champu

If I ever design a form that includes a selection for race (I really hope my carrier choices continue to be better than that) I will write it like this: Race: [ ] Black [ ] Native American [ ] Pacific Islander [ ] Hispanic [ ] Asian [ ] Non-Applicable

Side note: the Los Angeles city council, about two hours ago, passed a ban on possession of magazines that hold over ten rounds. The only net effect of this ordinance is to un-grandfather magazines that have been owned without incident for the past 21 years (federal AWB from 1994-2004 and the CA ban on magazines from 2000-present have grandfather clauses) Owners must turn them over, destroy them, or sell them out of state. So yeah, that's what "we" (America, one city at a time) are doing in response to gun violence now. We're doubling-down on stupid.

If planned parenthood were found to be coercing women who were "on the fence" into having abortions or performing procedures that exposed women to greater risk (such as waiting longer than necessary) without their knowledge and were doing so with the intent of maximizing the ability to harvest tissue and/or organs for sale, then I'd be outraged alongside you. As it stands, that's not happening. I understand you don't like abortions, but I find "death by paper cuts and bureaucracy" methods of fighting a woman's right to choose more disgusting than anything proven to be going on here.

actually A and B. If you want you can build your own, and then there is no requirement to register. I did say "buy" . You're correct, you don't have to register home builds. The ridiculous bill that was going to make unregistered homebuilds illegal passed both houses but was vetoed. I made a thread about it. That lawsuit was filed in Dec 2011 and decided in Aug 2014, but as far as I know is still stayed so you still have to wait every time. http://michellawyers.com/silvester-v-harris/ Understood, and I clarified that in post #160. And as I've mentioned before, the local policy was challenged in Oct 2009 and found unconstitutional in Feb 2014 but is still churning. http://michellawyers.com/guncasetracker/perutavsandiego/

Wait, huh?

Those are all state laws, not local laws (although the ccw one is state law combined with a local enforcement policy) and you'll forgive me for not having my spirits lifted when you point out how easy it is to ignore them. Remember how I said some are reasonable and some are ridiculous? My recommendation is to focus on the reasonable thing some of "us" do (if I may take the liberty of including myself in our conversation) and stop supporting people who focus on the unreasonable.

Depends on how big you require "we" to be. Last time I checked I'm a U.S. Citizen residing in the U.S. and I can't a) buy a gun from a private party without going through a dealer with a background check b) buy a gun without a safety written test and practical demonstration and registering it c) buy a 22 pistol that has a threaded barrel cause it's an "assault weapon" d) own a suppressor e) buy a handgun without waiting 10 days f) buy more than one handgun every 30 days g) buy a magazine that holds over ten rounds h) store a firearm in such a way that a child or prohibited person could get to it i) obtain a ccw permit j) transport a firearm without it being unloaded and locked in a container k) buy a handgun not on an approved list that you can no longer add guns to Since Sandy Hook? I've already posted threads about the new laws, some only proposed, some passed and signed. Some of the above is reasonable, some is ridiculous. None of it is "nothing."

[citation needed] This still isn't true you know.

Second step would be to admit that we have a gun problem that other countries do not have. And that we simply refuse to act on it. I would love to hear you explain how what you just wrote in response to my post (and my posts in the older thread I linked to) is a step towards an honest discussion about gun violence.

There have been entire threads discussing everything you've written here, some of which you've participated in. I said what I had to say about that mother jones article in this thread http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4722210#4722210 and posted some other thoughts at the end of that thread. We don't do nothing in response to reminders of gun violence in our country. What we do is throw biased articles at one another, make snarky comments on Internet forums, and then we vote for people who either try and pass legislation that pays no attention to details in gun violence statistics or we vote for people that will try and stop the first group. The first step towards having an "honest discussion about gun violence" is to drop the charade that either political party actually champions that right now.

so you are saying that the processed food complaint is valid. Har har. I'm saying, "say what you actually care about."

http://www.losangelesgasprices.com/Price_By_County.aspx I actually don't drive very much but gas prices where I am went from $3.60 to $4.20 over the last 2-3 weeks.

No offense to you or Mr Williams, but people in positions of authority who are neither lawmakers nor judges will say all kinds of crap to try and stop people from doing things they don't want them to do. (And people who are neither lawmakers nor judges will argue otherwise.) By way of example, in California, ask a shooting range owner, a gun store manager, a cop, anyone who answers the phone at CA DOJ, and a paid attorney how to legally transport a handgun and the ammunition for it from your house to the range. You'll get at least five different answers and at least four of them will be wrong. Just about anything short of established case law is moot.

And, again, complaints of excessive sodium and sugars are completely valid. I agree with that a lot more than I agree with complaints about food dyes. But complaining about the foods being "processed" is like people bitching about "liberals."

Thing is, in criticizing the term 'organic' in farming you're assuming that the term 'organic' in chemistry carries the original and correct meaning. This assumption doesn't really hold. Earlier recorded use of 'organic' and 'organical' in english carried the meaning of 'from living beings'. In that light, the term 'organic farming' makes perfect sense. My point is not that "organic" in the sense of organic chemistry is the One True Meaning (tm) of the word. My point was that it's another meaning of the word. I live around a lot of consumers that strike me as being more interested in the popularity of the word than what it means. What prompted me to be annoying in this thread was a recent conversation with a brother-in-law of mine. He was adamant about not buying "processed foods." And after additional inquiries into what he didn't like about them it became clear what he meant was he didn't like food dyes or when something says "artificial flavors" on it. I don't really get hung up on those ingredients, but if he doesn't like them that's fine. That's a lot different than just agreeing with him when he makes the claim, "processed foods are bad for you." I just don't care for words that become too simple a shorthand for complex ideas.

Interesting topic on the news today is the FBI's general profile of a terrorist included a background/education in hard sciences such as engineering. Their premise was that this background more generally led individuals to frame issues as succinctly as "black or white". So watch your posting, you already tick one of the FBI's boxes I'm just glad he wasn't named Shannon Maxwell Abdulazeez.

My background is neither in farming nor etymology and I don't have strong negative or positive feelings towards organic agriculture, I'm just playing Devil's advocate. "Organic", from a purely technical standpoint, is a really broad term. Presence or lack of carbon atoms in molecules aside, the broadness of the term is probably appropriate because organic agriculture has a lot of broadly stated goals. I like to call them "do good things" requirements. Now underneath that layer of stated goals, there are organizations that have more specific rules and standards to be followed. That's great, and I applaud the effort, but as we've seen here in California during the drought, farmers file for waivers to the regulations when things don't work out. I know it's a bad slippery slope argument, but the cynical side of me sees "organic farming" as meaning whatever it happens to mean today.

As a fellow electrical engineer, I strongly condem his actions.

Not by themselves they're not. It doesn't specifically mean anything, that was my point.

Is it worth noting that glyphosate, malathion, diazinon, parathion, and isobutylidenediurea are all organic compounds? No? Okay, I'll be on my way.

Which direction would you have insisted that fraction go? (Hint: the fifteenth amendment was ratified in 1870.)

Because "Hussein" is a much louder bell to ring than is "Rafael" (at least in recent times) and it's a bell they feel like ringing. If a right-wing candidate or president had, for instance, a hick-sounding middle name or nickname then detractors would use it sarcastically when they were whining about his or her policies too. People who refuse to refer to Obama without calling him BHO or something of that nature like he's a serial killer or something I place in the same category as people who left their Kerry/Edwards 2004 bumper sticker on their car until 2008.

I'm originally from Chicago* so of course the Red Hot is my favorite. I consider mustard, onions, sport peppers, and celery salt to be the stars of the show. Hungry while wandering around Reykjavik, I had a hot dog with mustard, remoulade, and crispy fried onions. It was also quite good. *...area. Grew up in 60067. Gotta nip that shit in the bud around here.

This thread has been pretty entertaining. I particularly like the caps-locked spelling error in the title and people feigning the inability to interpret / understand statistics about metropolitan areas that span multiple municipalities that vary greatly in size and population.

My post was not suggesting the perpetrators don't have nefarious intent nor that this breach isn't a very big deal. I was mocking the idea that your social security number is some gold standard of privacy like it's a naked photo of you or something. When you look at the totality of the SF86, about the only thing it doesn't cover is naked photos.