>> ^Lodurr:
I'm an open-minded guy, and non-religious, and I've been doubtful of my own position based on who else has the same position I do. I agree with Huckabee, but for none of the reasons he gave.
I look at the argument differently than both Stewart and Huckabee. We have to examine what the purpose of our government recognizing marriages and unions is in the first place. I think its purpose was to help couples procreate by giving them the money to support children. We still have positive population growth in the US, but all the countries that have or are moving towards negative population growth have a real need to grant incentives for couples to procreate.
With that in mind, why should the government grant the same financial incentives to same-sex couples?


What does marriage, in it's current context as a figurative and binding resolution of love and commitment have to do with procreation though? If you want to promote population growth then by all means provide tax credits to responsible child bearing couples. Not to mention birth rates have far less to do with whether couples tie the knot or not (ahaha), as negatively in relation with affluence and living standards, and cultural influences among many others factors.

I don't think 6 was racist. He's pointing out, correctly, that certain ethnic/cultural groups have much higher birth rates, and that's something that is generally good for a developed country.

5 wasn't that bad. 4 wasn't racist. 3 wasn't racist.

>> ^Farhad2000:

Who exactly are these high Racial Resentment Index voters? A majority, 61 percent, have less than a four-year college education, many are older (44 percent were over the age of 60 compared to just 18 percent under the age of 40) and nearly half (46 percent) live in the South.
from Newsweek.

You seem to have conveniently side step the points we both raise, bringing the issue back to whether or not a fetus constituents a human life.

The standard question of whether one sees a fetus as an unborn baby or as a human being is pretty standard pro-life argument, once someone starts to clarify that they don't see fetuses as human beings its easy to call us murders. Its not surprising that such arguments almost always stem from a religious stand point devoid of scientific or medical reasoning.

But who determines when life starts really? The definition of such is murky, some say that its from the point of conception yet scientifically that is preposterous since there is a lack of consciousness when cells simply start to subdivide.

The same analogy is seen in brain dead patients, remember Terri Shavio? Was she technically alive then? She was a human being but totally brain dead. Were we committing murder when disconnecting her from the machine? A fetus is much the same relying totally on the birth mother for life.

For me looking over what it means to be alive from a scientific and philosophical standpoint, a fetus is not a human being, its a forming human, not totally developed until the latter stages of pregnancy. I seen various attempts by pro-Lifers to convince me otherwise but come on do you recall being in the womb? You didn't because the neurons in your brain didn't even form then, your eyes were still developing its a reason they refer to a pregnancy as bun in the oven. But then again I come from a medical family.

But that doesn't matter me much, I doubt I can convince anyone with my own views but what we can agree is on the wider social aspects about what abolishing abortion means.

As I mentioned before if pro-lifers want abortion to be gone then they have to agree to adopt, raise, cloth and educate each child that is not aborted. Or pay the high taxes that result to support a first class foster and social assistance program for these children. Not aborting someone but making them live a incomplete existence through lack of a family, education, opportunities and a good upbringing for me is worse then abortion because then you are really fucking up someones existence.

Furthermore living in a world that is close to hitting a 7 billion population mark, with most of it living in the 3rd world with children who possess no parents through war, famine, disease, poverty and so on. I see no problem in curbing the birth rates through abortion. If Pro-Lifers are so concerned they should really go to Africa and adopt some kids and give them a shot at a normal life, they are already born, trying to make their way in this life. We don't have to argue if they are alive or not.

But simply saying abortion is wrong and not looking at the wider picture of where humanity is as a race in the 21st century on Earth is narrow minded.

Oh, and its not actually flimsy logic its a study that has been conducted in the 1940s, 70s and most recently in 2001 within the US, Canada and Australia that correlates legalized abortion with drops in crime.

Pretty lame.
Is this based on high birth rates 9 months after the superbowl?

I have seen another documentary about Russia where they said that they are experiencing a low birth rate and have a large population suffering from aids. It seems like such a double edged sword...on one hand they need more people to keep the economy going, yet no one wants to have a child in such conditions. It's really sad when you look at everything that is going on there maybe Kasparov will bring new hope.

Current Excel/PivotTable I'm working from, but I am going to put into SQL once I'm done playing in Excel, as Excel isn't powerful enough for true multidimensional analysis:

http://jp.infinitedev.net/CIAWorldFactbook.xls

In particular, take note of the worksheet: "BD Rate" which is a direct correlation of birth and death rates in all of the countries in the survey for which BD rates were available.

Source directly derived from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
in conjunction with the agents at the CIA's Office of Public Affairs.

(P.s. - if you have a statistic of the U.S.'s Death Rate PRIOR to private insurance/health care, please post it, along with source - that is really the only place you might see a difference, and it's likely that difference would not correlate with insurance/health care, but with birth rates and total population.

Comparing death rates for private/public insurance/health care with a different country is like comparing apples to slate granite - it's in both poor taste, and not an accurate statement that insurance/health care would have ANY correlation whatsoever, from one country to another, with death rates, as death rates are dependent on far too many local variables, like the country's birth rate, population, and area[not to mention things like HIV infection rate, etc].

In other words, we need a baseline for corrected death rate PRIOR to the implementation of private insurance in order to possibly make the correlation between insurance and death rate - my guess is that it wouldn't be more than a 1/1000 difference + or - our current death rate, given our birth rate and our population/density.

Seeing as how the CIA World Factbooks downloadable from the Office of Public Affairs only dates back to 2000, and the implementation of private insurance in the United States dates back to the Nixon Administration, I do not have the death rate/1000 population prior to the implementation of private insurance in the United States.)

Actually, I'm looking at the trend curve right now, and it's very very interesting - only 6 countries are outside of the Birthrate:Deathrate trend curve(provided by the very same CIA World Factbook that you state your "we'd see an impact on the death rates" quote above from), and 6 countries are outside of a Population:Area trend, too (this is from a pool of 250 countries the CIA has gathered Birthrate:Deathrate and Population:Area statistics on).

Sorry, not seeing any correlation between insurance/healthcare and death rates. As a matter of fact, Iraq only has a 5.26/1000 population death rate - albeit they have different population and area compared to us, but that is what these statistics are made to be used for - statistical analytics.

If anything, you can blame death rate on birth rate, population, and area(or birth rate and population density, if you want to go so far - Europe has a 10/1000:10/1000, or essentially a 1:1 correlation with birth and death rate, but they have about 113 people/sq. km - Poland also has a 1:1 correlation with birth and death rate, and they have 123 people/sq. km. Here in the U.S., we have a 1.7:1 birth/death rate, and we have around 30.65 people/sq. km - which is actually slightly lower than trend, as many other countries with less than 40 people/sq. km have 2.x:1 ratios).

As for a "rare enough issue" - watch "Sicko"....yeah, I hate the guy too, but he covers a couple stories at various hospitals and shelters where the staff state those "rarities" as common occurances.

Taxes: Case law must follow the Constitution, as stated under Amendment IX: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Unlike other countries, case law, by the very law of this Republic, can not supercede the Constitution in such a way as you state, as "The enumeration(interpretation - described in prior posts) of the Constitution shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" IN CONTEXT OF Amendment X: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

One of the powers NOT DELEGATED to the United States by the Constitution, was direct taxation of American citizens. This is WHY Title 26 HAS to state that the tax will only be applied toward international commerce, and foreign citizens working in the United States. It's buried, but if you have read all of U.S.C. Title 26, you'll see it in there.

"The Fed" may be how you think of as the "fourth branch of government," but, if you read the Constitution, which established this country, and set the rules by which all forms of government within the United States must operate, you will notice that there is absolutely NO necessity for a "fourth branch of government" - the Congress has the power to coin money, and the states have the power to choose whether to use it or not.

Have you taken a look around the United States lately? Generally, those that you are labeling as "too lazy or incompetent to get a creative job" had jobs they liked for quite a while - about 20-30 years, in many cases. The factories that they helped to start, or that they chose to work for, and studied specific schools of trade to get jobs in, have closed down. Much of the stuff they made is not even made in this country any longer.

Of course, you have your specialty Machining(CNC, Milling, etc.) companies that still exist in this country, but if you know anyone in that industry, you know how much they're struggling.

Heck, if you want, I have friends that were working for Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies that could tell you on what specific DAY they lost most of the money in their stocks.

Lotta manipulation out there, man - even to the people that had the discipline to work somewhere for 20-30 years and decide NOT to retire...and a lot of them are working at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Home Depot right now....heck, a lot of the guys I know worked on some of the first RAM in the world - designed it from scratch, and they're working for places like that right now. It's revolting, sir....very revolting to watch.

I'm guessing the birth rate soared in 1972 due to this song alone.

Right off the bat averaging from 1925 to 1965 seems strange... great depression and war and what-not... "golden years (4 decades?) of immigration," yeah well, I guess thats a matter of opinion (interned Japanese probably would disagree, for example). He then proceeds to comment that immigrants were "never so welcome" and "never did so well" as in this 40 year period, which is the polar opposite of something anyone giving a talk about numbers and statistics would say. He avoids any citation and, importantly, doesn't present any statements within the context of the times (US industrial age expansion, beginning of the corporation, etc.).

So at one minute in I'm already questioning everything this guy has to say because of his sweeping, unsubstantiated, 'those were the days...and those days were obviously only great become we had just a few immigrants' comments.

He then proceeds to show growth charts illustrating immigration (which is 0 at 1965?) doubling the birth rate of American children, and somehow doubling the strain on hopitals and sewer systems, despite being maybe 5-10% more people... at which point I called bullshit and stopped writing this comment.

daphne, good suggestion.

I was also in a class that was tasked with writing a paper on the world's overpopulation problem. We were to solve it. There are only two ways to do so... reduce the birth rate or increase the death rate. We were told to ignore any moral or ethical constraints we might place upon ourselves and come up with a solution that was economically and technologically viable. Many people, including me, came up with a variation of some sort on the Soylent Green scenario combined with a Logan's Run-ish lottery system. Not only an abundant food source, but paid for itself through the sale of "product" as fertilizer, and money raised by allowing those who could afford it the opportunity to buy out of the lottery, or they could spend less by hiring someone else to take their chances in the lottery for them, so there was some trickle-down, of a sort. Anyway, tired and rambling... must sleep now.