Thomas Kirby

The judge is the one who said that the "crime" was not sexually motivated, and he very well knew it. He doesn't have to give in to every demand that the prosecution makes. He should have told the prosecution to go fly a kite and then dare them to do something about it. This is called, among other things, exercising judgement, and that is what a judge is supposed to do. No, the appeals court did not do its job, and no, I am not that uncritical. The thing I tend to criticize the most is obvious stupidity, like that of the courts in question. What can I say? The courts weren't smart enough not to go for the McMartin preschool prosecutions. They weren't smart enough to realize that it was wrong to convict just in case the prosecutors and their dog and pony show were painting the correct picture. And now they're not smart enough to not require a man to be on the sex offender registry when he did not commit a sex crime. They are also not smart enough not to have a sex offender registry, but WTH, stupid is as stupid does. What they are doing is creating a situation in which continuing to have laws against those activities is going to be worse than useless and more dangerous than helpful, just like the drug laws. Then we aren't going to be able to have those laws when we need them. We're stuck between the probabilities of being unable to punish any perpetrators and being unable to live any sort of decent life. The man in question is experiencing the latter. A certain former pop star seems likely to be the former. We've let the law and the courts take over our thinking to the point that we can't count change.

.2 to .3 percent is a lot when you are talking about using it in ton quantities. That's 2 to 3 kilograms of U-235 per metric ton. I presume you've already read my longer post about that. What gets dangerous here is when the natural emissions of U-238 and U-235 gain opportunities to transmute other atoms into more radioactive substances that emit more neutrons and alpha particles. "Alpha" doesn't mean "safe" either. Alpha particles also cause transmutation. The absorption of alpha particles by U-238 nuclei is the beginning one of the routes that I remember to Pu-239, the long way around. I think that the fact is that any concentrated uranium, whether it contains any U-235 or not, is going to react with itself and produce fission products like a fuel rod does, only much more slowly. Put it near a moderator, it speeds up that process. Put it near some beryllium, and, well, you probably just better not put it near beryllium. There's just nothing like a hunk of uranium next to a substance that soaks up alpha particles and spits back neutrons. Throw in some carbon and you have something that will probably get me put in jail for just mentioning it. How many years in Marion can I get for saying, "please don't take two sheets of DU, put a sheet of carbon in between them, and whatever you do, don't enclose this sandwich in two sheets of beryllium, not even to prove a point? Please do not remember that a sheet of wood will do for the carbon." Here is a tutorial that seems to explain it pretty well. They make the claim that seems to me to be obviously true, that concentrated uranium reacts with itself. It's the same thing that Richard Feynman said in his biography. They had no ends of problems with that during the Manhattan Project times. Make note here that the numbers used by the writer of the tutorial are for much lower levels of U-235 than we can expect to encounter, at least according to several other sources on the net. It's in a chart a ways down the page. (Ok, that was a mistake on my part. That chart is of alpha emissions.) As if it weren't already stupid enough to try to say that DU is suitable for weapons the way we are using it, we probably won't be able to get it banned even because its potential use by terrorists is so painfully obvious.

James Randi is why I DON'T like debunking.

I've seen reports that among the veterans that a certain author has visited, he has found no healthy offspring born after Gulf War I. He probably should have asked Jeff Rense not to put his name up on his site, for rather obvious reasons. Most people around here might ban a user for providing a link to that site. U.S. gov tells us not to believe such reports. OK then, they have a lot of people who don't do anything important. Send them out to take surveys and tell us how many healthy children were born to veterans who were exposed to DU.

Don't sweat it. I have a hard time telling the difference myself sometimes. If I repeat what I have been "told" literally as I think I heard it, it does sound totally goofball, doesn't it? Someone may be telling the truth when they say that Uranium-238 is a low level hazard. What they haven't said is that even depleted uranium contains a lot of U-235 and other radionucleides. If they wanted to be as precise as they could, and as open and honest as I would want them to be, they would give us a list of complete analyses of the actual metals used in the tanks and the rounds, and for the tanks they would do this before and after they have been in service. Maybe I shouldn't believe the testimonies of people who have taken Geiger counters to those tanks. What do you think? Whatever the case may be, there is no good reason not to allow an international team of nuclear weapons inspectors total access to the contaminated areas and the tanks. A good President would beg them to do it. Even one who can acheive mediocrity would practically force them to do it. He would know how not to appear as if the government has decided to dodge the question. It doesn't take a genius like me. Every time I read about someone actually measuring the radioactivity of DU, someone else dismisses that person as a nutcase. OK, then, how about references to people who have made reliable measurements and published them and have not been dismissed as nutcases? As I said, there is no good reason not to do this.

Well, I've been told that depleted uranium is used for shielding in modern tanks. I've also been told that when you put people in those tanks, the water and carbon in their flesh does not moderate the fast neutrons emitted by the uranium, and this does not encourage chain reactions that make the sheathing more and more radioactive. Soldiers who inhale the dust from burning munitions do not experience burning when they ejaculate semen. They do not have mutated children from radioactive material that accumulates in their testicles. Depleted uranium does not still contain about 60 percent of the radioactivity of the original. Even though uranium rounds actually burn, people have not inhaled significant amounts of radionucleides because of this, and there are not poisonous quantities of uranium scattered around Iraq. The government is not hiding things from us, it is not soft-peddling the damages that have been done to our troops, all is right with the world. Also, no uranium gets into tobacco from the phosphate mines in Florida. Even if any were left after processing, it does not stick to the leaves of tobacco, does not have all sorts of decay products, and does not cause lung cancer.

I think that the "leeway" already exists.

I suppose that when they can replace the blood in a suspended human, they can replace it with an antifreeze that will protect the cells from being destroyed by ice crystals. Hydrogen sulfide sounds pretty scary. It's poisonous.

Phi, in the article, the judge was quoted as saying that there was no sexual motive in this case. I do not consider him to be constrained by statute for that reason. He wouldn't be the first judge in the world who ever decided that a law didn't apply, and he wouldn't be the first to get away with it. It was the judge who decided to say that there was no sexual motivation, not me.

I totally agree about the possibility of finding a pattern in the noise. However, like I said, I've listened to some of the samples. I might argue about the source of the sounds, but these sounds are not like finding patterns in the gurgling of water or the clicking of train wheels on the tracks. Some of them are extremely clear human voices, especially the example I just mentioned. In that sample, something about "Company A" came through very clearly. That particular one I would think would be because of radio frequency interference. One thing you learn when working with electronics is that the actions of the circuits are not nearly as cut and dried as you might expect or hope. A crystal radio set built for AM can pick up an FM radio transmission. When I attempted to build a very sensitive listening device one time, it clearly picked up someone's PA system from over a mile away. Even pretty well built electronics can generate anomalies. I'm sorry if someone feels that they have to publish such "results" uncritically, but I sympathize with where they are coming from. At the same time, when I was listening to the EVP samples, one or two of them were clearly voices, although sometimes distorted, and not noise, and not easy to write off as accidental detection of radio or TV transmissions. The only resort I would have there would be to accuse the experimenters of faking it. That is not something that I ever want to resort to just because I have trouble believing something. I would hate to be a snark hunter. I don't have the patience to pan for gold when I don't know when a nugget will show up, and I'm not sure that I will recognize a nugget, and the assay office will recognize that I have a nugget depending on the clerk's mood that day. The thing I am currently working on is mathematical, and the mathematics is not that complex, but it is taking FOREVER. At least I can work and earn a wage while I'm doing it.

I just re-read the entire thread. Even if others are not as long-winded, the majority seems to agree with me. The judge is nuts. Also, you are wrong. He could have come down on the side of sanity and nothing would have happened to him. No one is going to impeach a judge for saying "We know very well that he did not have sex with that girl, so we aren't going to punish him for having sex with that girl." My problem is that this society is once again driving itself past the point of insanity while actually making a problem worse. Even worse, it can't tell the difference, and it will definitely work to destroy anyone who can tell the difference. I don't think that the point is to solve problems. I think that the point is to commit cultural suicide in a futile attempt to take the bad guys down with us. The court was quoted as saying that the "crime" was not sexually motivated, but that his actions were "often a precursor" to sexual crimes. The only "spin" that can be put on such statements is to try to make it look like they said or did something sane. The court was unnecessarily reaching for a way to make it look like a sex crime. What you seem to be encouraging, and what you seem to be raging at me for attempting to discourage, is a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous for people who do things that can be misinterpreted as crimes. It isn't right to deliberately misinterpret an action, as the court admitted that it did in this case. Since practically anything can be misinterpreted that way, what you seem to be encouraging is a world in which no one can feel safe doing anything.

Well, Radiohead, I'm very close to saying that you can take my word for it. I'd rather you didn't just take my word for it. You have to trust yourself. I think and believe that what I am describing is irrational, but I am not irrational for describing it, except that my real name is out there with an opinion that has some chance of getting me killed. To me recent history includes Matthew Shephard, Salman Rushdie, Tienahmen Square, Kent State, the attacks on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the cold war, the Berlin Wall, the Viet Nam era, the beginning of Fred Phelps's career, the first trials of the Mississippi rednecks, and I'm not even old yet. Just from reading the news I know that people are still randomly killed even in the U.S. for being different or expressing different opinions. Certain other countries, forget it. The people who did me didn't know what they were doing. They didn't aim to destroy me or damage me, either. One of the things that will go into my book on this subject has to be the emotional dissociation that I witnessed. They're not belting a small child around "like a red-headed stepchild." They're making him a better and more productive citizen. They dissociate themselves from the reality of what they do. They harbor demons in their minds, like the thought that if they don't do particular things to their children, or allow them to be done, then their children will grow up to do Bad Things. It's just that moronic. Lowest common denominator behavior is like a scriptural requirement instead of being abhorred like it should be. What you are telling me is a very hopeful sign. Your parents are a lot more rational than mine. Better behavior is not gained by punishment. The worst behaved children that I knew were subjected to horrors by their parents. I'm not saying that I am an exception to that. What I have seen with others is of course bullying, the least you would expect from children who see a pattern of violence against children. I gained some measure of sympathy with the bullies when I realized that they had been taught that way and didn't know better. Also, I've read historical literature. They were worse just a century ago. I fear backsliding more than anything else. Technology doesn't stop domineering buttheads from tearing up people's lives. The ones who most diligently attend to the preservation of their lives are the ones who will survive.

Well, maybe I came home from work too tired to think straight. You're right, Radiohead, when did it become against the law to attempt to save a child's life? There are even good Samaritan laws. Some go so far as to require taking action if you can. That judge and the judges of the appellate court have a lot more discretion than they pretend to, starting with the discretion that they can exercise to not construct guilt for something that they know the man didn't do. The above mentioned judges are behaving irrationally, destructively, and even suspiciously. Perhaps my best condensation of my three earlier messages is this: In any game or conflict, and yes "game" is the best term to use here, if you lose your head your opponent will eat your lunch and bed your wife. Believe me, what an opponent actually does will be a lot cruder than that sounds. Making excuses to continue to lose your head in each such conflict is making excuses to continue to give away lunches and wives. It is true that this is an emotionally charged issue. The importance of the subject matter contributes to that, and the trouble is, the irony is, that the importance of the subject matter is why people should be most careful to behave in the most rational manner possible. It is why people should make the most sacrifices and bear unendurable emotional pain in order to have a chance to win, instead of going in with fists and feet flailing and falling on their keisters. "We" have been set up by a whole other layer of human predators to blow up at the slightest provocation. Often and usually by using the pretense that they are helping us to save society, these people have taught us to waste our energies fighting shadows and contributing nothing to our personal safety or the safety of our children. We can make a huge difference between using even a small amount of rational thought and rational work against a problem. We will never do this as long as we flail away. We will also never do this as long as we kill the messenger instead of listening. Personally, I don't want to be the messenger. This here is compulsive behavior by an adult survivor of child abuse. I do this once in a while in hope that it will contribute. Maybe it's irrational to believe this, but I keep believing that one well-written essay will do more good than all of the no-knock search warrants, all of the irrational judgements, all of the beatings and killings, or all of the hysteria. Maybe some day I will write a good essay like that. I will try not to triple-post again like that. Thank you for your patience.

Let me see if I can say something that sounds a little more coherent. In a case involving a child, which is better? Is it better to do the best job we can to protect the child and proceed rationally with whatever proceedings are necessary even if doing so fails to satisfy an appetite for violence? There is something I know from firsthand experience. Whatever it is that humans are doing to "protect children" starts with using the children themselves as tools and sports equipment. I've been the punching bag and the football more often than I want to count, mostly the punching bag. The tool use is mostly the thin edge of the wedge. There is some kind of weird program going on. People beat up their children, destroy their minds, murder their souls, and tremendously compromise their futures and their abilities. They do this in the name of protecting their children. It's obviously moronic to beat a child to death because the child did "something wrong" like use the wrong toothbrush. One of the worst things that there is to teach a child, and one of the most persistent habits, is to teach the child that if he is perceived as having erred, he will suffer the most vile forms of destruction that humans and Gods can conceive. That incidentally is what "sin" means, to err, or so I've heard. Maybe the entire reason that that poor soul was persecuted was because he took the time to express concern for the child's life. That is a capital crime in the society that I was raised in. "Pedophile" is just a handy label to hang on someone who has violated a cardinal rule. That rule is, never attempt to actually save a child's life or enable that child to live his or her own life.

How about the Nightbreaker experiments in which our soldiers were decieved about the dosages of radiation that they received from nuclear tests in which our government literally atom bombed our soldiers? Also, smallpox blankets are a classic that would be considered to be a nutcase conspiracy theory today. Plus, I do consider the evidence against fluoridation to be pretty strong. If nothing else, when you look around, a lot of very intelligent work has been done on this.

Just a cent or two worth here: You're probably right about the plural of anecdote, but I don't think that is enough to dismiss what many many people see and sense. EVP needs to be very carefully examined. I suppose that the people who do this and write books do have to eat so they do have to publish regularly, to both eat and do research, but I would prefer to see much more carefully vetted results. One EVP that I heard clearly seemed to include Humphrey Bogart's voice from what sounded like a war movie. One thing I am becoming more and more sure of is that scientific positivism is a falsity. A lot of things have been revised over and over again since people became convinced that science would accurately predict or describe anything. I fear that scientists have fallen into mental traps where they think that they have received the invariant word of God at the same time they see the Word rewriting itself minute by minute. Also, too much of science is stuck in blind alleys right now. It really isn't in shape to dismiss much of anything.

"Laws involving minors are a special case." Do tell, whoever wants to defend that thesis. Does this mean, "be as stupid as we want to be", "be as completely psycho as we want to be", or what? Does it mean "we get to use our children as an excuse to commit mayhem and murder against anyone we want"? Can anyone see the insanity of this? Can anyone see the insanity of sentencing people to a life of horror for things that everyone knows that they didn't do? Can anyone even see the futility? Let me lay this one on the line: These zero tolerance attacks on people, like beating a man for saving a girl's life and calling him a pedophile, are symptoms of psychopathy. They do not save children from anything. They help set up children for a very miserable kind of adulthood. What could we possibly be saving them for when more than 60 percent of their lives are going to suck horribly? I will tell you exactly what we are saving them for. We are saving them for a program of psychological and physical torture that is intended to do the exact opposite of giving them a better life in any way shape or form. We are even helping pedophiles destroy lives.

You know what would happen to the judge who refused to convict a man of a sexual offense for grabbing a girl's arm that way? Not one damned thing would happen to him, ever. He would never be punished. He would never lose his job. If he lost the sexual favors of his wife for a month, that's probably not a punishment. This judge is an idiot.

Hear, hear! I don't know that there is much that I can add to that. Maybe it should be another thread, but try to name a conspiracy theory more than 20 years old that hasn't been pretty much proven to be true by now, besides the one about fluoridation.

Let's get very technical here because I think that the distinction is very important. Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters are not made to deal with short circuits unless they also include a breaker, which some do. The ones that do are usually made for the breaker box and not for the outlet. The one thing that GFCI devices are for is to prevent potentially fatal electrical shocks. They detect current flowing to ground that is not supposed to flow to ground, presume that this current indicates a dangerous condition like a radio dropped in a bathtub, and shut down the current. Some time just about now the National Electrical Code is going to include requirements for AFCI devices, Arc Fault Circuit Interrupters. They detect arcing, which can happen in a bad outlet, like one that someone has squirted paint into (don't ask me how I know, I just know). That arcing can cause very high temperatures and set fires. This can also happen in bad wiring in lamps and appliances. A chip that can detect the electronic signature of an electric arc, essentially broadband noise, can interrupt a circuit hopefully before a fire start. How it can distinguish between that and the noise generated by the brushes of an electric motor I don't know.

The practice of suspending humans at low temperatures to enable lengthy surgical procedures is already a proven success. It's been around since at least the early 1960s. The point of doing it for three hours has to be to prove that the solution they pump in works. I wouldn't know what all the advantages would be to being able to replace the blood while keeping them cold, but this would be the forerunner to a solution that could be used to preserve the bodies long term.

This article says that eutectic point solder, 63 percent tin, 37 percent lead, melts at 361 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 182 decrees Centigrade. That mixture melts completely at its melting point instead of having a phase where it is pasty, like 60/40 and 50/50 solder do. The Wikipedia article describes the broader class of alloys that are called solders as having melting points up to about 450 C. If it is true that solder joints are weaker with lead-free solder, if I had the choice I would balk at demands to use lead-free solder. Too many safety-critical systems depend on electronics. Anything that increases their failure rate can cause more danger to the public safety than the lead in the circuit boards. Solder joints fail all the time. They will fail more often if they are mechanically weaker.

White phosphorus burns when embedded in flesh. It actually consumes oxygen from the body tissues. Definitely stick with small quantities, wear eye protection (I prefer body armor) get parental permission, and have a responsible and sober adult nearby. Bright lights are dangerous, too. Some of these preparations can damage the eyes. Some of them emit enough ultraviolet radiation to damage the skin and eyes. Just a little safety hint. There is rarely anything that a person does, experimenting in the lab, that is worth causing preventable damage to any tissues of the body, even if that damage is minor. At the very least, it's a lot more enjoyable to not have to go back to the house with tiny electrical, chemical, and radiation burns all over. Another note: Any chemical combination that can produce large quantities of light also produces a lot of heat, toxic gases, and may also be able to explode, even when not confined. They can also suddenly flare up and burn you.

It's difficult enough to strike a balance with a normal amount of empathy that does not have the habit of intruding on your senses all the time.

Having a different opinion does not constitute a personal attack, whether you are on the side of the mainstream or the fringe. It is true that so-called mainstream scientists will use personal attacks under the guise of having an honest difference of opinion. An old Martin Gardner article was stunningly bad that way, and he was the math guru of the 1950s. And no, "being wrong" does not justify personal attacks. I haven't seen any of that going on here, but I want moderators to be aware that some people do it, and watch out for it. It's not the subject matter. It's not the side you are on. It is the way you present your opinions.