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A serious question

One thing that I always try to do is be morally consistent. That is, do I apply the same rules in the same way every time. To do otherwise is to be a hypocrite. Most humans largely try to do the same thing. Of course, this results in people trying to justify heinous and immoral acts in order to assuage their own guilt of the hypocrisy. This is where today’s question comes from.

I can have camera footage of a crime. I can possess cell phone video of a fight, a murder, theft, or any other crimes and it is not illegal to possess that footage. There are even television shows that center around showing videos of crimes in progress. Most people do not have a problem with that.

Until the crime being filmed changes. Let me explain:
It is always a crime for an adult to knowingly have sex with a child. I don’t care how or what anyone says, I think that we can all agree with that one. Now, there could be a legitimate argument over what age a person ceases being a child, or what constitutes knowingly, but let’s leave that aside for now. The reason it is wrong and a crime is that a child cannot give consent. This is the reason why children can’t consent to any number of things from marriage, to contracts, medical care, and many others. This is also why it is a crime to have sex with certain adults with reduced mental capacity.

So with child pornography, what is going on here is that a pornographer is committing a crime in taking the picture in the first place, since that child is incapable of granting consent.

That is where my dilemma enters. The crime is the sexual act with a person who is victimizing a child. I am not trying to claim that child pornography should be legal, but I am trying to understand why it should be illegal to have a picture of one crime and not another, while still remaining logically consistent. Any ideas?

By Divemedic, ago

Irony

The government, through the Department of Agriculture, is distributing more food stamps than at any other time in history.
Meanwhile, the Park Service, another branch of the government, tells us not to feed the wild animals in the park, because they will become dependent and lose the ability to fend for themselves.

By Divemedic, ago

Small scare

So I was sitting in my living room yesterday, quietly studying my books, when I heard the door handle begin to jiggle. I live alone, so there is no reason for anyone to be entering my apartment. I grab my M&P 40, and while I am doing so, I hear a key slide into the lock. While covering the door (finger not on the trigger, thank you) a dozen thoughts run through my mind at 100 miles an hour: Is it an apartment maintenance man coming to repair something? A home invader? What is my plan if the door opens? Should I try to hold the bad guy at gunpoint and risk letting him get the first shot? Or just shoot as soon as he enters the apartment? What if there are more than one of them? Is the wall I am behind good cover? Or just concealment? Why didn’t I grab something heavier, like an AR or a shotgun?

The person on the other side of the door continues to jiggle the key in the lock, and jiggle the door handle. By this point, this has been going on for a good 30 seconds. I cautiously approach the door, and look out of the peephole, to see a youngish (maybe in her 20s) woman trying to open my door. She leaves. I still don’t know what was up with that.

By Divemedic, ago

Random Quote of the day

There are more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the ocean.

(If you doubt this, consider Avogadro’s number: 6.02 x 10^23. This means that for every 18 grams of water, there are 602 billion billion molecules. A liter of water weighs 1,000 grams, meaning that a 1 liter bottle of water contains  3.31 x 10^25 molecules.

The volume of the Earth’s oceans is about 1.4 x 10^9 cubic kilometers. That works out to 1.4 x 10^21 liters, meaning that there are more than 2,000 times as many molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the ocean..)

Hope I got all of the math correct.

By Divemedic, ago

Officer Discretion

My brother was in a car accident twice in a two week period. The first time, he was driving down a 4 lane divided highway in the right turn lane. Traffic was slow, and the vehicles in the other two lanes waved a vehicle across the highway. My brother T-boned him. The cop didn’t want to write a ticket, and said that due to officer discretion, wouldn’t. As a result, the insurance company claimed that my brother was 50% at fault, and would only pay half of the damage. So he had to fork out $2,000 to repair his car.

Having had his car back for just four days, my brother was sitting at a red light when a car rear ended him. The cops again used officer discretion to not write a ticket. Same story, the insurance company again refused to pay more than half. Another $1800 later, the body shop bought him a steak dinner for being a “good” customer, and bringing nearly $8,000 into the shop within a week or so.

So he complained to the police department and was told that there is no way that they can force cops to write tickets. The worst part? All of this happened during the same week that the city entered talks to install red light cameras at all of the intersections.

By Divemedic, ago

Our course is set

I am not a Ron Paul supporter, in the sense that I don’t run around actively supporting him as a candidate. In fact, there are places where he and I do not agree. Now, I am not going to use this post to extoll the virtues of one candidate over the other. What I AM going to do is point out where we are.

We are on the train to national insolvency and dictatorship. The left claims that they need to tax the rich to pay for all of their programs and ensure that everyone gets a fair share of the national economic pie. They ignore the fact that they are spending us into insolvency.

The right claims that they want to control the left’s spending, but never seem to do so. They claim that we need to cut spending and taxes. Just not defense. Oh, yeah, and we need to go to war with everyone until they all bow down to us as Americans. The chief war cry of the right is: if you don’ t vote for the party hack, it is the same as voting for the other guy. Except, they forget that it won’t matter which one you vote for, because other than the D or R behind his name, there is not a real difference between them.

Lest you forget, our last Republican president brought us a 9 year long war in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11; the Patriot Act; the TSA and their intrusive searches; secret prisons; torturing prisoners for information; and added more than $4,900,000,000,000 to the national debt in 8 years.

Our current President has expanded the powers left for him by his Republican predecessor and begun executing assassinating Americans without trial, forced people to buy products that they don’t want, and has expanded the national debt by $4,800,000,000,000 in just 4 years.

The reason why I would vote for Ron Paul isn’t because I always agree with him, it is because I already know what I am going to get with the others, and I know it isn’t working. I do believe, however, that it doesn’t matter who we vote for, as our course is set. We aren’t voting our way out of this. It is only a matter of time before we sink our national ship under the weight of financial irresponsibility.

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda film

The new movie Act of Valor comes out this weekend. Like Topgun, this movie is intended to be a propaganda piece that will increase enlistment in the Navy. (If you don’t believe it, click the link and read the article.) The Navy likes to make it appear as though everyone in the Navy is either a SEAL, an Electronics Technician, or an Officer. They try to gloss over the less glamorous facets like hull technicians, engineering department, and all of the dirty, nasty jobs that the majority of the crew has to perform in order to keep the ships running.

Go see the movie. I will. Just remember that the Naval Special Warfare Community is even smaller than the fighter pilot community, and both are very difficult to enter and have extremely high washout rates. The Navy gets you to enlist to be a pilot or a SEAL, and then makes sure that washout rates are near or over 90%. After all, very few people go into a recruiter’s office and sign up to chip and paint a ship for 4 years, but the job still needs to get done. The people who wash out of these programs are the ones who get stuck in these jobs, and they sometimes wash people out for the most minor reasons that they can think of.

In the early 80s, just before Top Gun came out, the Navy had a hard time getting the smart kids to join, because the Air Force was getting them all. (That is why Top Gun came out) When I was in boot camp, fully half of the recruits were there because of that movie (I was not) and stated that they wanted to become officers and eventually, pilots. Less than 1 in 1000 made officer, and less than 1 in 500 became pilots, and of those, the majority were helicopter and cargo plane pilots. Less than 1 in 100,000 enlisted recruits became fighter pilots.

So the Navy’s tool for getting the smart kids when I signed up was Nuclear Power School. A promise of E4 within months, E5 in less than 2 years, bonuses after the first year, and technical training were the draws. Of course, they glossed over the 70% washout rate. People were washed out for getting traffic tickets off base, being caught in the Enlisted Club after 10 pm, and drinking under age. They did all that they could to meet that 70% washout rate.

Four years later, the program was passing 75% of candidates, because the Navy had better ways to populate those crappy jobs.

So to sum it up, remember it is just a movie. Don’t sign up for the wrong reasons. Think about what you are getting yourself into.

By Divemedic, ago

Oil prices


This news report talks about rising gas prices and states that for every $50 you spend on gas:
$30.75 goes to the oil company
$7.00 to the refinery
$6.00 goes to the government
$4.00 to the distributor
$1.25 goes to the credit card company
$1.00 to the gas station

The entire article insinuates that the oil company is being greedy, but how fair is that?
$50 in gas, with prices around $4 a gallon, will get you about 12.5 gallons. There are 42 gallons to a barrel of oil, so your $50 in gas becomes slightly less than a third of a barrel of oil. Oil is currently about $110 a barrel. A third of that is about $33, which is about what you pay.

What changes the price of oil? In this case, blame the dollar. The government is not counting the price of fuel or food when they calculate inflation. The government is spending so much that the dollar is losing value, which is increasing the price of goods bought overseas, and the number one imported good is—- gasoline.

Blame profligate deficit spending for the pump prices.

By Divemedic, ago

Never doing that again

While I was doing my taxes, I was playing with Quicken and decided to see what living in my house cost me. I “bought” that house in 2007 for $236,000. Two and a half years later, it was worth only $96,000 and I declared bankruptcy to get that albatross from around my neck. When all was said and done, it came out in court that no one could tell me who owned the mortgage on that house, and so I won a “free” house in court.

Out of the five years since I bought it, I have not paid a dime in mortgage payments since September, 2009. Even so, that house has cost me $44,254 in mortgage payments over the last 5 years. Other expenses for the last five years:
Homeowner’s Association: $1,591
Electric bills: $15,471
A new air conditioner/ heat pump: $4,219
Household maintenance, landscaping, and lawn care: $11,152
New appliances on moving in: $5,408
Insurance: $5160
Property taxes: $6341
That is a total of $93,596 for 58 months. That works out to $1,613 a month. Now keep in mind, I haven’t made payments on that house for half of the time I have been there. If I had been, the monthly cost would increase to about $2,300 a month.

Now, to be truthful, I would have to pay utilities in an apartment, but I included them above because I have never had an apartment with $400 electric bills, which were not all that unusual in this house.

The five previous years in an apartment cost me an average of $1234 a month, including utilities and renter’s insurance. My apartment was nice. It was only 200 square feet smaller than the house I bought, and it had a garage. Does anyone think that the tax advantage of owning a home saves you $14,000 a year in taxes? Not even mentioning that the house is worth $142,000 less than I borrowed on it. Had I not filed bankruptcy and gotten that house, I would still be upside down on it. I am not repeating that mistake. I will rent from now on, thank you very much.

By Divemedic, ago

The biology of self control, part 2

This is a continuation of the post on the physiological origins of self control and criminals. For the first part, click here.

The next neurotransmitter that is important is Serotonin. Serotonin is not capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier, so the brain must produce all that it needs. Serotonin is produced by converting an amino acid called tryptophan into Serotonin. (Serotonin is also used for other purposes in other parts of the body, but that is not within the scope of this post.)

Serotonin is the chemical that causes us to feel loved, safe, and comfortable. This is why meals high in tryptophan are called comfort foods. This is also how the drug Ecstasy (MDMA) works. That drug causes a massive release of Serotonin from your neurons. Long term use of MDMA actually causes a decrease in Serotonin, though, as the cells that produce it begin to “burn out.” Various other drugs that are centrally acting also work on Serotonin and its receptors, like SSRIs.

When we do what we know that we are supposed to do, the frontal lobe rewards us with a rush of Serotonin. This is the brain’s reward system for good behavior. The Midbrain rewards pleasurable behavior with Dopamine. The balance between the two is the way our behavior is controlled: Midbrain rewards us for pleasure seeking, the Frontal Lobe rewards us for controlling our bad behavior. Most people are fairly balanced between the two, and mostly seek out pleasurable but good behavior.

There are things that can upset this balance:
A mother who exposes her unborn child to alcohol can damage the frontal lobe, and giver birth to a child with impulsive and unsocial behavior. Remember hearing about how the prenatal exposure to alcohol affects the corpus callosum? That’s the membrane between the left brain and the right brain that passes information between the two hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum of kids with fetal alcohol syndrome is damaged, and in some cases it is absent. This is very similar to what happens when a “normal” person drinks alcohol. After a few drinks, alcohol shuts down the left side of the frontal lobe, which no longer functions the way it should and this suppresses the frontal lobe, causing the person to act on impulse, disregarding consequences, and seek more reward from the Midbrain. A person will act to do things, even  when they know that it is wrong and will cause them trouble in the end. With long term alcohol and drug use, this condition becomes a permanent dysfunction.

Since much of this is biochemical and not conscious thought, people with frontal lobes that are damaged by congenital defects or drug use have no way of stopping this behavior.

That brings us back to recognizing a person’s potential for becoming a killer. We can look for people who:
 – chronically use alcohol or drugs,
– have displayed a history of not producing enough Serotonin. They are easy to recognize, as they have problems controlling their impulsive behavior (in other words- criminal records). However, this only is a reliable indicator if the criminal KNEW that what he was doing was wrong. After all, the person must know it is the wrong thing to do, if the frontal lobe is to be expected to control the impulse.
– Identifying others who have problems with their impulse control center. This suggests that there may be a test that can be performed that will indicate a person’s proclivity for committing crimes, which may mean that there is a medical solution for some criminals.

You also can see why gun control has little effect. The criminal is a criminal because his brain doesn’t stop him from committing acts that he knows are wrong. He knows it is illegal to rob someone, but he doesn’t care. He knows as a convicted criminal that it is wrong for him to own a gun, but doesn’t care.

On the other side of that, a man convicted of an obscure felony like owning more than 5 sex toys is not a threat to public safety and is unlikely to commit a crime with a firearm, as his impulse control is most probably fully functional.

By Divemedic, ago