Virdea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFKu_bwMoYE&feature=youtu.be

If you watch the movie you learn a lot about tactics. 1. Three guys almost always line up in a row for a center of mass shot that kills all three. Despite being in enfilade with each other, they will still be shooting at you. 2. When presented with an off-axis threat the best way to engage it is to do a to a quarter-spin barrel roll from standing position to land on your stomach. 3. When under cover and presented with a target, the best way to engage the target is to leave cover, do a shoulder roll, and engage the enemy with a snap shot. 4a. When naked in a bath and armed only with two revolver, the best defensive move when assaulted by 15 armed men is to leave your bath and shoot it out while walking down the hall. 4b. Of course, those revolvers you always take into your bath with you are pretty reliable considering. 4c. Considering she shoots 16 times, I am left to worry about where her spare ammo was kept. 4d. And of course, when presented with two targets on either side the skilled pistoleer engaged them by crossing his/her arms and shooting double off-handed. 4e. Damn good gas seal on the one she has pressed to her chest. Last Frontier I shot burned by hand a little. 4f. Guys bath with pants and hat on. 5. When caught in the open and under fire from multiple targets, the best solution is to advance parallel with those targets, spinning as you move, firing each quarter turn. The spinning confuses the hell out of them. 6. When facing a gunman mano y mano, the most accurate way to engage them is to leap in the air shooting two revolvers at the same time. Likely they will do the same. More than likely you will land four feet from each other with a thud, and have to engage in some western martial arts. 7a. Capoeira is the most common martial art practiced by the western outlaw in the 1880s. 7b. Be careful, the bartender, prostitutes, and the guy who empties the outhouse are experts at it. 8. A man running who is shot in the chest will have enough energy to continue running 20 paces and dive off a porch, breaking the banister. 9. James Hong - for when you cannot afford both comedy relief and Mr. Miagi, combine it into one character. 10. Adrienne Barbeau. Remember when she was married to Carpenter and did not have it take this sort of role? 11. One liners. Did gunfighters in the west have personal writers? The worst: no it is not a comedy. They are serious with this thing.

They just took it out to get washed and are letting it air dry.

I give you without exception, the movie that was so bad that after airing in it Lithuania the entire population voted to reunite with Russia, the movie that Kim Jong Um called, "my sort of flick", the film that broke all the rules, then made up twenty new rules and broke them, the film that the Dahli Lama declared he would rather torture a nun than watch again, The film that the laws of 41 nations and four terrorists groups make a mortal sin to embed in a web pages, the cinema experience that define Gary Busey's career as finally over. I give you GHOST ROCK

The US has pushed since the 1950s the open nuclear concept. That included the possibility of Russian observers on US submarines and at US airbases and rights of overflight for Russian planes who file flight plans 20 hours in advance.

I use Gold Dots because they are the most effective and humane ammunition that has a normal name. If someone made a good round and called it "buttercup flower power low daisy bullets" and created a gun to fire them called a "Ray of sunshine and wafting willows gun" then I would buy them both. My former bullets, Winchester Silver-Tips were derided, but I challenge anyone to deride any 40 Cal bullet. Because, I choose them for stopping and not killing. Heck - driven to it I hope someone survives if I have to shoot them - living people can learn from their mistakes. However - when the attorneys are suing you for every dime you and your family will ever have, the name of the bullet you use will resonate and be said over and over. The people seeking to ruin you will have someone testify that you use a Glock which is made of plastic and is designed to sneak through metal detectors, and they will testify that your shooting two rounds center of mass was a premeditated design to kill a person execution style, and they will read the name of your bullets as often as they can to get the jury to believe you loaded Black Talon baby killer rounds. Gold Dot sounds like a Walmart coffee maker. I noticed I have my sidearm sitting on my work desk right next to me, and it still has Gold Dots.

Same way we quantify anything. You create an operational definition and test that definition for internal and external validity then run with it. However you throw around terms like "fact free hypothesis" and accuse posters of working without facts, but I basically rattled off an entire section of the FBI handbook to you - that was not good enough facts so I dropped the attempt and moved to social science theory. If you were my student and said "how do you quantify diversity" like it was impossible I would have you off doing a supplemental paper. I am not even fond of Fearon because it over estimates diversity in European nations and underestimates those in South American and Africa, but if you turned in a paper with Fearon then I would understand your model.

This is correct. There are small things we can do. >Early tracking mandatory pre-K for all children, with special classrooms for children whose parents are incarcerated to teach basic skills on how to be a human being to children who have learned nothing of that sort at home. Piaget says before age 8 a small correction leads to big change. >More money to special education and an end to mainstreaming / a return to tracked education. This repairs the dumbed down K-12 system. Scholarship students at very good private high schools break all sorts of statistical models. Those two things alone could drop future crime rates by 25% and represent the absolute best investment in terms of ROI.

I fire about 150 gold dots a month - I am using up the last of my supply since I switched to copper loads (I sill carry a glaser magazine and glaser in my backup though). My ammo bill will sky rocket on the coppers though, but I am happy I got away from gold dot before they went the way of the do do.

I made the same complaint to my physics prof. His explanation I am still trying to understand, but came in three parts. One part was that atoms of air are a finite size. The smaller the lifting surface the less efficient the lift generated from very small surfaces. You get an advantage at that size only if you can make atoms in the air smaller to allow more pressure differential in a given area. Lifting surfaces gain efficiency as they scale upward. This is most noticeable in very small lifting surfaces. Second is parasitic control mass. Human operated planes could only get so small before the parasitic mass of the human made it impossible to design them any smaller. Small lifting surfaces need a small engine in them to distort the lifting surface and this machine imposes a physical limit. If the smallest lifter you can make is 20 grains, then building smaller bullets is a greater challenge. A third issue is cost. My physics prof is an industrial engineer. Micro-machines quadruple in cost as the halve in size. I think the issue is the physics of air pressure more than anything else.

Tox looks pretty good considering how long ago (s)he died. - edit: assuming that is Ballinger and not your Grandmother, my South African history quits the year after Jan Smuts left office.)

There is a similar situation with police shootings in the US. Police officer shoots African American. People rush in and declare the shooting is because of racism. Racism is a causal issue that can correlate with murder. The cops however test clean of racism (they are just as racist as society as a whole). So curing a disease that does not objectively exist will not result in ending police shootings.

Neo-Marxism is the academic theory that poverty and inequality breed societal problems, as opposed to Marxism which is a form of government that purports at its center to solve the ills inequality. For example, Neo-Marxism predicts that any societal activity that leads to advancement will be moderated by the socio-economic class of the person involved. To test this take a thing and see if socio-economics is a factor. In this way it is a tool. Marxism is a normative tool that say a priori this is how to make the world work. A political system. Marxism has never worked. Neo-Marxism is like a screw driver - works nice except everyone wants to use it to turn a nut or hammer a nail. Oh, we call Neo-Marxism the Chicago school in the US to avoid mistakes. I don't because a lot of people I work with are international.

I agree with this. The 11mm limit for smart projectiles is in part based on the surface area of the maneuver surfaces - you simply cannot bend wind any more.

Actually I will agree and disagree. One point - those zip codes are not all racially based or class based. There was one set of yahoos that I had to arrest three brothers for child pornography and child molestation. I say me, but it was me and 400 others who arrested them because they were sovereign citizens and our nation had no right to keep them from placing their reproductive organs onto the bodies of six-year olds. To make matters worse, God gave them permission as well. All of the guys ended up getting bright eyed in State pen, which I do not agree with and feel IS a problem with incarceration, but all of them were of a common cultural group, church goes, and members of the NRA. However, as you say crime and poverty do not go hand in hand. Look at Iowa or Nebraska.

You are too hard on the people of South Africa, and I think the people of that nation would take offense, but I understand why you may dislike them. I protested against them in the 1980s, and my one arrest in my jacket came from tying myself to a gate in front of their old embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. When I was 18 South Africa was the great Satan and I hoped that the lot of them would burn in hell. I do not now fault South Africa for xenophobia, I am amazed that they are not more so. One need only head north for a stay in Zimbabwe and find the most racist and backward country in the world. I like you Toxn, you are smart and educated, but I hate people kicking the guy who is struggling to do his best. South Africa has a lot of problems and they are trying to solve them. There is never a time in that region that someone -- Boer, Uitlander, Zulu, Indian, and what have you has not been at the throats of another. If I had lived in the late 1940 I am not sure I would have liked Jan Smuts, but I feel he is misunderstood because we do not account for all the things that limited him, and two books of letters I have on him do not read much like a racist dictator. So I defend South Africa from people who want a whipping boy not because it is perfect, but because it is imperfect but is really, really trying hard to move away from a tough time in its history and gain a balanced appreciation of its past. 100 years from now South Africa will be, along with Brazil, the two most powerful nations in that hemisphere.

You actually ran across the big problem with most Neo-Marxist research. Fajnzylber claims to have solved his causation issues, but his foundation on Becker is flawed. Heck, plug in that freak who invented the Southernness index and you will find out that living in a southern city makes you a criminal. I have a correlation between temperature in a city, rain fall, and crime rate. However, there is no causation. The causation is that bad guys rob people in clear weather because they do not like to get rained on or cold. The main killer for the theory that poverty breeds crimes as a significant causal factor is the US, past 20 years. Falling crime rate is correlated .6 something (a HUGE correlation) rising unemployment and greater social inequality multiplier. For a theory to work it has to predict something, then that something has to happen. The opposite happened. Thus the theory must be revisited. Interesting correlation that Chicago school Neo-Marxists should look into is that the number of hours you are read to by your parents before age 8, the more successful you will be. Piaget says this causes improved brain function and better socialization - so you have a testable causal factor.

Because it is my human rights that have to be spent to get the guy who robbed a bank (or even sold heroin) out of jail. Personally, if I have to pay to have someone warehoused under threat of their committing violence on me, then it has to be done under my terms. And my terms are - commit a violent act for any reason, earn a stay at a welfare center which I choose to call a jail. I will accept no other terms since they are my rights, I possess them already, and it takes extraordinary acts to remove them. Pablo Fajnzylber, working under a Neo-Marxist assumption set, reverses causality as a matter of course in the article - which is why I teach my students to tread carefully when employing a tool like Neo-Marxism. Now I am the last person to throw Gary Becker and the Chicago mafia under the bus here, their work is valid and their discovery connecting racial bias with economic disfavor are ground breaking and important. But their work can, should, and is questionable with regards to crime. Messier found no connection between economics and crime. Blau squared found a connection, but also a blizzard of caveats. All this work pre-exists the article you provide but the author - a world bank employee, choose to only use Becker as a foundation. About like someone arguing against germ theory but failing to cite John Snow. Now to personal experience. I never in five years arrested anyone who stole because they needed money to feed themselves or house their family. You could argue they did not have a yacht, but neither do I. And the theory you present cannot be used to predict the chance of someone being a criminal.

This is not an unfounded fear. For thirty years Israel treated its own ethnic minority of muslims far better than adjacent nations treated Jews, Maronites, and even fellow Muslims. An Arab or a Muslim could join the army, but was not required to. They pay taxes and vote. Their property rights are identical to that of their Jewish neighbors. The test was not IF Jews could live with Arab Muslims, which had been proven by the fact that millions of Jews lived in nearly every Middle East nation prior to 1900 and significantly the Ottoman empire, but if Muslim Arabs could live peacefully in a state where they were the minority - an uncommon experience since Sharia only recognizes government based on majority Arab rule and has no structures in place for any other manner of living (well, except for the Druze). I still like to think that this will happen if the outside tensions can be eased. Solve the refugee camps by resettlement. The US is gun shy about Muslim Palestinians but personally I think they are tough buggers with a wonderful culture - anyone who visits Toledo will discover that. The US should open its doors to 50,000 of them. Egypt, Iraq, Iran, (eventually Syria), Lebanon, Jordan, and Algeria each take 50,000. We already have the camps 1/3 empty and we know each country could resettle that many quickly. Israel takes 50,000, as does the West Bank/Gaza. 10,000 to each former Soviet nation, and 10,000 to each European nation, maybe balanced in a way that takes into account size / ability. Russia takes 50,000. The number start to add up. Create a family lottery with preferences. Once the refugees are solved then the rest starts to fall into the place.

Except, it has not worked and won't. The safety net in the US is quite extensive for people without work - it is propaganda that it is not. A person who did work and looses their job earns around $2,800 per month in pay and benefits per member of household. After a year they loose unemployment and settle at around $1,600 per month if they are able bodied and able to work - up $400 in the past couple of years. The average American has access to, in their lifetime, around $20,000 in education assistance - that varies by your ability. It is correct that an able bodied person who can work but is unwilling to do so gets the shaft - they will take home around $1,600 per month because they loose one of the assistance programs. I should note that my wife's sister makes less in adjusted food basket dollars as a secretary in Brazil. The highest per capita social security payment package also corresponds with cities with the highest crime rate in the US. In an attempt to stem high crime in DC under Marion Berry Washington DC launched a massive local aid program - the benefits for a non-worker who has never held a job leaped to $3200 per year (factoring in free health care). The crime rate shot up. Then we found that one of our key statistical models was off kilter. You would think no jobs >>> higher crime. In the case of DC the causal relationship was reversed. Crime >>> lead to >>> no jobs. Blanket welfare programs >>> lead to people who had more spare time >>> higher crime >>> less jobs. We destroyed an entire US city with unthinking benevolence. To check this we look to other systems in the Americas. Brazil is a poster child for this. Crime in Brazil has skyrocketed in the past decade. That sky rocket has been attached to a sudden increase in public funding for social spending. Venezuela was the same. So was Honduras and Guatemala. Social spending turns out to be the last thing you want to do indiscriminately. Sort of like blood diamonds - looks good, no causal proof it works. Then we look at a nation where social spending was increased massively and no crime. Turns out it was Cuba. Cuba has the lowest crime rate in the hemisphere. And they are proof that is low crime is your goal, you can achieve it simply by giving up human rights and human liberty and stalling your economy. You cannot do a Cuba in the United States, we cannot have regular genocides like the Europeans. Crime is at an all time low now since the 50s, and given the disparity in how crime is recorded between Europe and the US, and treating Europe as a single nation, the US has a categorical advantage over Europe in all but one area (gun crime - we suck at that).

I doubt this will actually happen. Terminal graphing is a very useful exercise, and zero intercept generation a tool no leader should misunderstand, but my stats professor said that taken to far you will actually believe that in the year 2101 the entire world will live in Kenya, have a last name of Chang, and be Hindu. Orthodox religions in free societies with open press always look good on paper, but the conversion rate out of the religion is simply too high. And yes, as soon as Israel falters on its everyone fights rule probably it quits being Israel, but if the army starts to suffer then even the orthodox will be handed swords and called Essenes.

Toxn, Let me offer you an alternative theory that has some traction now. Crime rates rise with social diversity. The more diverse a population is, the more crime you have. European and Asian countries have regularly (every 50 or 100 years) held genocides of one type or another, keeping diversity in those countries low. Or they have limited immigration after starting with limited diversity. The US has mostly avoided genocides, and most of its actions of that sort are more than 100 years in the past, and involved smallish population bases. Would you advice the US, if it could reduce crime by reducing diversity, to undertake a genocide, if that was the only option? Steve

This is exactly why there will never be peace. Israel may have more ability to harm their enemies, but Israel has to have this. If Israel wins a war against their enemies, their enemies remain in existence. Gaza and the West Bank are proof of this - the occupation of these territories did not result in genocide and ethic cleansing. If Israel ever looses a war in a big way then 8 million human beings will be put to the sword and the nation of Israel will never again recover. And the region will still be subject to roiling wars and bloodshed because the victorious Arab armies will immediately start destroying each other. Peace treaties either come from the complete and utter destruction of a people's ability to resist, or from a fair and equitable recognition of mutual benefit. The US has one of the longest unbroken peace treaties operational in the history of human existence (the Morocco / US treaty) but even this treaty is one that is subject to constant strain and reflection. As the strongest party Israel must be offered a deal that solves basic problems on the ground, which will cause Israel's natural left leaning people to come to the table. Marlin Fitzwater told me that Reagan proposed a deal that had a lot of traction years ago. Refugees in each state get citizenship in their state, with the US providing aid to absorb the populations - and the hopes that other groups also set up with aid. PLO removes the plan from its documents calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Palestinian populations to vote for options of self-government or territorial status with a neighbor. 97% of lands pre-1967 returned. Jerusalem a shared city. Israel jumped on board. No other nation did. The USSR did its best to talk them out of it. Egypt and Jordan had their own deals. Lebanon was a mess. Syria, Iran, the PLO, and Iraq broke down on the existence of Israel - each wanted all Jewish descent people removed as a non-negotiable point.

Actually it is not such a no brainer. We can lock up a lot less - Brazil and Mexico lock up only a third the people that we do. And they have nearly crime free streets where one can walk arm in arm with their loved one without fear.

Israeli aid is called a fifth rail because it is untouchable in the political scheme. Or was. US support for Israel was always based on a number of factors. Anti-semitism is relatively low in the United States - it existed, and certainly cannot be condoned - Ford of FMC was after all one of the progenitors of the Protocols, but it was really had to make it go - Americans never really cared enough. American's first real exposure to anti-semitism was a shock. My uncle Walter was housed in Bergen Belsen after his escape of IIIA, Uncle Robert rescued slave laborers in Italy with the 168th Infantry Regiment, and supposedly Uncle McKeeby (Gerald - his father, my Great Uncle, was the model for the painting American Gothic) had something to do with the camps but never spoke of it or his service, and he died when I was still in high school. So in my family alone, all from Iowa who had pretty much, as far as I can gather, never met anyone Jewish in their lives, three patriarchs were immensely effected by the genocide and inclined to support for Israel. A second factor is education. Until just this last generation American education in history was second to none in terms of fair and even-handed discussion of world affairs. You still got nuggets such as my own textbook in Florida that had an entire chapter in it on the advantages of slavery, but by and large the US look at the rest of the world was surprisingly even handed. It is amazing to consider this when the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Judaism Without Embellishment was listed on required reading lists for eight Eastern European nations until the middle 1980s - and educated Americans traveling abroad are often shocked to discover nuggets from these works winding up in table conversations held up as "proof" of Jewish perfidy. So there is a distaste for the anti-semitic rhetoric that often comes with tirades about Israel on the world stage, and certainly there is a dislike of the evil Israel bombast that fills official media from many countries, it is too close to the evil US rhetoric that you put up with when you travel. You often loose American audiences as soon as you throw nonsensical racist diatribe into logical arguments, even if many Americans are racist themselves. Finally, the modern narratives of Israel are often hard for the US to wrap their heads around. Rachel Corrie lays down in front of a tractor and gets squashed may look like good press, but polling shows most Americans are not too put out by a privileged college girl who decides to do something really stupid. Millions of dollars were spent by four major PR agencies in the US pushing that story and it just did not resonate. Three Israeli kids are murdered and Hamas lists their killers on its wall of heroes, while the Jewish murderer of Palestinian kids gets a stiff jail sentence. It calls into question a lot of other events where Israel really should have a nice heaping of blame. And then there is Leon Klinghoffer. That story still resonates and last year a poll found 40% of Americans remember his name. You want to Americans hate you and support your opponent no matter how bad they are, kill a 70-year old guy in a wheel chair. My friends over in Sociology call this the Cowboy narrative in American social mythology. Everyone - even if they have no grandfather, resonates with the image of the kindly old man who has wisdom but need protection. I participated in a manhunt for a man who mugged and tortured and elderly gentleman that lasted weeks. And the US never forgot Klinghoffer. They hunted Muhammad Zaidan for years, and when they caught him they treated him in ways I would not treat a NAZI concentration camp guard, and there was simply no sympathy for this guy - even the major prisoner aid groups in the US refused to intervene on him despite his recanting the Achille Lauro. The story goes - and may be apocryphal, that three people stood by as he had a heart attack and died, which I find reprehensible, but which the average American would see as cowboy justice. So Israel has a big bank of goodwill, and their enemies are perceived as much worse than them despite multi-million dollar PR efforts. That said, I think that Israel has finally started taking its first steps to alienating the US. Bibi used US internal politics once too often and it looks smart - Republicans would invite Pol Pot to dinner if it pissed off Obama, but that sort of thing turns around on you a la Jane Fonda.