OR, there is an extremely large number of closeted pedophiles and it IS, IN FACT, a very small percentage of them that are dumb enough to get caught.

To be honest, I think that is the most likely case. There is nothing about being a pedophile that would make someone stupid or ignorant of the law and stigma, or the risks, and there is nothing to indicate that this is some sort of government conspiracy to screw over innocent people.

Research indicates there are likely approx 1.5 million pedophiles in the US (around 0.5% of the population based on several recent studies). That's about the same number of people as there are Muslims in the United States and about twice as many as all Buddhists in the US.

Food for thought.

Let me point out one thing that you might be partially correct about.

More than half (the FBI estimated around 60% in a paper in 1999) of child abuse that goes to trial IS, in fact, situational. It is an otherwise normal person doing something bad that they normally wouldn't do, under unusual circumstances.

However, the group "pedophiles" and the group "child molesters", while overlapping, are not equal. Many pedophiles never abuse children. Many who abuse children are not pedophiles (by a strict diagnostic criteria). Some pedophiles view child porn, some do not and keep their thoughts to themselves.

I'll leave the rest of the conclusions to you.

Frankly, the people in the linked PDF were folks like telephone repairmen and low level office workers. I doubt this was some sort of big publicity stunt. We're talking a dozen or so people here, nobody who really means anything to the organizations they represented....

I think there's reasonable evidence from a series of population surveys that around 0.5% of the population is attracted to kids, exclusively or primarily. That's about 1.5 million in the US, 35 million in the world.

Most manage to live a pretty normal life without doing illegal stuff, but even if 10% of those people do get porn at some point, that's still 150,000.

How many get caught? :-)

Well, research shows that you're an idiot. :-)

Just because you want it to be different doesn't mean it is. Simply accepting the fact that pedophilia is a sexual orientation like many others doesn't automatically make it acceptible and justified. It simply underscores the fact that humans who find themselves attracted to kids aren't "fundamentally broken". Research doesn't back that up at all. In fact, research indicates that the majority of them are profoundly normal in almost every way.

The image of a drooling pervert with low self-esteem and poor impulse control is based on studies out of the 1970s and 1980s that used population samples from high-security prisons and mental institutions. When you take people out of prisons and mental hospitals, wouldn't you expect them to be a tad off, from the norm?

There is shockingly little study on non-offending pedophiles, because of the social stigma of the topic, but what research there is indicates that something over 70% of exclusive pedophiles claim to have never abused a child and within that group, MMPI inventories and other social adjustment standards seem to lead us to believe that these people are very normal, well adjusted people, many of whom indicate they would remove those sexual feelings if they could, but they can't, so they have to learn to live with them.

I would also point out that the most common kind of child porn, according to a talk I heard a few years ago, are images and videos of teens that they take of themselves, alone in their bedroom, often on a webcam. These apparently outnumber other types of images by a notable factor.

But then again, feel free to continue to believe what makes you comfortable.

I was just thinking this.

The GP said "even an accusation" and I was thinking "someone doesn't have to be guilty in order to accuse them!!!"

So the problem isn't the people downloading it, so much as the way that it's perceived.

I recall India is currently voting on legislation to make child sexual abuse the only crime in the country that sets a "guilty until proven innocent" precedent.

Frightening!

It's pretty interesting that a couple of random phone calls "Mr xxx is a pedophile" would pretty much destroy most people's lives.

Doesn't that underscore a fundamental breakage in our social system?

You can be banned from several of those things for even being ACCUSED of abusing a child, even if it's absurd and false.

But I do agree, this is hardly a felony. I'm sure they simply shoehorned it into some existing law like "interrupting government operations" which is intended for a variety of uses.

The oil spill covers over 10,000 square miles.

Why must a photographer run over containment booms in order to get a picture of a small section of oil slick?

Besides, all the good pictures are from helicopters anyway. You can't obtain the scope of this from the surface.

I'm not sure why you're arguing this so strenuously, other than to pretend to toss around your (air quotes) expert knowledge.

Haha.

Win.

Well, I know several people, for around the price of a nice SUV, that outfitted their homes to be both electricity and carbon-neutral. They have a nice high-efficiency refrigerator and freezer and regular oven and heat their water by solar power.

They have solar panels with a 75 year lifespan that actually put power BACK INTO the grid for most of the day and the freezer cycles off during while they're sleeping, relying on residual heat and good insulation to keep everything frozen while solar power isn't available. A small bank of non-toxic batteries in the basement provides power for LED lights and a computer or two during the evenings and heat-pumps buried deep into the soil keep the internal temperature VERY nice winter, fall, spring and summer.

But their neighbor installed a big pool and a home theater and bought a Porche.... spending roughly the same amount, but with no environmental benefits.

Which should we encourage, as a culture?

Right now we strongly encourage the latter.

Is that right?

ROFL!!! I was reading with at least an eye for factual statements... but wow... this is just silly

What a fucking retard. Thermodynamics applies to CLOSED SYSTEMS. This paper is a giant crock of ignorant blogger spooge.

There are HUNDREDS of rebuttals online. The simple fact is that in the caculations, they used equations that ASSUME a radiative black body is at "thermal equilibrium" (which the Earth is not) and then use those calculations to prove that..... get this... the Earth is at thermal equilibrium and therefore cannot heat up.

You must recognize that their claim of the invalidity of the atmospheric "greenhouse effect" is absolute bullshit. The moon maintains an average surface temperature of -31C, which is consistent with the net solar absorption and radiation of a similarly constituted black body (because it does not have an atmospheric greenhouse) and the Earth maintains a notably higher temperature due to that same atmospheric effect that they concluded (and also assumed) was invalid. Not to mention Venus which maintains a temperature almost 300 degrees too hot, due to its dense atmosphere.

Oh my GOD, I can't believe they published that. What a crock of shit.

You should know that it was not "peer reviewed". That journal uses an "invitation review" which means all they did was submit a few friend's reviews along with it, which was sufficient for that particular journal, but they were refused publication in about a dozen others first.

What a fucking tool.

Uhm.

The scientific basis of climate change in the IPCC paper (the GW1 paper) has been more thoroughly peer reviewed than any scientific study in the history of mankind.

However, the later sections, which try to establish the POLITICAL RAMIFICATIONS of the proven research are what we're talking about here, and they were stated to have used "grey sources" from non-government publications, non-reviewed estimates, etc.

In fact, it was the scientists themselves (from the original GW1 paper) who found these newest errors.

You seem to see some sort of vast cabal of conspiring scientists... when I think you're just digging for bites to troll on.

Hah.

This sounds like my 5 year old niece trying to reason out why she shouldn't have to put shoes on to go outside.

"you NEVER let me do what I want. I hate you." :-)

I'm sorry? In College Station, Texas, the humidex today is 52C

Yikes.