between them is that I consider Lamarck as having done the hard work, thought seriously and deeply about alternative ideas, having had a breadth of knowledge for his time, knowing the various problems with existing ideas of the time, and being willing to put serious ideas on the table (which he eventually DID abandon, when later knowledge and new theoretical ideas overwhelmed his own with significantly fewer problems and a broader reach.)
Lamarck's principle was that external stimuli and various internal requirements would cause fluids to concentrate in particular parts of the body through exercise, stimulating the emergence of a new organ there. He proposed that the fluids naturally flowed towards used organs and away from unused ones, causing some to develop further and others to dwindle or atrophy. Overall, it was an adaptive theory.
His theory swept away any real meaning of taxonomic differences and treated all organisms as simply proceeding towards greater complexity. This was supported by what could be seen from the geologic record as it was understood then and, in fact, with the fossil discoveries that only came years later in and around the 1820's and 1830's, his ideas were revived because of this evidence. And again, it was revived with the even greater evidence arriving from geologic finds in the late
1800's. It was attractive that here was a theory before the advent of these discoveries that could be seen to have predicted them.
His theory was also challenged by facts of the time, as well. Anatomic parts of organisms are too interdependent -- too finely arranged -- for the whole to evolve in the piecemeal ways that Lamarck proposed, for example. Many other problems arose with it, too.
But it was proposed by someone who, at least, held the chair in invertebrate studies at the Museum of Natural History in France.
I would consider Larkin's ideas the pale wanderings of a amateur, by comparison with Lamarck.
I'd just like to see what you are asking for -- a mechanism. Lamarck, at least, didn't just propose some concept and let others come up with that. He knew something about the subject and proposed specific mechanisms as well as proposed evidence that supported his idea. And it was able to make predictions about eventual geologic discoveries.
I'd like to see the mechanism here and some predictions made that aren't made by existing evolutionary theory. I'd like to see evidence that there is a breadth of familiarity with current understanding, as well.
In the meantime, it doesn't catch my attention much. Imaginative, yes. Worth any serious time before John puts some work into it? No. We can afford to hold our breath on this one.
I do. But then, perhaps that's an artifact combining many factors selected for by evolution. There is a marked difference between language and music, for example, in this evolutionary sense. We "feel" both of these things. But music is the confluence of other selective pressures on a family of separate areas in the brain, for entirely non-music evolutionary pressures. Consciousness may be something like that. Or not.
But one thing is for certain. We don't know what we are talking about when we say "consiousness." And I don't believe it would make for an objective standard in law for defining life. Would be interesting to see your argument otherwise here and I'd probably debate it with you, vigorously.
And you, Jon, have proved yourself such a profound dip-shit... you must be a Democrat ;-)
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
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| 1962 | Democrat is what we call our ignorant citizens Unfortunately they're now in the majority :-(
As a side note: I explained myself fully enough, read enough of Larkin already on this particular subject, listened to the back and forth, looked for any evidence of something showing substantial recognition of known science, and did the necessary fact checking before coming to my conclusion. At least it is an informed one, to some degree.
By the way, this _should_ not be about my personality or anyone else's, yours included. This _should_ be about the standards of evidence we require of those who make science claims. If I have to prod someone to get them to work for their own ideas, then prod I will and unabashedly. But the purpose is always to improve the science thinking.
Being congenial isn't supposed to be the priority -- something I sense you must thoroughly and completely understand and subscribe to. ;)
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Democrat is what we call our ignorant citizens
Unfortunately they're now in the majority :-(
There are a number of cell-suicide mechanisms already observed. Google "cell suicide", "phenoptosis" and such. And social insects commit suicide for the good of the hive. People even die for their friends and family. In these cases, the genes of the suicid-ee are surely lost, but the mechanism somehow persists.
So some day when Science finally explains consciousness as an artifact or "the last refuge of the obscurantist", we'll all instantly go pop, like soap bubbles, into oblivion. Sort of the ultimate Freudian therapy! But then, who's going to be around to collapse all those wave functions?
But the courts are already called upon to decide if it's OK to pull the plug on a person in a vegetative state. A couple of criteria that are used include "will this person ever regain consciousness?" and "does an EEG or other test indicate high-level brain activity?"
The law usually decides that, if a person has no prospect of ever "regaining consciousness" then it's OK to withdraw life support. And doctors are presumed competent to measure this consciousness. Legally, a body without consciousness is just meat.
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