You failed to demonstrate that more than one of these many annual nonfatal injuries involves a penis being shot off.

Most US gun owners don't have good enough aim to shoot off their own penises. That's why they need semi-automatic weapons. It raises the odds of being able to actually hit that tiny thing.

Pathology? There is nothing pathological about a person wanting to employ all self-defensive measures to secure life or liberty

Gun ownership in the US has very little to do with "life or liberty". Be honest with yourself. If it was really about protecting your "life or liberty", you wouldn't have clown shows like this.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/blo...

There is nothing invalid about using defensive uses of guns by police and against animals, since if there were no gun available

Yes, there is. No gun control proposal in the US has suggested taking guns away from law enforcement, the military or people who live where there are wildlife attacks. It's completely invalid. The technical term is "red herring". Look it up. Lott's book was about civilian ownership of guns. Kleck's work was designed to support civilian ownership of guns and has been used to attack all gun control laws. What's worse, his sloppy work and broad assumptions were used by the Supreme Court in the Heller decision, which began this entire notion of the Second Amendment being about civilian ownership of guns. Remember, until the '80s, there were no legal scholars who believed in this absolutist notion of the Second Amendment. Even Robert Bork, the sainted patron of the modern conservative, believed the Second Amendment did not apply to a right of every civilian to own (not to mention carry) a gun.

This entire argument is an artifact of Edwin Meese, the NRA and the Reagan Administration. There was a time when the NRA's literature quoted the entire Second Amendment, including the militia clause. Now, the quote above their headquarters door leaves that entire clause out. People who act like this so-called "right" goes back to the founding fathers are dizzy.

Let's assume Lott's figure is in the ball park just for argument sake.

No. Why should we do that when we know it's an imaginary number.

Your assertion that the U.S. may be the most lawless country in the world is ludicrous.

That's not my assertion, it's Lott's. His results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection. Yet guns are rarely carried, less than a third of adult Americans personally own guns, and only 27,000 homicides occurred in 1992. He assumes that there were 2.5 million attempted crimes that were thwarted by gun ownership. If that's true, and without those guns those crimes would have occurred, it would make the United States the most lawless country in the world. Do the math yourself. Assume for a moment that gun ownership is banned. Add 2.5 million to the crime statistics. That would just about triple the crime rate in the US.

Secondly, my neighbor travels to South America regularly and used to live in Argentina.

Do you know what "anecdotal" means? I lived in Sao Paolo when my wife was doing a math fellowship at a university there. The crime statistics in Brasil are about 30% higher than the US. Not double, not triple.

So as far as i'm concerned I'd believe him before believing your generalization.

What generalization? I cited a list of researchers and their studies that have refuted Lott. Are you going to believe your neighbor over published studies, too?

"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them." - Edward Snowden.

It's that "done in our name" portion. We run this gin-joint. Our spies have performed illegal operations.

That's actually quite a lot of effort that entire news corporations are STILL shuffling through. Years later. And what if he slipped up while censoring the data? You'd trust one man without a budget and a limited time-frame rather than an organization with a QA department? Or I supposed you'd rather he enter Russia with all of the NSA's as-of-yet unreleased secrets.

And do you honestly believe that anyone at the NSA could have influenced ISIS's surge to power? Really? Do you honestly believe that IF ONLY Snowden hadn't blown that whistle, then somehow the NSA would have prevented the clusterfuck in Iraq right now?

You think that 1 out 2 protesting hippies in the 1960's went on to start a management career or entered politics?

I think your memory is about as good as your sense of statistics.

Long story short, the hippies were right. There really WERE communist spies infiltrating our government and society. But it didn't matter, because our system was better than the communist one. We didn't have to go off on pointless wars and trod on the necks of foreigners because, given time, our system won out, their collapsed, and all the satellite nations that they held sway over converted to our system. We didn't have to keep black and whites from marrying. We didn't have to dissolve Turing's nuts. We didn't have to hand guns to the contras just because the leader wanted to think about socialism. And we didn't have to have rebels invade Cuba. These are things that, with 20/20 hindsight, were bloody fucking stupid to support at the time. And the people protesting them, the hippies getting tear-gassed, were right. They had a more accurate world-view.

Sadly, the allure of being authoritarian jackboot-thugs never really went away, and it's coming back. Cops are decked out in military gear, our leaders are defending torture and assassinations, and widespread dragnets aren't being shot down.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I think we need another wave of hippies. Unfortunately, their tent-camp was dispersed.

but WHY did it collapse? was it distribution? poor messaging? slow communication?

A lot of those reason have been solved.
Sometimes people see where a technology is going, and jump to the point, forgetting the need for infrastructure to support it. Once the technology infrastructure is in place, those things become marketable.

In short, you need to eat your meat before you can have you pudding.

Near as I can tell:
The product you link to is a extracorporeal cytokine adsorber.

With this product in the /. article, there is no excess cytokine to absorb.

This is the sort of rational and realistic responses with pertenant historical insight sans the common snide, cynical, partisian, or whack-job comments. It is on-topic, concise, and detailed. It answers a common question that would be raised by the uninformed about the topic at hand.

And it's not upvoted at all. Come on mods, do the hard-work of setting that slider all the way to zero and look for things that deserve mod points.
And you, coward, get a name so this sort of thing is easier to spot.

"A good person will do good; a bad person may do good if the carrot (heaven), or stick (hell), is strong enough to deter them from acting bad"

no. A bad person will say that God wants them to do whatever bad they are doing.
It becomes an excuse.

Yes, public property should be devoid of all religious symbols.
I don't care if you have a manger and the words Christmas on you property.
To put it in a public space is to force a religion onto all the people.

We have Freedom of religion for a reason.

The military FORCING people to be christian and pray is a BAD thing.
There has been a big push to get more religion(Christianity) into the military.
The Mid-East used to be pretty free and open, then religious group started infecting the government, and withing a decade religion was forced onto all the people, and te countries generally stopped producing anything and became ces pools.

Remember, ISIS is claiming the are religiously oppressed because they can't make other people bent to their religion.

Religion alows the ignorant to think what they do is for God, therefore it's OK.

Being resistant to change is a good thing.
I mean, if things are working as is, any change could be bad.

Of course change can be good too.

The irony of course is this is not tied to conservative/liberal. It is merely on the issues.

For example, conservatives are resistant to social change. The family has been working for a long time now. What's a world of single mothers, non-married people, children raised in daycares... going to result in? They are resistant to that change and fear that world. They have plenty of studies to back up their fear on the surface.

But for some reason, they don't have as much fear of environmental damage. The data is there, but they still believe we can conquer nature by managing it.
Just think about it. Have they really thought about farming, relocating population, eroding shorelines, increased storms...? Really it is a huge change we've embarked on in the last 150 years of industrialization. Yet, they charge on without question assuming they can always correct that damage if any occurs.

Liberals/Progressives are resistant to environmental change. The environment has been working for a long time now. What's a world of increased C02, changing climate, and others going to result in. They are resistant to that change and fear that world. They have plenty of doomsday studies to back up that fear on the surface.

But for some reason, they don't have as much fear of social damage. The data is there, but they still believe we can conquer society by managing it.
Just think about it. Have they really thought about pensions, taking care of the elderly, slowing growth, raising kids in daycares... in their master social plans? Really it is a huge change we've embarked on in the last 50 years. Yet, they charge on without question assuming they can always correct that damage if any occurs.

Rational thinking people avoid big changes to large scale complex systems (like society or the environment) when they can. They move incrementally as much as possible and see the changes (both good and bad). That's about all you can really say about these huge complex system be it the environment/economy/society.

Heck, maybe C02 rise and we just adapt to it by moving people away from shorelines, moving farmland to areas that used to be colder..
You know... like maybe the family structure is outdated to a large extent, and we as a society adapt to it via more government programs.

"As a mystic I have _knowledge_ by definition, aka experience."
false. Completly and utterly false. Are you simple?

"Athiest[sic] telling other people what they can and cannot know is the height of ignorance and arrogance. "
which is why we ask for proof.

"They are literally like the blind man telling those who can see color that they are delusional."
so now you are saying you have special vision no one else has? Hoe convenient.
You are simple.

atheism is not a religion.
The rest of your post is 3rd grade tripe.

Every religious conflict with science I have aver read about is due to people being ignorant of their own theology, and/or the history of their holy book.

Example: Bible literalists.