Andy9o8

Interestingly enough, douches often do.

I'm truly very sorry for what happened to you. When I was in the 2nd grade we had a mean, abusive school principal who'd find lame excuses to "discipline" me for any fabricated reason, usually the guise of bad schoolwork, by grabbing my arm in a vise-like grip and hitting my ass excrutiatingly hard with his hand-of-stone. Any excuse he could to inflict pain, and it always seemed to end with his big hand on my little ass. He used to keep a paddle in his office to administer some of his whuppings. A fine piece of workmanship; it had holes drilled into it to lessen the weight and wind resistance and give it just that right balance. He was verbally and emotionally abusive to me, too, which I won't detail. He's 20 years dead; if I could exhume his grave and piss onto the face of his rotting corpse, I would. So. Now that we've each discussed our bona fides, I want to say that I don't believe for a minute that the genuine original, or the institutional, reason for the Boy Scouts' ban on gays has ever been to minimize the risk of assault by pedophiles. Public relations packaging and after-the-fact rationalizing aside, for the Scouts it's always been about maintaining Puritan morals and couching arcane bigotries in the veneer of "wholesome family values". I was in the Boy Scouts for a while, and I value the experience. This Neanderthal policy has been out of place in mainstream American society for decades. It's high time for it to be consigned to the ash-heap.

I tend to think life would still be rather exciting without needed to shit on other peoples beliefs. Does people believing in god for what ever reason, make the said Professor's mathematics any more challenging or interesting to him. People like that aren't interesting, chances are if they are all ways shitting on other people, then they are probably pieces of shit! Sorry to Dave for pressing the thread-drift further, but... since we weren't in the classroom to observe the full context for ourselves, I'm thinking it's quite possible, and quite natural, that a course devoted to cosmology would prompt discussions about the origins of the cosmos, so.... well, you see. Anyhow, what more logical place to get into a debate than a college classroom? And who knows who said what first, and who had an attitude about whom? And it could very well be a matter of perception: one man's "teaching about the scientific method" is another man's "belittling religion." Too bad there's no videotape. Or maybe everyone in the room was a douche.

It's also very much about allowing openly gay youths to be scouts alongside their straight fellow scouts.

In 25 years, in courts all over the country, I've seen a grand total of.. one judge who used a gavel, and actually banged the damned thing. And sadly, he was literally - not just metaphorically - one of the stupidest humans I've ever met. He'd say shit from the bench that would leave everyone in the room, not just the lawyers, with mouths agape. On a brighter note, he's now the Flying Spaghetti Monster's problem, not ours.

Hm. A Ph.D. mathemetician actually skeptical of something lacking empirical scientific proof. Shocking. Unless those people were pushing their beliefs, or bring the point up for debate, said professor would just be a huge douche. There is a fine line between being enlightened, and being an ignoramus. We're all douches. Like would be utterly boring without it.

Here you go. That was too easy.

Hm. A Ph.D. mathemetician actually skeptical of something lacking empirical scientific proof. Shocking.

Just curious if your property includes the air as well as the ground. If not, would a drone hovering outside your window be considered in the 'public domain' and anything it sees 'in plain sight'? That's long-since been ruled on by various courts around the country - mostly police helos finding pot farms, stills, other illegal activity, etc. 9 out of 10 courts say the airspace is open, so it's in plain sight. Don't want your shit seen? Conceal it from view, on all 3 dimensions.

None of my college professors really pushed any agenda at all, one way or the other, and I was a government major at a uni in the heart of Yankee-land. OK, one history prof was a Communist, but that's it; and he was an oddball who nobody took seriously, anyway. And that school has a huge Business/Management department, and the profs there were and are overwhelmingly conservative and Republican. In law school, also in the Northeast, most profs were pretty moderate; and the contracts, corporate, tax and estate guys were very conservative. No out-of-the-closet pinkos.

LOL, then you have to explain to your happy felony-defendant client, "No, he means after your sentence is served."

see post #19.

Ooh. Sounds kinda like a gun thread.

Maybe the best way to honor Kyle would be making it much harder for mentally disturbed people to have access to guns. Nothing wrong with that. I think engaging war veterans in other activities would be good. Ending the war and getting these kids out of harms way would do better. Agreed. But let's not stop there. The next step is for all of us to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk. The lessons we supposedly learned from Vietnam seem to have been forgotten once that generation was in charge, because we went did it all over again in Iraq. Agent Orange was replaced with new mystery maladies, and the last batch of PTSD disabled have been supplanted with the latest batch of PTSD disableds. And look what it's gotten us. 40 years ago, when we were naively protesting our asses off, we learned the hard way that once the soldiers are in-country, protesting at home is too little and too late to do much good. The next time a President and Congress are hot to say "Go", We The People have to be willing to stand up and say "No!"

Ludes are so day-before-yesterday, John.

Gee, John. So bored you need multiple sock puppets at once? , that's creepy.

One person's "amusing" is another person's "annoying". One person's sock puppet is another person's creepy stalker.

They got ripped at $25k each. I made my drone for around $1k, complete with GoPro. Pfft That's wholesale. And does it have a missile pylon?

My quick & dirty Google search couldn't find that. Maybe I missed it? Could you please help me out with a link to that quote? Thanks.

I don't think the bill has been passed or come up for a vote yet; it's still circulating through the state legislative process. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You don't. You, all by yourself, can stand on a soapbox in any park or street corner and protest all you want as long as that doesn't affect the flow of other people's traffic or business...knock yourself out. Totally free. I'd defend your right to do that to the death and so would the ACLU. What you need a permit for is a parade or something else that fucks up the flow of traffic or requires additional police to to reroute said traffic or deal with the crowds. But there are many times when, in my opinion, local authorities use that as an excuse to regulate, restrict and censor public demonstrations of free speech. Here, too, my starting default position is to be highly disapproving of demonstration permits, on constitutional grounds. What do you suppose the "A" stands for?

Depends on what they're actually paying for. Are you suggesting a government paid gun welfare program to give guns to people who can't afford them? I wouldn't have thought that would be your style. I'm not for it. The de facto reality is that in order for a person to exercise a number of their rights, they have to pay to do so. For instance, in order to exercise your 3rd Amendment, you kind of have to at least have paid for your domicile to begin with. Likewise with your gun and bullets. You already pay sales tax on those. A registration fee would be nothing different. In another gun thread a few days ago I expressed that I feel that registration fees and/or insurance premiums can be high enough to be unconstitutional. Ah - here it is: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4436736#4436736 And by logical extension, low enough to be consider Constitutional as well. I guess the Supreme Court could decide what is the appropriate level of fees. They're just judges. As I noted in the linked post, a NYC judge already ruled one particular fee structure to be constitutional, and I disagree with that ruling; I felt the fees in that case were excessive.

Depends on what they're actually paying for. Are you suggesting a government paid gun welfare program to give guns to people who can't afford them? I wouldn't have thought that would be your style. I'm not for it. The de facto reality is that in order for a person to exercise a number of their rights, they have to pay to do so. For instance, in order to exercise your 3rd Amendment, you kind of have to at least have paid for your domicile to begin with. Likewise with your gun and bullets. You already pay sales tax on those. A registration fee would be nothing different. In another gun thread a few days ago I expressed that I feel that registration fees and/or insurance premiums can be high enough to be unconstitutional. Ah - here it is: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4436736#4436736 Generally speaking, my starting position is to be very disapproving of having to pay to exercise constitutional rights.

Jesus Christ! No, seriously; he's on the list.

Lotta Motel 6's, eh?