Random Nuclear Strikes

Nothing really to say that I didn’t say yesterday on this assignment. Except maybe that, while I attempted to keep the blogger in me restrained for the assignment, I failed in a couple places and let the snark stay where it was spewed.

Conversely, I absolutely had to hold back the actual vitriol, and therefore didn’t crush Mr. Doyle (though I may have accused him of agitprop).

I hope you enjoy reading what I submitted to the Professor.

As with the other assignments, I put in links to my sources instead of footnotes, and my grade for the paper is after the block quote. I’ve included a couple of extra links at the bottom of the page that I didn’t end up using but thought that y’all might find handy in the future.

Enjoy!

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This is the big one. The Lab where I got to pick the topic and find an article I wished to “critique” within one of the “scientific journals” at the college’s library.

I chose “The Roots of Homicide” by Rodger Doyle, which was published in the October, 2000 issue of Scientific American and decided I was going to make it pertinent to the course by classifying and titling it as “Violence in American Culture versus other Industrialized Nations”.

Essentially, Mr. Doyle’s conclusion is that the availability of lawfully owned firearms leads to high rates of homicide.

You know that is bunk. I know that is bunk. So I went about proving it.

This article contained a map of the western industrialized nations in the northern hemisphere that I can’t seem to get to load from the PDF file. It also included Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, but excluded Mexico and everything south of it, none of the Middle East, no part of the African continent, and no other part of Asia besides the already mentioned Japan.

Each nation was color-coded as per their national homicide rate. Except for America, which not only had it’s national homicide rate listed, but was also broken down state-by-state with each state being color-coded. Sources were the UN and the FBI.

I’ve posted the article below the fold for you to read, absorb and laugh at today. Tomorrow I’ll post my essay.

One thing to remember, I found no pro-2nd Amendment Rights articles in any of the scientific journals at my disposal within the college’s rather large selection. I found five anti-2nd Amendment Rights articles in 20 minutes of searching, and chose this one because it was one of the two most vomit inducing and definitely the most insipid.

This is the 2A equivalent of the Global Warming Death Cult’s “Peer-Review” process: If there are no pro-2nd Amendment Rights articles in scientific journals, then apparently, no one supports 2nd Amendment Rights, and consequently, there must not be a 2nd Amendment Right amongst the “respectable scientific community”.

Do try and enjoy.

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Yay! The final paper before “The Big One”.

Boo! Hiss! The topic wants me to write about how rich countries can help poor countries (again).

Being tired of this topic, I refuse to answer.

The Assignments: Squatter Settlements & The Causes of Poverty

Rural-to-urban migration in Latin American cities often results in large squatter settlements surrounding the city. Where did the residents of these slums come from, and why did they move? Who owns the land they move onto? When did this phenomenon begin, and for what reasons? At what rate are these squatter settlements still growing?

Many work in the informal economy and live in informal housing. What does this actually mean, in practical terms? Are the urban poor better off or worse off compared to their rural counterparts?

When one city is much larger than any other, it tends to attract more migrants. How successful are governmental attempts to create second big cities, and do these secondary cities reduce the migration pressure on the largest city?

What other programs have governments implemented to address the problems of the peripheral poor, or what programs or policies might be helpful? Mention as many ideas as you can, keeping in mind the limited capital resources.

However simplistic, unfair, and wrong it may be to divide the world into the rich and the poor, it would be just as unreasonable to deny the stark differences between what we call the first world and what we call the third world. Why is the developing world—most of Central and South America, Africa, and Asia—poor?

Your answer should incorporate many of the themes from preceding chapters: Topography, natural resources, relative location, climate, weather, and soils, population, culture, religion, language, political system, regional organizations, economic system, colonial history, foreign policy, and global trade.

Comment meaningfully on as many of these as possible and suggest, if you can, which, if any, are more important than others.

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