Once again...nothing to be done but prayers and thoughts
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marmott
Active member
Sims 4 modder makes $6,000 per month peddling digital drugs
https://www.techspot.com/news/73316-sims-4-modder-makes-6000-month-peddling-digital.html
The mod is called "Basemental," and it introduces marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and MDMA (aka Molly, X, Ecstasy) to the game, which the sims can buy, consume, and sell. It also added a "drug dealer" trait so you can create a sim that can supply the illicit contraband. The mod even has a relatively complex system that not only makes the sims act high, hungover, or crashed out, but also allows them to become addicted, overdose (fatally and nonfatally), and get arrested for drug possession.
https://www.techspot.com/news/73316-sims-4-modder-makes-6000-month-peddling-digital.html
The mod is called "Basemental," and it introduces marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and MDMA (aka Molly, X, Ecstasy) to the game, which the sims can buy, consume, and sell. It also added a "drug dealer" trait so you can create a sim that can supply the illicit contraband. The mod even has a relatively complex system that not only makes the sims act high, hungover, or crashed out, but also allows them to become addicted, overdose (fatally and nonfatally), and get arrested for drug possession.
Burn That Belly
New member
x
irvinehomeowner
Well-known member
marmott said:
Uhhh. I did mention other media in my post.
momopi
Well-known member
As I've said previously, there is no accurate statistics on firearm ownership because we don't have a comprehensive system of firearm registration in every state or nation-wide. In California for example, DOJ did not even retain information on long gun transactions until 2014. Prior to 1968 (GCA) serial numbers weren't even required for firearms, and only recently did we pass laws requiring serial numbers for home made firearms.
The kind of "statistics" that are often cited are compiled from telephone surveys. They're inaccurate due to low level of public trust to these kind of cold calls. If someone cold called me to ask what's in my gun safe, I'd tell them I don't own any and hang up. Pro-gun rights publications are inclined to exaggerate ownership numbers versus pro-gun control outlets, like those under Bloomberg LP, are likely to understate the ownership numbers.
When Gallup did surveys on gun ownership, the results came out like this:
1983: 40%
1993: 51%
1999: 34%
2012: 45%
2015: 43%
Citing survey results as facts and figures is wishful thinking at best, pathological lying at worst. Realistically I wouldn't even know how to calculate the number of 80% lower receivers sold and assembled off-record. I've seen them advertised for as low as $33, complete kits for $60 w/jig kits. When 3D milling machines become affordable people can just point and click to mill their own components at home.
The kind of "statistics" that are often cited are compiled from telephone surveys. They're inaccurate due to low level of public trust to these kind of cold calls. If someone cold called me to ask what's in my gun safe, I'd tell them I don't own any and hang up. Pro-gun rights publications are inclined to exaggerate ownership numbers versus pro-gun control outlets, like those under Bloomberg LP, are likely to understate the ownership numbers.
When Gallup did surveys on gun ownership, the results came out like this:
1983: 40%
1993: 51%
1999: 34%
2012: 45%
2015: 43%
Citing survey results as facts and figures is wishful thinking at best, pathological lying at worst. Realistically I wouldn't even know how to calculate the number of 80% lower receivers sold and assembled off-record. I've seen them advertised for as low as $33, complete kits for $60 w/jig kits. When 3D milling machines become affordable people can just point and click to mill their own components at home.
The more deleterious effect on mental health that I can see is older citizens watching too much Fox News ...
A Rigorous Scientific Look Into The 'Fox News Effect'
In 2012, a Fairleigh Dickinson University survey reported that Fox News viewers were less informed about current events than people who didn't follow the news at all. The survey had asked current events questions like "Which party has the most seats in the House of Representatives?" and also asked what source of news people followed. The Fox viewers' current events scores were in the basement. This finding was immediately trumpeted by the liberal media?by Fox, not so much?and has since become known as the Fox News effect. It conjures the image of Fox News as a black hole that sucks facts out of viewers' heads.
I have done similar surveys, both of current events and more general knowledge. In my research too, Fox News viewers scored the lowest of over 30 popular news sources (though Fox viewers did at least score better than those saying they didn't follow the news). The chart?s horizontal black lines with tick marks indicate the margins of statistical error. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a news satire, had the best-informed viewers.
Stereotypes aside, it's not that Fox News viewers live in a bubble and get all their news from that one source. The average Fox viewer listed 4.5 other source of news they regularly followed. Many also got news from the major broadcast networks, Facebook, and the liberal news channel MSNBC. Nevertheless, those who listed Fox News as one of their news sources had overall lower levels of knowledge on the factual questions. Fox viewers were less likely to know the capital of Canada, the religion of the Dalai Lama, or the size of the Federal budget. They couldn't find South Carolina on map or name the second digit of pi.
The Fox News effect is a correlation. It doesn't prove that watching Fox News causes people to be ill-informed.
Causes are much trickier to establish. I will give my guesses (along with the warning that they're only guesses). The first thing to realize is that every news medium has its own audience demographics. It's no secret to advertisers that the average Fox News viewer has less formal education and income than the average New York Times reader.
The Times is urban and urbane; Fox is small-town/suburban and populist. Fox competes directly against hundreds of other cable channels and has established a specialized niche in its media ecology. Fox trades in stories about the venality of big government, liberal overreach and little-guy heroes of the heartland. A large share of Fox stories deftly push emotional buttons (lest the viewer push the buttons on his or her remote?)
This format has been successful, but it has drawbacks. There's a lot that goes on in the world that doesn't easily fit the Fox template. There are important stories that don't make anyone angry, prove liberals are evil or otherwise carry an emotional punch. Fox viewers get less of them. Fox News is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up red meat. A more balanced diet might be healthier in the long run.
A Rigorous Scientific Look Into The 'Fox News Effect'
In 2012, a Fairleigh Dickinson University survey reported that Fox News viewers were less informed about current events than people who didn't follow the news at all. The survey had asked current events questions like "Which party has the most seats in the House of Representatives?" and also asked what source of news people followed. The Fox viewers' current events scores were in the basement. This finding was immediately trumpeted by the liberal media?by Fox, not so much?and has since become known as the Fox News effect. It conjures the image of Fox News as a black hole that sucks facts out of viewers' heads.
I have done similar surveys, both of current events and more general knowledge. In my research too, Fox News viewers scored the lowest of over 30 popular news sources (though Fox viewers did at least score better than those saying they didn't follow the news). The chart?s horizontal black lines with tick marks indicate the margins of statistical error. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a news satire, had the best-informed viewers.
Stereotypes aside, it's not that Fox News viewers live in a bubble and get all their news from that one source. The average Fox viewer listed 4.5 other source of news they regularly followed. Many also got news from the major broadcast networks, Facebook, and the liberal news channel MSNBC. Nevertheless, those who listed Fox News as one of their news sources had overall lower levels of knowledge on the factual questions. Fox viewers were less likely to know the capital of Canada, the religion of the Dalai Lama, or the size of the Federal budget. They couldn't find South Carolina on map or name the second digit of pi.
The Fox News effect is a correlation. It doesn't prove that watching Fox News causes people to be ill-informed.
Causes are much trickier to establish. I will give my guesses (along with the warning that they're only guesses). The first thing to realize is that every news medium has its own audience demographics. It's no secret to advertisers that the average Fox News viewer has less formal education and income than the average New York Times reader.
The Times is urban and urbane; Fox is small-town/suburban and populist. Fox competes directly against hundreds of other cable channels and has established a specialized niche in its media ecology. Fox trades in stories about the venality of big government, liberal overreach and little-guy heroes of the heartland. A large share of Fox stories deftly push emotional buttons (lest the viewer push the buttons on his or her remote?)
This format has been successful, but it has drawbacks. There's a lot that goes on in the world that doesn't easily fit the Fox template. There are important stories that don't make anyone angry, prove liberals are evil or otherwise carry an emotional punch. Fox viewers get less of them. Fox News is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up red meat. A more balanced diet might be healthier in the long run.
This is an older article before OReilly and Ailes were fired ... from a competing outlet -- but most of what they say here rings true ..
Fox News and the anxious elderly
"Viewers don't want to be informed. Viewers want to feel informed."
Those are the words of Chet Collier, one of the founders of Fox News, as quoted in Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Roger Ailes, the network's chief.
Mission apparently accomplished: Fox is the most-watched cable news network, and yet, some surveys suggest that people who rely on Fox as their primary information source know less about current events than people who watch no news at all.
But to jab at Fox for inaccuracy is to miss Fox's purpose. Fox has created an information community. We used to say, "Everybody's entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." In a mass media age, what counted as "fact" was defined by a few great national institutions: a small group of prestigious newspapers, a pair of leading news magazines, a trio of television broadcasters.
Dissenters had a difficult time reaching any kind of large audience -- or even identifying who their audience might be.
Advancing technology opened new possibilities, and Sherman's biography deftly tells the story of how it happened.
The launch of CNN inspired NBC to create a cable news channel of its own, CNBC. Roger Ailes -- a former TV producer who had emerged as the most successful Republican campaign consultant of the 1980s -- was hired to run CNBC. After he lost an internal power struggle, Ailes joined Rupert Murdoch's Fox network.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Before Fox, news programmers had struggled with the question of what their product was. Did it include health information, and if so, how much? Weather? Financial information? Human interest? Political opinion? Ailes built his new channel upon a very different question: who is my product for?
The largest generation in American history, the baby boomers, were reaching deep middle age by the mid-1990s. They were beginning to share an experience familiar to all who pass age 50: living in a country very different from the one they had been born into.
Fox offered them a new virtual environment in which they could feel more at home than they did in the outside world. Fox was carefully designed to look like a TV show from the 1970s: no holograms, no urban hipster studios, lots of primary colors.
In other respects too, Fox offered a path back to a vanishing past. Here was a place in which men were firmly in charge, and in which women were valued most for their physical attractiveness. Here was a place in which ethnic minorities appeared only in secondary roles -- and then, with brave exceptions, only to affirm the rightness of the opinions of the white males in the primary roles.
Back in the 1970s, students of public opinion had noticed a strange anomaly: in the very years, 1967-1973, when trust in government, business, the military and organized religion most sharply declined, trust in television rose. Some speculated that TV as an institution had an inherently adversarial relationship to other institutions: TV enhanced its own credibility by denigrating the credibility of everything and everyone that wasn't TV.
That theory was coded into the DNA of Fox. Here, on this station, the chosen market segment could enjoy security and validation. Out there was depicted a hostile world of threats, danger, crime, and decaying values.
In the nearly two decades since the launch of Fox, the average age of the viewers has increased -- and so has their alienation from a country that twice elected Barack Obama to the presidency.
Economic prospects have narrowed and darkened for middle-income people. First the stock market, then the housing market, then the gold market bubbled and burst -- taking the savings of the unwary with them. Americans in their 60s have reason to worry about the stability of Social Security and Medicare.
New claims on government assistance -- unemployment insurance, health care spending on under-65s -- can be seen as drains on resources that would otherwise flow to the over-65s.
The question famously associated with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, "Who's looking out for you?" resonates especially powerfully in the ears of the economically anxious elderly in a rapidly changing country.
Gabriel Sherman tells eyebrow-raising stories about Roger Ailes. Always a man who kept enemies' lists, Ailes has -- in Sherman's account -- succumbed to increasing apprehension as he has gained increasing power. His office is secured with a double set of locked and coded doors. His country home features a panic room. Former employees report being followed and suspect their e-mail has been read. The anxiety that permeates Fox News' broadcasts emanates authentically from the man at the top. Yet it speaks also to something pervasive in Fox's audience too.
Like talk radio before it, but even more intensely, Fox offered information programmed not as a stream of randomly connected facts, but as a means of self-definition and a refuge from a hostile external reality. Fox is a news medium that functions as a social medium.
How this new kind of TV news was built, and at what price, is the story painstakingly narrated by Gabriel Sherman in his indispensable book. What to think of this new kind of information entity is up to you. He only reports. You'll have to decide.
Fox News and the anxious elderly
"Viewers don't want to be informed. Viewers want to feel informed."
Those are the words of Chet Collier, one of the founders of Fox News, as quoted in Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Roger Ailes, the network's chief.
Mission apparently accomplished: Fox is the most-watched cable news network, and yet, some surveys suggest that people who rely on Fox as their primary information source know less about current events than people who watch no news at all.
But to jab at Fox for inaccuracy is to miss Fox's purpose. Fox has created an information community. We used to say, "Everybody's entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." In a mass media age, what counted as "fact" was defined by a few great national institutions: a small group of prestigious newspapers, a pair of leading news magazines, a trio of television broadcasters.
Dissenters had a difficult time reaching any kind of large audience -- or even identifying who their audience might be.
Advancing technology opened new possibilities, and Sherman's biography deftly tells the story of how it happened.
The launch of CNN inspired NBC to create a cable news channel of its own, CNBC. Roger Ailes -- a former TV producer who had emerged as the most successful Republican campaign consultant of the 1980s -- was hired to run CNBC. After he lost an internal power struggle, Ailes joined Rupert Murdoch's Fox network.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Before Fox, news programmers had struggled with the question of what their product was. Did it include health information, and if so, how much? Weather? Financial information? Human interest? Political opinion? Ailes built his new channel upon a very different question: who is my product for?
The largest generation in American history, the baby boomers, were reaching deep middle age by the mid-1990s. They were beginning to share an experience familiar to all who pass age 50: living in a country very different from the one they had been born into.
Fox offered them a new virtual environment in which they could feel more at home than they did in the outside world. Fox was carefully designed to look like a TV show from the 1970s: no holograms, no urban hipster studios, lots of primary colors.
In other respects too, Fox offered a path back to a vanishing past. Here was a place in which men were firmly in charge, and in which women were valued most for their physical attractiveness. Here was a place in which ethnic minorities appeared only in secondary roles -- and then, with brave exceptions, only to affirm the rightness of the opinions of the white males in the primary roles.
Back in the 1970s, students of public opinion had noticed a strange anomaly: in the very years, 1967-1973, when trust in government, business, the military and organized religion most sharply declined, trust in television rose. Some speculated that TV as an institution had an inherently adversarial relationship to other institutions: TV enhanced its own credibility by denigrating the credibility of everything and everyone that wasn't TV.
That theory was coded into the DNA of Fox. Here, on this station, the chosen market segment could enjoy security and validation. Out there was depicted a hostile world of threats, danger, crime, and decaying values.
In the nearly two decades since the launch of Fox, the average age of the viewers has increased -- and so has their alienation from a country that twice elected Barack Obama to the presidency.
Economic prospects have narrowed and darkened for middle-income people. First the stock market, then the housing market, then the gold market bubbled and burst -- taking the savings of the unwary with them. Americans in their 60s have reason to worry about the stability of Social Security and Medicare.
New claims on government assistance -- unemployment insurance, health care spending on under-65s -- can be seen as drains on resources that would otherwise flow to the over-65s.
The question famously associated with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, "Who's looking out for you?" resonates especially powerfully in the ears of the economically anxious elderly in a rapidly changing country.
Gabriel Sherman tells eyebrow-raising stories about Roger Ailes. Always a man who kept enemies' lists, Ailes has -- in Sherman's account -- succumbed to increasing apprehension as he has gained increasing power. His office is secured with a double set of locked and coded doors. His country home features a panic room. Former employees report being followed and suspect their e-mail has been read. The anxiety that permeates Fox News' broadcasts emanates authentically from the man at the top. Yet it speaks also to something pervasive in Fox's audience too.
Like talk radio before it, but even more intensely, Fox offered information programmed not as a stream of randomly connected facts, but as a means of self-definition and a refuge from a hostile external reality. Fox is a news medium that functions as a social medium.
How this new kind of TV news was built, and at what price, is the story painstakingly narrated by Gabriel Sherman in his indispensable book. What to think of this new kind of information entity is up to you. He only reports. You'll have to decide.
momopi said:
Good post
and herein lies the problem -- if you can measure and track gun ownership , how do you even begin to solve this complex problem. We can register cars , boats , motorcycles, and track them down --- why cant we do the same for all guns sold.
Criminals will always find a way to buy illegal guns just as criminals will find a way to buy illegal cars. But that doesn't mean we throw our hands up and stop doing anything about it.
morekaos said:
Of course, the gun confiscation advocates know that only a tiny fraction of gun deaths are related to assault rifle use. They talk incessantly about assault rifles despite their virtual irrelevance in gun deaths because they think it is a photogenic prop to disguise their real agenda which is to ban all guns. Assault rifles are used as the camel's nose under the tent which they hope to use to bring the whole camel into the tent. Same way Dems use DACA as a photogenic prop when DACA only represents a tiny percentage of total illegal immigrants. Dems hope that DACA will be the camel's nose that gets the whole camel (all illegals) into the tent.
What is the rationale for non-military/law enforcement owning an AR-15 type weapon, other than it's a very effective weapon? The statistics on deaths caused by long rifles do not reflect that a single person with an AR-15 type weapon can kill many with very little difficulty. The AR-15 is easy to shoot, easy to modify, and easy to maintain, as per the needs of the military it was designed for. It should not be in the hands of the general public. If limiting the sales of these weapons will prevent one school shooting, or even decrease the number of deaths in an event, it is worth it.
The truth is, children are dying. Many more are traumatized forever. The argument that evil people will find a way doesn't fly with me. Maybe if it took a few weeks longer for this kid to get a weapon, someone could have caught him. These families are shattered, we owe it to them to do something. I think it needs to be addressed on multiple fronts, from gun control laws, to armed guards at schools, even to changing the way we design schools. It really is only a matter of time before something happens much closer to home.
The truth is, children are dying. Many more are traumatized forever. The argument that evil people will find a way doesn't fly with me. Maybe if it took a few weeks longer for this kid to get a weapon, someone could have caught him. These families are shattered, we owe it to them to do something. I think it needs to be addressed on multiple fronts, from gun control laws, to armed guards at schools, even to changing the way we design schools. It really is only a matter of time before something happens much closer to home.
wrigley said:
AR 15 civilian owners are a protected , coddled class
This is the affirmative action hiding in plain sight
The most mind boggling stat is 3 percent of Americans own half the guns in this country
That 3 percent has more power than images of dead kids and their crying parents on the TV screen every few weeks
Are we still a democracy ?
morekaos
Well-known member
When Will We Have the Guts to Link Fatherlessness to School Shootings?
Now that the gun control advocates have had their fifteen minutes of fame, let?s start focusing on the real issues impacting the rise in school shootings since that infamous day in Columbine in 1999. Issue number one that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge: fatherlessness. Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters.
Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the new book The Boy Crisis, explains:
Minimal or no father involvement, whether due to divorce, death, or imprisonment, is common to Adam Lanza, Elliott Rodgers, Dylan Roof and Stephen Paddock.
In the case of 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, he was adopted at birth. His adoptive dad died when Nikolas was much younger, and doubtless the challenges of this fatherlessness was compounded by the death of his adoptive mom three and a half months ago.
The rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011. We blame guns, violence in the media, violence in video games, and poor family values. Each is a plausible player. But our daughters live in the same homes, with the same access to the same guns, video games, and media, and are raised with the same family values. Our daughters are not killing. Our sons are.
But boys with significant father involvement are not doing these shootings. Without dads as role models, boys? testosterone is not well channeled. The boy experiences a sense of purposelessness, a lack of boundary enforcement, rudderlessness, and often withdraws into video games and video porn. At worst, when boys? testosterone is not well-channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world?s most destructive forces. When boys? testosterone is well channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world?s most constructive forces.
As Terry Brennan, co-founder of Leading Women for Shared Parenting, notes:
72 percent of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers; the same for 60 percent of all rapists.
70 percent of juveniles in state institutions grew up in single- or no-parent situations
The number of single-parent households is a good predictor of violent crime in a community, while poverty rate is not.
[url]https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/will-guts-link-fatherlessness-school-shootings/[/url]
Now that the gun control advocates have had their fifteen minutes of fame, let?s start focusing on the real issues impacting the rise in school shootings since that infamous day in Columbine in 1999. Issue number one that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge: fatherlessness. Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters.
Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the new book The Boy Crisis, explains:
Minimal or no father involvement, whether due to divorce, death, or imprisonment, is common to Adam Lanza, Elliott Rodgers, Dylan Roof and Stephen Paddock.
In the case of 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, he was adopted at birth. His adoptive dad died when Nikolas was much younger, and doubtless the challenges of this fatherlessness was compounded by the death of his adoptive mom three and a half months ago.
The rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011. We blame guns, violence in the media, violence in video games, and poor family values. Each is a plausible player. But our daughters live in the same homes, with the same access to the same guns, video games, and media, and are raised with the same family values. Our daughters are not killing. Our sons are.
But boys with significant father involvement are not doing these shootings. Without dads as role models, boys? testosterone is not well channeled. The boy experiences a sense of purposelessness, a lack of boundary enforcement, rudderlessness, and often withdraws into video games and video porn. At worst, when boys? testosterone is not well-channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world?s most destructive forces. When boys? testosterone is well channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world?s most constructive forces.
As Terry Brennan, co-founder of Leading Women for Shared Parenting, notes:
72 percent of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers; the same for 60 percent of all rapists.
70 percent of juveniles in state institutions grew up in single- or no-parent situations
The number of single-parent households is a good predictor of violent crime in a community, while poverty rate is not.
[url]https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/will-guts-link-fatherlessness-school-shootings/[/url]
Loco_local
Active member
When will we admit that every single mass shooter had 46 chromosomes? You never hear of someone with 47 doing something this heinous. Someone should conduct a study and publish a paper on this topic.
morekaos
Well-known member
Loco_local said:
Maybe...Hollywood thought it important enough to make a show about it...
Glee's School Shooter Has Down Syndrome
Last night's especially very special episode of Glee took on the hot-button topic of school shooting. A series of gunshots put everyone in William McKinley High School in lock down. No one was actually shot, so the episode was kind of inert and lacking the sort of catharsis that would come from watching people on Glee die.
In the end, it turned out that Becky did it. Becky is Glee's resident character with Down syndrome.
http://gawker.com/5994515/glees-school-shooter-has-down-syndrome
If anyone still doesn?t believe how far down the rabbit hole or abyss we now are ?- last few days you are seeing many Americans defend a foreign power who launched an attack our country and at the same time attack and insult teen survivors of a US school shooting for discussing policies with which they disagree.