muff528

How old a picture do you wanna go I am not in the picture but my great geat grandfather and his family is. There are a whole bunch of great grand relatives in it. I do have one of the scatter guns in the piccie though, it was almost brand new

Once there was this guy that had a few new ideas. People have tested these ideas ever since and have not been able to disprove them. Then, new observations seemed to defy one of his ideas and he said that was his "greatest blunder". Then, many years after he died (and finally did or didn't-did find the "truth"), even newer observations showed that the idea he doubted might have provided a clue to something completely unimagined by anyone. So, maybe he was "right" after all. But he also said something to the effect that "God doesn't play dice" and it turns out that he was probably wrong about that one ......or was he?

Now there's a one-page world history textbook!

Sometimes just changing your medication will help.

Wow! There are more criminals named "Mark"(21) than "Tony"(14). Looks like movie people need to rewrite some of their stuff! ("The Simpsons", too.)

I have no idea what to do with a cat, but..... BEEEEEER!

Yeah! If I didn't like water I'd buy some of that stuff ...just based on that commercial.

reply]ok so this thread http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4022009;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread along with a some what recent run in with one of my friends where 3 men were trying to break into his house, one jumped the fence and 2 were trying to kick in the door, when he welcomed them with a .45 in their face and they took off running and the police later caught them. now my question is, and im sure it varies state to state, but assuming it is a CLEAR breaking an entering, if one of the invaders is shot by the home owner during that situation who is charged with the murder? is it the accomplices or is it the home owner. ive heard stories of both but no real definitive answer. Here is a recent case here in Central Florida.

Unlikely. The South was, at the time, economically based on the production of one product, cotton, which was sold to industries in Northern States for processing into finished products. The demand for cotton was strong, and no alternatives were available, so there still would have been a market for cotton even at the higher prices that would have been necessary without slave labor. So if their raw material cotton prices went up, that would have caused prices for finished cotton products in the North to go up. Causing inflation for both economies. So it could be argued that another motivation of seceeding was simply as an inflation control measure for both sides. I'm not sure that a price, based on the theft of labor, that is raised because that labor is now compensated, can be considered "inflation". Likewise, if the price of a car can be lowered by forcing the autoworkers into mandatory, uncompensated labor, can that be considered a "deflation"? Maybe the north liked the price of cotton shirts and didn't ask whether any human suffering was involved in the manufacturing process. (Don't ask, Don't tell; the 3 monkeys; etc.). Kinda like the way we are consuming cheap goods from some countries where labor is "cheap" (for some "unknown" reason) - so to speak. If I was a widget outlet store and I was allowed by my government to steal my inventory I could drive my competitor (who is dumb enough to actually pay for his inventory) out of business. If stealing widgets suddenly became illegal and the widget end user now had to buy from the guy who bought his inventory, that wouldn't be considered inflation. ...would it?

I am not disagreeing with you that the issue of slavery directly lead to secession and the war. My points were that the constitutional right of each of the United States to independent self-determination was poisoned by the irresponsible, immoral, illegal and unconstitutional practice of holding humans to slavery and that the "north" was just as guilty as the "south" in allowing slavery to exist. Sure, the single-minded southern slave-holding states did secede over slavery issues. But, the north did not engage in war to abolish slavery. It fought to "preserve the Union" and only when things weren't looking so good on the war front did they appeal to and rally the abolitionists and southern slaves to their new cause ...free the slaves. "States rights" lost. The idea of "States rights" is not in itself a bad idea but the concept was abused by the citizens of some states to deny a group of people their guaranteed, unalienable constitutional rights. The result was, rather than to specifically criminalize slavery and affirm the founding principles, to transfer power from the States to the federal government. Good or bad, that transfer of power has continued for 150 years.

The economic issue the southern states were interested in was their right to continue to hold slaves and expand slavery into the western territories. The States rights they were interested in was the right to continue with slavery and expand slavery into the western territories. It's very telling the Declaration did not list any other economic or states rights issues by name but includes (by my quick count) eight references to slavery. Here is an article that shows the complexity of the issues that contributed to the Civil War. Although the catalyst really was the issue of slavery it did boil down to the so-called "states rights". Some northern politicians were becoming more aligned with the abolitionist movement but a series of events and rulings regarding slavery and individual states led directly to secession of some slave states, even before Lincoln was inaugurated. It certainly was not a cut and dried question of the northern pro-abolition guys vs the southern pro-slavery guys. Even 2 years into the war the Emancipation Proclamation "freed" only those slaves from states that had seceded from the Union. It was not intended to (immediately) affect slavery in pro-Union states. It also allowed those "free" slaves from those Confederate states to join the Union forces ...which, IMO, was the intention of the Proclamation since the Union's situation in the war had become dire. Lincoln played the E.P. like a "hole card up his sleeve" to try to foment a sort of rebellion in the South. If the war, and the intention of the Union at the war's beginning, was simply to abolish slavery then abolition would have been well on it's way in the pre-war Union and the E.P., or something like it, would have been declared at or before the beginning of the war and would have had language to free all slaves, even (especially) those under Union control. So, while the South's resistance to abolition violated the rights of slaves as guaranteed in the Constitution, the North's motives weren't so pure, either. I think motives for both sides was more economic and less altruistic than either side would like to admit. Also ...while reading some of this stuff I thought it was somewhat ironic that the Dred Scott decision, while (unconstitutionally, IMO) affirming the slave status of Mr. Scott, it also struck down a couple of "States Rights" Acts which helped push the slave states to secession. Dred Scott

i FUCKING HATE christmas music. leave that shit alone for fuck's sake. christmas has been around for 100's of years and we still have the same damn songs. enough is fucking enough "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" is only a few years old ...relatively speaking.

But ...but ...You live in the land of nutcrackers, gingerbread, sugarplums (whatever those are) chocolate and classic Christmas imagery! You actually live inside a Christmas card! Happy Birthday!

So ...Is Herman's Hermits going to Zhills or not? Maybe just Herman? Is the Lovin' Spoonful going to play with them?

.....depends.

And the nearest star system is about 24 trillion miles away. So it'll be a while before anyone gets there (from here).

You been hangin' out on 6th Avenue again!?

...is how many years it would take to flush $1.1 trillion down a toilet if you dropped a $100 bill in every second without stopping. If you started at midnight you'd have flushed over $1 million by 2:47 AM.

Love the sound of that big-hole Martin way better than the Santa Cruz Tony's been playing lately.

Who put the bomp In the bomp-pah bomp-pah bomp? Who put the ram In the rama lama ding dong? Who put the bop In the bop shoo bop shoo bop? Who put the dip In the dip ta dip ta dip?

"Hey Mikey! ...I double-dog dare you to squeeze one of those and drink whatever comes out of it!" (If you know who Mikey is you really are old.

For some reason that reminded me of an old TV show (maybe McHales Navy or such). In one scene the guys stumbled on an island in the Pacific where a couple of American soldiers didn't know the war had ended. The old soldiers weren't sure that their would-be rescuers were Americans so they posed a test question that they knew any real American would be able to answer correctly. They yelled "Where are the Dodgers from?" When the response was "Los Angeles!" they unloaded on the guys.

Aren't we both '57 models? I'm just low mileage. Yep,I'm a 57....

Looks real enough to me!

Sigh. I hear that every time I send out a bill. No.. that's the "feeding of the legal sharks".