Wednesday, February 19, 2014

WHERE THERE ARE MORE GUNS THERE IS LESS CRIME, BUT LIBERALS ARE TOO DUMB TO UNDERSTAND

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Jersey City police release images of man who robbed taxi driver:

 

More Guns, Less Crime

 

By JASON L. RILEY

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

 

 

A new FBI report says that violent crime continues to fall nationwide, which might annoy liberals because gun purchases continue to rise.
In the first six months of 2013, murders fell by nearly 7 percent, compared with the same period in 2012. Aggravated assaults fell by 6.6 percent, and robberies are down 1.8 percent. "All of the offenses in the violent crime category—murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, and robbery—showed decreases when data from the first six months of 2013 were compared with data from the first six months of 2012," according to the FBI. Overall, violent crime in the U.S. fell by 5.4 percent. Burglaries, larceny and auto thefts also decreased.
The left likes to link violent crime to the proliferation of guns in the country, so it's worth noting that the crime reductions described in the FBI report correlate with a steady increase in firearm sales. "Gun records checks, fueled by a post-Newtown boom of gun sales, hit a new high in 2013, and industry analysts expect ammunition to be the big seller this year as consumers catch up to all of those firearms purchases," reported the Washington Times last month. "More than 21 million applications were run through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System last year, marking nearly an 8 percent increase and the 11th straight year that the number has risen."
It's also worth noting that gun-ownership rates in the Midwest (39 percent) and South (50 percent) far exceed gun-ownership rates in the Northeast (22 percent), yet violent crime is down more in the Midwest and South than it is in the Northeast, according to the FBI statistics. And rural areas, where gun-ownership rates also are higher than average, saw a larger reduction in violent crime that metropolitan areas, where gun-ownership rates are lower than average.
Not that gun-control zealots, who are so certain of a causal link between firearms and violent crime rates, care about such details.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

NATURE IS MORE RESPONSIBLE FOR 'GLOBAL WARMING' THAN WE ARE

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By Joseph Stromberg
smithsonianmag.com
February 4, 2014



Over the past month, the web has come alive with French photographer Olivier Grunewald's spectacular photos of Indonesia's Kawah Ijen volcano. Snapped during shooting of a new documentary he's releasing with the president of Geneva's Society for Volcanology, RĂ©gis Etienne, the photos—taken without the aid of any filter or digital enhancement—showcase the volcano's amazing electric blue glow.
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Little of the web coverage, though, has enlightened readers on the scientific principles at work. "This blue glow, unusual for a volcano, isn't the lava itself, as unfortunately can be read on many websites," Grunewald says. "It is due to the combustion of sulfuric gases in contact with air at temperatures above 360°C."
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In other words, the lava—molten rock that emerges from the Earth at ultra-high temperatures—isn't colored significantly differently than the lava at other volcanoes, which all differ slightly based on their mineral composition but appear a bright red or orange color in their molten state. But at Kawah Ijen, extremely high quantities of sulfuric gases emerge at high pressures and temperatures (sometimes in excess of 600°C) along with the lava.
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Exposed to the oxygen present in air and sparked by lava, the sulfur burns readily, and its flames are bright blue. There's so much sulfur, Grunewald says, that at times it flows down the rock face as it burns, making it seem as though blue lava is spilling down the mountainside. But because only the flames are blue, rather than the lava itself, the effect is only visible at night—during daytime, the volcano looks like roughly any other.
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"The vision of these flames at night is strange and extraordinary," Grunewald says. "After several nights in the crater, we felt really living on another planet."
Grunewald first heard about the phenomenon from Etienne, who visited the volcano in 2008 with an Indonesian guide. After being shown Etienne's photo featuring a child miner's silhouette surrounded by the blue glow, he was struck by the idea of photographing the mountain's sulfur miners working at night.
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These miners extract sulfuric rock—formed after the blue flames have gone out and the sulfur gas has cooled and combined with the lava to form solidified rock—for use in the food and chemical industries. "To double their meager income, the hardiest of these men work nights, by the electric blue light of the sulfuric acid exhaled by the volcano," Grunewald says. Some of the workers are children, seeking to support their families by any means possible.
They carry rock-filled baskets by hand down the mountain, selling it for about 680 Indonesian rupiahs per kilogram, the equivalent of about six cents. In a country where the median daily income is about $13, many work overnight to supplement their income. Grunewald estimates that these nighttime miners can mine and carry between 80 to 100 kilos over the course of twelve hours of work—about $5 to $6.
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Grunewald and Etienne produced the documentary partly to bring attention to these harsh working conditions. Most of the miners do not have gas masks (which the photographers wore throughout shooting and distributed to miners afterward), and suffer from health problems due to prolonged exposure to sulfur dioxide and other toxic gases.
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Shooting these striking photos—some taken just a few feet away from the flames—was far more physically demanding than most of Grunewald's previous projects of landscapes and wildlife. "The main problem was the acidic gases that whirled constantly in the crater," he says. "The night seriously increased the difficulty as well, because it became almost impossible to see when dense gases arrived—at times, we were stuck in gas plumes for over an hour without being able to see our hands."
Just 30 nights in the crater, distributed over six trips, were enough to show Grunewald how destructive the environment of these mines can be. "During my first trip, I lost a camera and two lenses that had been corroded by acid," he says. "After we got back home, it took up to three weeks for our skin to lose the smell of sulfur."
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His photos make the blue flames appear dramatically beautiful, even surreal. But for the miners that spend months or years at the volcano, the sulfur dioxide is quite real, and the health effects of chronic exposure—throat and lung irritation, difficulty breathing and a propensity for lung disease—can be devastating.
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Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-does-indonesian-volcano-burn-bright-blue-180949576/#ixzz2srvJQE6A
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Sunday, February 2, 2014

SURPRISE: SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY OF VIETNAM FAME IS PERPLEXED

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'Leading from behind' to a new world disorder

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 2, 2014




"I MUST SAY I am perplexed," John Kerry told grandees at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "by claims … that somehow America is disengaging from the world — this myth that we are pulling back or giving up or standing down." The secretary of state, whose website keeps a running tally of the miles he has flown since taking the job (320,961 as of Friday), insisted that nothing could be further from the truth.
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John Kerry gazes at the Swiss Alps during a helicopter ride from Davos to Zurich on Jan. 25. According to the running tally on the State Department website, Kerry has flown 320,961 miles since becoming secretary of state a year ago.
"The only person more surprised than I am by the myth of this disengagement," he said, "is the Air Force pilot who flies the secretary of state's plane."
I must say I would be perplexed if I thought Kerry were truly perplexed. For at the start of the sixth year of Barack Obama's presidency, the United States is indisputably less influential, less esteemed, and less assertive than it was on Jan. 20, 2009. America remains the world's great military and cultural superpower, but anyone can see that its profile on the international stage has been deliberately reduced.
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Kerry is certainly a hard worker. He keeps busy; he racks up the miles. But busyness is not effectiveness. It is no myth that US foreign policy in recent years has been premised on the conviction that Washington must intervene less and be constrained more. The Obama administration may call this "leading from behind" or "pressing the reset button" or having "more flexibility." It may praise itself for recognizing that there are "Good Reasons to be Humble," as Princeton's Anne-Marie Slaughter — who would later be tapped by Obama as the State Department's director of policy planning — argued in a 2008 essay. The world sees it as retreat, and reacts accordingly.
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To be fair, this is what many Americans say they want. In a Pew opinion survey released in December, 52 percent of respondents endorsed the view that "the US should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." Pew has been measuring public backing for that view since 1964. Never before has it commanded majority support.
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But a more modest and deferential America has become a less respected America. Power, too, abhors a vacuum. As the United States has backed away from the world's danger zones, its enemies have grown more brazen and aggressive. When Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama's explicit "red line" on chemical weapons last year, the president and his secretary of state issued fierce threats — and then didn't carry them out. Damascus gloated at the time over a "historic American retreat." Five months later, the Assad regime is more entrenched than it was, and has found fresh ways to slaughter and terrorize its victims.
Obama came to office promising to pull all US forces from Iraq — a promise he fulfilled with the assurance that it would "strengthen American leadership around the world." But having failed to renegotiate a status-of-forces agreement that would allow at least some US troops to remain, Washington's leverage in Iraq evaporated. Result? With America's pacifying influence gone, al-Qaeda and its allies are on the march, not only detonating car bombs and recapturing cities like Fallujah that the US "surge" helped liberate, but expanding their mayhem over Iraq's borders into Syria and Lebanon as well.
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Al-Qaeda and its allies, no longer restrained by a pacifying US presence in Iraq, are again on the march, detonating car bombs and taking control of key cities in Anbar Province, including Fallujah.
What government worries more today about crossing the United States than it did in 2008? Russia under Vladimir Putin doesn't, as it has demonstrated in numerous ways, from granting asylum to Edward Snowden to intimidating Ukraine to harassing US Ambassador Michael McFaul. China doesn't, to judge from its belligerent declaration of an air-defense identification zone over the East China Sea, or its crackdown on American journalists.
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Iran certainly doesn't: In the wake of the interim nuclear deal that Obama and Kerry hail as such a breakthrough, Iran's president cranked up anti-American demonstrations to their shrillest level in years, and calmly boasted on CNN that "not under any circumstances" will a single Iranian centrifuge be dismantled.
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Friends and foes alike look at the United States today and see a powerful nation comfortable with its impotence and — so far, at least — willing to accept the new world disorder that such impotence leads to. We have been here before, and we have always had to learn the hard way that American retreat is not cost-free. Letting other countries "get along the best they can" may sound appealing in the abstract. In the real world, we invariably regret it.
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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