Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #576 – 2016-07-09, 01:28:33 The Washington Post has deicovered that the longer in what passes for a police in the ex-colonies the more physical and dangerous they get. There is also a feeling that they are not being trained properly and far too quick to be violent or just pump you with lead too quickly. A normal country wouldn't put up with the part police state attitude. If you are stopped or held and black citizen you are on a sticky wicket.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #577 – 2016-07-17, 11:02:30 Meanwhile in Tennessee, Ken Ham's Ark Park has successfully been completed and opened to the public. It also received its first celeb visitor. No official numbers available on other visitors.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #578 – 2016-07-17, 14:02:17 An Ark Park? that's probably just a kind of zoo indoors that doesn't even floats. A Purgatory Park would be funnier.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #579 – 2016-07-17, 15:17:04 Ken Ham's Ark Park, officially Ark Encounter, is a totally serious no-joke entreprise, a major investment of $100 million in private donations. The result is a full-size replica of the famous historical Ark of Noah, in Ken Ham's own words.[video]https://youtu.be/FVRghWdkg5M[/video]
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #580 – 2016-07-17, 15:40:18 Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-17, 15:17:04Ken Ham's Ark Park, officially Ark Encounter, is a totally serious no-joke entreprise, a major investment of $100 million in private donations. The result is a full-size replica of the famous historical Ark of Noah, in Ken Ham's own words.100 millions in private donations for such a thing... that people have too much money. BTW, the thing is ugly. Since it's built with wood let's hope it burns soon.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #581 – 2016-07-17, 15:57:37 Quote from: Belfrager on 2016-07-17, 15:40:18BTW, the thing is ugly. Since it's built with wood let's hope it burns soon.Wouldn't you rather wish for a second deluge and see if the ark works? 1 Likes
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #582 – 2016-07-17, 16:00:16 Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-17, 15:57:37Quote from: Belfrager on 2016-07-17, 15:40:18BTW, the thing is ugly. Since it's built with wood let's hope it burns soon.Wouldn't you rather wish for a second deluge and see if the ark works?Brilliant idea.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #583 – 2016-07-17, 16:09:19 7 officers shot; 3 feared dead in Baton Rouge . This is where Alton Sterling was shot by cops, who claimed he was reaching for a gun. Last Edit: 2016-07-17, 16:22:32 by midnight raccoon
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #584 – 2016-07-17, 21:45:19 When policemen are nothing but executioners dressed in uniforms, they become easy targets. Simple as that.Another thing, does Baton Rouge means what it suggests, simply red lipstick? What a name for a town...
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #585 – 2016-07-18, 01:40:15 Quote from: Belfrager on 2016-07-17, 13:45:19Simple as that.Your subtlety overwhelms me! (Do you and Howie share the "TV room" in the home…?)
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #586 – 2016-07-18, 15:12:50 As it turns out, this time the shooter wasn't hunting cops. The officers were called in for gunfire.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #587 – 2016-08-07, 09:49:11 In America, they're destroying the libraries.http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/07/31/launching-a-makerspace-lessons-learned-from-a-transformed-school-library/QuoteLuhtala is blessed with a big library, but for most of her career it has been dominated by large bookshelves. Over time, Luhtala has pared down her collection as she increased the digital reading material the library offers, but in order to make room for a makerspace she cleared out 7,000 books. She might not have had the courage to make such a drastic change if she hadn’t had the firm support, and indeed push, from her principal to create a makerspace. Luhtala kept most of her fiction and donated a lot of the nonfiction, which kids are now mostly accessing digitally anyway (emphasis mine).Call me crazy, but a "makerspace" that basically consists of stuff you can do at home hardly seems useful enough to destroy a library. Just repurpose a spare (class)room or computer room or something.[1] In a workshop I expect to be able to (learn) wood and metal working with lathes and millers, bandsaws, maybe soldering, sewing, etc. Stuff you can't do at home. I mean, even a mini-lathe is going to set you back at least €600, which is awful steep for something you'll probably never use. A simple soldering iron meanwhile is going to cost you €10. You can afford to try it a few times and then ignore it if it isn't your thing.When I was reading The Case for Books it spoke of a caricature of crazy librarians destroying books to put them on microfilm, but in this case the caricature seems to have taken on organic substance. I'll just quote the only comment in full to finish:Quote from: kryten8This might be the saddest article I have read in a long time, and a great example of why I am skeptical of the huge STEM push we are getting; why did all of this have to happen at the expense of books and reading? You had a space that was dedicated to reading, and now that part of the library is an afterthought. The kids will notice and respond to that. If the principal had wanted a maker space so badly, he/she should have dedicated some other space to the idea.1 Yes, you can make do with less computers in the computer rooms because everyone's got laptops now. The space dedicated to computers in the 1990s and 2000s can be reconfigured to be more dynamic in nature in the 2010s.↵
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #588 – 2016-08-07, 11:49:06 Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-08-07, 09:49:11Call me crazy, but a "makerspace" that basically consists of stuff you can do at home hardly seems useful enough to destroy a library. Just repurpose a spare (class)room or computer room or something.Yes, it's craziness to destroy a library for this purpose, but a "makerspace" has its purpose in school, outside home. You see, most parents go to work in order to be able to afford to raise a child. Going to work takes time, all day mostly, so in this modern society hardly any parent actually raises their own children. This is where school must make up for missing parenthood. So, a "makerspace" should be part of normal school curriculum, a "handicraft" class or something like that. School should not be choosing between a library and a makerspace. School must have both. This is what they had when I went to school. In addition, my school had a museum, a chemistry lab, a biology collection, sports field and a garden too. Schools should have all that and more. My school was a village public school, not a privately sponsored city school.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #589 – 2016-08-07, 13:08:13 Quote from: ersi on 2016-08-07, 11:49:06So, a "makerspace" should be part of normal school curriculum, a "handicraft" class or something like that.Oh, I agree. It was when I went to school. We had a library, a (work)shop and an arts & crafts space (or whatever you want to call it). I think a makerspace also implies some electronics/Lego Mindstorms kind of stuff, but I guess I'm a few years too old for that. I was certainly young enough when Mindstorms first came out, but schools don't go for that kind of thing until a few years later. We did do some electronics and logical circuits and the like in physics of course, a practical application of the theory in the same way you apply the theory of chemistry and biology. But ultimately if you are going to make cuts, I think cutting into things you can't easily and cheaply have at home (like a workshop or a library) is far worse than cutting into the kind of arts & crafts that you can at least in theory easily and cheaply do at home.The argument that people should raise their children and that school isn't for raising children is patently absurd. Children spend the majority of their time in school, so how exactly are parents supposed to raise their children while they're at work and the kids at school? Exactly.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #590 – 2016-08-07, 14:07:44 Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-08-07, 13:08:13The argument that people should raise their children and that school isn't for raising children is patently absurd.Nope.Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-08-07, 13:08:13Children spend the majority of their time in school, so how exactly are parents supposed to raise their children while they're at work and the kids at school?Work less, live more.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #591 – 2016-08-07, 15:12:25 Quote from: Belfrager on 2016-08-07, 14:07:44Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-08-07, 13:08:13Children spend the majority of their time in school, so how exactly are parents supposed to raise their children while they're at work and the kids at school?Work less, live more.This is the way of life I miss in good old medieval times: Parents worked in the field, growing the food for the family, and children, as soon as they were old enough to understand orders and had the capacity to coordinate their thought with their movement, worked alongside with them. This way the children learned to grow food by observing their parents, by following orders of parents, and by directly contributing to putting their own food on their own table, all the while being under parental supervision. Putting food on your table is the only skill people really need and it worked naturally all by itself back then, the way the family structure and way of life had been instituted. Why this wonderful synergy had to be broken, I have no idea, but now it's irreversibly broken. Now everybody must engage in some utterly meaningless activity to earn money and then buy food. The earnings must be sufficient if you want to afford what you need, but in order to afford what you need you have to do and earn what you really don't need, which takes away family time. If you still have time left after work, you need that time to rest from all the meaninglessness, so you cannot spend it properly with the family anyway. In medieval times, every addition to family was welcome, because it meant an additional contribution to the work force, and work simply meant feeding yourself and yours. Work and life were the same thing back then. Your maxim may be applicable only in the modern world where work and life are different things. But the modern world is self-contradictory. In the modern world, if you want to work less, you have to have no family, so that you don't need to worry for so many people and you don't need to earn so much, but then what kind of life would that be? What would such life consist of? 1 Likes
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #592 – 2016-08-07, 15:33:26 Quote from: Belfrager on 2016-08-07, 14:07:44Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-08-07, 13:08:13The argument that people should raise their children and that school isn't for raising children is patently absurd.Nope.Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-08-07, 13:08:13Children spend the majority of their time in school, so how exactly are parents supposed to raise their children while they're at work and the kids at school?Work less, live more.I'm not talking about how it should be, I'm saying how it is. The claim is that schools (where kids legally have to spend 6-8 hours a day) aren't for raising children. But if kids spend half of their waking hours at school, it'd be awful negligent to say the least if the only raising they got was outside of school. It's flat-out reality denial.I'm not opposed to home-schooling. I'm in favor of universal basic income. But I'm not talking about ideals. What I'm talking about is those that say it's not teacher's responsibility. For better or worse, given the conditions of present-day society, it is.(And besides, it's work less, go hungry/homeless.)
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #593 – 2016-08-07, 15:46:38 Quote from: ersi on 2016-08-07, 15:12:25But the modern world is self-contradictory. In the modern world, if you want to work less, you have to have no family, so that you don't need to worry for so many people and you don't need to earn so much, but then what kind of life would that be? What would such life consist of?Not exactly, what the modern world does is to convince people that they need to have things in order to be something. To buy as a sine qua non condition to exist.People don't need all that stuff they work for, people don't need the lifestyle the media presents them as the only way to have a life, what people need is to redefine themselves their priorities and get rid of the be productive forever nightmare.If someone what he wants is to have a five or six children family he just need to leave the urban modern lifestyle. Even in Europe there's still plenty of space for the pursuit of happiness.More and more people are refusing to turn into work slaves, slaves without any meaningful life. There's a growing movement going on and soon it will be unstoppable.Then, it's when the massacres will begin, consumerism showing it's real nature.P.S. to those slow to understand evidence, by consumerism real nature I mean the domination by insect like elites. The same elites that prohibits smoke. There's noting as fumigation to kill insects. Last Edit: 2016-08-07, 22:33:18 by Belfrager
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #594 – 2016-08-10, 18:43:39 I thought this was quite interesting.Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootingshttp://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117259
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #595 – 2016-08-11, 05:54:34 "How to play silly games with statistics that you don't understand" would have been a better title… And, golly, look at the wee p value! "Contagion" — really? Ever heard of the Epidemiologist's Fallacy?
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #596 – 2016-08-11, 07:39:28 No, but that sounds like a simple case of misattribution. The authors did happen to say this.QuoteWhile our analysis was initially inspired by the hypothesis that mass media attention given to sensational violent events may promote ideation in vulnerable individuals, in practice what our analysis tests is whether or not temporal patterns in the data indicate evidence for contagion, by whatever means.
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #597 – 2016-08-11, 10:14:24 QuoteSeveral past studies have found that media reports of suicides and homicides appear to subsequently increase the incidence of similar events in the community, apparently due to the coverage planting the seeds of ideation in at-risk individuals to commit similar acts.So, according to the studies there is a high risk for contamination through media coverage.This implies (even so the authors don't dare to tell it directly) that keeping those homicides as secret as possible (no media coverage at all) will substantially reduce the risk of 'contamination'.This is a nice catch IMHO.In a wealthy society where almost 3 out of 100 people have a criminal record something is going utterly wrong.Instead of analysing and pointing the finger at the real causes, the authors prefer a diversionary tactic by blaming the media first. Some questions came to my mind:Misconduct among police officers is also mainly a result of media coverage? What next? Criminal gene propagating among people of low income social classes?How about countries with higher rates of homicides? Are those higher rates the result of more media coverage than in the USA?Why doesn't media coverage 'infect' people equally in different countries?QuoteThe authors have no support or funding to report.Wonder how the authors have met each other? By coincidence on Facebook?Are such studies part of their spare time hobby? 2 Likes
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #598 – 2016-08-11, 14:00:30 Quote from: krake on 2016-08-11, 10:14:24This implies (even so the authors don't dare to tell it directly) that keeping those homicides as secret as possible (no media coverage at all) will substantially reduce the risk of 'contamination'.This is a nice catch IMHO.It does, but not in the sense that relevant facts should be kept quiet. It implies something more along the lines of no photos of the perpetrators, possibly no names or at least no full names (like suspects), no details about the lives of the terrorists and no interviews with their family members. More like train or plane disasters, less like, well, terrorist attacks. Who are the victims, was the aid effective, what were the (security) mistakes that led to this terrible outcome. In brief, no terror porn.[1] That point of view is defended in Le Monde, among others. Now I have some doubts as to the actual efficacy such leftist self-sensorship. The problem and solution with regard to radicalizing Muslims seems to be much more distinctly pinpointed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But at the same time, many terrorists are indeed looking for their fifteen minutes of fame, especially the type of American high school shooter the linked paper is largely about.1 Interestingly, this is how suicides are reported around these parts.↵
Re: What's Going on in the Americas? Reply #599 – 2016-08-11, 15:34:12 My reply was referring to homicides in general.However it applies even to terrorist attacks we witness lately in Europe.Such attacks don't occur out of the blue moon. There is a causality between the proclaimed 'war on terror' aka regime changes through military force (disguised geostrategic power struggle and struggle to have control over natural ressources) and what is happening in front of our doorsteps. Since this war was started hundred of thousands if not millions of people had to die for it.We (the West) have actively contributed to the radicalization and destabilization of parts of the world. Bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya for regime changes and pipelines which might serve our future interests. Stir up a bloody civil war in Syria, fought and financed by mercenaries financed from abroad.QuoteOur friends and allies funded ISISWhat Wesley Clark omits to mention is the role of the USA, starting with the radicalization of 'freedom fighters' in Afghanistan, the organized death squads in Iraq, and the support for 'moderate' head choppers in Syria. I could add more but this should suffice for the broad picture.BTW, QuoteBlair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-U.S./anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.” (source)So IMHO, blaming the media is hypocritical to say the least.
Topic: What's Going on in the Americas? (Read 261737 times)
