peacefuljeffrey

I put leaving your nail clippings for others to encounter on a par with leaving sheets of sunburned skin peelings around. People naturally find bits of other people's bodies to be a bit unnerving and gross. I think they're both annoying, but there is far less chance that someone would get away with stinking our office up with nail polish fumes! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Come on, I agree that seeing long nails on men is gross, but there is still nothing demonstrating that they couldn't clip their nails at HOME. There is no need for them to do it at the OFFICE. If you realize your nails are getting a bit long, (A) you should have realized it yesterday, or this morning before work, and (B) they can't possibly have gotten so much longer in the time since the last opportunity you should have taken to cut them, that they MUST be done before you get home again. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

You're not wrong: it IS inappropriate. It falls under the heading of personal grooming, and that is supposed to be done in privacy, on your own time. There are a few people in my office who do that, too! One is a 79-year-old woman with a hunchback! The other was a dude who got fired, and I think there are two or three others, who either clip or file their nails or both. I can't imagine the urgency of clipping one's nails being so bad that it couldn't have been done earlier that day before coming to work! Did the nails suddenly go from just fine, to, "Damn! I gotta clip these right now and can't wait til I get home!" in just a few hours?! If I ever saw the clipper lying around, I'd probably take it and surreptitiously put it in the trash. Leave them to figure out that it pissed somebody off! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Cynthia, is that the fridge pic? That is by far the best tandem pic I have ever seen, bar none. It utterly captures the thrill and amazement of a first tandem!

I am usually called a liberal. How is it my fault? (In fact "liberal" is usually used as an insult around here). That's 'cause everyone realizes there's nothing respectable about holding liberal views! That's almost like saying, "In fact, 'pedophile' is usually used as an insult around here.' " -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Oh please. If it is, then that's just us getting in step with the rest of the world. You seem to be treating this as though it's the government stepping in and censoring the airwaves. But in reality, it's a network or two, which clearly have commercial interests to protect. They clearly do market research -- everyone knows that -- and they try to do their best to keep from pissing off people who they feel are the large chunk of their cash pot. They are not to be faulted for saying to themselves, "Gee, if we do X, the people who object to X, who are a major chunk, probably the hugest chunk, of our market are gonna hit us in the bottom line, so we'd better not do X." They are private entities. This is their prerogative. If NOT running this is something that offends people, then THOSE people can withhold their dollars. That's how this works. Freedom of choice is a real bitch, isn't it, Bill? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

At this point how do we know that is fact? Bodies on slabs with entry and exit wounds are pretty strong testament to this kind of thing. And an investigation that finds they were hit in the back, and that they were not armed at the time, that'll be the final nail in the coffin for this psycho. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

What?! No padlock on this thread yet?! -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I know I'm not Kev, but since I agree and hold the same view, I'll contribute my explanation for variety's sake. I don't believe in supernatural forces because they most certainly have not been proved to exist. If they had, our capacity to spread information would have surely brought such proof before me; and if logical proof of something is presented to me, I have no problem accepting its truth. But so far, zip. But if your argument for believing in them is simply, "Well, they could exist," I think that standard for believing is too low. I am not someone who believes radical things and defends that belief as long as they have not yet been DISproved. I withhold believe UNTIL something IS proved, generally. Forming and holding beliefs strictly on the basis of "why not?" is just sloppily unscientific. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

No, not as any kind of sentient, semi-sentient, or palpable force. Evil is not a brooding, maleficent "entity" -- it is simply that set of things that we define as undesirable or bad in the extreme. And there is no one official definition for what is evil. We would consider infanticide "evil," but the Spartans used to leave weak children on a hillside to die. We view human sacrifice as evil, but some cultures did it and thought of it as wholesome, and beneficial to their people. I certainly do not believe in a force of evil. Evil is simply the term given to stuff after the fact when we have a strong aversion to it. If a huge comet came along and smacked the earth and eradicated not just humanity but all life on the planet, would that be evil? I mean, why wouldn't it qualify, if anything would? Isn't the nasty, pointless killing of all earthly life, like, huge orders of magnitude worse than the simple rape, torture, or murder of a single innocent person -- which we have no reservations about calling "evil"? But it would just be a mindless comet with no agenda. How could that be evil? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Now I guess he'll start making millions more writing "books" about the experience, and do the talk-show circuit... ugh. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

My dad splurged for a noise-reduction headset, something like $300 or $400, and he swears by it. He's normally kinda cheap about stuff like that, so it's saying something. I don't know what brand he has, though. I have a Flightcomm headset that is not NR, but I like it okay. I had the upgrade to gel-filled earcups for a few extra bucks. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Okay, well, Rush Limbaugh today said that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's son is turning down lucrative private sector jobs to enlist in the army because he thinks it's his duty. Yes, that Daley, the liberal police-statist corrupt shitbag (who closed down and destroyed Meigs Field in the dark of night). His son is enlisting. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Howard Stern. Here is a guy who claims to have tens of millions of loyal fans, and he urged them to vote against Bush, and still nada. Even compiled with ALL of the MANY celebrities who urged their fans to vote against Bush, even with all of the Soros billions, Bush still won. But I picked Stern because he demonstrates just how irrelevant a moronic, unfunny "shock jock" can be even when tries his damnedest, because his fans are just, well, stupid and unconcerned. You can't say that Moore was "irrelevant" because simply given how much press and discussion he got, that means he was not irrelevant. It's just that the "grassroots" that he motivated still were not enough to win Kerry the White House. There just are apparently more people who think right than think left in the U.S., the bullshit claims of the left that they are the majority notwithstanding. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Yes, and the really sad, really bad thing about it all is that those who say they believe in these bans and these registries that don't work WILL NEVER ADMIT IT, because that would require that they admit they were WRONG about something, and that their views were misguided and erroneous. So they cling and cling and cling, even though everyone knows they're wrong, and even though they themselves know that everyone knows that they themselves know they're wrong. The tenacity with which they cling to obviously failed policies with no rational reason for doing so is something that could be the subject of doctoral theses... What I'm saying is, don't expect the cheerleaders for gun bans and registries to go abandoning those useless gestures any time soon. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Next logical question you must answer, assuming your statement is axiomatic (which it is not, actually, but that's another issue): "Is all killing bad?" Failing to answer this question leaves us trying to control guns in order to stop "killing," but does not address the fact that killing in defense of the lives of the innocent is NOT BAD, and is not an argument for the prevention of killing using guns (or anything else, and for that matter, I don't see you urging tighter knife and bat controls). -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Yep... you are absolutely correct. I am always amazed that I have to explain this to some people. The easiest way I found so far is to point out that laws against murder, theft, adultery and drunk driving don't stop those activities either! This is true. Some people hold these up against gun bans and say, "Well if you want to scrap gun bans because they don't stop criminals from getting and using guns, why not scrap laws against murder because they don't prevent murderers from killing?" Now, that line of argument is specious. Here's why. The purpose of outlawing murder and theft, et al, is to provide that anyone committing them can be punished, because those things are BAD. Simply owning a gun is not, of and by itself, BAD. It is neutral. What you DO with that gun can be good or bad or neutral -- but that falls under the heading of murder, theft, et al. A law against having a gun does nothing to make anyone safer, and neither does a law against murder. Those who choose to own an illegal gun, those who choose to commit a criminal murder... they will do it despite a law that says, "Don't." But we have a NEED to punish a murderer, to remove him from society. We do NOT have a NEED to punish someone simply for the sake of his having a gun! There is no specific harm in that. Harm comes in only if you decide to commit an offense with the gun. And if you are hoping to prevent offenses by preventing people from having the means to offend, you have to roll back the rules of what we're allowed to have far beyond just guns, because the same twisted logic can be applied to baseball bats, cars, alcohol, gasoline and thousands of other things. The long and the short of it is, laws against gun ownership and laws against murder and other things like it are not on a parallel at all. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Toronto is to be forgiven for anything they might do wrong for 100 years, just because they gave us Rush.

Yikes. I almost passed out when i was in the ER with someone while he got his shoulder put back in place. Shit, I would love to have seen that! Me, all I've ever seen was some guy who worked in the kitchen when I was working at TGIFriday's get a few stitches in the base of his thumb after he stabbed it while cutting avocados. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Wow! This does not sound like it was the average cutaway! I was gonna ask why it was so hard to keep the handle, because it wasn't even a thought when I had my only cutaway back in October... but whatever happened to you seems to have been a bit more trying! What went on?? -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

So you bypassed Sebastian completely, and deprived me/us of the chance to meet you and jump with you in a beautiful seaside setting?! Would you please come by if you're still gonna be in the area?

If I was not skydiving, I would be playing more Disc Golf, which I played before I got into skydiving. I'd be spending more time inline skating. I'd be spending more time kayaking (surf and flat water). I'd be spending more time reading. I'd be spending more time doing crafts like knotted necklaces (though I guess it wouldn't be closing-pin necklaces ). I'm sure I'd locate and join a martial arts school; I've been too long out of that. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

According to my dad, a 35-year insurance agent in NY state, IF YOU KEEP YOUR PLATES (your car is still registered for use on public roadways) and your insurance policy cancels, you have 90 days in which to get your policy reinstated. For the first 90 days of cancellation of the auto insurance policy, you will be fined $6 per day as an uninsured motorist (and don't kid yourself, the DMV is in cahoots with the insurance companies about the status of your policy). After 90 days, if you still have not gotten insurance on the registered vehicle, you continue to be fined as before AND you lose your license for one day, for each additional day past the first 90 for which you have no insurance on the registered vehicle. Interestingly, if you have insurance on a vehicle, that insurance covers you for EVERY vehicle you might drive, even if you borrow a vehicle from a friend and he has let his insurance lapse. (This may vary from state to state, but it was the case when I lived in NY.) So if you got stopped in a car, and it was registered, and you have a valid license and you have insurance on your own car, you are not "driving an uninsured vehicle." Be aware of this if you ever get a ticket for it. My dad had an insured client beat a ticket for that because he happened to call my dad and mention he had gotten an uninsured motorist ticket in someone else's car. My dad knew his client had a current policy. He told the guy to go into court with proof of that, and the ticket was dismissed. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I find that the "commerce clause" is overused (ABused) by the government to seize power that it should not have, by s-e-r-i-o-u-s-l-y ... s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the definition of what "affects interstate commerce." I have read of applications of this clause that were absolutely absurd, transparent grabs on the part of congress to regulate stuff it had no legitimate reason to. They are cynically manipulating the use of the clause, turning it to overuse and usurpation. -Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Favorite? Bah. I can't pick one single favorite treat any more than I can pick a single favorite food! Here are some treats I love: - creme brulee - tapioca pudding - Zours (sour candies like Mike n Ike) - Snickers - ice cream (with chunky things in it) - anything berry flavored (preferably with real berries in it) - Jeffrey -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"