Andy9o8

No. But what does that have to do with it? Well, it's obvious: bad analogies are like, well... oatmeal without garden shears: both can give you hives. OK, maybe not. But they're always a good fall-back to feed the simple masses.

speech

A heartfelt thank you, Gov. Brewer, for the veto. I may not agree with all the Arizonian policies, but thank you very much for the veto. As much as I'm with you on this, Mark; and Yes, she ultimately did The Right Thing, I don't think she did it because she felt it was The Right Thing To Do from an ethical or social-policy standpoint. She did it out of purely political and financial calculation. Put another way: Make no mistake, she's not your friend.

Does 1861 - 1865 ring a bell? Rephrasing the question, could it happen again? How about the Al Qaeda sleeper groups uniting in an overall attack? What would happen if major areas of our infrastructure shut down? No communications, no fuel, no money. LOL. You're so worried about the distraction coming from al-Q'aeda-esqe Moozlims, you're completely ignoring where the real threat of that kind of shit, on that kind of scale, is coming from: it's.... ....well, you wanna take a guess?

Wendy put forth most of the specific rebuttals to your various points that I would have. Or at least as well as a rocket scientist can be expected to do it.

Tebow did more than simply "out" himself publicly as a devout Christian - which is all that Sam did: he outed himself; nothing less, but nothing more. Tebow went out of his way to make photogenic displays of it while on the game field ; and anyone who buys that he wasn't trying to make a public display of it is naive indeed. People weren't bashing his devout faith; they were bashing his making a BFD about it while the cameras were rolling. He sought public view, and thus invited public reaction. By contrast, I rather doubt that Sam is going to do "gay stuff" on the field. Everyone knows that's the figure skaters.

I hope Arizona is proud of itself. It has now joined other enlightened places like Uganda and Sudan.

All for the sake of maintaining the idiotic criminalization of marijuana, a product which practically everybody either wants or feels "live and let live" about. I hope society feels Officer Sowers's life was worth sacrificing for that. Talk about your fucked up social priorities...

I wonder how many of the people shot dead by their partners and/or with their own guns felt exactly the same way. A timely question, as it happens: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/man-shoots-himself_n_4853983.html

Depends.

Don't you dare minimize my rant.

Our military, police, firefighting, air traffic controllers and pothole-filling are currently "free", K-12 public schools are currently "free"; so what's the inherent Red Menace evil in suggesting that the public funds currently allocated toward public school education be extended to no-tuition, publicly-funded 4-year degree programs, existing along-side the university educations that charge tuition? I'd much rather donate an extra $100 toward your kids' education than toward the profits of McDonnell Douglas or Halliburton any day of the week. The Pie will always be there; it's just a question of how large it will be, and where the slices go. Are people who favor large allocations of The Pie toward a strong military Communists because the slice comes from public funds? "Usual suspects"? Really, Bill? I don't see how that kind of broad-brush demonizing advances a serious discussion.

No, no; without good grammar, skydiving is meaningless.

I think you have a short - i.e., post-WWII, Euro-influenced - view of history. Also, you, like most of us who live in North or South America, live in a country that on the whole was geographically insulated from much of the immediate peril that endangered the homes of people in Europe and Asia during WWII. Europe has been at relative peace your entire lifetime; but the now-elderly people who well remember when WWII was raging view history - and, thus, the prospects for the long-term future - through a very different lens. It's an unresolvable, yet still timely and interesting, thought experiment to ponder: if personal firearms ownership throughout Europe and Asia had been as pervasive in the 1st half of the 20th Century as it is in the US, could the fascists of Germany, Italy, Japan, etc. have had the successes they did, necessitating nothing less than total warfare on a global scale to eradicate them? I can tell you that those type of policy considerations provided the philosophical, as well as practical, underpinnings of what came to be codified in the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution.

I am not comfortable with that definition. In my mind, "morality" and "ethics" may or may not not be entirely identical, but they greatly overlap. Or, perhaps morality is a sub-set of ethics. But in any event, I think that metrics and considerations of both ethics and morality can exist entirely independently of any presumption of, or reference, to any form of deity, spirituality, superstition, etc. Put another way, you can have very strongly-held personal and social standards re: honesty, sexual conduct, pair-bond fidelity - basically all the "10 Commandments"-type stuff - without any reference or belief whatsoever to religion or spirituality. Because so many people's brains are hard-wired (whether from birth and/or the powerful and lasting effects of social indoctrination) to presume the existence of "spirituality" (etc., etc.,, in whatever form(s)...), there seems to exist a predisposed social bias to presume that the highest tenets of morality are necessarily religiously-derived; and that the logical corollary is that a complete lack of religious or spiritual beliefs connotes a comparative deficit of ethics or is a breeding ground for immorality. I think that's unfortunate.

Wendy said taint.

I think she means something most other people haven't done.

Seems to me that, technically, most if not all porn actors are at risk of violating the black-letter of most states' prostitution statutes, in the instances in which they're actually engaging in sexual contact, and not just simulating it (which is to say: virtually all of the time), since they're presumably being compensated for their on-film sexual conduct.

zactly.

But these business owners have no power. Of course they do. They have the economic and political power to monopolize certain essential services, and effectively deny or restrict such essential services to entire segments of society based on nothing more than ethnicity. Recognition of that core reality was the policy underpinning the US's Civil Rights Act in the 1960s (and related federal court decisions of the same time period) which prohibited businesses such as restaurants, hotels, bus companies, etc. from discriminating against ethnic classes of potential customers. That was just the first generation of such laws. Laws prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals are the next generation of laws, but they have the same policy foundation. Sorry, but in the US, the argument "I can refuse service to whomever I want" was consumed on the funeral pyres of the law almost 50 years ago.

In North Carolina; prostitution, sex acts or using real property for the use of either in exchange for compensation is illegal. I think it's: sex acts in exchange for compensation is illegal prostitution; and allowing prostitution to take place on real property you own or possess is also illegal. But simply receiving compensation in exchange for allowing sex acts to take place on your real property would not, in and of itself, be (constitutionally) illegal, because that would logically make running a hotel or motel virtually impossible.

Disagree. The grammar could be tighter, but the phrase "who witnessed the jump" modifies the entire phrase "another licensed skydiver, a pilot, or a USPA National or FAI Judge". Contextually, viewed as a whole, and since obviously a skydiver always witnesses his own jump, it is clear that (a) neither the hypothetical signing pilot nor the hypothetical signing judge are to be the same jumper whose jump is being signed-off on - in other words, jumpers who also happen to be pilots or judges may not sign-off on their own skydives. It is also clear that (b) technically, anyone who signs off on another jumper's jump should have witnessed the jump. Whether "witnessed" means to have actually watched the jumper's jump, or to have simply been present at the DZ while the jump took place, is another issue that is left undefined by the regulation. I am guided, in part, by one of the most basic principles of statutory construction: do not interpret an imprecision or ambiguity of language or grammar in a written rule (law, regulation, etc.) such that it produces an absurd result. To prohibit jumpers from signing-off on their own jumps, but yet carve out a narrow exception for jumpers who just happen to have pilot's licenses or serve as a national or FAI judge and allow only that sub-set to sign-off on their own jumps, would be an absurd result.

Sorry to hear your inner child has died. http://www.naturalnews.com/043984_44-year-old_fetus_lithopedion_elderly_woman.html

Your first photo shows another blast from the past: toggles that really are toggles!

They do seem long on opinion and conclusions (which may or may not ultimately be correct), and short on hard data to specifically support them. Hey, Jan: we're still looking for objective, factual support for your contention of the fakey-blood thingie. Evidence: it's what's for breakfast.