As AP already noted, this is a winning strategy for Clinton in the primary because her base has largely been sold on the idea of things like expanded background checks at the federal level and a national gun registry. (!) How they will react to actual gun confiscation from law abiding owners remains to be seen. But when it comes to the general election, Clinton has a serious storm brewing on the horizon. Regarding a ban on all semi-automatic weapons, including handguns, the public has been consistent in their response for decades. As of last year there was 73% opposition to such a ban, and 63% said that a home was safer if there was a gun in the house.
Those numbers don’t shift when there is a mass shooting. They never do in any significant way. So with all that in mind, I think we need to encourage Hillary to pick up this flag and run with it. In fact, I’m going to go on record as supporting Hillary to be the nominee for the Democrats next year. This is just what the Democrats need and I look forward to her explaining her gun confiscation plans to the public when she debates the eventual GOP nominee.
Yup. And as noted, crime rates, and particularly armed robberies, when up in Australia after the buy-back.
Yes, I think that, while some people have serious health issues, much of this is just fad.
[Update a while later]
I should note that I’m allergic to tree nuts, but it’s never been life threatening, as far as I know. It’s just that if I eat them, the linings of my mouth and throat itch.
One more point. I’m not normally into censorship, but I think that the “Food Babe” moron should be banned from the Internet.
This whole debate assumes that the only purpose of space exploration is science. But if we want to settle space, we have to accept the fact that we are going to “contaminate” it with earthly life.
The volunteers also slept continuously. They would toss and turn like everyone does, but they almost never woke up for a concerted window in the middle of the night. This contradicts a growing idea, popularized by historian Roger Ekirch, that sleeping in eight-hour chunks is a modern affectation.
Ekirch combed through centuries of Western literature and documents to show that Europeans used to sleep in two segments, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness. Siegel doesn’t dispute Ekirch’s analysis; he just thinks that the old two-block pattern was preceded by an even older single-block one. “The two-sleep pattern was probably due to humans migrating so far from the equator that they had long dark periods,” he says. “The long nights caused this pathological sleep pattern and the advent of electric lights and heating restored the primal one.”
Interesting. Also some good advice for better sleep.
I don’t know, it still seems like you’ll expend more energy by standing than sitting. But now I don’t feel as bad that I’ve never gotten around to getting/making one.
Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly homogenistic in comparison to them.
The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.
All part of the reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did as a kid.