Nightingale

However, if the police really did have a person on the inside for four years (and it sounds like they did), they may have had enough evidence already, and a specific child calling for help may have been what spurred them to act, rather than being the probable cause itself. They're just going to argue that they had enough probable cause without the phone call. Getting evidence thrown out is VERY difficult to do.

How does a divorce cost the government that much? When I got divorced, we paid the fee (I think it was around $400???). Your tax dollars are covering the rest. In a courthouse, there's the judge's salary. And the bailiff's salary. And the Court Clerk's salary. (edit: I forgot the court reporter's salary) You've got the state bar expenses to keep track of your lawyer. You've got the expense of a taxpayer paid for, court appointed lawyer for your kids in some situations. And then there's the county recorder and records clerks that have to keep track of who's married and who's divorced. On top of that, you have the financial overhead for buildings and maintenance. Then, you have the people in the federal government working on taxes and making sure that you're not claiming your now ex spouse. You've got the expenses at the records office to change your name back to your maiden name. You've got the expenses at the DMV to change your driving records to your new name... the list goes on. Divorce isn't cheap.

I agree with this, but one question I have is: If marriage was no longer recognized by the law, how would that affect immigration laws? If I was in a relationship with a non-U.S. citizen, and I wanted my partner to be able to permanently live with me in the U.S., would I still be able to sponsor him to become a U.S. citizen? Sure. You help him find a job, get the employer to sign the appropriate paperwork, and bring him over here on a work visa, and he can begin the process of becoming a citizen. Or, we start a special visa program where a person may sponsor another person towards citizenship, provided they can show that they have the means to financially support that person until they fulfill the citizenship requirements.

What it's costing us as taxpayers: The entire cost of the divorce court system. A single divorce costs state and federal governments about $30,000. The 10.4 million divorces in 2002 are estimated to have cost the taxpayers over $30 billion. (Whitehead, B. and Popenoe, D. The State of Our Unions) Just to put this in perspective, if the $30 billion/year rate was consistent from 2003-2008, that's $150 Billion, or around 1/4 the cost of the war in Iraq.

Beyond financial and legal benefits, there are no reasons to have legally sanctioned marriage.

No. I don't feel as if I have an obligation or responsibility to help people in need. But I do it anyway.

As long as there was what appeared to be probable cause at the time of the search, and the officers involved in the search did not know the evidence that provided the probable cause was flawed, the search is probably legal, and the evidence admissible.

Personally, I don't think marriage should be recognized by law at all. The government simply has no business regulating relationships between consenting adults. Marry in your church or in front of your community, but it shouldn't confer any kind of special status whatsoever.

No, they didn't. The law is against having more than one LEGAL spouse. The men in those communities typically do not legally marry their second "wife", but have a church ceremony only. Since there is no law about multiple adults living together, and the church ceremony has no legal standing, there is no crime provided all parties are over 18.

You may want to return your keyboard... the punctuation keys aren't working.

I don't really agree with that... Skydiving, even if someone leaves the sport before 500 jumps, will always be a part of you. There's something about jumping that changes people, and whether you have 5 jumps or 500, it's something you take with you forever.

What's the climate like where you are? Yucca live all over, and depending on the species, there are different ways to kill them. If you live in a dry climate, I'd try overwatering.

CNN has a video: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/04/16/lkl.flds.polygamy.cnn Apparently it shows inside the compound. The lady who is talking to the reporter is a little scary...

Same here. I can't go to animal shelters, because I want to adopt them all and come home crying because I can't take them all, and I know I'd end up picking the most pathetic one that looked the saddest rather than picking the one that would make a good pet. As for the poster that didn't like equating animals with people... I think in many situations, animals are BETTER than people, because they can never be anything less than completely honest.

No idea... I had something really creepy happen to me in college that was probably a similar phenomenon. I was in the concert hall just after midnight, recording for the soundtrack for a film project I was working on. My friend was up in the audio booth working sound, and I was down on the stage at the piano. I finished my song and sat quietly, waiting for my friend to indicate that he'd stopped recording. Instead, when I looked up at the booth, he was gesturing to me frantically. I went running up there. The lights on the inputs were still flashing, like there was still a low level of sound going into the system. This concert hall was built for recording, was highly soundproofed, and there wasn't a sound in the place other than the two of us, and we weren't talking. We were looking at each other, thinking WTF, when the lights stopped. We rewound the tape and played it back. At first, all we heard was static, and then, when we cranked the volume up to max, we heard the school choir singing Faure's Requiem. I was completely freaked out, because the last time we had performed that piece, it was at the funeral of one of the choir's mentors, who had selected that requiem for the choir a year earlier, and who always sat in the audience whenever there was music happening in the concert hall, even if it was just a recording or rehearsal. If there was music happening in that hall, he was there. Half the choir, upon hearing this, was firmly convinced it was some kind of message from the grave, letting us know he was still listening. Personally, I think the recording was probably being broadcast on the school's radio station, and the equipment picked it up, or the tape had been used so many times that it had recorded one of our rehearsals and didn't erase completely. Either way, it was weird and kind of cool.

They do make animal diapers... check in the dog section of PetCo.

Well, Penn and Teller certainly charge an arm and a leg for their show tickets, but they're honest about it, and you get what you paid for: entertainment.

It's pretty common. The term the skeptic community uses for it is "transcendental temptation." Karla McLaren, a former psychic, has this to say about it: " For instance, an understanding of cold reading would have helped me a great deal. I never knew what cold reading was, and until I saw professional magician and debunker Mark Edward use cold reading on an ABC News special last year, I didn't understand that I had long used a form of cold reading in my own work! I was never taught cold reading and I never intended to defraud anyone - I simply picked up the technique through cultural osmosis." You can read the whole article here: http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-05/new-age.html

That side of people that wants so badly to believe is what psychics take advantage of, whether they know it or not. People who learn cold reading accidentally and convince themselves they're psychic may not know they're deceiving themselves and you, but there is no way a hot reader doesn't know what they're doing. They're the worst kind of liar. No, I haven't seen that show. Is it on DVD?

Because he had fooled too many people. The people in his audience were so hopeful they would grasp on to anything and supply him with what he needed to cold read. When you cold read, there are going to be misses. I remember a few misses I considered catastrophic that, when I talked to the person later, they didn't even remember, because the brain doesn't focus on things that it doesn't want to hear... it focuses on what it considers important and dismisses what's not relevant. The people who come to psychics have already suspended their disbelief. It's up to the psychic reader to run with it at that point. They're reading something, of course, but it isn't cards or minds... it's faces, actions and responses.

Sylvia Browne once told a woman that she had a "surgical instrument" inside her from a surgery the woman had told her about, and that she should go get an MRI to prove it was there!!! An MRI giant magnet mixed with a left behind surgical instrument?! WTF.

If what she's doing goes beyond cold reading, she's probably hot reading. Most of those shows have a list of their audience members. You can't just buy a ticket like you can to a movie theater. You have to give your name in advance. All it would take for most of those people is some creative googling around the local obituary pages for "Edna Ross is survived by her son Mark and granddaughter Janet" so she has a history of Edna's life as a horse rancher and how her quilts won at the state fair, and now, all she has to do is say "I'm getting an E name.... Edie... Edna... She wants to speak to a Matt... no, it's Mark. Definitely Mark." And then she talks about how much Edna loved horses and is happily quilting away in heaven while she looks down on her lovely granddaughter Janet.

John Edwards. Another damn good cold reader, and the show was heavily edited only to show the "hits" rather than the misses. They tape for EIGHT hours, and only made a thirty minute show. Prior to the show, the audience was seated for several hours (microphones already hooked up!), and of course, everyone was chatting about what dead person they wanted to talk to... and guess who was probably listening... Below is a letter sent to the Randi Foundation from an audience member on John Edwards' Show:

Sylvia Browne: Coast to Coast AM radio show (January 3 2006) (George) Noory: The election in 2008. Let's jump ahead a couple years. (Sylvia) Browne: Mmm-hmm. Noory: Who do you see as the two major candidates? Browne: Well, strangely enough, I think Kerry and McCain are going to run. Montel Williams (2003) Williams: What was all that? Half of you were going to go vote for him, so be quiet. All right, OK. So now, what about, what about, let's talk about people in--in the--in the news. How about Hillary Rodham Clinton? What's going to happen with her? Browne: She'll never run. Montel Williams (December 31 2002) Williams: J. Lo, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. Browne: Yeah, they're going to get married, yeah, but it's not going to last. I mean, they don't have a good track record. You don't have to be psychic to figure this out. in fact, Lopez and Affleck called off their engagement Montel Williams (December 27 2006) Williams: Dang. Is J. Lo gonna have a baby? Browne: No, no...I think she wants to have one, but there's something wrong there that--I don't know. Either she can't or won't or whatever. Lopez announced her pregnancy in October 2007 and delivered in February, 2008 Montel Williams (May 24th, 2006) Woman: I lost my boyfriend tragically, um... a few years ago. (choking back tears) They never found him, and I've had such a hard time since. Every day. (Sylvia) Browne: The reason why you didn't find him is 'cause he's in water. And, find him in water... Browne: (to Montel) it's like the girl that's missing in Aruba. (to woman) You can't find somebody... Woman: (interrupting) Well, it was... September eleventh. There was no... He was a fireman, but... there was no... Montel Williams (April 29th, 1999) (Audrey) Sanderford: (Voiceover) On March 25th, 1999, my six-year-old granddaughter, Opal Jennings, was abducted from my front yard and has yet to be found. The past few weeks have been unbearable for me and my family. Even though there is an overwhelming amount of support from our community, police department, the FBI and different forms of media, my Opal is still missing. To this day, I still like to believe she is not (unintelligible). This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. I have made so many pleas to whoever has her, to return our little girl home safely. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she? Browne: She’s… not… dead. But what bothers me – now I’ve never heard of this before, but for some reason, she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro. Or Kukoura. I don’t know anything about it, but… According to Opal's family after her body was found, “It was determined that Opal was killed by trauma to the head with(in) several hours of her abduction.” She was found 13 miles from where she was taken, in Texas. Montel Williams (February 26 2003) Regarding Sean Hornbeck: Pam Akers: Is he still with us? Browne: [shaking her head] No. Sean Hornbeck was found several years later, quite alive. Sylvia Browne charged his parents $700 per hour. ________________________________________________ Edited to add: These are the statements that people don't remember. They remember when she says things that happen later on, but the human memory is selective, and tends to dismiss what's inaccurate due to a lack of association. If she says "George Bush will win the election!" (Montel), everyone forgets that a few months earlier, she was saying the democrats were going to win! The mind thinks back and draws an association with what was said and what happened, not what was said and what didn't happen.

Awesome!