winsor

Moses Invests. FWIW, I sincerely doubt that Jesus, if asked, would have picked the cross as his symbol of choice, any more than Marie Antoinette would have opted for the guillotine. When the Romans coopted the Messianic Movement of Judaism, they chose the preferred means of executing Jews as the symbol of their dominance; I'm not sure if that is ironic or just plain sick. I still flinch when I see crosses - " this is how we kill Jews around here, boyo..." BSBD, Winsor

Some would say that living in a society that is armed to the teeth is really no freedom at all. I never understood where the right to a "well regulated militia" transformed into arming every single swinging dick walking down the street. One thing is for sure, you can never go wrong when it comes to fear mongering, The gun industry and the NRA are laughing all the way to the bank. Gee whiz, you sure show a clear understanding of advanced civilizations like Switzerland. Evidently a little better than your understanding. The vast majority of Swiss government issued firearms are not issued with ammunition, only a couple of thousand reservist, who will be stationed at airports durning national emergencies are issued ammunition to keep at home. It is also very difficult to get a CC permit, one must have a clean background and show a very clear security reason why it's needed. That's just a little different, don't ya think? Was that the way it was when you lived there?

Some would say that living in a society that is armed to the teeth is really no freedom at all. I never understood where the right to a "well regulated militia" transformed into arming every single swinging dick walking down the street. One thing is for sure, you can never go wrong when it comes to fear mongering, The gun industry and the NRA are laughing all the way to the bank. Gee whiz, you sure show a clear understanding of advanced civilizations like Switzerland.

Big deal, it's been done.

"Fighting against homosexuality???" To thine own self be true. If something trips your trigger, go for it (assuming it is adult homo sapiens). Most of the people I know who had to stifle gay urges eventually came to grips with the fact that they were gay. Big deal. Often there would have been a marriage to reassure themselves that they were 'normal,' since, as one of them put it, "nobody wants to be a paraiah." I know this may come as a shock, but from what I understand it is pretty well hard-wired. A truly straight guy can be in a locker room with all sorts of naked, buff studs and it is a complete non-issue. However, the mere scent of the pheromones of a sexually primed female will trigger increased pulse, salivation and the beginnings of all kinds of physiological responses. Mind you, this has nothing to do with value judgments, morals, social norms and the like. Gay and straight is not a matter of 'better or worse,' and I question the motivation of anyone who cares all that much one way or another. Even though a woman is completely off the menu, I am acutely aware if she is sexually attractive or not. Guys, however, elicit a dial tone across the board. YMMV. BSBD, Winsor

No, it is not. They are estimates. And if the estimate for one is an order or two of magnitude bigger than the other, you don't worry about it having a precision value of 1 vote. That's the situation we're in here. We know that the solutions are much worse than the stated problem, and that both are dwarfed by the problems around voting system accuracy in general. And how do you make these counts? You have direct data, like numbers of people caught/charged/convicted, numbers of people who show up at the poll and see their name crossed off, number of dead people who subsequently voted, number of legal voters who get letters in the mail telling them their name is spelled like a felon and now have to spend tens of hours to fix, and numbers of people who show up at the polls and find their names missing. You may have actual numbers of the quantity of ballots tossed in each precinct due to hanging chads or other irregularities. And then you have indirect data - the comparison of the results versus exit polls and pre election polling. You have the vote differences between precincts. The expectation is that the fraudulent votes are skewed to one side - any significant quantity will result in statistical outliers. Then please provide links to the estimates you use to come to your conclusions. You state that "We know that the solutions are much worse than the stated problem...". (Even though you admitted we only have estimates) Please provide these estimates that are accurate enough to make such clear conclusions of fact. I think this is the third time in this thread that I have asked for such clear cut facts. The only thing I've seen is one account that referenced a survey that said poor people have a harder time getting ID and then made the leap of inference that they would not vote and then added the personal judgment that the voter impact was 'significant'. Not even the 'estimate' that you cite. It's very easy. Just show me the fact based estimates that show how hard it is for people to obtain ID and how little voter fraud there is in comparison. In order for an argument to be valid, the number of votes stolen by voter fraud must be less than the number of votes lost due to inability to secure ID with a minimal degree of effort...I would say about the degree of effort needed to register to vote in the first place. Of course, therein lies a problem. Filling out a voter registration card is usually required to vote. And it could easily serve as a form of ID, couldn't it? Or are you advocating the elimination of voter registration as well? As far as voter fraud issues go, I give you John F. Kennedy. "Son, you only need to win by one vote - I can't afford a landslide." Joseph P. Kennedy Stalin reputedly said (my Russian is weak) that who votes does not matter - who COUNTS the votes matters. In the 1960 election cycle, Richard J. Daley, a good pal of JPK, worked on behalf of the Kennedy campaign. In Chicago at the time, whoever Daley backed won Cook County - regardless of quite who actually voted for whom. Add to this Lyndon B. Johnson, the king of the stuffed ballot box. Votes for LBJ in Texas were routinely submitted in alphabetical order, in the same hand. His campaign manager confessed on his deathbed to voter fraud on an heroic scale (say it ain't so!), all of which was rather well known at the time. According to various sources, Nixon did, in fact, receive more votes, and would have had more electoral votes without professional massaging of the results, than did our eventual 35th president. JFK was a much more likable guy, while RMN was decidedly more competent. Odious though Tricky Dick may have been, there is a vanishingly small likelihood that we would have been embroiled in Southeast Asia if he had been in office. It is also interesting to consider how Henry Cabot Lodge might have handled things if Nixon had been in the crosshairs in Dealy Plaza. Luckily we do not have candidates being elected with 124% of the vote like some places do, but to pretend that irregularities in the polling process are not a factor in our fair Republic is inane. BSBD, Winsor

Good point.

Hey, unfair to Exxon. Exxon now admits that AGW is real. They'd make blood sacrifice to Baal if there was a buck to be made.

I don't know where I pitched, but I have been in the saddle at three digits. Many moons ago I watched as Steve 'Deadman' Morell hooked up a bright orange Interceptor he had just purchased. The ceilings had been low all weekend, but he convinced the pilot to take him up to test jump his new canopy. With just a little testosterone in the air, there was a discussion of "how low can you go?" Very shortly thereafter, the plane was coming over the peas at 250 feet and descending, with Steve on the step holding his pilot chute in hand. Since the bridle was flapping around, the guy inside the plane shooting camera reached out to hold his closing pin in place. With the pilot screaming "don't jump!," Steve left the step and I hit the shutter release with my camera on 'continuous.' After he hit the peas and came to a stop, I still had some of the 24 exposures left - well less than 10 seconds between step and pea pit. At the Convention in Rantoul a couple of guys decided to do brief RW during a hop an pop. After breakoff, one of them then took it down a bit - after which his canopy sniveled (go figure). In all fairness, he did manage to clear his brakes before landing, but he did not have a whole lot of room to spare. A good rule of thumb regarding low pull contests is that you can't set a new record, the best you can do is tie the existing. BSBD, Winsor

Thermodynamics are not magic. Don't swallow too much conspiritonium. If you learn about this, and comparative cars, and why they are not widespread you will understand. It's a complex situation, this article and the hundreds like it are sensationalistic fallacious click-bait. If you only 'follow the money', or only follow the science, you are left with a polarized image. It's not just the car, or the Mh370 loss, or anything viral these days, it's leaked into everything. We need more people who can identify the science from the media. Wow... that sounds familiar and I check myself there, but, that is my though for the night. "careful you don't step in the bullshit"... There was a story of a magic carburetor where mileage was so good that you had to be careful not to use any other efficiency-improvement devices for fear that you would exceed 100%, causing the tank overflow and become a fire hazard. A Major Oil Company, realizing that this invention would put them out of business, bought the patent rights and made sure that our cars only got 14 mpg. A perusal of patent literature shows no sign of any such device, but the story made the rounds anyway. Texaco did, in fact, develop the CVCC engine, but at $0.24/gal, the increased cost of the engine would not be amortized over the average life of a U.S. car at the time. Not so in Japan. Honda bought the rights and used the design quite successfully in a small 4-cylinder engine for many years. It got something short of 300 mpg, but what the hell. BSBD, Winsor

This is logical gibberish.

I'm sure it's fair and balanced. They said so themselves.

Whatever your persuasion, it's one to a customer. At 84, he was hardly nipped in his prime. I am reminded of Hitchens' comment regarding Jerry Falwell to the effect that, if given an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox. The sentiment would certainly apply here.

I came across this.

Anything by the Village People would be fun.

Why? I'm open to explanation. My belief is that it is subject to lines being drawn. And different people draw them in different places. Perhaps in twenty years people will start saying that the term "Vikings" is bad. I can see a team name like the Lafayette Coonasses being objectionable by lots of people and being rabidly supported by self-identifying coonasses around Lafayette and elsewhere. But as I've also stated with regard to auto names, we'll name a rugged car a "Cherokee" but not name an economy car a "Jew." Because there are lines. I'll have you know, sir, that a 'Jew Canoe' is but another name for a Cadillac. I drive a Town Car, but what the hell.

This may well be the Black Swan.

Really? Give us the Executive Summary. Get rid of overhead, which is well over 90% of the cost of health care as it now exists. This would be staunchly opposed by the legion of parasites who have attached themselves to the health care industry, but fuck them, they bring nothing to the party. The problem with most recommendations regarding health care is that they presume at the outset that hospitals and medical providers should be free to charge whatever they please, and that we must somehow distribute the burden to cover the cost. Unfortunately, when everyone is required to own a Yugo and pay Rolls Royce prices for the privilege, there is no way to distribute the costs so that the mass majority of people aren't stuck with the full tab (plus shipping and handling, of course). You can get competent personnel all day long who could run a hospital system for a salary of $200,000 or less; when the salaries at the top are well into the seven figures, there's something very wrong. When a brilliant 5 star hotel can be had for less than $500 a night, there is no reason that a room in a hospital should cost $10,000. An example of how the rules can be changed significantly is tort reform, to forbid suits against physicians. If a physician is guilty of gross negligence, they can have criminal charges filed against them and/or have their credentials yanked, but the responsibility for compensation for malpractice falls on the patient. Before undergoing a procedure, you can take out a policy so that if, say, the wrong leg is removed, you get X number of dollars. There could be a kiosk at hospitals like you used to have at airports, selling malpractice insurance instead of trip insurance. The verbiage necessary to implement such a structural change is simple, but the effect would be massive. Half a dozen rules with similar scope would put most of the drones in the health care industry out of work, and would sharply reduce the incomes of the most excessively overpaid, without reducing the availability or quality of health care in the slightest. BSBD, Winsor

Overall, the ACA is a disaster coming and going. Getting bogged down in the particulars of one case or another is an exercise in distraction. The health care system in this country is broken, and, in the case of the ACA, the cure is worse than the disease. The ACA does nothing to address the fundamental problems with the administration and regulation of health care, but, rather, adds another layer or two of administration and regulation to address perceived problems. 90% of the problems with health care could be addressed in 10 pages or less. Anything coming out of congress that takes thousands of pages to get the job done is guaranteed to be an abortion, and the ACA is a case in point. You may return to picking flyshit out of pepper.

Two wrongs do NOT make a right. Three lefts do.

Awww poor thing. Please get above the third grade level (with apologies to third graders everywhere). You are just so cute with your attempts at personal attacks...bless your little heart. I give you credit for the capacity to communicate without a surfeit of malevolence. I look forward to your doing something to justify that faith.

Awww poor thing. Please get above the third grade level (with apologies to third graders everywhere).

My kingdom for a kill file.

I do not know about your profession.. but I am not asked to do anything in mine that is distasteful in any way what-so-ever for the performance of my duties. I love what I do. If I was asked to sound as fucking clueless as anyone of them on FAUX is doing on a daily basis.. I would leave and take a long shower before finding a respectable job. One of the reasons I am not sure if I agree or disagree with Ann Coulter is that I can not get past all the poison long enough to find out. I suspect her goal is simply to get some people's goats. When someone starts off with balls to the wall invective, it takes too much effort to discern the basis of their standpoint. By and large, it does not seem to matter greatly whether their argument has merit if it relies entirely upon emotion. Even if you think that someone is a poopy-head, it might be more effective to provide the evidence that brought you to that conclusion and have your audience conclude "gosh, what a poopy-head!" than it is to come out and call him a poopy-head. If you intent to make a valid point from time to time, that is not apparent. If your goal is simply to vent your spleen, carry on. BSBD, Winsor

I played with the numbers a while back, and it went something like this: if the US Gov't spent absolutely nothing more than it took in, and every taxpayer paid another $1,000 a month to pay off the existing debt, at the going mortgage rates it would take something like 42 years for us to be flat broke. This is not going to happen. Every society that has dug itself in this deep has eventually had the same outcome. For a number of reasons we are significantly further behind the power curve than any of the previous societies that have so thoroughly screwed the pooch. The simplest way to put things into perspective is to consider a 'quarantine' of the country. This is to say we look at what would happen if no goods or services either entered or left the country. This would be the case if the dollar reverted to its inherent value, which is zero (in 1923 it took 1,000,000,000,000 Reichmarks to buy one Rentenmark ). The good news is that our national debt becomes the price of a Happy Meal. The bad news is that we can not buy a damned thing. Okay, where does this leave us? Let's look at our energy use for starts. Our oil and gas production is up (yay!) and our consumption is down (yippee!), to the extent that we produce almost half as much as we use (what?!). If the dollar goes away, tankers headed towards our shores will make a u-turn. Now, having half as much petroleum available does not mean that we will only be able to buy half as much gasoline as we did before, using an equivalent amount of our new currency (bitcoins?). The amount of fuel used by mandatory applications such as power plants, agriculture (we'll get to that) defense purposes, transport and what not is over half of the current supply. The upshot is that the SUV in the driveway just became a lawn ornament for the forseeable future. If you work beyond bicycle distance from home, you had best hope you can telecommute. Now let's look at the Happy Meal that our national debt will buy us. To grow the wheat for the bun, we use fertilizers and pesticides brought to you by cheap and abundant petroleum. We carefully tend our fields with various products of John Deere, International Harvester and so forth, all running on cheap and plentiful petroleum. These crops are brought to the market by a legion of Peterbilts and Mack trucks, also powered by cheap and plentiful petroleum. I'm sure I've missed a few critical issues, but you get the drift. When I lived in Switzerland it was stressed to me that their society and economy are structured to take into account the fact that every once in a while the borders are effectively sealed, and there is no supply of anything that is not produced locally. The structural differences between the Swiss model and the US of A are massive and too many to list. Given that a great deal of our economy is nonproductive by design, there is no reason to suppose that we will simply change gears and get with the program. The bottom line is that we are beyond fucked. The only question is when it will all come together. BSBD, Winsor