Got a train to catch. What is it that make songs about trains so magical?
I’ll sum it up in two concepts: “Playing God”, and “Unintended Consequences”
Researchers found that sites with the highest abundance of the native animals had the lowest shrub layer vegetation cover and a lower number of birds.
It is described as the first study of its kind in the UK to examine the possible impact of just one species of deer on the natural environment….Since 1995, the Deer Initiative – a partnership between statutory, voluntary and private organisations – has been looking at ways to establish and promote the “sustainable management of wild deer” in England and Wales.
In order to deliver an effective management policy, the partnership highlighted a number of challenges that needed to be addressed, including:
Deer often have specific impacts on vulnerable habitat as well as agriculture and forestry
The animals tend to range over large areas (beyond site boundaries) and need to be managed on a landscape scale, with collaboration between landownersEcologists warn that the threat from deer to woodlands consist of a number of factors, including a reduction in the growth and density of saplings, bark damage and a change in the composition of under-storey vegetation.
In England they used to shoot and eat them. Now look what they have!
This reminds me of all the forest conservation that lead to massive destructive wild fires, as small fires were not allowed to burn up the brush.
Besides just the schadenfreude of seeing a man who thinks he’s the smartest man alive fail at his stupid business venture, there’s this.
“Current Media was built based on a few key goals: To give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling,” Gore and Hyatt said.
“Al-Jazeera has the same goals and, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us.”
If by “Truth to Power” he means “Kill all the Jews!”.
The acquisition could extend Al-Jazeera’s reach beyond a few large U.S. metropolitan areas, where some people can watch Al-Jazeera English.
Now I won’t say they can’t say and do what they do. 1st Amendment is just as universal and God-Given right as any other, and it applies to all humanity. Still it saddens me that an Anti-Semite TV network is expanding its reach into the US. Just like it saddens me that our own President’s racist history goes widely ignored.
I really have some fears we’re sliding back into the Jim Crow era. Of course the 2nd Class citizens being whites, Christians, and Jews.
Yesterday’s story had negligence from no working smoke detectors, this is even worse:
Two women accused of leaving four children alone in a home where a fire broke out, killing two of them, were each ordered held on $100,000 bond Monday….The women told firefighters and police officers responding to the fire that a cousin named Brandy was supposed to have been watching the children, but Dickler said the two women do not have a cousin by that name.
Each of the women is charged with two felony counts of endangering a child causing their death and two misdemeanor counts of endangering the life and health of a child.
People babble about “Gun Death”, yet something as simple as pure negligence can be just as deadly. Its almost like the deaths aren’t the important part.
h/t Liana
Personally I’m all for using words exactly how they mean.
Now “Harvesting Game” makes perfect sense if you’re Ted Nugent who has lots of land, planted feed lots and other things to keep the game animals on his land healthy and happy…until its time for him to kill and eat them.
Meanwhile the Prairie Dogs on the Farm Family’s farm are pests…I helped kill a bunch of those pest. All were left to rot or get eaten by they Coyotes.
Same goes for hunting in the Maine woods…you’re not harvesting, you’re hunting and killing. Nothing wrong with that.
Same goes for self defense. You aren’t killing your attacker, you’re stopping them, because if and attacker lives or dies is irrelevant to a successful defensive gun use. Still when people ask me “Why do you NEEEEEED a weapon designed to kill”, rather than being verbose and explaining that the weapons are designed to STOP not to kill, I usually reply “because killing is perfectly legal!”. Sometimes those terms are good to get people thinking in the right way.
If you don’t think guns should be capable of killing, then you’re against justifiable homicide. If you’re against justifiable homicide, you’re a monster and should be labeled as such.
Also my carry guns are indeed weapons. My two primary carry guns are my S&W1911Sc, and my Kahr PM45. Neither are ideal target or plinking guns. They’re ideal WEAPONS, and that’s what I carry them for. Nothing wrong with people being armed with WEAPONS.
Of course a .22 bolt action isn’t much of a weapon, and really doesn’t deserve that moniker…unless in an instant its being USED as a weapon.
Words mean things, and I have no problem speaking the truth.
What do you think the big issue will be that will bring women into the Libertarian front?
Great video
I ran similar numbers which got me to switch sides in the whole gun debate. Also he’s not noting the scandal where the Home Office of the UK was altering the number to make the violent crime rate look less than it really is.
h/t ENDO
More politicians pushing Doctors to push their agenda:
More than 30,000 people die from gun injuries each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gun injuries account for nearly 1 in 5 injury deaths in the United States. More than 96% of those deaths are due to suicide and homicide.
In an editorial published in Annals, a publication of the American College of Physicians (ACP), on Monday, Dr. Christine Laine, editor-in-chief of the journal and a general internist, calls on physicians to use their voices in this gun control debate, just as doctors have done regarding other issues that threaten public health, such as smoking, air pollution, drunk driving and vaccinations.
Laine points out that the American College of Physicians, which is the largest medical-specialty organization and second-largest physician group in the United States, identified gun violence as a public health issue back in 1998, but says the subsequent response from fellow physicians – whose mission it is to prevent, detect and treat illness in adults – is “lackluster” when it comes to their involvement in preventing gun injuries.
“Lackluster” because they know its bullshit. Hell my wife had the whole “Gun Talk” with her PCP during a checkup. She pushed back, and the doctor quickly admitted she personally knew nothing about guns or the issue of safety.
“It is almost impossible today to get federal funding for firearm injury prevention research,” says Dr. Arthur Kellermann in a December 19 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kellermann, now with the Rand Corporation, treated (among others) gunshot victims during his 25-year career practicing and teaching emergency medicine, most recently in Atlanta. He’s referring to how federal funding for gun studies dried up because “the (National Rifle Association) strategy of shutting down the pipeline of science was effective.”
Good old Dr. Kellerman! An Anti-gun activist pushing his agenda in the name of psudo-science! I wonder how he’d feel about federal funding to show the BENEFIT of firearms? No, we should only pay taxes to REMOVE our rights!
And there’s this angle from Reason
Psychiatrically informed policies aimed at controlling people rather than weapons are popular in the wake of mass shootings, especially among those who rightly worry that gun restrictions will unfairly burden law-abiding Americans while failing to prevent future attacks. Yet treating gun violence as “a mental health problem” presents similar dangers…..In any event, mental health professionals are notoriously bad at predicting which of the world’s many misfits, cranks, and oddballs will become violent. “Over thirty years of commentary, judicial opinion, and scientific review argue that predictions of danger lack scientific rigor,” notes University of Georgia law professor Alexander Scherr in a 2003 Hastings Law Journal article. “The sharpest critique finds that mental health professionals perform no better than chance at predicting violence, and perhaps perform even worse.”
So even if the mental-health criteria for rejecting gun buyers (or for commitment) were expanded, there is little reason to think they could distinguish between future Lanzas and people who pose no threat. Survey data from the National Institute of Mental Health indicate that nearly half of all Americans qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis at some point in their lives. That’s a pretty wide dragnet…..Even under current law, mental illness can become a label for unconventional political beliefs. Remember Brandon Raub, the Marine Corps veteran who was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Virginia last summer based on his conspiracy-minded, anti-government Facebook posts?
The malleability of mental illness was also apparent at a 2007 debate among the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. After seeing a YouTube video in which Jered Townsend of Clio, Michigan, asked about gun control and referred to his rifle as “my baby,” Joseph Biden said: “If that’s his baby, he needs help….I don’t know that he is mentally qualified to own that gun. I’m being serious.”
Yep, they want to “Limit Crazies From Having Guns” by calling us all Crazy!
h/t Mrs. Weer’d
Gunmen on motorcycles sprayed a van carrying employees from a community center with bullets Tuesday, killing five female teachers and two aid workers, but sparing a child they took out of the vehicle before opening fire.
The director of the group that the seven worked for says he suspects it may have been the latest in a series of attacks targeting anti-polio efforts in Pakistan. Some militants oppose the vaccination campaigns, accusing health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and alleging the vaccine is intended to make Muslim children sterile.
Who do we blame? Guns? Muslim Radicals? Or Jenny McCarthy?
A crowd stampeded after leaving a New Year’s fireworks show early Tuesday in Ivory Coast’s commercial center, killing 61 people — many of them youths — and injuring more than 200, rescue workers said…Thousands had gathered at the Felix Houphouet Boigny Stadium in Abidjan’s Plateau district to see the fireworks. After the show, the crowds poured onto the Boulevard de la Republic by the Hotel Tiama at about 1 a.m., said Col. Issa Sako of the fire department rescue team.
“The flood of people leaving the stadium became a stampede which led to the deaths of more than 60 and injured more than 200,” Sako told Ivory Coast state TV.
What the Hell?? No fire, no panic, no odd incident mentioned…just thousands of people gathering in one spot and 61 people dying. Not their first instance of this either.
This is not Ivory Coast’s first stadium tragedy. In 2009, 22 people died and over 130 were injured in a stampede at a World Cup qualifying match at the Houphouet Boigny stadium, prompting FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, to impose a fine of tens of thousands of dollars on Ivory Coast’s soccer federation. The stadium, which officially holds 35,000, was overcrowded at the time of the disaster.
A year later, two people were killed and 30 wounded in a stampede at a municipal stadium during a reggae concert in Bouake, the country’s second-largest city. The concert was organized in the city, held by rebels at the time, to promote peace and reconciliation.
The recent shooting in New Town Connecticut is a horrible event, but this body count just pales in comparison. And this isn’t an isolated event!
Hey, but let’s just focus on “Gun Death”, because that’s the only way dozens of youths can be killed in one place!
Horrible.
h/t Barron
