Vegas, baby, Vegas!
Thanks to OMWC for bailing me out yesterday. Moving sucks. Just ask Raiders fans. Man, Josh Gordon needs to lay off the drugs. Or the NFL needs to update its CBA to allow its employees to do what they want with their own bodies.
Drew Brees was nearly perfect as the New Orleans Saints (Buckeyes South) won big. Liverpool play Villa in the League Cup today and play in the club World Cup tomorrow. They’re taking both matches about as seriously as they need to in order to keep rolling toward a EPL title, thankfully. And your hockey winners last night were: Florida, Nashville, Columbus, St Louis, and Edmonton.
I spy with my little eye a commie destroying my legacy!
Publishing legend Bob Guccione was born on this day. As were commie Pope Francis, tingly-leg guy Chris Matthews, comedic genius Eugene Levy, Steely Dan drummer Jim Hodder, Spaceballs‘s Bill Pullman, MMA legend Chuck Liddell, the lovely Milla Jovovich, boxing stud Manny Pacquiao, leaker Bradley Manning, and underrated actor Giovanni Ribisi.
OK then, here come…the links!
The EU may be in trouble, as it appears the British have elected people who understand how negotiations actually work. Of course, the EU is in trouble as soon as one of their two cash cows bails anyway. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of that globalist shitshow.
At first I thought this was a tragedy. Then I saw what the contents were. I’m firmly in the “meh” column now.
The South shall rise again…from the dead!
I wonder how hard they’re really looking for the person who did this. Also, don’t read the comments. Lots of fans of theft, censorship and banning of inanimate objects in there.
This is what’s called “tax evasion” when a normal person does it. When it’s a Chicago city employee, its called an error that they get to fix when caught.
Too gaudy even for Trump…but not Mitt.
Speaking of big money…this is pretty serious money. Jeez, Mormon Church. When is enough enough? Although I’m skeptical of the “whistleblower’s” motives.
A series of deadly storms ripped across the south, claiming one person. Man, that sucks. I got nothing snarky to say.
This is my favorite version of this song. Suck it, John Legend.
That’s it. Go have a great day, friends.
Look who’s early!
Mornin’ Sloop.
Good morning! Just trying to get a jump on the long day ahead. I have the distinct pleasure of going to Zapata today. Not sure if one handgun is enough for that trip so I’m taking three just to be sure.
Oh well, it’ll be profitable.
How profitable can it be bringing only three handguns into a market saturated with them? Oh, you meant you were buying there and selling them someplace with higher demand.
It’s a nice package of construction equipment for me to start my Feb auction with. And a pit stop in Corpus Christi on the way back to supplement it with.
If all goes as planned this week, I’ll be whole for 2020 before the year even starts. ??
what is the carbon footprint on those things?
Depends. The new Tier 4 final motors put out almost no emissions. Going back to Tier 0 motors and there is a fair bit.
But the benefit to humanity outweighs the carbon emissions.
I am still in love with the taxidermy squirrel with a gun and also the hoofed African thingy with big twisty horns that I got from one of your Texas auctions.
People come to my office and have one of three reactions to the squirrel:
1) Didn’t notice. Not observant
2) Ok you are weird, lady
3) I like the cut of your gib
That’s how I weed them out.
You steal from the unobservant ones?
No, I just send them off to Sustainment Engineering, where they just make 10000 widgets all the same. I am in research and development, which requires creativity
Banjos wanted that squirrel so bad.
Aww. Now I feel bad.
But I outbid everybuddy! Yay, free markets!
3) I like the cut of your gibI think you mean….
3) I like the cut of your glib
“It appears the British have elected people who understand how negotiations actually work”
Don’t worry, the BBC has begun working on that. I listened to some of their coverage yesterday and the main takeaway was that Boris Johnson won an “ugly baby” contest, that his party won the majority because he was the least worst candidate, etc., etc.
And, as a bonus, the reporter filing this story pointed out that he really wasn’t a politician because he’d actually started out as a reporter. Then the reporter filing the story quickly corrected his own comments by saying, and I kid you not, “well, not really a journalist, a columnist actually.”
his party won the majority because he was the least worst candidate
Well, this is probably correct. I mean, part of their platform was “we swear not to touch socialized medicine”. And even that wasn’t good enough for a lot of voters who wanted it to become even larger and less-accountable.
True, but the implication of the reporting was that Johnson still didn’t really have a Brexit mandate.
The real implication is that upper-class jet-setting twits will have to spend more time in customs.
Don’t forget they will also have egg on their face because they have been telling everyone this is a dead deal. And more importantly: they are going to lose that racket that has allowed them to do quite well while the average man got fucked over hard.
The part of all of this Brexit screaming is the total lack of self awareness by the remainers. Every ‘evil’ Brexit will create is actually a creation of the EU. There is no reason at all that the exact same free and open import export and travel situation cannot continue except that the EU imposes draconian rules. Stop regulating every damn thing and watch the money flow.
As is the case in almost all elections.
The real hard-hitting journalism is being done by actors who read copy off a teleprompter, you see.
The parties switched?
No. They shifted. This is now a center-right position.
Didn’t Christopher Steele and Glen Simpson already pen an article claiming Johnson was elected because of Russian interference,hence again moving the strategy of team blue in the US from the last 3 years over to the Brits? Yeah, he did. And the guardian published this dreck without any shame…
And I am back!
The EU may be in trouble, as it appears the British have elected people who understand how negotiations actually work. Of course, the EU is in trouble as soon as one of their two cash cows bails anyway. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of that globalist shitshow. – this shit better not make scotch more expensive is all I’m saying
If it does, feel free to blame the EU for imposing the tariff out of spite.
I could start a whisky smuggling operation.
Slow down there, Joe Kennedy.
Romanians were smuggling petrol into Serbia during the Kosovo kerfuffle, how hard can it be?
With gasoline you can’t drink your profits away.
Coward.
Challenge accepted!
-Florida Man
Well, I did get introduced to Malort at a Christmas party on Saturday. I imagine that would be close to gasoline… and it still wasn’t the worst shot I’ve had in my life.
Wow, worse than Chartreuse? Fun fact – I’m pretty sure it’s the only liquor to have a color named after it. Also, My beloved Johnny White’s Pub in NOLA has several plaques from the monastery/distillery giving us kudos for selling more Chartreuse than any other bar on Earth for the year. G/d bless the graveyard shift strippers.
l0b0t: Never had Chartreuse (to my knowledge). Malort is basically a wormwood infused vodka, I personally think that Fernet Branca is more in your face, but that’s because it has that menthol kick as well.
Chartreuse – yellow or green?
The color of barf
Speaking of barf, if you’ve never eaten Chunky Spicy a chicken Quedadilla soup, don’t. It literally tastes like vomit going back down.
This is not an exaggeration. It seriously tastes like vomit.
Chartreuse is also a breed of cat. We had one for 12 years, a stone cold killer. Great cat.
“I personally think that Fernet Branca is more in your face, but that’s because it has that menthol kick as well.”
I have an unopened bottle at home. Bought it after my sister ordered it after a great Italian dinner. She had them shake it with ice in a cocktail shaker and then strained into a glass. Damn tasty!
I’m sure tariff-free Scotch will be a condition of Scottish Independence.
It would just break English hearts to get the freeloaders off their dole.
Speaking of scotch I just bought a bottle of Compass Box Spice Tree am curious how that is
Speaking of big money…this is pretty serious money. Jeez, Mormon Church. When is enough enough? Although I’m skeptical of the “whistleblower’s” motives. – donate towards reducing US government debt!
So question for the glibertariat.
In Romania a while ago there was this disastrous nightclub fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectiv_nightclub_fire
Not the first wave of sentences came, although there will be appeals
Basically the club owners got 12 years in prison, the manager and pyro technicians of the fireworks company got 7 to 10, the mayor at the time 8 who was generally in charge of the safety regulations, an employee of the city hall who should have inspected the club and probably took bribes got 8 and two fire department employees who should have inspected and were probably bribed not to got 7 each. In the end they may get out early with good behavior. What do you think of this outcome, from both a justice and a libertarian way of looking at things? How are club fires prevented or punished in libertopia?
In Bucharest those basement clubs were pretty bad, I generally avoided them – just the cigarette smoke was unbearable to me – although had been in a few times. One of them was like a warrant and the only exit was on some narrow windy stairs, if there was a fire in there I would have been fucked, especially since it was super crowded and most people had been drinking.
What do you think of this outcome, from both a justice and a libertarian way of looking at things?
I’m not a huge fan of negligence being criminally prosecuted. Money is the language of torts, not jail time.
irrespective of the results of said negligence? Say 1000 dead?
The line between crime and tort is pretty arbitrary. I’d agree that negligence
shouldn’t be criminal, but once you’ve taken bribes to be negligent, that
seems to me to have become something else.
I assume in libertopia there would not be City regulations for clubs and as such no need to bribe… So the question is about jail for public officials who take bribes should regulations exist because this leads to arbitrary enforcement
Presumably in libertopia there would be a lot more certifying organizations.
“This nightclub certified FireSAFE(tm) by Good Clubkeeping Laboratories”.
So there’d still be opportunities for bribes and fraud.
And Profit!!!!
/Quark
Incidentally, nobody would die from a fire in Quark’s place because dead customers don’t pay their tab.
Until someone overrode the safety protocols in the holosuites.
I gets some of how Holosuites work. But you can’t play baseball in a fucking holosuite with an entire team in the field. Sure, you could simulate a game or even participate if it’s just one person. But fielding an entire team? Your spatial closeness to those also in the room would fuck up the whole goddamn program.
Fucking Sisko and his stupid ideas on how to embarrass Romulans.
Your spatial closeness to those also in the room would fuck up the whole goddamn program.
Think modern VR without the headset. With a mastery of optics and the ability to synthesize physical matter out of light, you could put each person into a little phonebooth that feels like an entire world.
That said, the holodeck technology in ST was magic and not self-consistent.
once you’ve taken bribes to be negligent, that
seems to me to have become something else.
Yup, agreed
In libertopia, club fires are their own punishment.
The insurance company hires a bounty hunter to summarily execute the people who cost them all the money on the wrongful death payout.
And if there is no insurance?
Europeans are so naiive.
Don’t be ridiculous. In Libertopia the insurance companies become the defacto governments. The insurance would have been conditional on the sale of the land, the construction of the club, and the local fire protection racket.
More seriously though, the libertarian solution is basically go to court. For everything. Libertarian society would be so fucking litigious you’d need about 1/3 of the population employed as arbitrators, mediators, judges, and private security contractors.
Beats one third employed as regulators, guidance counselors, and diversity coordinators.
Eh, six of one, half a dozen of the other IMO. The sole redeeming value of a libertarian lawfare regulatory state administered by insurance companies is that you could theoretically go pull a Randy Weaver and State Farm won’t send snipers out to kill you like a real government would.
In libertopia, the patron assumes all the risk. No insurance necessary. And every establishment would either have an incinerator or a nearby pig farm to handle disposal should any patron get out of line.
Do you have a reasonable expectation of safety based on the actions/precautions of the owner when you enter a business? Serious question.
I would say yes. I mean people going in a shop do not expect to have knives falling from the ceiling randomly
Is it not your responsibility to ensure the venue meets your threshold of “safe” before you enter and as you decide to remain as the number of people there grows?
Unless they advertise as “fireproof”, I still believe it’s the responsibility of the patrons to decide for themselves if they’d feel safe should a fire break out.
There’s an asymmetry of information problem here though. The venue
management is in a much better position to be able to know the
relevant information to determine how safe it is. The transaction
costs would be far too high (in my subjective opinion of course) to
require that every patron conduct some sort of investigation beforehand.
Thank you, Karl.
Karl?
I understand that. But it’s not hard, in my opinion, to quickly assess the safety of a venue should a sudden and catastrophic event happen (like a fire or armed attacker). I’ve been to plenty of places where I looked around and said to myself “I feel fine but if the number of people in here doubles I won’t” and act accordingly for the rest of the evening.
Not to mention that there would be several local sources of information relaying such important information. Even if government were completely honest, things like Yelp would still exist. And yes, Yelp is corrupt, but the reasoning behind that assumption is the exact reasoning one should use when assessing the corruption of any government agent. Government’s ability to “normalize” corruption is not an indication of its honesty.
I think in a non-libertopia situation patrons assume the fire regs are respected. I would think patrons would be more careful in general in libertopia, but not always.
But a fire some may expect, what happened probably not. The fire spread almost instantly
I don’t think that “safety” can be a yes or no thing. Safe from what is a better way to
think about it. Meteor strikes? Probably not. A floor with water damage such that
you’ll fall through? Probably. I’m not sure how to draw an objective standard.
“Objective” here in the normal English sense of the word, not the legal test sense.
I found all 3 club owners getting the same weird though, as they had split the various duties of the club and one had nothing to do with the bad foam insulation or the pyrotechnics. Similarly, the owner of the fireworks company got 3 years, although he was not directly involved in any way. The manager got like 8
It’s called “pound of flesh”. The people now have theirs.
The club had opened in May 2013 on the location of the previous Pionierul factory, at Tăbăcarilor Street 7 in Sector 4 of Bucharest, within 3 km (2 mi) of the Palace of the Parliament.
Could’ve possibly hurt the ultimate victim. The State.
illegal indoor usage of outdoor pyrotechnics
It would be negligence for reality not to burn the place down. Are they insane?
Yeah. I’m good with the jail time, especially in conjunction with the bribery stuff.
Even with the fireworks guy. A “professional” should have known better. It’s why you hire professionals.
The fireworgs guy probably was not sufficiently professional. He did some stupid things, but I expect did not expect the super fire prone sound proofing for the room.
Agreed. Thought “outdoor use” vs “indoor use” should be the kind of thing they learn on day one.
Dunno the exact situation, but I’d imagine the fireworks would’ve done big damage even without the ridiculous sound proofing.
Given I went into such clubs as a dumb student with lots of dumb students who had no thought of safety, I wonder if in libertopia parents could teach kids not to go to shitty clubs… But it was often precisely a sort of rebellion to go to the shitty club.
Then again there were dozens such shitty clubs and only one big fire. In general the owners did not want to kill patrons. But this one must iof been hell on earth. Real shitty way to die or become permanently scarred.
One of the shittier things is when some priest tried to make it about that dam metal music.
As a note, most Romanians commenting online think the punishments are way to light, they wanted twice that
Not real Romanians. Those are Hungarians. Those fuckers can hold a grudge like nobody else.
My take is that there are two different things going on: restitution and retribution.
Regardless of whether or not you meant to, if you damaged something/someone. you need to make the other party whole. Punitive jail time might be warranted for criminal acts, but for non-criminal ones, it gets in the way of restoring the injured party.
But that’s Romanian jail, so they probably get to go out during the day and just report back to the jail at night.
But they’d be incinerated!
Well, I need to go on a canoeing trip soon. Hope I don’t lose that Ruger AR556 I picked up last night.
On a fishing trip one of our friends is a professional photographer with expensive equipment. His good friend and fishing partner advised him not to stand up in the boat to take pictures. The photo guy slipped and watched his 1500 dollar camera sink. Somehow his insurance company paid off but required a receipt for the replacement camera.
Ugh.
My professional photographer neighbor has this weird sunken parking area at his house, and sometimes it floods during heavy rain. During one particularly bad storm, his garage and basement got flooded (since they’re both below ground level) and he lost about $35,000 – yes, three zeroes on the end – of camera equipment.
While the likelihood of a tragedy is low the results can be tragic.
My new hobby is taking graphs of economic data over time and indicating the year that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in case people find that helpful or informative.
https://twitter.com/WardQNormal/status/1206280031552454656
Seriously, though. I don’t think Reagan and “Trickle Down” get nearly enough credit for how they led to the economic and moral bankruptcy in this country. We need to bring back the pre-Reagan tax structure in this country.
Funny how the slogan “Make America Great Again” never acknowledges that the era of “greatness” they all want to return to had top tax rates more than double what they are now.
Literally every single measure he’s tracking over time gets worse after Reagan. You probably shouldn’t put together infographics when you can’t understand what’s being conveyed.
I think that is his point, it all got worse due to the marginal tax rate cuts.
But the rate cuts weren’t permanent. That’s why it’s such a retarded thing to point out. “Hey, look much was added to the public debt from 1981-1989 because of the Reagan tax cuts. But wait, look how this trend line keeps going up logarithmically even though the tax cuts expired and rates were all over the place for the next 30 years…”
Later in the thread:
So, just a bitchy millennial blaming people and yelling at his parents.
Meh, it can still be a salient point. Tuition has gone way up; of course, the reasons for that implicate both the GOP and the Democrats, and the latter party has nothing but bad ideas that will make it worse.
It all got worse because of entitlements and baked-in spending increases.
^^^THIS^^^
But the fuckers buying votes with tax payer money are not going to point that out.
There were 2 quarters during the 2008 recession when even the official gamed inflation metrics said SS benefits were supposed to decrease. The ratchet, however, cannot go the other way, and so they were just going to stay flat. But even that was too much! Congress passed laws to increase the SS benefits anyway, even though there was no justification for it.
Um, what?
Prior to Reagan, the tax rates might have been high, but these were more than offset by the number of things that could be deducted. The lowered tax rates were a negotiated item in exchange for eliminating many of these deductions. If you think the government took a revenue hit, you’re not playing with a full deck.
One argument might be that the structure with deduction encouraged more investment / higher employee salary. But completely ignoring the Nixon gold thing for me is strange…
Few government actors – Reagan included – give a flying fuck about “investment” and “employee salary”. It was during Reagan’s time when Social Security “benefits” began being taxed.
top tax rates more than double what they are now
Yet the effective tax rate for the top bracket was about the same, and the proportion of taxes paid by those with high incomes was lower. Nobody really pays a damn bit of attention to the details; it’s all narrative.
Now do spending under a Democratic congress.
In case Q is not around, random pic of naked woman with sword. NSFW obviously…
https://twitter.com/Paynota/status/1206869990873415681
Not thicc
Looking sharp
Looking for love.
In all the wrong places?
Points all her own, way up high.
More my speed. Hot with just a touch of crazy.
There is more than a touch there, isn’t there?
I’ll need to see her feet
“Mormon Church has misled members on $100 billion tax-exempt investment fund, whistleblower alleges”
Now do Joel Osteen! Or Scientology! Or Creflo Dollar! Or the Vatican….or…..
*Opus Dei Assassins Dispatched to Tres’ home*
What the article described sounded fine to me. They meet their nut out of current receipts and the invest the excess. It’s called prudence. There may be some UBIT owing, but there is nothing wrong with building your endowment.
“Creflo Dollar!”
As I have said for years — The man’s last name is Dollar, people!
“We were just waiting until it got to $200 billion, and then we were donating it all!”
I might as well start the day being an asshole so…Isn’t that pic of JPIII and not Fr. Frank?
At least I’m wrong too. JPII
::shrugs::
Not sure. I googled “Pope Francis idiot” and that popped up. If it’s JP3, which it appears to be upon closer inspection, I’ll update the caption in a second.
There was a third one?
In Guntown, Mississippi, near Tupelo and about 260 miles (420 kilometers) north-northeast of Amite County, an apparent tornado destroyed a church and damaged dozens of homes.
We’re used to it. Several of my people were killed in that same area in 1936. I was in one that killed 20ish a few miles north in 1971ish.
I’m never down in the woods any more, but in the seventies it was common to see dead school buses that had been repurposed as storm cellars. You dig a trench into the side of a clay hill, push the beast in the hole, and then bury the whole mess leaving only the rear emergency door exposed.
That seems practical
Uffda. Tupelo. I’ve been there too many times! Have to fly in to Memphis and drive.
But you get to be in Memphis!
And if you didn’t want to drive, you could probably catch one of the Elvis tour buses that head over to Tupelo (and you’d get a ticket to Graceland).
Graceland did a lot to help me understand religion.
Graceland is a “must go” place if you are ever in Memphis.
You go there thinking it is going to be a corny laugh (and it kind of is), but by the time you leave you are pretty much in awe of all the crap Elvis did.
When I was taking my parents to see it, our tour was delayed because James Brown was on a private tour just ahead of us. Don’t try to tell me you are cooler than James Brown.
Earlier this year, the COO of the Chicago Department of Aviation was forced to resign after an NBC 5 Investigates report revealed that although he claimed residence in the city, he had been living in a Naperville home instead.
“You gotta live here, and if you don’t live here, you’re taking money from us,” Lightfoot said at the time. “If we find you, we’re gonna fire you.”
Wut?
Our ceo just fired for corruption. Airports must be a haven for the shady.
The hard left are just as protectionist and mercantilist as the populist right. Just a smidge stupider, and more prone to use criminal laws for the purpose than tariffs (because they don’t understand that taxes disincentivize behavior)
Seriously, though. I don’t think Reagan and “Trickle Down” get nearly enough credit for how they led to the economic and moral bankruptcy in this country. We need to bring back the pre-Reagan tax structure in this country.
Bring back the
pre-Reaganpre-LBJ Federal Register, and we’ll talk.…but those white neighbors and friends would never openly talk about the ‘valor’ and ‘courage’ of Nazi soldiers the way they talk about Confederate ones.
So they should talk about Nazi valor and courage or they shouldn’t talk about Confederate valor and courage? Or maybe we should save those worlds solely for Greta.
Confederates were proto-nazis. This is known because ‘shut up bigot’.
Because the Nazis were not Americans. In Germany I suspect their are plenty of descendants of dead soldiers who would honor their sacrifice while recognizing that it was made in an evil cause.
there.
To be fair, though, would they plant Nazi flags at the graves of the dead soldiers?
They might well plant military flags, which is what I saw in the picture. I wonder how many people protesting understand that what they are calling the ‘confederate flag’ is actually the battle colors. The actual confederate flag looks like this. (yes I know they later adopted the stars and bars)
Yeah i know, but even planting the the war ensign of Germany would bear the Swastika.
Not exactly. One of the necessary steps in getting West Germany integrated into NATO and the other Western institutions was whitewashing the Wehrmacht’s complicity in the Nazi regime. As a consequence, officers of the Wehrmacht who weren’t obvious Nazi honchos, e.g. Rommel, were glorified. So, while they may get modern or pre-Nazi German flags instead of ones with swastikas, the association is still there.
Whether this merits the iconoclasm it tends to generate is another question.
Add in the fact that the Civil War wasn’t as simple as a fight between slavery v. abolition, and it makes even more sense why people may treat the confederacy with reverence.
Personally, I think both sides were sitting on the wrong side of some of the issues, so I celebrate the progress made by the union winning and I decry the erosion of liberty caused by the union winning. I see zero reason why nuance can’t be applied here.
Add in the fact that the Civil War wasn’t as simple as a fight between slavery v. abolition, and it makes even more sense why people may treat the confederacy with reverence.
This * 1000. The idea that Slavery had nothing to do with the situation is laughable. But at the same time the Idea that the North was fighting to abolish slavery is not really borne out. Not at the outset of war. It was clearly a war to keep the Southern States from leaving. Nuance is particularly important here.
I see zero reason why nuance can’t be applied here.
Because Nuance means you think there is more to the story than just “slavery bad, North fight against Slavery, North Good”. And if you reject the conclusion that the North was Good in any way then you must be rejecting the premise that Savery was bad.
Slavery was there from the outset; the only thing that wasn’t was total abolition. The Civil War didn’t really begin in 1861, it began in 1856, and it was definitely about slavery.
However, you are correct that the North’s initial goal was not total abolition; it was only containment.
Huh, I know, or used to know the cat girl in the tornado story. I am glad she is ok. The reports I heard yesterday were pretty bad. Thank God no one died around here. From the photos I saw and first hand reports I was getting it didnt seem likely that we would get off without some fatalities.
*knocks on wood*
“it didnt seem likely that we would get off without some fatalities.
*knocks on wood*”
That’s one macabre euphemism!
Guys… R’yleh may have been in Lake Erie this whole time. And something is rising.
There used to be a sushi restaurant on Shaker Square (memory tells me it was called Sushi on the Square, but I’m not sure). I went there when they opened, and they had a roll called “Lake Erie Surprise”. What could that possibly be? We decided it must be a roll with broken glass, three eyed fish, and lighter fluid.
Even the Old Ones couldn’t have lived in Lake Erie over the past 75 years. Y’all’s waterways are nasty.
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Besides, the lake has been getting cleaner, due to the invasive Zebra Mussels. I still wouldn’t want to be one of the crew people rowing down the Cuyahoga, or the people who kayak there (or in the lake itself).
“Guys… R’yleh may have been in Lake Erie this whole time. And something is rising.”
+1 Non-Euclidean Geometry.
Also: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Also also Hey there Cthulhu.
And a female vocalist’s cover of the above.
R’yleh
Will Alex Rogan and Grig defend it against that bastard Xur and the Ko-Dan armada?
“Will Alex Rogan and Grig defend it against that bastard Xur and the Ko-Dan armada?”
+1 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmPGuMGs8cg" Death Blossom.
Oops. Should be this link.
“She won’t answer the helm. We’re locked into the moon’s gravitational pull. What do we do?”
::tinted monocle goes into place::
“We die.”
Sloop,
That was the next clip I played after reviewing the “Death Blossom” scene.
It is time to get to work. Thank you for the links and I agree with your opinion with regards to Giovanni Ribis.
I picked a bad day to go to the DMV
So the thing with RealID compliant licenses is that they are supposed to show your citizenship.
How does that square with “undocumented democrats”???
I also chuckled/grimaced at this line from the DMV: In addition to the combination of proofs we currently accept, beginning December 16, 2019, we will also accept: a valid, unexpired consular identification document issued by a consulate They probably sell those, right?
What set me off was that they wouldn’t accept my laminated SS card when I was renewing my license last year.
I got my SS card back in the early ’70s and my dad had it laminated at his office. Since then, they’ve started printing “do not laminate” on the cards (I have no idea why). Sometimes I will get a bit of flack about mine being laminated, but I point out to them that it doesn’t say I can’t laminate it on my card and the person grudgingly says OK.
I was able to enlist in the Marines with that card, I got several passports with that card. But the state of Minnesoda rejected my use of that card when trying to get a new driver’s license because we finally caved on REAL ID.
I suspect the rule against lamination is supposed to help prevent forgery. The type of paper something is printed on is one of the safeguards, and you can’t evaluate it if its laminated.
That is probably the reason for the new rules. But mine was super old and if the Feds and the Marines took it, I have no idea why the flacks at Minnesoda wouldn’t.
So, this is a situation where using “undocumented immigrants” has simply GOT to be a lie. They must mean “illegal immigrant using government documents from their country of citizenship.”
If you could really get an ID without documents, then any 14 year old could get a legitimate driver’s license showing that they were over 21.
Can’t they? They sure could when I was younger.
Unpossible. I have it on good authority that people of color can’t obtain identification and requiring it is racist.
The soft bigotry of low expectations
Possibly GWB’s greatest contribution to speech.
Every fucking day at the DMV is a bad day. But according to the people that say you have a right to free healthcare – meaning we make people in the medical profession indentured servants at best, and slaves if you really are honest about it – the people that run the DMV (government bureaucrats) should be running your healthcare…
Amen to that.
Anybody who’s dealt with the VA or Bureau of Indian Affairs health system would never endorse socialized healthcare.
My sister had a serious back surgery when she was a preteen. It was done through the army cause Dad was a major.
It turned out great only because because her surgeon was a saint who really cared. He was a vet too.
The VA pretyy much killed my dad. Wouldnt let yhem treat my dog.
So if I am seriously injured and need a medivac helicopter, will I be denied if I am not carrying read ID (or a passport)?
“Anybody who’s dealt with the VA or Bureau of Indian Affairs health system would never endorse socialized healthcare.”
Preach on sister. Nothing did more ti disincentive me from socialized medicine than the fucking VA. Never. Fucking NEVER!
Despite the wonderful surgeon, the rest was a mess. She had been dining her own blood for the surgery leading up to it, but they fucked up and she only had half what she needed! I was only twelve but I was deemed tall enough that I supplied the rest.
She shared a room with a kid who was dying of leukemia.
The food was so awful, we smuggled in burgers and pizza!
^doning her own blood
Donating is my guess?
Yes but for reasons unknown they call it “doning” if you’re putting it away for yourself. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just admit you are a Vampire and lost track of where you were posting.
I just got VA hearing aids, after a long wait to see the audiologist (about 3 months) and another month to get the devices. The devices are top of the shelf, free batteries for life. On the other hand hearing aids are not really a health issue but a quality of life thing. Previously, 30 years ago, I was misdiagnosed with a hernia when I knew that I had one. I vowed never to go back but compromised myself when a friend told me about the free (to me) hearing aids.
Yeah, I can see you making that exception, but in general when dealing with them I expect the hidden cost to always be far worse than anything I am willing to pay.
Bullshit. Drive southwest from where I live to a very high income neighborhood, and the DMV is great. I’m sure its a coincidence.
‘Boy Meets World’ star Maitland Ward: I make more money doing porn
https://nypost.com/2019/12/16/boy-meets-world-star-maitland-ward-i-make-more-money-doing-porn/
thicc?
A business genius…
*grabs binder*
Uh, I have to go to class.
Dylann Roof posed with the flag in photos before carrying out his massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.
I don’t see the relevance to the subject at hand.
IIRC correctly, he was wearing a GAP sweater. Just sayin’.
BAN GAP!
Random thought about safety/selfpreservation.
How many people on a deck are too many? When do you, as a reasonably intelligent, aware person, look at an overloaded structure and say, “That’s okay. I think I’ll stay in the kitchen.”?
Are you high?
Off the top of my head, the only fatal deck collapses (2 in recent memory, one at a bar, the other at a winery) I’m aware of have all happened in Put-In-Bay, a tourist destination that’s known for excessive alcohol consumption, wild parties, and people getting OVI’s (DUI’s to the other states) on golf carts.
I once exited from an elevator because it turned into a phone booth packing contest. It was a wise choice, because the cable slipped around the spindle and the elevator got stuck between floors for a few hours until the fire department lowered them to the basement.
Usually a little buzzer will go off if the weight limit is passed.
This particular elevator was in the center of Bonn, Germany and fairly old.
German firefighters are a surly bunch.
Well, to be fair, they are recruited mostly from the German population.
THICC?
Yup. I like how the Japanese based Glib and the NYC based glib know about that stupid buzzer.
My current workplace is old – many small elevators so not an issue.
I find elevator queuing theory and design really interesting. For example in NYC, the door close button does nothing. It’s there for fire use only. Because folks in NYC would otherwise cheerfully close the door right in the face of the guy behind him.
OTH, they are functional in Japan. My friend in Kansai was kidding me when we got into an elevator and I hit the floor button without hitting door close (as nobody else was waiting) and waiting for it to automatically close.
I hope you held the door open button while your friend exited.
In the Chicago area elevators I’ve been in, the door close button does nothing – except for my present building in which 40% of the floor space is occupied by a Japanese company.
In both my home and work buildings the close door button works as advertised. *shrug*
Newer elevator perhaps?
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/547416/do-close-door-buttons-elevators-actually-do-anything
Maybe they just forgot to deactivate them. It’s not in my head, I know that.
Precisely why I never go to parties unless there are at least 2 structural engineers in attendance.
Odd, I immediately leave parties hosting structural engineers.
Structural engineers do have better moments.
Only when they’re not under stress.
May I inspect your cantilevered beam?
That might relieve some tension.
Well, you’re increasing my Young’s modulus.
You guys keep buttressing Pat’s argument.
Check out my free body diagram.
You’re into free body culture?
Keeping track of threading to continue the comment arch takes calculation.
It’s a floor. It holds as many people as there are room for.
Haven’t you ever seen the videos of trucks in the third world wildly overloaded bogging down and/or turning over. ‘Load’ is not a thing that most people naturally think of. The natural inclination is to think of space as the limiting factor, not load capacity. That is the natural way the untrained human mind thinks.
Engineering has to be studied and learned for a reason.
Same way for tall steel structures. The reinforcements aren’t weight bearing. Their tensile strength is what is important as they are there to pull.
How big is the deck?
I don’t see the relevance to the subject at hand.
Those flags made him do it. It never would have happened if he had never set eyes on a Confederate flag.
Just ban all iconography to be safe.
Another story about the evils of government, and for bonus link on topicness, it involves Utah.
“After migration, he just never retired an old domain, took 4 leftover Windows 2000 servers (yes you read that correctly) and 2 ancient RedHat servers since the licenses still worked and struck them in a closet for 15 years with a house fan from Walmart.”
https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/1206868345129230337
I thought this was one of the companies I used to work out, but was disappointed it was not.
What I am seeing here reads like this worked for 15 years basically unattended. To my untrained mind that sounds like it is pretty stable.
Well… “Worked”. what it sounds like is that the Finance team knew on some level they were working with rickety software. Otherwise they would have brought up issues to the IT department.
I got nothing snarky to say.
You’d be in a whirlwind of trouble if you did.
It would be a vortex of negativity directed at me.
I’mm a bit peckish. Yoplait time!!
Yoplait is a delicious gluten free yogurt – there is gluten in yogurt?
Er, not that I’m aware. I had a lovely serving of peach.
I love the texture of the fruit bits…❤️❤️
Hayek, have you been to Major Market in Esc.? A little pricey but lots of unusual and imported food.
No, I haven’t! Are you a rare SoCal Glib??
Guilty.
Back when I was working retail in the late 90’s, one of the printer manufacturers started slapping a “Y2K compliant!” sticker on the box of their new printers. These were home inkjet printers, so no ties to the date at all. The sales rep at least had the common decency to look embarrassed the company he was working for was doing that.
I suggested we label our power conversion module “gluten free”
A few marketing nitwits thought I was serious and we should do it.
Crazy Auntie Maxine is still crazy.
Waters said, “Well, they say these things because they cannot refute the facts. As a matter of fact, when I observed this president and the way that he conducted himself during the primary elections, the way he called names, the way he lied, the way he talked about grabbing women by their private parts— I never thought we would hear president talk like that. And also, I had done some research. I knew about his alignment with Putin. I knew about Manafort and what the relationship was. And the fact that he had been sent there by Putin, in essence, to head up the president’s campaign. Because I believe, even though I don’t have the facts to prove it, I believe that Putin wanted to lift the sanctions. He’s always wanted to lift these sanctions that were placed on him because of his interfering and incursion into Crimea. So I believe that they wanted to elect President Trump. And Trump, I believe, agreed. I will always believe this, that he agreed that if he got elected, he would lift those sanctions. He would like to do it. He’s not been able to do it.”
She continued, “When they talk about we’re just making things up, and he talks about this as a witch hunt, there are too many facts. This president will not condemn Putin for hacking into the Democratic National Committee. Will not condemn him for hacking into our election system. These are facts. Seventeen of our intelligence agencies have said this. Are these patriots or not? What do they think about our democracy being undermined by the president of the United States of America? If they want to say we just don’t like him, they don’t really care about what happened to this democracy, don’t have an appreciation for the Constitution.”
Neither do you.
It’s a paper written like a thousand years ago by a bunch of no good honkeys!
Maybe the DNC should cough up the servers so that can be verified first.
You mean dig up Seth Rich’s corpse?
Is he the guy that committed suicide by double tapping himself in the back of the head during a “botched robbery”?
Yeah. A robbery where nothing was taken and whose alleged perpetrator didn’t get caught on camera in a city with a camera on every single block.
“I believe, even though I don’t have the facts to prove it”
There is the whole anti-Trump shitshow in a nutshell, impeachment included. There is a good reason they don’t have the facts.
I want to set up the Govertard Olympics between her, Jackson Lee, Johnson, and AOC. That would be awesome.
“the EU is in trouble as soon as one of their two cash cows bails anyway.”
There are five actually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_statistics
I argue if ANY of those leave it’s a major problem and four of those are original members.
Might as well make it six. Sweden’s net contributions shouldn’t be taken lightly.
That chart shows Holland head and shoulders above the rest in per capita and punching way way above their weight in net contribution.
Denmark is another. Part of that is their gross impact is small so they choose to give more to make up for it.
But the point is only a handful are net contributors.
And when a significant net contributor exits, the burden on the remaining net contributors increases disproportionately.
They’d be fucked if the Netherlands left with their “largest deep water port in Europe” but no one in that country wants out so its a moot point.
An Evening With Michelle. *Repost from the overnight.
Somebody misses getting pegged by Angela Merkel.
Cuck.
I know someone like this.
Meh, he doesn’t believe that tripe. He’s just giving them what they want to hear.
Woke for Nookie from Wookie.
So you can take that cookie
Michelle told him to say this or no more of the good stuff at home for him.
Define “good stuff”.
No wait, on second thought don’t. It’ll bring back thoughts of that Chunky soup from yesterday.
The down low dudes she brings home to share. Like Cory Booker, and when they feel like adding a man to the mix Hillary.
“I’m absolutely confident that for two years, if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement,” previous US president Barack Obama said.
But then they all sync up and the world ends in a nuclear holocaust.
Thatcher? Yes. Merkel? No. Oddly cuntes differ just like cods.
The Asian ones are slanted?
And they love you long time…
Well why did he continue running against Hillary for the DNC nomination in 2008? Why didn’t he voluntarily step down so that a woman could run the country and usher in a new era of peace?
That quote sounds like the same fantastical one about how if we had followed the example of the native Americans, the would would be better. Cause the indigenous people of the Americas never warred on each other and totally respected everything and anything. They were saints…
Shut up bitch, and make me a sandwich! I need something to eat while I dismantle your “legacy”.
/Orangebadman
Why won’t you rubes just sit back and take it?
“These movements have gained traction, evoking vernacular (namely “sanctuary”) that had been similarly utilized by cities that refused to voluntarily cooperate with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the deportation of undocumented immigrants. The Editorial Board of the Washington Post distinguished the use of “sanctuary city” in the case of gun control in a recent op ed. They clarified that, in the case of the sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants, no law was being necessarily broken. However, gun control sanctuaries have adopted vocabulary that ignores written legislation signed by the governor and drafted by the state legislature.
Nevertheless, these resolutions are legally meaningless. In Virginia, these resolutions have become preemptive political statements against expected Democratic-led legislative gun control measures to be introduced next year as the most recent round of November state election resulted in a Democratic-led Virginia General Assembly as well as Executive Mansion — for the first time in about twenty years.”
No law is being broken when counties adopt Second Amendment Sanctuary resolutions, or when county sheriffs and commonwealth’s attorneys use their discretion in enforcing the law. Are the resolutions legally meaningless? They’re resolutions, not ordinances, so of course they don’t have the weight of law. Clearly though, they have meaning and purpose for the thousands of Virginians who’ve packed in to their county supervisors meetings to show their support. That’s what worries Patolia.
“However, the conversation surrounding gun sanctuary resolutions in counties and cities across the countrybrings into question the concerning future of enforcement. Though reasonable legislation will be enacted by Richmond in the coming year, any law will only be as effective as its executor. Without local funding sources as well as support by governing authorities (i.e law enforcement), how can what will soon be the rule of state law be appropriately enforced? Will arms be wrung that same way President Eisenhower mobilized the National Guard to enforce desegregation of the school system in Little Rock in 1957?”
Patolia has his analogy and history backwards. Eisenhower didn’t send in the National Guard to enforce desegregation of the Little Rock public schools. He sent in the 101st Airborne after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent black students from entering the city’s Central High School.
Just as Faubus did in 1957, if Governor Ralph Northam activated the state’s National Guard to enforce his unconstitutional gun control laws, he’d be using the power of military force to prevent the exercise of a right. Maybe the question Patolia should be asking is whether or not Donald Trump would send in the 101st Airborne to ensure the constitutional rights of Virginians aren’t violated.
We, your intellectual superiors, by virtue of our credentialed system, know what is best for you unwashed and deplorable turds!
“What the fuck? You’re saying the baddies can ignore the law just like we do?!”
It really is funny to see them twist on this. I’d say they have a valid point that states are Unitary, and so by some meaning of it, County Employees could be considered State Employees. But I don’t think The Legislature wants to dissolve all the counties over this. That wouldn’t be a good look for the party of “Democracy”. That argument falls flat on it’s face however when the State Legislature is violating it’s own Consititution.
According to the logic of the left the State Legislature overrides those pesky state constitutions. I mean Those usually put the government under MORE stringent rules. we can’t have that!
It’s Virginia, send in the Corps, the officers should already know the terrain.
A Method to Provoke Obsessive Compulsive Symptoms for Basic Research and Clinical Interventions
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00814/full
Throw a box of toothpicks on the floor?
Only Democrats understand democracy
Most of the people whom I like or trust believe—and believe rather strongly—that what Trump has done rises to a crime. For them, the analysis of whether Trump should be impeached can’t help but be informed by their view that Trump represents an existential threat to the country. If he might damage American democracy at some fundamental level, without any obvious recourse, then pursuing his removal from office would seem to go without saying. That he is in a position to win again in 2020 and serve another four years makes impeachment all the more urgent.
Yet if you believe, as I do, that Trump is bad, but also that his badness falls somewhat short of an existential threat, then impeachment, however justified in theory, becomes less straightforward. The process does not unfold in a political vacuum, and Democrats should not let the certainty of their legal reasoning push them toward impeachment without regard for its real-world consequences—which are uncertain and could prove costly. Impeachment also runs the risk of hijacking the debate in the Democratic primary, as well as further embittering Trump’s supporters and souring them on the democratic process.
Watching the Democrats throw a three year temper tantrum and refuse to accept the results of a national election makes me think the Democrats are the ones who have soured on democracy.
Democracy – like bipartisanship – means team blue wins.
See? Simple.
Whats amazing is they’re doing to Trump what they did to Nixon after he negotiated a victory with Vietnam. They hated so much it was him they chose to destroy the deal based on petty politics and let Vietnam suffer – a damn war they initiated AND escalated. But can’t have that prick Nixon getting the glory!
Just an awful party from within.
I’m reading the Federalist Papers. I’m only about 25% in (last time I read them it was the early 90s) and so far? Definitely they envisioned a republic and not a democracy. And Madison characterized ‘forgiveness of debt’ as ‘wicked’.
They really do think that if they win the political battle, all those Trumpsters are just going to go back to being muttering, helpless racists. That isn’t how this works.
They don’t care. Unless they are in charge, nobody will be allowed to be in charge. That’s the message.
Have they looked across the pond? Noted bigot Boris Johnson just got elected PM of Britain for the exact same reason Trump did. The blue collar guys saw the left wing had nothing for them, so they flipped to Tory
All I hear our credentialed masters say is that these traitors that turned away from them and their agenda after these shlobs realized that the credentialed masters would never deliver or stop taken advantage of the masses naivete, now must be punished for doing so.
If Trump is removed from office, Trump’s supporters will have every right to overthrow the junta in Washington DC. The game is over.
We have to ignore the democratic process to save democracy?
Hell, some people have advocated a secret ballot to impeach Trump.
Nothing screams democracy like preventing voters from knowing how their elected officials are voting on perhaps the biggest federal government issue today.
I said it yesterday, but agents have no right to act privately when acting on behalf of their principal.
Evidence on the swedish model of sexual services demand side criminalisation failure:
https://twitter.com/RajRedlich/status/1114884601451810816
Huh? The Swedes fuck?
No, mostly the immigrants
They must be fucking the Swedish women then…
Hell, they are fucking the whole country.
Vox Media to cut hundreds of freelance jobs ahead of changes in California gig economy laws
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/16/vox-media-to-cut-hundreds-of-freelance-jobs-ahead-of-californias-ab5.html
The mavericks block seemed to blame the law
https://www.mavsmoneyball.com/2019/12/16/21024414/california-terrible-ab5-came-for-me-today-and-im-devastated
the warriors blog seemed to blame exploitative corporations
https://www.goldenstateofmind.com/2019/12/16/21024619/nba-2019-did-vox-just-fire-the-entire-golden-state-of-mind-staff
Anyway haha vox
Communication was lousy
“The “gig economy” has plusses and minuses for both employees and contractors.
Sounds like Vox handled this really poorly.
What is clear is that the GSOM writers are awesome. I have no idea how big your audience is, but hopefully big enough to have some sort of subscription service that pays you.
Hope you guys can work something out.”
They fricken just don’t get it. It doesn’t fricken register in their thick fricken skulls. Even with the truth staring them in the face they still pull out the ‘pros and cons’ canard.
No. In this case, the fact is this is a direct result of that stupid law. And this emotional thing about doing it ‘at Christmas’ is strange. Perhaps but keep the anger squarely on the Democrat (s) in California who tabled and passed the bill. They’re they ones who stole Christmas.
Until voters or people like this person refuse to accept interventionism of this sort generally always screws people then they deserve the governance they get.
Sorry. Quotes start at ‘communication was lousy’.
A lot of the SBNation blogs were pretty big before Vox tried to kill them ten years (or so) ago by driving off the best writers (RIP Conquest Chronicles and to a lesser extent Shakin the Southland) when Vox decided to push a mandatory post per day along its general wokeism.
I forgot my point: Several of those blogs could possibly exist on there own since they did it prior to Vox and SBNation.
Best take on this shit I have seen.
And the best part is all the hair pulling and clothes rending by the idiots that supported this idiotic idea and helped make it law now suddenly realizing that even the platform that allowed them to push this idiotic agenda is responding to the consequences of this idiotic law and sticking it up their asses.
That. Is. Awesome.
There you go. They got what they deserved.
Wait a minute – that wasn’t supposed to impact the good guys!
Somehow these people have yet to figure out that when you encircle the guy they have decided to shoot & kill in the name of the revolution, and then, start firing at em, some of those bullets will hit the people forming said circle. Unintended, intended consequences FTW.
Tard Tuesday: I Love TLAs
Best comment:
Pretty sure I read somewhere that the FBI is staffed overwhelmingly with Democrats just like every other government agency.
They’re uniformly statist, no matter which party they belong to.
Yeah, but Obama went overboard weaponizing the leadership of every three letter D.C. agency with partisan hacks he then used to further his and the dnc agenda. We have this shitshow today because he had the FBI spying on all his political and personal opponents. And the FBI was not alone. The IRS and a lot of the other agencies were turned on anyone that got in the way of team blue’s power aspirations.
I don’t disagree.
But the problem will not be solved until they are stripped of their excessive power. Both parties want it for themselves.
Everything bad is always the fault of whatever trivial minority remains.
The FBI is holy! It is the last line of defense against Trump and his SS.
OR
The FBI is the SS. (Note I think Praetorian guard is a more apt example)
So, if there is anything good to come from this shitshow, it will be to clean out the racism, sexism and anti- Democratic Party bias in the FBI that has gone unchecked since before the Nixon years.
J. Edgar Hoover is long dead. This comment is, at best, four decades out of date.
More substantively, a full-blown impeachment trial distracts Democrats from their natural strengths: channeling Americans’ anger against massive inequality and economic injustice and moving Americans toward what I’ve described as the “economics of meaning,” in which economic or class critiques are a means to focus anger, create meaning, and build solidarity.
The politics of division and hate. Isn’t that what they incessantly accuse Republicans of?
“But our hate and division is virtuous. Theirs is bad!”
-prog/socialists
Anyone here ever had to explain to airport security in another country while they are conducting a TSA inspection for a flight back to the US why there is GSR on their bag? Let me tell ya: it was not fun and these morons were ready to lock me up forever. That’s what I get for taking a bag that sits right next to my shooting bag on an unscheduled emergency trip across the pond. Lucky for me, I was able to show them that I was a legal permitted carrier and that since they could find neither weapon nor explosives in my luggage, they let me make my way back. I am sure I will be on some no fly list now. Not a fun trip period (this was not the only sad/bad thing, but I won’t bore you ladies with the rest).
In a pre-9/11 simpler time I asked why a bag that I occasionally took the range kept getting “sniffed” after going through X-ray.
The guy straight up told me what they doing and I never used that bag to fly again.
Maybe one the more learned Glibs, i.e. OMWC, or other can tell you exactly what they are sniffing. My understanding is that it is the nitrates. So maybe next time you can tell them you used it to carry all kinds of dried salami.
The same thing happens to me, but with the bag i keep all the crusty socks in…
What have you been sticking your feet into? Or worse, what are you crusting them socks with brah…
I think bringing meats or plants into the country results in a far worse LEO response than bringing in explosives or guns these days…
Fair point.
I’d still rather tell the clowns out the airport that I used the bag for a trip to the Italian market instead of the range, however.
Not gonna disagree. This happened to me in Portugal. They might actually have understood the whole salami thing I guess, but owning your own gun and actually shooting the thing seemed like something they couldn’t grasp. It was also funny because I was not my usual patient self (I had left my car keys in the hotel safe in Brussels and was figuring out how the fuck I was gonna get my car out of long term parking at JFK with the least amount of pain & suffering) and they read that as me somehow having “ulterior motives”. That I was not cowering or kissing their ass was not well received.
“I am a free man, not a serf. I have the right to defend myself, and own the means to do so. i have respected the laws of your country, even though they violate basic human rights. Am I being detained?”
They’re usually using colorimetric analysis with specialized papers that shift color under presence of certain compounds.
Change the paper and the programming and you can detect all sorts of things from cocaine to C4
The question would be what criteria they are using for explosives. Too broad will get you foodstuffs and dirty socks and too narrow it might miss some home grown explosive.
They probably have sniffers in the X-Ray machine that detect volatiles and flag items for further testing. I would assume that things like nail polish remover would set them off pretty regularly.
Apparently the cologne I use also does that…
They probably have sniffers in the X-Ray machine that detect volatiles and flag items for further testing.
There used to be such things, but I haven’t seen them in 5+ years. It basically sneezed at you and let you continue on.
My understanding is that the millimeter wave tech just bounces a signal off of your body that passes through fabric. If it comes back at the proper frequency/amplitude, there’s nothing but fabric between you and the scanner. If it’s wrong, there’s something (including wet fabric from sweat) in the way. I have a few pairs of pants that always get flagged around the ankle. They’re all thicker cut denim, so it’s probably just a mass of fabric setting it off.
I was referring to the luggage machines, not the Rapeyscanners
I think they use mass spectrography when they swab your bag or shoes. Don’t bring your shoes from the gun range to the airport.
I keep track of which coats and shoes I have worn to the range because of this.
Lucked out at work. Had to take half of last week off to watch my (sick ) son. No fires or nothing in that time, despite there being one almost every day the previous week.
Comparative European institutions and the ‘Little Divergence’, 1385–1800
António Henriques, Nuno Palma 10 December 2019
The decline of countries such as Castile and Portugal, which first benefited from access to the New World, relative to their followers, especially England and the Netherlands, is often attributed to the quality of the Iberian countries’ institutions at the time Atlantic trade opened. This column questions this narrative by comparing Iberian and English institutional quality over time, considering the frequency and nature of parliamentary meetings, the frequency and intensity of extraordinary taxation and coin debasement, and real interest spreads for public debt. It finds no evidence that the political institutions of Iberia were worse until at least 1650.
https://voxeu.org/article/comparative-european-institutions-and-little-divergence-1385-1800#.Xe-zNYikNwg.twitter
That actually looks interesting. A lot of poeple have argued that it was poor Iberian institutions that led to our modern world where the Resource Rich South American colonies are poorer than the North American Colonies, which were relatively resource poor.
Granted that for quite a while the South american Nations (:cough:Argentina:cough:) were comparable with the United States or Canada. Then something happened in 1900’s. No one can know what though, but Argentina lagged and fell behind. It’s a complete mystery.
iberian institutions did lead to a much more feudal like organization in Argentina, which generate a permanent conflict between groups.
^ The rigidity of the class divisions and lack of mechanisms for social mobility is a BIG driver of the socialism that ruined Argentina. Redistribution of wealth sounds much more reasonable and fair when those born outside the landed class are blocked from ever building wealth.
Seems like that was more of a function of how the Spanish and Portuguese colonized, rather than a distinct importation of institutions. There wasn’t a lot of conflict between “Europeans”, “Mistizo”, and “Natives” in the English colonies, because it wasn’t as common to have relations with the natives (hence no “mistizo”) and the English didn’t really like living among the Natives, so much as isolating them separately outside of their colonies (hence no “natives”).
Sure ya papist, that’s what you want us to think! Seriously, though,there is a pretty clear link between the hierarchical Church and the feudal system. It is not necessarily a causal link, nor is it clear which direction the causality flows if it is causal, but the Catholic Church parallels the hierarchical top down flow of power of feudalism.
I think you find what you want to find. The “South America” wasn’t as successful as “North America” because Catholicism has a lot of holes in the argument, including the fact that Maryland was a Catholic colony in the US and yet I don’t think it was backward in comparison to the other thirteen colonies. There is also the fact that Mexico under Diaz (prior to the Mexican Revolution) or Argentina prior to Peron had booming economies with a burgeoning middle class. The US benefited from the fact that its Revolution was not continuous and messy and they thankfully put down “Shay’s Rebellion” before it gathered steam. And Canada benefited from being a British colony until the world wars.
It’s not that I take issue with the thesis, it’s that I have a hard time accepting an overarching explanation for civilization development. It’s the same problem that I have with “being a wealthy nation must result in less births” or “colder climates produce more wealthy nations”. There may be some validity in these arguments, but to suggest that this is the all encompassing reasons why different places developed differently, I find hard to believe. There are too many variables in life.
That explains Baltimore!
There’s a clearer link between Protestantism and socialism, but believe what you want to believe.
there is a pretty clear link between the hierarchical Church and the feudal system
I don’t think this means as much as you think it means. The Church is about 2000 years old, give or take. For about 800-1200 of those years, depending on place, it was the only consistent authority in the Western world. The Church no more created feudalism than it was created by feudalism. Secular and religious feudalism arose in the same context: the near-anarchy following the fall of the Roman Empire and various kingdoms. Indeed, religions feudalism was originally a function of the Church’s independence of secular authority; it had to take care of itself, so it practiced manorialism. It wasn’t until the end of the feudal era that the Church began to assert itself as supreme authority over all, which is where the downfall really began. But secular authority had the same problem, culminating in Louis XIV calling himself the “Sun King”.
I get that you wanted to use my post as a launch pad, and that is cool, but please don’t start out
and then cherry pick a sentence to deliberately ignore the part where I said the same thing you are saying to ‘refute’ me.
You are right. I misread what you wrote. I apologize.
So thoughts on when Slack is going to remove the “OK” hand sing emoji? Because while 90% of the country knows it is just the “OK” sign, it seems we must be enthralled to attention whoring victim larpers.
A lot of poeple have argued that it was poor Iberian institutions that led to our modern world where the Resource Rich South American colonies are poorer than the North American Colonies, which were relatively resource poor.
I blame Catholicism.
Hmmmm… But then you’d expect South West States like New Mexico to be….
That’s a popular theory. I blame their embrace of the continental Enlightenment, versus the American Enlightenment.
In a “I like where I live statement”. Yesterday morning there was an abandoned vehicle on the side of the highway. Was there on the way home as well. This morning the vehicle was still there. All four tires where still attached to the vehicle, all glass was not broken or cracked.
It’s nice that a vehicle doesn’t get trashed and picked clean for just sitting on the side of the road.
Yesterday morning there was an abandoned vehicle on the side of the highway. Was there on the way home as well. This morning the vehicle was still there. All four tires where still attached to the vehicle, all glass was not broken or cracked.
I worked in NYC one summer in college. Watching the progressive disassembly/deterioration (usually ending in a fiery death) of cars on the shoulder of the Cross Bronx Expressway was fascinating, for lack of a better word.
On any given trip to the grocery in my nearby town there will be cars in the parking lot, engines running, windows partially down, perhaps a dog or two in the vehicle….
No one touches them.
Wife and I have left doors unlocked when we leave numerous times. Once or twice the garage door was left open, all because of forgetfulness, but no one has ever touched any of our stuff.
This parish has one of the lowest crime rates in the country. You cant blow your nose around here without everyone knowing about it. If you commit a theft the sheriff will be visiting you before the day is out. When we do have a theft it is invariably a dopehead that looks exactly as you would expect and they are always caught.
*I was recently called for jury duty. I begged out because of the wife’s condition. I had heard about the arrest, but the trial was for a full blown sociopath/sicko serial killer type. He had a dungeon-like setup in a remote house. He had been kidnapping young women and keeping them captive for torture and rape. It was only a matter of time before he escalated to murder. As a matter of fact I wonder if they had cadaver dogs run the woods around there.
That is a rare, though not rare enough, crime in any place. I think that is the first one of those we have had in this area in history.
If it wasn’t for the likely length of that trial, I would not be sad to get picked for that jury.
I came within a whisker of getting on the jury for an interesting looking cartel case. Wouldn’t have minded at all. As soon as the defendant walked in for jury selection, dressed in a suit and everything, I said (to myself) “gotta be cartel”. They told us what the case was (pot smuggling and welfare fraud, with a liberal sprinking of conspiracy and illegals), and I knew it had to be cartel.
Not a chance. You lose any hope of sitting on a criminal jury when you pass the bar. No lawyer wants another lawyer in the jury room.
I was picked for a grand jury, and had to beg off due to work commitments. I admit I played the “charitable hospital” card.
I was not struck until the last round of the criminal trial, when they basically took the 14 remaining jurors in the front rows.
I was surprised I wasn’t struck from either one. Nobody batted an eye at me being a lawyer, though.
I think I dropped a comment.
I was picked for a grand jury and had to beg off by playing the “my charitable hospital can’t do without me that long”.
I wasn’t picked for the criminal trial because they took the 14 remaining jurors in the front rows, and I was in the back row. Nothing to do with me being a lawyer.
It never came up either time.
Now it shows up.
The one time I went through voir dire it seemed obvious to me that both sides were trying to find people that could be easily led. I was making mental notes on who in my group of 14 would be dismissed and I was at least 80% correct.
I went through Voi Dire ore whatever for Jury selection for a case where a guy had shot a fleeing intruder in his mothers house.
It sounded interesting, but reviewing the news reports after i wasn’t selected, i think i would have voted to convict on one of the counts.
Why is anyone bothering to pick up the beer? Local teens would pick the site clean of all the undamaged cans. The homeless will cart off the cans that were broken.
Nature will provide!
The circle of life
Now you gave the people at Disney another brilliant idea for a reboot of that movie…
Nature would prevail in SF and LA if it would ever rain in CA but NO! That’s why someone has to decide to wash the sidewalks/streets.
“I spy with my little eye a commie destroying my legacy!”
Wait, that’s a picture of Pope Francis. Shouldn’t the picture be of Pope John Paul II? I’m not smart enough to get these jokes
Isn’t it a picture of jpii?
Oh, you may be right. I thought it was Francis, but now that I look at it- it does look like John Paul II. Never mind. I need my eyes checked, I guess
Someone upthread said that it was a picture of JPII, so Sloopy changed the caption.
On the Mormon thing:
“whistle blower alleges” – talk is cheap. Not sure if this is a “qui tam”, although I suspect it is. If so, then the whistleblower stands to collect up 20% of whatever penalty the IRS imposes.
I don’t know where the idea comes from, either, that every nickel collected by a church has to be spent in the year it is collected. There’s no such obligation that I’m aware of. In fact, it would be violation of the church’s fiduciary duties not to have a surplus, and not to invest the surplus.
Passive investments/endowments aren’t subject to UBIT, generally speaking, unless they are in controlled entities. Every competently run nonprofit of any size in the country invests in publicly issued securities issued by for-profit companies whose business has nothing to do with the charitable mission of the nonprofit.
Much of the jabber about asking for tithes even though the church has sizable reserves sounds like somebody has a grudge. None of it has anything to do with the tax laws applicable to a church.
That’s my understanding as well.
If the LDS church’s investment fund looks fishy, wait until they look at college endowment funds or the Vatican bank. Oh wait, you can’t look at either.
The number of suspect loans from those has got to be enormous.
It’s amusingly quaint to think that the charging of interest was considered usurious and sinful without exception for the first 1500 years of Christianity.
Technically still is in some denominations, but “usury” is defined differently than the literal definition.
Well we couldn’t very well sit by and let the Jews eat our lunch on account of the gentile lending exception.
Funny Story. I had a Bangladeshi Money and Banking teacher. He told us that when he worked in banladesh he was a banker and his family would talk to him and say “Radish… You are going to hell”
The Knights Templar and many religious orders offered loans with interest in the 1200s
And look what it got them.
Never make loans to the French king. Evergreen
But you should take loans from the french King and then send your most Hotheaded guy to fan the flames of revolution so that they kill the king. Then when they ask for their money, point out that you owe it to the French King, who they just killed.
/George Washington.
I will not have you besmirch George Washington in my presence
Besmirch? It was an excelent political move to some demanding French diplomat.
Yes, Washington punked them good, much to Francophile Jefferson’s dismay
I’d expect there’s plenty of insider deals and “investments” in businesses belonging to LDS cronies that might cause tax problems. But that’s not what I’m seeing in the article.
Your son is a monster
The #MeToo movement has created an opportunity, a mandate not only to discuss sexual violence but to engage young men in authentic, long-overdue conversations about gender and intimacy. I don’t want to suggest that this is easy. Back in the early 1990s, when I began writing about how girls’ confidence drops during adolescence, parents would privately tell me that they were afraid to raise outspoken daughters, girls who stood up for themselves and their rights, because they might be excluded by peers and called “bossy” (or worse). Although there is still much work to be done, things are different for young women today. Now it’s time to rethink assumptions about how we raise boys. That will require models of manhood that are neither ashamed nor regressive, and that emphasize emotional flexibility—a hallmark of mental health. Stoicism is valuable sometimes, as is free expression; toughness and tenderness can coexist in one human. In the right context, physical aggression is fun, satisfying, even thrilling. If your response to all of this is Obviously, I’d say: Sure, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the strength and durability of the cultural machinery at work on adolescent boys. Real change will require a sustained, collective effort on the part of fathers, mothers, teachers, coaches. (A study of 2,000 male high-school athletes found significantly reduced rates of dating violence and a greater likelihood of intervening to stop other boys’ abusive conduct among those who participated in weekly coach-led discussions about consent, personal responsibility, and respectful behavior.)
We have to purposefully and repeatedly broaden the masculine repertoire for dealing with disappointment, anger, desire. We have to say not just what we don’t want from boys but what we do want from them. Instructing them to “respect women” and to “not get anyone pregnant” isn’t enough. As one college sophomore told me, “That’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.” By staying quiet, we leave many boys in a state of confusion—or worse, push them into a defensive crouch, primed to display their manhood in the one way that is definitely on offer: by being a dick.
Blah blah bah blah blah.
Boys need to be rounded up and re-educated. Because they’re rapists and sociopaths.
*thinks back to one of the writers at TOS, cant remember which chick it was*
“How long before we see a libertarian ensnared by the #MeToo movement?”
If I have to explain self-ownership and its implications to someone claiming to be a libertarian, they aren’t a libertarian.
There was a #metoo thing-y at CATO a couple of years back and it ensnared Ed Crane, much to the delight of some
But sammich jokes cause harm! If you don’t get that, you need to educate yourself!
Story by Peggy Orenstein
I’m sorry, but I’m going to pull a leftist move here. I’m sick of stories with crap like this:
That will require models of manhood that are neither ashamed nor regressive,
By people who have never spent a day of their life being a teenage boy. But sure come in with your “Models of Manhood” and try to shape it to be what you want it to be.
And it’s not that i’m against using social pressure to try to push out the bad aspects of society or individuals, but these are the same people who act like any social presssure on girls is systematic sexisim.
That will require models of manhood that are neither ashamed nor regressive,
The leftist desire to reshape human nature never ends. This is just “new Soviet man” in skinny jeans.
The same people will fight tooth and nail against models of male behavior that involve the concept of chivalry.
To Further lay on. These are the same people who pushed and pushed and pushed to shut down every mens organization. This has clearly led to a fall in the amount of time young men are learning from their older wiser fellows, who are typically the best people to instill values in young men.
Models are constructs created from observed reality to study aspects of a thing. They are not templates for recreating the thing as a different thing.
Get along with science. Once we can predict things with our models, clearly we can then change things to get the aspects of our models to change the way we want them to.
This has never had a negative effect in the social sciences.
“If we change the model of reality, we change reality.”
I think deep down this is really the kind of magical thinking that a lot of people have.
Yes, and they’ve spent decades pushing policies that have resulted in record numbers of fathers not raising their boys right – or at all.
“Boys need to be rounded up and re-educated. Because they’re rapists and sociopaths.”
It’s worse than that: they need to be reeducated, because they should be made to cater to the ever changing whims of the women in their lives. Fuck off ad die you asshats.
*15 seconds later*
“Islam is a religion of peace that brings cultural enrichment and unique perspectives to Western society!”
Why do you hate the Aloha Snackbar? It’s offerings explode with flavor.
its. sorry Ted
It is 9:36 a.m. and there are already 300 comments. Do you expect me to read thrm all before I comment?
Thank you to everyone who consented to be interviewed last night. Yes, Spud, Kansas Citians ARE the good fer nuthin’ layabouts, thanks to Mother Nature’s idea of “climate change,” which dumped a bunch of snow on us Sunday, but it made the Chiefs-Donkeys game more exciting. Also, welcome two new Tulpae!
NOW I will read the comments.
Interviewed for what?
casting couch
Chapter 18.
Around these parts, I’m thinking that’s probably a Rule 34 euphemism.
It is a chapter in my medieval book, wherein our hero’s sexual appetite is demonstrated to be unexaggerated (to make the point that he really does not want to get it on with the heroine and is, in fact, friend-zoning her because she is a brunette). It is what brought “cunte” and “cod” to the Glibernation.
We had two new Tulpae step out of the shadows. I proceeded to waterboard them, and some other Glibs decided to be waterboarded also.
Hey Mojo, my invincible kid is making her first road trip in lovely winter weather. She’s headed to Boulder via STL and KC.
*gnaws on fingernails*
On the bright side, half of that trip the land is so flat you can slide off the road and never hit so much as a speed bump.
Bro Dean was on a ski trip and driving through North Texas awhile back, which is pretty damn flat. Wintry weather, and they went off on overpass.
But I’m sure she’ll be fine, TARD.
Now I need to get home and start drinking.
I just drove back from Denver last week. Roads were perfect. She’ll be fine.
Last week we didn’t have the sky dump mounds of snow on us. No ice, though, thank heavens.
Yes, but you’re Tundra, she’s Georgia Peach.
she’s Georgia Peach
*Thinks of Nicholas Cage in Wild at Heart and starts giggling wildly*
Good luck to her. We have had (according to the news) an “outbreak” of potholes. I apologize to her in advance, on my metro’s behalf, for not vaccinating the roads. We hope she does not pick up the epidemic on her way out of town to spread it across the Great Plains.
Achieving Quantum Wokeness (Paywalled at WSJ)
Check your binary privilege?
I remember when IDE cables and motherboard connectors changed their labeling from Master/Slave to Primary/Secondary
Now that you mention it, so do I!
They didn’t want to be SCSI.
Now we just have to do away with classifying cables as having “male” or “female” connectors.
Plumbers likely to be quite unhappy.
If I have to ask a cable what it identifies as in order to plug it in I am moving to the woods and shooting people.
The Unashooter?
“Receiver” seems to be problematic.
I remember being called on the use of ‘abort’ to terminate a computer process in a class I was teaching.
“Jeez, Mormon Church”
I dated a woman who came from a Mormon family. She abandoned the church, which meant she was barred from attending her little sister’s Mormon church wedding. What a fucking asshole religion.
Appropriate exceptions having been made for our resident Mormons, of course.
My complaint is that [[we]] scrimp and save, but don’t have half the reputation (((they))) do.
They are 5780 years old. You guys haven’t hit 200.
You’ve got work on lowering the tithing requirements.
That’s not fair
Meh. She knew when she left she wouldn’t be able to attend. Did she not do a proper risk-reward analysis?
was it a dry wedding? lobster or steak on the menu? these are important variables in the calculation.
This is how it goes: You, your intended, and vetted* family members and friends go into the temple. You and your intended kneel at an altar and say your vows while said family and friends watch. You come out, take pictures, have a reception.
None of that generally includes bridesmaids, groomsmen, or any of the traditional trappings of a walk-down-the-aisle-in-a-church wedding.
So the sister would have been welcome at the reception, which, yes, would have been dry as a bone, with nary a lobster or steak in sight (unless they were well to do).
*Vetted: Only members in good standing who have passed through a not-very-rigorous interview process can go into the temple.
I got married in the temple. My husband’s family didn’t bother to show up for the reception because they were traveling and the “I can’t see the wedding anyway” was a convenient excuse and they weren’t interested in him mich anyway. Same for one of my besties.
I cannot go into the temple now because I am not properly vetted because I won’t lie on one (now two) of the questions because of a crisis of faith, not because I’m doing anything wrong. My husband does not want to attend without me, so he also does not have a “temple recommend.”
4 more days of work (including today), 6 more days overall until I head up to North Carolina for Christmas and am done for the year. Don’t get back til January 3rd. Fuck yeah.
Labour is coming unhinged (well, more unhinged) and is unsurprisingly blaming DAH JOOZ for their election massacre.
https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/1206948402409484290
What they need is some kind of solution to this Jewish problem.
A final one.
All working class people are Jewish now? What in the actual fuck is this argument suppose to mean? Jews are so all powerful that they caused former solid Labour constituencies to abandon the party?
Their global hypnosis is well known.
“If we change the model of reality, we change reality.”
I think deep down this is really the kind of magical thinking that a lot of people have.
Exactly.
See, also: Warren, Elizabeth
I don’t classify Warren as a “Magical Thinker”, or at least she’s not a true believer. True Believers in magical thinking don’t become millionares. No she knows that she can promise a wealth tax knowing full well that it’s what her base wants to hear and that she will never be able to follow through with it.
In politics the best promises are the ones you can make and then blame someone else for not keeping. She’s as much a charlatan as Trump.
She’s headed to Boulder via STL and KC.
I-70.
I hated that drive.
I-80 normally, but this winter, that is a bad risk.
Why would you take 80?
Better maintained, flatter, straighter, faster, gradual, straight incline up into the mountains, not a tangle of squirrelly mountain passes.
On second thought, however, I realize that *I* go all the way to Salt Lake, so the advantage only happens west of Cheyenne, which is where you would turn south on I-25 to get to Denver.
I would take I-70 to Denver if that’s my destination, especially in the winter. I would never take I-70 to go to Salt Lake, especially in the winter.
Hmm, so you hate the pretty part.
No, in fact, I love the drive from Denver to I-15. In the not-winter. My mother loves the Rockies and so when I was a child, we spent a wee bit of time in such places as Vail and Estes Park (not skiing—too poor for that).
I do not meander or rubberneck at the landscape. I always have a destination, which is never actually Colorado. I get there as quickly as possible and setting land speed records is fun.
I also do not like driving/riding on the outside of those sheer mountain dropoffs. Pretty, but I’m afraid of heights.
I-70 is bad, but I remember the crosswinds on I-80 during a snowstorm were brutal.
I-70 is gorgeous in places! Of course the gorgeous part happens after Denver, so she won’t see it lol. My first cross country drive was to Las Vegas via 70 and everything from Denver on was amazing. Everything up to Denver was the flattest most featureless landscape on earth.
That will require models of manhood that are neither ashamed nor regressive,
Maybe I’m going to sound a little old-fashioned here, but didn’t we spend a few centuries building just that, at least when those standards were adhered to? People decided those standards and codes weren’t enlightened or progressive enough. The chivalric contract was too constraining on women, don’t you know? Now they’re surprised boys don’t really feel much need to be bound by the contract the women abrogated. And they don’t like what they see when the boys are no longer bound. But, they still haven’t really learned all that much. You aren’t going to erase masculine impulses in young boys. All you’re going to do is fail to properly channel them.
I’m in the line of there has been a lot of push to get rid of traditional mens institutions, where boys learned from older men.
Well it’s the general social distaste for masculinity that’s become all the rage. If an institution is masculine, it means that its a part of the patriarchy and has to be either destroyed or de-masculinized (sexually integrated). It occurs to the people pushing this that social institutions might be instruments of socialization, but not that much of that socialization is about channeling men’s masculine energies to productive and healthy ends, rather than any sort of cosmic scheme against women.
I am not sure many people have caught on to the fact that the people fighting “masculinity” only fight men, and in particular men that are not part of their tribe of nutfucking jobs, and also institutions they don’t like, being masculine… The problem is just who gets to wield power with these fucks.
Meanwhile, in good old American antisemitism, here’s a an elected member of the Jersey City Board of Education pushing all kinds of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Wonder what the public reaction would be if she wasn’t a black democrat. As it is the only place I’m seeing this is on twitter.
https://twitter.com/ReaganBattalion/status/1206940237555027973
It’s sad that Trump has normalized white supremacy to the point that even Black Democrat politicians are falling for it.
https://www.insidernj.com/jersey-citys-dirty-little-secret/
Okay, Twitter and an obscure blog.
Why does the article repeatedly use the adjective without a noun? Do they think by saying Jewish instead of Jews they are being less anti-semitic?
I’d say likely typo. It’s essentially a blog.
Also, I can’t figure out what her complaint is. Jewish people offered black people “bags of money” for their property, and they accepted? That’s … a bad thing?
In the US of A – remember if there is any issue of any kind – it’s somebody else’s fault.
YES! Property should never change hands unless the new hands are the same color as the old hands! As has been commented before the ‘civil rights’ types have come full circle.
Well, yeah, when that dirty money was made by selling body parts.
Literally worse than Hitler.
They make it look voluntary, which is worse than Hitler because clearly it isn’t voluntary, because if it was they would do what i want them to do.
I don’t classify Warren as a “Magical Thinker”, or at least she’s not a true believer.
I think she really does believe a lot of the nonsensical crap she pushes.
Her morals and beliefs are situational. They are whatever helps her take advantage of the situation/people/institutions/anything. She is truly a profiteer in every sense of the word.
I don’t think she’s Hillary lite. She’s a true believer, and that’s the scary part.
She legitimately believes that companies are out to screw the common man in the name of increasing profits. She legitimately believes that government is the only way the people can push back against predatory behavior from corporations.
If I have to ask a cable what it identifies as in order to plug it in I am moving to the woods and shooting people.
Protip: There are a lot more people to shoot at in cities.
Re the church’s billions—I have several theories on what could happen if this is real, chief among them at least 2 class-action suits. 1) to get money back and 2) get voluntary clergy reclassified as employees and paid (and if you think that can’t happen because “voluntary,” pleasee California and Uber). The value of the labor/man hours and how much it would take to pay all those people would, in fact, bankrupt the church.
My only real complaint, however, is that they won’t hire and pay janitors. They used to, when I was a kid. Now the buildings are cleaned by the members on a rotating schedule. My husband and I refuse to do this. As part of the church’s infrastructure, the buildings should be maintained by hired professionals, or at least the welfare recipients.
Minor quibble, and this is more disappointment than anything, is the church’s withdrawal from Scouts. I don’t know if it was spurred by the expense, but I’m sure it played a part. The church subsidized it heavily. The BSA is toast without the church.
I too was brought up short at the mention of the bounty, so while my eyebrows are raised all the way back to the cowlick on the crown of my head, I’m not going to dismiss the claims altogether.
I do not like the current leadership, I don’t trust them, and no, I do not believe the president of the church is the prophet of God, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some risky crony deals that they thought they could do and remain untouchable.
I think the Boy Scouts withdrew from the church more so than the church withdrawing from the Boy Scouts. Most Christian denominations have ended their support for the Boy Scouts too. The same is true for the girl scouts.
Fact is that alleged corruption within the LDS seems like small potatoes when you consider that a certain other church runs a bank that has literally been tied to money laundering and is so secretive that the last two people assigned to investigate their shenanigans have been mysteriously fired and one ended up in jail on dubious accusations.
Long story short, leave the damn Mormons alone.
The worst thing about that bank was that it provided the plot for Godfather III.
I’ll never forgive the bank for providing the plot for the worst movie in that trilogy.
I can never get too worked about the banking shenanigans. It doesn’t even make the top 5 list of the Catholic Church’s corrupt practices.
That’s where you’re wrong. It’s all tied together.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/secrets-of-the-vatican/
What was in the dossier that led to Benedict’s resignation? And why is Cardinal Vigano in hiding after making his accusations against certain cardinals?
Trumps Piss tapes!
We got em this time!
1. Killing hundreds of children at an orphanage
2. That other thing they did with kids, and the cover up, and allowing it to happen repeatedly, and still not owning up to it to this day
3. Complicity with Franco’s regime
4. Grande Noirceur
5. Similar attitudes in Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, etc.
(and all of this is pretty specific to North America and the British Isles; there are some allegations about complicity in genocide in Africa, too)
Number 3 and 4 is a curious argument.
You forgot the Cristero War.
The Church sided with reactionaries and oppressed non-Catholics, and then in the end it was all for naught as those regimes collapsed and the moral authority of the Church along with them.
Just so, I’m clear- the “reactionaries” weren’t the Republicans who were shooting people for attending mass and burning churches, right? Franco and the revolt against the government was just a spontaneous uprising by disgruntled reactionaries. Nothing led to that. Everything was good and pure, before those evil reactionaries said “I don’t like progress”.
I have not given a pass to the revolutionaries against whom reactionaries arise. This is not a holistic assessment of the Church’s virtues and vices, nor those of its enemies and bystanders, it is an assessment of the Church’s own corrupt actions. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, Francisco Franco died in 1975, that’s roughly 36 years when Franco’s actions can’t be excused. Moreover, nobody was killing any priests in Quebec.
It’s true. “Reactionaries” don’t like being killed for believing what they believe. I remember all those non-Catholic churches that Franco burned and their believers that he shot. And the Quebec government and their evil anti-communism and how they oppressed all the non-believers in ways. There were ways, I’m sure of it. It’s good, though, that the Soviet Union had the good sense to support the non-reactionary forces in that Civil War. God bless them. But, the church continued their evil reactionary ways by funding opposition to the Soviets in eastern Europe. You can’t help those reactionaries.
In Bocaccio’s Decameron, one of the stories mentions Catholic priests having an affinity for little boys. It was written in the 1300s.
It just jumped out at me and made me wonder how long this has been a thing.
Since the institution of priestly celebacy I’d wager.
I bet Epstein was Catholic, too. Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Warren Buffet- all Catholic.
The higher prevalence of sexual assault at public schools is probably a Jesuit conspiracy, too, to deflect attention.
This is the problem with discussing this topic with religious zealots
The Church didn’t create pedophilia and it isn’t uniquely responsible. The modern public school system has many parallels here.
But the Church’s actions as an institution are what betray it. It chose to cover up, it chose to pay people off, it chose to reassign bad actors to new victims, and it chooses to this day to act like it was all just a quaint misunderstanding that should be downplayed or ignored as much as possible.
No one is disagreeing, but when you start throwing out things like “complicity in Franco’s regime” you pretty much show your hand. I’m not defending the hierarchy, nor am I even equivocating. You have your convictions and no amount of logic or reality will dissuade you. I get it.
I think you are reading way more into what I wrote than is actually there.
Really? I feel like it’s the other way around.
I am not building a case against the Church as some historical villain. If anything, I think the collapse of its authority marks one of the major turning points for the worse in Western history. My point is that it was an active participant in its own fate.
When you attack the church for supporting a duly elected government in Quebec and start acting as if Franco is some aberration, rather than a reaction to the violence perpetuated by the Republicans your perspective is pretty clear.
Why anyone would oppose communists is beyond me.
OK, I feel like it’s not possible to have a reasonable conversation about this topic. This was not a personal attack, and I did not intend to offend.
No, the process was begun way before it happened.
So the gunshop owner who bought my guns—we discussed that a little. I had taken my mis-purchased ammo to him too and he said he couldn’t resell it, but would I mind if he gave it to the Boy Scouts. Neh, go ahead, knock yourself out. Then he said, “Never mind. I’ll give it to 4H. I don’t like the Boy Scouts anymore. They doubled their fees and the boys can’t raise the money.”
I said, “My church withdrew and it probably was its death knell.”
He agreed heartily with that.
Honestly, I don’t really care. I should as an Eagle scout, but the BSA has not been a static actor in all of this. See my above comments about the destruction of mens institutions.
See: romance novels, where the toxic masculinity ramps up harder and faster as the SJWs tear masculinity down.
There are a couple of things going on here that I think are fascinating, and I may do an article.
1) The prolific romance review blogs are run by SJWs who feel they must defend their love of romance novels. They eat them up, but review the unwoke ones u favorably (“This is not your mother’s rapetastic romance”).
2) Thus, “problematic” elements are being screamed out of existemce by aforementioned SJWs. They are trying to bet-down the heroes as mich as possible. but when they get what they want they complain that it’s cookie cutter and not interesting. Beta (read: chill alpha) heroes can be interesting if you do them right, but you can’t get your romance fix with them.
3) SOMEONE is buying all those bully/reverse harem romances because they are proliferating, and it’s not the people who hang out with woke romance readers. Or maybe it is and they get their un-woke jollies on the DL.
4) The rapetastic romances have split into two analogues: a) m/m hurt/comfort romances, which are indistinguishable from ye olde rapetastic romances only by the presence of a second penis and absence of any vaginas, and b) “fated mate” supernatural storylines, in which the heroine has no choice.
Masculinity is highly prized. This is (one reason?) why romance novels are the biggest thing in genre fiction by far.
YA Dystopian fiction was gonna give it a run for it’s money tho.
Yes. However, romance readers eat that up, too. I doubt the number of teenagers reading it comes anywhere close to the number of adult women reading it.
I don’t. I have always had a taste for May-December romances, although that’s on the wane now that I’m on the December end of the spectrum.
I also suspect this is because very often, those dystopians have a badass female lead (and often 2 guys fighting for her heart) who is badass, and that is attractive (would have been to teenage me). It is also written in first person (sometimes present tense) which puts you immediately INTO the character instead of WATCHING the character.
I don’t want to read/write teenagers, which is one reason I had such a hard time with my Prohibition book, because the heroine was 16. I had the advantage of the time period to make her seem more mature than a 16yo is now.
I can’t stand present tense – everything is “Now” and I try to cram the entire scene into a single instant buffer and it hurts my head and sounds all wrong and it feels like a giant colossal run-on sentence with no end because it’s all happening “Now” so it distorts the perception of time since there is no before or after in now, just everything ahppening at once and by the time the scene and “now” finally ends my stress levels have shot through the roof because the buffer overflowed and I don’t know what happened.
I’ve heard that before. Lots. The first time I heard it, I was shocked.
Me, personally, I don’t care. Sometimes I don’t even notice. If I like the summary, I am willing to go on the ride the author wants to take me on.
It’s not a conscious choice, it’s just what happens trying to read present tense stories.
Today’s earworm. Yes, I’m still on them.
I honestly like having a building maintained by its membership. At one of my clubs, the bullseye team empties the lead traps, the IDPA guys sweep and mop the floors, etc. Of course, I’ve been part of painting an mowing parties since I was a boy scout so it seems kind of normal to me.
When your membership is already spending 10-20 hours a week maintaining operations in addition to meetings, asking it to clean the building TOO is too much.
Also, free labor as part of some ritual or test of loyalty (having done it and been taken advantage of) is bullshit. Using loyalty as the cudgel is additionally foul-tasting, so I may have some unresolved anger issues with the whole setup.
Perhaps relevant?
Yes, and people joined the church for baseball, too.
If more people knew that the bishop of a ward (parish) is responsible for the well-being of all the people within his boundary, more people would ask for help.
When my sick-almost-homeless bestie was in StL needing a way to get to me for a roof (I couldn’t afford to go get her), I called up the bishop there and asked if he could make sure she got her stuff moved out of her apartment and into a storage unit, and he made it happen. She was shocked.
So yes, if you ask, you shall receive. But even if you know you can ask, you have to know WHOM to ask, which is the hard part.
Well, I did live in a fraternity house which, as you might expect, involves a VAST amount of cleaning. Which also means I (like many others) can verify that the women’s bathroom is vastly worse than the men’s
fraternity house …. women’s bathroom
*smoke from the brain*
One summer in high school my buddy hooked me up with a gig helping him clean out a frat house at WSU before the fall semester. I can assure you that at that particular house, there was absolutely not a vast amount of cleaning that took place. Worst hundred bucks we ever made.
At work, they had to have a meeting with all the women to tell them that the bathroom has been in horrible condition and they need to clean up after themselves better.
Cleaning up after oneself is different from being expected to deep-clean a building used by 1200 people a week for free.
I used to go to a public shooting range that had a pretty good self-maintenance mindset. There was a broom and dustpan sitting against the back wall, and someone would usually sweep up the brass and dump it in the bucket when it got excessive. People were good about following the ceasefire procedure. It was a little-known place that was a bit janky and had only a small selection of rental guns, so it was mostly experienced shooters, not newbies who are renting a Desert Eagle for shits and giggles.
Then they got shut down because some business on the other side allegedly had bullets flying over their parking lot (meaning that, if it were true, someone was shooting in the wrong direction). They were allowed to re-open, but they had some shitty plywood blinders nailed up over the range, making it so that you could only shoot rifles sitting down at the bench (shooting a lever-action sitting down is NOT fun). The pistol range was unchanged, but when my friend and I were shooting 9mm handguns at the same time and the range officer told us “no rapid fire”, we knew it was time to find a new range.
I still think some of the local businesses wanted to be rid of that range (which had been there since the ’50s) and got the city government to fuck them over.
we knew it was time to find a new range.
Range?
One of the nice things about living in the sticks, along the mountains, is that finding a place with a nice backstop is not hard to find.
Yea, that would be nice. My friend and primary shooting buddy was looking at a house out in the country where we could shoot, so maybe that will be an option in the future.
PS: He just gave me a CZ-82 for Christmas this weekend.
They brazenly came on the property of black homeowners and waved bags of money.
“I didn’t even know my house was for sale, until somebody came and told me.”
I still think some of the local businesses wanted to be rid of that range (which had been there since the ’50s) and got the city government to fuck them over.
That could never happen.
I told that theory to my brother, who replied with “I don’t know about that… That would require secrecy among all those businesses, the city government, and the police department*.” I told him it doesn’t require secrecy at all; just a population that trusts the government by default and is conditioned to write off such ideas as a “crazy conspiracy theory”.
* Allegedly, the police got a call about bullets flying over people’s backyards and the parking lots of businesses, and the responding officer said he had to flop and army-crawl away to avoid being hit by bullets.
responding officer said he had to flop and army-crawl away to avoid being hit by bullets.
No amount of low crawl could get most fat ass cops close enough to the ground.
No kidding dude. My jogging route goes past the county courthouse, and I often see deputies escorting inmates to trials. The cops are so fat that they would literally have to lift up their gut in order to draw their gun. What the fuck would they do if one of those skinny methheads took off running? Even in handcuffs, there’s no way they would be apprehended by Chief Wiggum over there.
I don’t understand how they are not dismissed from their jobs if they’re not physically fit for duty. Oh right, government-sector labor unions.
https://today.duke.edu/2019/12/saidduke-nina-totenberg-2nd-amendment-supreme-court
“So I don’t actually know how this plays out. But I’m old enough to remember when the Chief Justice of the United States, a relatively conservative Republican named Warren Burger, thought that the idea that there was an individual right to own a gun was just silly. And used that word silly.”
-NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent commenting on NYSRPA vs NYC that was heard at SCOTUS two weeks ago
“relatively” conservative just means he was a squishy moderate. Burger voted for abortion in Roe v Wade and affirmative action in Bakke. of course he voted that nobody has a right to own a gun.
The connection between Republicans and the Second Amendment is more recent than people realize. While Archie Bunker was pro-gun rights, he was a) a fictional character and b) a hair’s width away from being a blue dog in his day. There were plenty of concerned (mostly white) conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s over “Saturday night specials” etc. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was a thoroughly bipartisan affair, and it got more nays from Democrats than Republicans both in absolute and relative numbers.
(and those Democratic nays were from the South, so I don’t think they were over the bill not going far enough to control guns)
The Parties… um… switched… erm… :head explodes:
The Parties have always been coalitions. I get that in leftist circles it is popular to talk about the switch and in rightist circles it is popular to deny it, but a lot of relatively conservative southerners did in fact switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican in response to the events of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Very few things in human affairs are bright line yea/nay.
I think it is interesting how there used to be coalitions somewhat outside of party politics that were in some sense stronger than party affiliation, but it seems like those coalitions don’t exist as much today.