jkm2500

Hey Professor, I am confused as to what this has to do with this thread. I am also confused, because you are inferring that I at some point in time I said this. Maybe you can straighten things out. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

To say yes, would concede to the same logic that the Brady bill had an effect on crime in the states. I think that it may have a small impact on the overall numbers, but that aint saying much. By looking at the stats on Canada it shows that there are only 30 something million people that live there. If you take a cross section of the US that falls into the same population density I would conjecture that the violent crime rate would be about the same. There isnt any one reason why the crime rate is dropping. It could be said that due to weather patterns in the last 5 years crime is down. Don't claim that this one change is the cause of a trend. I think that there are too many causes to list. Check out the table (it is for the US, but for a similar time frame to show the same correlation could be drawn). It shows that the crime rate is dropping while the number of crimes has actually just gotten back to the starting point. I guess, dont let the numbers fool you. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

What kind of fuel economy do you get when you run this mixture? Where is this amount available? What is the cost? I know that in the long run it would be cheaper for the individual to convert to ethanol. But I dont know what the cost is right now. Here is a crazy idea: We have pipelines to run oil, why not pipe water in from the oceans to produce the agriculture? We wouldnt be producing the crops to be consumed, just processed. Ok next: It has been said(and I could take a while to find a link) that corn can be used twice in the production of ethanol. Once in the distilling process, then it is viable as feed for livestock. Which is turned into manure, which could be used as fertilizer. Feasible? efficient? economical? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

I think that 10% is way too little too late. But I dont know enough about it yet. Ethanol producers in the US can double production at any given moment, and that is just the beginning. We should be pushing for way more than 10% by 2010. GM is working on the hydrogen angle of things. How is that a viable alternative? I dont know of an economical way to produce hydrogen, but I dont claim to be an expert either. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

Why aren't we pursuing ethanol production as a strong alternative to gas. It makes more sense to use a renewable resource, and it won't put the gas companies out of business considering that most ethanol is denatured. SO why not run 75% gasohol? That provides jobs for people right here in the US, keeps the money here in the US, Doesn't it make sense? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

Don't worry about irritating it. I got a fairly big piece done on my shoulder that took several sittings to finish. I jumped the entire time. But, that is definitely up to you.... The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

I disagree with your statement. I think that there are less commited people in the military if you institute the draft. That is bad for everything in the military. Commitment to the war is just that, we commited to see it through to the end. Now whether you like it or not, or whether these parents like it or not, we have a commitment to that right now. To tell your kids to be be un-american or unpatriotic is unethical just because we are in an "unpopular" war. I am of the opinion that there are other countries which would love thier citizenship besides this one. We need to become commited to our country in order to make things better. I will not blow smoke and tell you that gov't is justified in the things that it does. I think that maybe we need new blood in some prominent positions in order to fix things. However, war will always be unpopular. It doesn't matter who is in the whitehouse or congress or whatever. On another note, what do you feel is a justifiable reason to go to war? What would be a popular war? What would be a good reason to watch our sons and daughter go to war, to fight and die for? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

True, the combat arms don't supply a lot of technical skills. The police departments, fire departments, and plenty of civilian employers are looking for the other skills that soldiers learn, like leadership, ability to function in high stress enviroments, and on and on. There are plenty of civilian employers who have active recruiting programs for people transitioning out of the Army, merely because they know that the ex soldiers will show up to work on time. MOS decision in the Army and Air force is up to the Recruit. So if the recruit picks a less desirable civilian equivalent isnt that almost like picking a worthless major in college? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

Bill, I dont think that the draft is the answer to the question either. There is a problem with instituting the draft. The biggest problem is that moral in the military would be decimated. Right now, and in my opinion even though op-tempo is high, the moral is high. Besides there are a lot of perks to join the Army right now. Perks that won't be taken advantage of if there isnt enough publicity. There are too many kids that get out of High School and go on to do little with thier lives. I am not saying that the answer is allowing the recruiters unfettered access to students, however not letting them talk to kids is just not going to work either. On another note. This type of posturing by parents only shows kids that Un-Americanism is OK. I think that if this type of attitude continues, this country that was once great fall apart even further. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

How quickly the American public forgets. Wasn't it a few years ago that CONGRESS voted to send in the troops. In a situation like this what should be done? I say pull the recruiters and the funding. Let the parents pick up the bill for the education. But that wouldn't solve the problem. Any ideas? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

From the NYTimes:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/nyregion/03recruit.html?th&emc=th June 3, 2005 Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents By DAMIEN CAVE Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children. Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message. Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq. "We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow." Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move. Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end. Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving. At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment. A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003. "Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face." Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent. The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children. Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power. "With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist." Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance. Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now," he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. " Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence. "I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility." Military officials are clearly concerned. In an interview last month, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said parental resistance could put the all-volunteer force in jeopardy. When parents and other influential adults dissuade young people from enlisting, he said, "it begs the question of what our national staying power might be for what certainly appears to be a long fight." In response, the Army has rolled out a campaign aimed at parents, with television ads and a Web site that includes videos of parents talking about why they supported their children's decision to enlist. General Rochelle said that it was still too early to tell if it is making a difference. But Col. David Slotwinski, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting, said that the Army faced an uphill battle because many baby boomer parents are inclined to view military service negatively, especially during a controversial war. "They don't realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful," said Colonel Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. "If you don't, you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service." Many of the mothers and fathers most adamant about recruitment do have a history of opposition to Vietnam. Amy Hagopian, 49, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, and her husband, Stephen Ludwig, 57, a carpenter, said that they and many parents who contest recruiting at Garfield High in Seattle have a history of antiwar sentiment and see their efforts as an extension of their pacifism. But, he added, parents are also reacting to what they see as the military's increased intrusion into the lives of their children. "The recruiters are in your face, in the library, in the lunchroom," he said. "They're contacting the most vulnerable students and recruiting them to go to war." The access is legally protected. As recently as 2000, said one former recruiter in California, it was necessary to dig through the trash at high schools and colleges to find students' names and phone numbers. But No Child Left Behind mandates that school districts can receive federal funds only if they grant military recruiters "the same access to secondary school students" as is provided to colleges and employers. So although the Garfield P.T.S.A. voted last month to ban military recruiters from the school and its 1,600 students, the Seattle school district could not sign on to the idea without losing at least $15 million in federal education funds. "The parents have chosen to take a stand, but we still have to comply with No Child Left Behind," said Peter Daniels, communications director for the district. In Whittier, a city of 85,000 10 miles southeast of East Los Angeles, about a dozen families last September accused the district of failing to properly advise parents that they had the right to deny recruiters access to their children's personal information. Mr. Terrazas, 51, the father of a Whittier High School junior, said the notification was buried among other documents in a preregistration packet sent out last summer. "It didn't say that the military has access to students' information," he said. "It just said to write a letter if you didn't want your kid listed in a public directory." A few years ago, after Sept. 11, the issue might not have gotten Mr. Terrazas's attention. His father served in World War II, his brother in Vietnam, and he said that he had always supported having a strong military able to defend the country. But after the war in Iraq yielded no weapons of mass destruction, and as the death toll has mounted, he cannot reconcile the pride he feels at seeing marines deliver aid after the tsunami in Asia with his concern over the effort in Baghdad, he said. "Because of the situation we're in now, I would not want my son to serve," he said. "It's the policy that I'm against, not the military." After Mr. Terrazas and several other parents expressed their concern about the school's role in recruitment, the district drafted a new policy. On May 23, it introduced a proposed opt-out form for the district's 14,000 students. The form, said Ron Carruth, Whittier's assistant superintendent, includes an explanation of the law, and boxes that parents can check to indicate they do not want information on their child released to either the military, colleges, vocational schools or other sources of recruitment. Mr. Carruth said that next year the district would also prohibit all recruiters from appearing in classrooms, and keep the military ones from bringing equipment like Humvees onto school grounds, a commonly used recruitment tool. He said that some of the information from the 11-by-17-inch poster that Mr. Terrazas sought to post, including how to verify recruiters' claims about financial benefits, will be part of a pamphlet created by the school for students. And at least a dozen other districts in the area, Mr. Carruth added, up from three in November, are considering similar plans. Unlike Mr. Terrazas, Ms. Rogers, 37, of High Falls in the upper Hudson Valley, had not thought much about the war before she began speaking out in her school district. She had been "politically apathetic," she said. She did not know about No Child Left Behind's reporting requirements, nor did she opt out. When her son, Jonah, said he was thinking of sitting out a gym class that was to be led by National Guard recruiters, Ms. Rogers, who works part time as a clerk at the local motor vehicles office and receives public assistance, said she told him not to be "a rebel without a cause." "In this world," she recalled telling him, "we need a strong military." But then she heard from her son that the class was mandatory, and that recruiters were handing out free T-shirts and key chains - "Like, 'Hey, let's join the military. It's fun,' " she said. First she called the Rondout Valley High School to complain about the "false advertising," she said, then her congressman. On May 24, at the first school board meeting since the gym class, she read aloud from a recruiting handbook that advised recruiters on ways to gain maximum access to schools, including offering doughnuts. A high school senior, Katie Coalla, 18, stood up at one point and tearfully defended the recruiters, receiving applause from the crowd of about 70, but Ms. Rogers persisted. "Pulling in this need for heartstrings patriotic support is clouding the issue," she said. "The point is not whether I support the troops. It's about whether a well-organized propaganda machine should be targeted at children and enforced by the schools." Laura Cummins, in Accord, N.Y., contributed reporting for this article. edited to add url The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

That can't be....there aren't any terrorists in Iraq. We had no reason to think that Saddam was harboring terrorists! It is all a big lie!! The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

You sound like an armchair quarterback that really "knows" what he is talking about, but in the end is just full of hot air. I know what good has happened there. I was there. I was part of the rebuilding. I took part in it. I watched as the children were able to go school. I was there when the people were able to do things that they werent under Saddam. You tell me you want proof, you need to take your head out of the sand and look, you will find proof. OK, pop quiz hotshot.....what do you think should be done? Since you know everything, and you've been there and all. I want to know what you think should happen. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

because that would lack in sensitivity. I say hang him from a tree in his front yard... The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/E/EXECUTION_LIVER_DONATION?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME Sounds like he got what was coming.....doctors also said that he wasn't a good donor. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

I think that your opinion is skewed a little bit. Maybe a little hatred of the good ol' USA in your blood? You are trying to tell me that the soldiers/airmen/sailors/marines are equivalent to terrorists? Do terrorists rebuild the country that has been destroyed after the fighting is over? Do they build schools? What about hospitals? Do terrorists spend truckloads of money to rebuild a 3rd world nation that has been repressed for years by its own dictator? Tell me again how we, as Americans, are terrorists? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

It never ceases to amaze me.... If the roles had been reversed, do you think that muslims detaining a christian would be so gracious as to give him a bible? I doubt it, but I dont think that a christian (or person of any other faith) would have time to read it in between rounds of torture. Maybe, I think too much, or not enough. If the cleric's logic stands, then I think that we should wage a holy war against them for desecrating the American flag. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=615&e=1&u=/nm/20050513/pl_nm/arms_usa_bases_closing_dc There I made it clicky for you.... The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

There are some and I mean some people out there that choose to be gay. But most are born that way. The choice to be gay is not the child's, it is made before the fetus is even capable of living outside the womb. The preoptic area of the hypothalmus is what determines the sexual attraction of the child. This is determined during the formation of the brain. An enlarged preoptic area (regardless of male or female) will mean that the child will be attracted to females. An less pronounced preoptic area will present itself by desiring male companionship. The cause is chemical or genetic. Chemically if there is an elevated level of testosterone or cortisol then the offspring will tend to have smaller preoptic areas, thus preferring male offspring. (An explanation of this could be that if the mother is under stress-testosterone/cortisol, there is a chance that the offspring could be placed under duress. By producing homosexual offspring, it would then limit the population growth.) There are lots of cases of genetic abnormalities, but that tends to affect women more than men. The last situation is in pharmacology. Where women who were exposed to certain chemicals(drugs) while pregnant had homosexual offspring. Examples of this; women exposed to diethylstilbestrol (DES) (used to prevent miscarriages) produced more declared homosexual female offspring. (whatever that is worth) To sum it up, most gay people are made that way. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

That was my point. I think that no matter what we do as a society, there will always be people that have no place. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

murders would stop. But apparently murder still does happen, by other means. Maybe Germany should outlaw swords too. http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050403-123713-7848r.htm The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

So, according to your logic we should "regulate" automobiles better than we do, because responsiblities are being neglected? What about baseball bats? What about box cutters? What about (something similarly dangerous) ad nauseum? I agree that there are irresponsible people out there. My next question for you is, why arent we prosecuting the irresponsible ones? Cant we do that without making it difficult on the law abiding (responsible) citizens? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

Me too, they are cute and cuddly.....taste like chicken! The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

I guess it could be seen as though I misrepresent your position. However, you didn't answer the question...is it your paranoia or mine that rules out? Because you are right, every illegally owned firearm once had a legal owner. But kallend, anything can be used illegally, from a gun to a car to baseball bats. Does using a gun to commit murder make guns illegal? or does murder make murder illegal? As far as I know (and I am nowhere near as educated as you are), killing someone is illegal. It doesn't matter the means. So, tell me again.....what is your position? The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

I hate getting into debates with you, not because you are right or wrong, but merely because you fail to see anyone else's point. It is like when I try to tell my 4yo old to eat his peas, I may know what I feel is right, he wont listen. The whole point of the gun control side of the argument (hell, both sides if you think open mindedly) is that people want to have a feeling of safety. For the anti-gunners nobody owning a firearm is the way to achieve that level of safety. It is in my opinion a false sense of safety (but my opinion might be skewed considering that I have on at least one occasion used a firearm to insure my personal safety). THe idea that because something is legal or illegal and therefore doesn't happen is irrelevant. If all people in the US were law abiding, we wouldn't be having this debate. So the question is, is it your paranoia that rules out....or mine? I personally would rather not be the victim of a violent crime, and unfortunately the statistics say that eventually me or one of my (only) ten friends will be a victim. But, if I am the victim, I want the ability to defend myself. Selfish...maybe. But, your reasoning is just as solid as mine. However, your reasoning would also indicate that we shouldn't be allowed to drive cars, own hair dryers, skydive, or any other "dangerous activity" that has been used as an example. Because, your paranoid about safety..... I ran the spell checker....."skydive" is misspelled on a skydiving website, go figure. The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.