GeorgiaDon

I was unaware that any law required all tourists, visitors to the US, or even residents to be able to speak "American". Could you point me to that law? I'll want to be as accurate as possible when I advise my European, Asian, and African colleagues that they are not welcome here, and let them know they should spend their vacation dollars elsewhere where they are more likely to not be assaulted by the police. It seems clear to me that this is yet another case of a person who is committing no crime and posing no threat being needlessly assaulted by a thug officer. "All this could be avoided" if officers were not encouraged to think they are entitled to bully anyone they wish, and act as judge, jury, and sometimes executioner because their inner "sheepdog" felt the "sheep" was not acting sufficiently subservient. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Exactly. I can't think of any Americans that would react otherwise if the US were to be occupied by some foreign country. Yet, somehow, those same Americans seem to believe that people elsewhere in the world welcome being invaded and occupied, especially if the invaders are Americans. How can it be surprising to anybody that when the US overthrows elected governments and installs (and supports financially and militarily) dictators who subject the population to decades of oppression, imprisonment, and torture, those people come to hate the US? We would certainly hate anybody who did that to us! It's almost as if some people believe that only Americans have any pride or desire to order their own lives, and everybody who just happened to be born anywhere else in the world is unfit for anything except to be used to advance America's interests. Oh well, at least we didn't keep any of those countries. It's bad enough that we invaded Iraq under false pretenses, but then we didn't even bother to try to understand the culture and so managed to further inflame their stupid sectarian hostilities. Then we went and compounded it by running various campuses of the University of ISIS, rounding up all these jihadist nutjobs and putting them all together so they could plan on how to take over once we left. It would be a good thing if political leaders would think about putting themselves in the shoes of other people and ask "how would I react if someone did this to me?". "Do unto others as you would have done unto you" applies to countries as well as it does to your neighbor. If some action makes you mad enough that you'd want to kill, it'll probably make the other guy feel the same way too. On the other hand if some action makes you feel good about a situation, or that you have something to gain by pursuing it, other people will probably react the same way. All we have gained from these years of war in Iraq and apparently Afghanistan is a hornet's nest ten times worse than what went before. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

What percentage of Americans would like to see all Muslims killed? There are several who post here in Speaker's Corner who Regularly voice that opinion. How often do we hear that we should turn the entire Arab world into a "glass parking lot"? In all seriousness I bet at least 10% of the US population would have no qualms about exterminating everyone who follows Islam. That's a good 32 million right there. After all, "you must choose a side" and "being neutral is not an option". A pox on both houses, I say. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

How about you consider the facts.There are many Islamic countries in the world. When did Egypt declare war on the US? On Europe? How about Indonesia, when did they declare war on us? Can you name a single Islamic country that declared war on us before we invaded them? Yet if Mr. Deace is to be believed all people of the Islamic faith are mad dogs who want nothing more than to kill us. I suspect it is Mr. Deace who wants to see worldwide war over religion. There are certainly some highly radicalized groups within the Islamic faith who have done us harm and would like to do more. These people are just a small fraction of the whole of the Islamic people, and they do much more damage to other Islamic people than they have done to us. The

However the authorization is given based on information the police put in the warrant application. The judge has no resources to go out and independently verify all the claims in the application, and (in theory) no-knock warrants should only be used when there is a high likelihood that the evidence or person sought is in danger of being lost if action is not taken quickly, leaving the courts no time to conduct a separate investigation even if they did have the resources. It is up to the police to do the "due diligence" and ensure the statements in the application are as accurate as possible. In an environment where there are rarely any consequences that attach to the police for failure to do that, it seems to be an all to common event that such warrants are served on innocent people. Even if a lawsuit results, that is paid by the municipality (and so ultimately local taxpayers) and does not come out of the negligent police officer's pay or the departments budget. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

This case was an exceptionally poor choice as a "poster child" for the issue of excessive police force. If anything it plays right into the "they're all thugs who got what they deserved" stereotype. IMHO no jury would ever convict Wilson of any wrongdoing, criminal or civil. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, but here's a link to a news story on the case, which indicates he was charged with "three counts of possession of prescription drugs outside of the original container". Here is an article on the case from the campus newspaper. The article quotes the prof's attorney (Grant): "Grant said the charges involving not keeping drugs in an original container are common because most Georgians don't know it is illegal to store drugs out of their original prescription bottles." What were the drugs in question? The police initially described the drugs as "narcotics" and "happy pills". Here again from the Red and Black article: "Of the drugs found in Lance's office not in their original containers, one (Donepezil) is commonly used to treat Alzheimer's and the other two (Amlodipine Besylae and Benazepril and Losartan) are commonly used to treat high blood pressure." I didn't find the article where I saw that the "loose pills out of their original containers" were in one of those daily dispenser strips, that might have been a local TV news story. I do not know what the Georgia law actually says, but it seems the police interpret the law to say you can't have prescription drugs out of the original container, even if you are the person to whom the prescription was issued. It would not be the first time law enforcement has their own "take" on a law. Several years ago a local woman was stopped and ticketed for having an "obscene" bumper sticker ("I'm sick of all this Bushit"), even though the state Supreme Court had ruled the law she was ticketed under unconstitutional years before. It turned out the "handbook of law enforcement" used to teach police the law had never been updated to reflect the change, even though the handbook is supposed to be updated annually. It's not a safe assumption to assume the police must know the law better than you (the generic you, not Andy you) do. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

No kidding. A professor here got himself in a major pile of shit. First, in a real dumbass move he tried to talk a grad student into picking up some prescription drugs for him while the student was in Mexico. The drugs (for which he had a prescription) are much cheaper in Mexico so he thought he'd give the student the money and prescription and just have it filled in Mexico. Of course it is illegal to have prescriptions filled out of country (a blatant move to protect drug company profit margins IMO). The student mention the arrangement to someone, and pretty quickly the campus police were involved and the professor was arrested. Now for the piling on and drug paraphernalia part. The campus police searched the prof's office, and discovered (gasp!!!) that he had his prescription drugs in his office, in one of those daily dispensing containers (the kind with that are a strip with a compartment for Monday, one for Tuesday, etc.) Now in Georgia (and I assume elsewhere) it is a felony to transport drugs, even your own prescription, outside of the original container in which they were dispensed by the pharmacy. Even though every drug store in the country sells those "daily reminder" containers, it is apparently a crime to take your pills from the original container and put them in those strips. Naturally the prof was charged with for soliciting the student to pick up his prescription in Mexico, but he was also charged for having his prescription in a daily use strip, and was charged for "drug paraphernalia" for being in possession of the strip. The case was settled with some plea bargain, and the guy is no longer teaching at the University, so I don't know what charges he finally plead to, but I suspect the "drug paraphernalia" charge was there just as a bargaining chip to leverage some sort of a deal. So, just be aware that if you use one of those "daily" dispenser containers to keep track of whether or not you have taken your meds, you are committing a crime (at least in the eyes of the University of Georgia police). Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'm quite sure that 1,000 years from now "they" will not have returned to the idea that stars are painted on the inside of a globe, or that the Earth is flat and the center of the universe, or that fully formed little babies are scrunched up inside of sperm, or any of the other notions of "how things work" that prevailed in "biblical times". Biblical thought completely dominated European society for over 1,500 years and produced no useful insights into medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, or any other field of study of "how things work". All of our advances that have resulted in modern medicine and technology came about as a result of the Enlightenment and adoption of the scientific method, and that was resisted tooth and nail by the advocates of the Bible as the font and sole repository of all knowledge. And yet, according to the Bible, we are the crowning pinnacle of God's creation. Don't you think He could have perhaps done a bit better, being all-knowing and all-powerful? Stop repeating what history? Scripture has inspired an incredible amount of hatred and war over the millennia. Of course if we were to become a society that rejects any thought that is inconsistent with what is written in the Bible, and all think and look the same down to proscriptions on diet and clothing and hair styles, we might attain a sort of "peace". Somewhat like what the Taliban or ISIS wish to impose on their societies, but centered on Jesus instead of Mohammed. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So medicine, engineering, architecture, and so on are useless things? You think we'd be better off if medicines were invented by uneducated hacks? You'd fly in planes designed by people who couldn't hack college level math? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

So which one are you, Marc? High strung and irritable all the time, or ... ? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I know it's a tangent, but these statements set me off - that's a battle philosophy of the weak and scared - or one of the vengeful - or both weakness - another's actions should not define your willingness to use your strength at the least possible level to take care of business Strength allows us the privilege to respond with the least measures to stop threat, not to overwhelm a slight with overbearing viciousness over-reaction is a childish tantrum of shivering cowards hiding behind rocks and others bigger than them and if that's not applicable then I'd note that vengeance is not justice. vengeance is selfish and petty and also the domain of the weak willed, and ultimately, the scared and timid happy holidaysExcellent post. I'll only add "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" (attributed to Ghandi). Happy and safe holidays to all, Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I read it that way also. I just wonder why the state would not have set up any mechanism for people to get their rights back. That it was not a priority is just another indication of the too-common attitude towards anyone who has ever dealt with any form of mental illness. Unfortunately the best we can hope for is that Michigan does, obviously reluctantly, set up a program. People will still have to spend a small fortune, and likely a lot of time in court, to prove their treatment for depression 28 years ago does not mean they are still too dangerous to be allowed to exercise their constitutional rights. The system will continue to deter people from seeking treatment for mental illness, adding to the toll of unnecessary suffering (on the part of the ill who don't get help) and public risk (by discouraging intervention before a violent crime is committed). Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

QuoteIllegal emigrants are criminals right, Just sayingTongue[/:P] Your country makes it a crime to leave? If someone doesn't like it there and decides to move elsewhere, wouldn't that be something you'd want to encourage? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Ya In Iowa, if a spouce or live in partner get a restraining order against you, the police can (and many times do) come get your gunsThat's a completely different issue from mental illness. Unfortunately it's all too common for people, overwhelmingly women, to be killed or seriously injured by their spouse/partner. If enough evidence of threatening behavior exists to warrant a restraining order it seems not unreasonable to try to limit someone's ability to cause deadly harm. No doubt most of the people being "retrained" would not actually follow through on their threatening behavior, but in the end they are only temporarily inconvenienced, and that has to be balanced against the hundreds of women who are murdered or critically injured every year. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic. I agree with the decision, and I think it could well be a net positive wrt gun violence. The effectively permanent loss of gun and other rights, as well as life-long problems with employment, is a significant deterrent that discourages people from getting treatment for mental illness. Many people choose to struggle through their illness on their own, or choose not to try to get loved ones to seek treatment, because of the permanent stigmatization. Personally I think the prohibition on gun ownership should be restricted to people who are suffering from a mental illness that results in paranoia or a serious impairment in their ability to make rational decisions. It makes no sense to apply it to people who pose no elevated risk, such as people with obsessive-compulsive disorder or panic attacks. Further, if the condition is temporary any prohibition should be revoked automatically once the condition no longer exists and is unlikely to recur. People should not have to go to court, at considerable expense, time, and effort, to prove they are not a danger; rather if the state wants to restrict their rights the state should have to make a case that they are a significant ongoing risk to public safety. As a Canadian, I am not sure if you understand how broken the American mental health treatment system is. As an ex-pat Canadian myself, I am routinely shocked at the cavalier treatment of the mentally ill in the US; I recall things being much different in Canada. Treatment facilities are woefully inadequate here; you basically have to commit a major violent crime to get treatment for serious illnesses such as paranoia and schizophrenia. Invariably after such a crime we learn that the family has been trying to get treatment for the patient for years, but there is no room. It is also almost always the case that there is an escalating history of violent incidents before the "big one". Of course, once things have got to that point the patient is also involved with the criminal "justice" system, which by default becomes the mechanism to warehouse the seriously mentally ill. It's unfortunate but true that the majority of Americans will fight tooth and nail against paying taxes to fund mental health hospitals, but the same people are all in favor of building ever more prisons. Anyway, the attitude towards mental illness is so backward that most of the public is entirely incapable of the nuance needed to realize that not all mental illnesses are the same, and most are not at all associated with violent tenancies. Any politician who proposed any relaxation of the current laws regarding the mentally ill would get clobbered on election day. If it takes a court ruling to get the legislature to change their tune, so be it. In the meantime, anything that reduces the stigma that discourages people from seeking treatment is a good thing in my book. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I was talking about society becoming more inclusive, and here you go again with the tribalism. It sounds to me as if you are stuck in the notion that things were perfect as they were when we were young, and have been changing (which automatically means going downhill) ever since. Everyone thinks the music they grew up to is vastly better than the crap people are making today, and so on. When you were young, white men ran the show. It didn't matter if they were drunks, or whatever, they were in charge because, well, God said so. That's the way it had always been, always would be. Women and non-whites knew their place. Well, times have changed. Other people have a say as well, now. It must be hard for you. Speaking of misogynists! I have never been sure if Paul was just asexual, or if he was outright gay. He sure hated women, though. Sorry you're so stuck in your tribalism, Ron. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'm willing to believe you on that. A big reason this thread took the direction it did is because it began with the article you linked (by Ray Gano) that contained a number of messages. It seems you saw mostly (or entirely) his call to men to be responsible, which is of course a message no-one can really disagree with. Unfortunately he conflated that with hero worship of guys who put on uniforms (military, fireMEN (but not women), etc) and sort of crapped on everyone else (doctors, teachers, etc). Worse, his whole article is full of rants against women taking any position of responsibility, and against men who support women who want to make their own life choices. You quote Ephesians, he gives us this quote: 1 Timothy 2:12 But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. There is nothing in Timothy about mutual decision making or chain of command. It is all "women need to shut up, they have nothing to add to any possible conversation". Now there may be people here or there who seek to manage their relationships with women that way, but if they do I suggest they have other issues and are using religion to excuse their misogyny. As you say, almost no Christian couples really live that way, at least judging by all the people I know. Apparently you and your wife don't live that way either, but I think that is because Timothy is completely at odds with what it takes to make a loving relationship. I assume we're not talking about trivial issues such as what to have for dinner here. On the big things, such as whether or not to have kids, or to move for a job (leaving friends and family behind) I'd suggest a couple with a strong relationship should be able to work through the pluses and minuses and come to a mutual decision. If not, maybe the relationship isn't very good. Anyway there are alternatives to one partner always getting to make the choice: the one who is most effected might get last word (example: the woman, if it involves pregnancy and childbirth). Yeah, I agree that's a stretch. The question does arise about what is the "Christian" thing to do if your wife does not "submit", but I agree to assume violence is an exaggeration. Religion and social convention have always been intertwined, and so one sometimes has to try to distinguish between what is the real message of religion and what is just expression of social conventions at the time the passage was written. In biblical times almost all societies were highly male-dominated, and the writing reflects that. Over the past couple of centuries in particular, the trend has been to remove restrictions based on race, religion, and gender. I like to think the ideal would be a society in which everybody is allowed to speak, and everybody is allowed to make the decisions that affect their lives for themselves. I suspect you would tend to agree. Old strictures against women speaking will go the way of prohibitions on blending fabrics. For those who choose to follow Jesus, I think His message will be clearer when it is not obscured under the rags of stone-age social conventions. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

You forgot about killing their friends, family, and anyone who lives in the same country. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Sounds like someone is upset they won't get to be governor of Butfuckistan somewhere. Doesn't it just totally suck that Germany and Japan are now our allies? I'm sure we can all agree we'd be much better off if we were occupying them by force and dealing with the inevitable insurgency. And don't forget about the Cold War. It's a disgrace that that was resolved without a single city being nuked! I mean, the whole planet might have been a radioactive cinder but at least we would have been able to say we won. Well, if anyone was still alive they could have said it. You mean like killing as many people as possible? By the way, in your avatar you're saluting with the wrong arm. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

It takes a long time to starve to death, if a person is hydrated. A long, painful, miserable time. I'm sure the procedure was done out of concern for the self-interest of the prisoners. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

While many in the US would like to believe the Iron Curtain fell because Regan went to Berlin and ordered Gorbachev to "tear down this wall", in reality it had vastly more to do with the fact that people in Eastern Europe were increasingly able to see how people in the West lived, and realized what a colossal lie the Soviet empire was pushing. Communication, trade, people moving back and forth: no totalitarian regime can withstand that. The most powerful weapon the Western democracies have is the fact that despite their imperfections people here are vastly better off than people in any communist or totalitarian nation. As soon as trade was opened between Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Western Europe the Iron Curtain was bound to eventually collapse. I'll acknowledge that the US did spend the Soviets under the table on defense, too, and ultimately the Soviets could not keep up. Sanctions have completely failed to change the Cuban government. Tourism and iphones (i.e. money) should do the trick. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I don't hate the military, that's just your delusion. I come from a military family in fact. My father, brother, sister, and brother-in-law are all active or retired military. I do not like the notion, sometimes expressed here in speaker's corner, that people should be excused from violating crimes because they are/were a Marine. I also disagree with the often insinuated notion that military service makes someone a better "American" than teachers, or rocket scientists, or brain surgeons etc are. Why are you always so angry? We never hear anything but spittle-filled hateful ranting and diatribes from you. "Bleeding liberal vaginas" and crap of that nature. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Now don't you go posting anything critical of a Marine (or Marine reservist, or anyone connected to the Marines). Who are you (or I) to criticize them? Don't you know they are above the law? Anyway, I bet Obama killed those people, just to make the Marines look bad, or distract attention from Bengazi, or something. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Irony alert! I guess when other people glorify violence they're thugs, but when you glorify violence that makes you a patriot? Or maybe it just makes you a different thug? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)