no, I think you misread...2000 is the number of people who were shot in Chicago at the end of the year, 260 is the number shot in a small town after a year... You seem to be saying that the 260 number is worse than the 2000 number... There's your liberal spin, even tho you can't see it...

Is this 9th grade math class?

the way I see it, if someone has to look for peace and enjoyment, then it's a problem to be solved, because you would have to find it...if it just comes naturally, then it's not a problem...

there's always problems, we just don't always realize that we're thinking about how to solve problems in almost all of our awake time..

isn't looking for peace and enjoyment just another problem to solve?

I doubt that...it's human nature to solve problems

yea, keep laughing in a few years when your crime rate matches ours...

http://theconversation.com/why-your-brain-never-runs-out-of-problems-to-find-98990


Why do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in more places than ever.

Think of a "neighborhood watch" made up of volunteers who call the police when they see anything suspicious. Imagine a new volunteer who joins the watch to help lower crime in the area. When they first start volunteering, they raise the alarm when they see signs of serious crimes, like assault or burglary.

Let's assume these efforts help and, over time, assaults and burglaries become rarer in the neighborhood. What would the volunteer do next? One possibility is that they would relax and stop calling the police. After all, the serious crimes they used to worry about are a thing of the past.

But you may share the intuition my research group had - that many volunteers in this situation wouldn't relax just because crime went down. Instead, they'd start calling things "suspicious" that they would never have cared about back when crime was high, like jaywalking or loitering at night.

You can probably think of many similar situations in which problems never seem to go away, because people keep changing how they define them. This is sometimes called "concept creep," or "moving the goalposts," and it can be a frustrating experience. How can you know if you're making progress solving a problem, when you keep redefining what it means to solve it? My colleagues and I wanted to understand when this kind of behavior happens, why, and if it can be prevented.

neighborhood watch
© Marc Bruxelle/Shutterstock.com
After violent crime starts going down, loiterers and jaywalkers may start to seem more threatening.
Looking for trouble

To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task - to look at a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem "threatening." The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless.

As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of "threatening" to include a wider range of faces. In other words, when they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered "threats" depended on how many threats they had seen lately.

This kind of inconsistency isn't limited to judgments about threat. In another experiment, we asked people to make an even simpler decision: whether colored dots on a screen were blue or purple.

blue dots
© David Levari, CC BY-ND
As the context changes, so do the boundaries of your categories.
As blue dots became rare, people started calling slightly purple dots blue. They even did this when we told them blue dots were going to become rare, or offered them cash prizes to stay consistent over time. These results suggest that this behavior isn't entirely under conscious control - otherwise, people would have been able to be consistent to earn a cash prize.

Expanding what counts as immoral

After looking at the results of our experiments on facial threat and color judgments, our research group wondered if maybe this was just a funny property of the visual system. Would this kind of concept change also happen with non-visual judgments?

To test this, we ran a final experiment in which we asked volunteers to read about different scientific studies, and decide which were ethical and which were unethical. We were skeptical that we would find the same inconsistencies in these kind of judgments that we did with colors and threat.

Why? Because moral judgments, we suspected, would be more consistent across time than other kinds of judgments. After all, if you think violence is wrong today, you should still think it is wrong tomorrow, regardless of how much or how little violence you see that day.

But surprisingly, we found the same pattern. As we showed people fewer and fewer unethical studies over time, they started calling a wider range of studies unethical. In other words, just because they were reading about fewer unethical studies, they became harsher judges of what counted as ethical.

The brain likes to make comparisons

Why can't people help but expand what they call threatening when threats become rare? Research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that this kind of behavior is a consequence of the basic way that our brains process information - we are constantly comparing what is front of us to its recent context.

Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threatening faces it has seen. This kind of comparison could lead directly to the pattern my research group saw in our experiments, because when threatening faces are rare, new faces would be judged relative to mostly harmless faces. In a sea of mild faces, even slightly threatening faces might seem scary.

It turns out that for your brain, relative comparisons often use less energy than absolute measurements. To get a sense for why this is, just think about how it's easier to remember which of your cousins is the tallest than exactly how tall each cousin is. Human brains have likely evolved to use relative comparisons in many situations, because these comparisons often provide enough information to safely navigate our environments and make decisions, all while expending as little effort as possible.

Being consistent when it counts

Sometimes, relative judgments work just fine. If you are looking for a fancy restaurant, what you count as "fancy" in Paris, Texas, should be different than in Paris, France.
dog walking
© Louis Amal on Unsplash
What once seemed banal can be recategorized as a threat in a new context.
But a neighborhood watcher who makes relative judgments will keep expanding their concept of "crime" to include milder and milder transgressions, long after serious crimes have become rare. As a result, they may never fully appreciate their success in helping to reduce the problem they are worried about. From medical diagnoses to financial investments, modern humans have to make many complicated judgments where being consistent matters.

How can people make more consistent decisions when necessary? My research group is currently doing follow-up research in the lab to develop more effective interventions to help counter the strange consequences of relative judgment.

One potential strategy: When you're making decisions where consistency is important, define your categories as clearly as you can. So if you do join a neighborhood watch, think about writing down a list of what kinds of transgressions to worry about when you start. Otherwise, before you know it, you may find yourself calling the cops on dogs being walked without leashes.

There's a strange confluence happening in Canada that is likely to alter the fate of all citizens across the country and leave an indelible mark upon the psyche of what was once considered a peaceful and friendly nation. A perfect storm is brewing of seemingly unrelated, but loosely connected events, that have transpired to increase tension and foment division between formerly amicable citizens in a profound and significant way.

Uncontrolled illegal mass immigration, along with the spectre of potential Islamic terrorism, combined with the forcible imposition of absurd and counter-productive neo-Marxist, social-justice inspired government policies, has resulted in a very public backlash recently, which has at times taken the form of several highly publicized incidents deemed as racially motivated "hate crimes" by Canada's progressive liberal media.

Contrary to all appearances, this confluence may not be merely an accidental and independent series of events, but is arguably a direct result of a deliberate and conscious plan by those in power to weaken national sovereignty and sow discord, mistrust and hostility between different groups of people. The signs are all there. It's time to put the pieces together...

No ID, No Visa, No Background Check, No Problem

In January of 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ostensibly threw open Canada's borders by tweeting a message to immigrants the world over that his government would gladly welcome in anyone claiming refugee status. The tweet was made in response to US President Donald Trump's executive order at the time, restricting immigration and temporarily limiting travel from 7 Muslim majority countries.

The tweet was generally praised by the mainstream media for being empathic and inclusive, touching on themes of tolerance and diversity, and containing all the proper SJW buzzwords that make those with diminished capacity for rational, nuanced thought feel really good about themselves. In reality however, it was a typically vainglorious and cynical move by the notoriously leftist PM, virtue signalling his moral superiority to the world by setting himself up in opposition to the evil Herr Trump.

Better known for his good looks and groovy socks than his towering intellect, Justin Trudeau appears to lack the foresight to understand the consequences of his actions. In one careless tweet, he not only opened the flood gates to allow hordes of illegal immigrants to claim asylum in Canada, but he himself could reasonably be held responsible for the inevitable public backlash that will follow.

Since Trudeau made that tweet in 2017, Canada's borders have been inundated with tens of thousands of so-called "asylum seekers", crossing over from the US, mostly into Quebec, with recent estimates of hundreds more crossing the border every day. At an estimated cost so far of 270 million taxpayer dollars, there is no end to the migrant crisis in sight, and thanks to Trudeau, illegal border crossers can now expect the RCMP to help carry their luggage for them! Once they land in Canada, they can use their newfound refugee status to become 'anchor relatives' and eventually bring over their entire extended family from overseas.
Screen shot immigration quote canada
© Global News
The fact of the matter remains that a vast majority (over 90%) of these illegal border crossers (now dubbed "irregular" migrants by the MSM) are not true refugees at all. They consist mostly of Haitians and Nigerians who crossed into Canada from the USA, hardly a war-torn or ****-hole country by modern standards, and many of them came into the US on regular tourist visas and are using Canada's porous border policy to jump the queue ahead of all other legitimate immigrant hopefuls.

This is not only grossly unfair, but could be seen as a slap in the face to those families who have struggled to apply fairly through the system and have invested $thousands and waited years to legally immigrate to Canada. Is it any wonder that a sizeable number of Chinese Canadians recently held a protest in Markham Ontario against the open border policies of Justin Trudeau?

More here http://www.sott.net/article/392889-Terrorism-Immigration-and-Racism-in-Canada-The-Backlash-has-Begun

why should Trump go to jail? What was the contribution the Russians gave Trump Jr.? What law was broken? Trump owns a multi national corporation, some doesn't meet with foreign Nationals?

I noticed you laughing, but I didn't notice ANYONE provingme wrong...

http://thedailybanter.com/issues/2013/09/09/11-profound-quotes-on-politics-by-george-carlin/

dead is dead either way...30 - 40 people being shot every weekend doesn't mean we should cancel it out because they have a huge population...the per capita crap is just a liberal spin to keep their gun control fantasy alive a little longer, that's why they news media refuses to shed any light on how gun control doesn't work...40 people shot in one weekend vrs 5 from a smaller town... At the end of a year, over 2000 shot in Chicago vrs 260 in the smaller town...can you see where your logic is messed up?

Not sure of the meaning of this, but Alex Jones was kicked off all the social media platforms yesterday, all except twitter closed all his accounts and removed his pages ..

mathematically, the answer is yes...the milky way itself has over 100 billion stars in it, and it's estimated there's trillions of galaxies... But since the universe is so vast, we may never know...

I think there could have big bangs, not just one...I think the universe is eternal, always been here, always be here...the lives of planets, stars and even galaxies when destroyed just breed for new creations...ever think about when a black holes is full? Would it blow up? How would that compare to the big bang?

I don't consider the internet freedom of speech...way to many idiots saying way to many stupid things...

oh phttt... Always a spin...new Orleans is number 1, Chicago is number 2... No per capita crap

us? Is there a mouse in your shirtless pocket?

no there's not...the only other city is new Orleans, the city that was made into the "chocolate city" after hurricane Rita hit.... And they don't have the ridiculous gun laws like Chicago...