Domain: texasmonthly.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to texasmonthly.com.
Comments · 21
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Re:... good luck
Apparently not the mall and often not the park these days, so where?
How about the local Catholic Church? I'm sure that the priests will do their best to make your children feel most comfortable.
Oh, wait . . .
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Re:Manufactured outrage
Most of those are actually false (1,4,6) or at best distorted. This is not surprising as Breitbart is an awful source of any news and Steve Bannon basically helped dictate this immigration policy.
1. He's enforcing the most draconian option. They claim the kids are unaccompanied but by prosecuting the adults criminally instead of civilly -- they obviously have that right -- they can isolate both the parents and the kids. This is even happening to people trying to claim asylum at ports of entry.
2. Many do. The vast majority arrive with an adult. The trafickers posing as a family account for .61% of kids.
3. Many, if not all, of these children have been apart from their parents for more than 20 days. Even a cursory google shows this is heinously out of context.
4. This is just unmitigated bullshit. It's child abuse (per pediatricians AND psychiatrists) and nothing DHS says has been independently verified. Either way being separated from family and put in a detention center is certainly not GOOD treatment
5. People are generally not jailed for misdemeanors. Children certainly aren't seized and they get preference in their bail hearing if they are the sole caregiver.
6. This is just unmitigated bullshit. He kept families together.
7. Ignoring the fact that DHS has started turning people away from ports of entry, yes they are actively being turned away and sometimes seized. This is, once again, easily findable via basic google. Some actual sources WITH SOURCES!
https://www.texasmonthly.com/p...
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
Even if you don't like NYT or NPR, there are other outlets that report it as well, even websites like Snopes and politifact. Basically that was a shit post for covering an awful practice and an even bigger shit post because it was so laughably bad and fake,. -
This really hurts ...
... because it should have been Texas.
They would have detected the Higgs boson first, and would have attracted the best scientific minds on the planet.
The infrastructure and support system including housing, lodging, eateries, fuel
...The list is enormous and the impact great.
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Re:I'm not surprisedCongratulations. You got everything wrong. Even by randomly guessing, you should've gotten half your statements right.
we keep cutting funding to education and research.
Spending on education is up.
Non-defense R&D spending is up.Companies don't innovate. There's not enough money on the table to make it worth while. Aside from the occasional bored aristocrat it's mostly been the government that financed innovation; usually through the public university system. But nobody wants to pay the taxes for that.
Corporations spend roughly twice as much money on R&D as the government.
Heck, we just borrowed $1.5 trillion over 10 years to finance massive tax cuts
The last major tax cut was 15 years ago. The drop in tax revenue in the last decade was due to the recession following the collapse of the housing bubble. Currently, tax revenue is back up to "normal" levels (if you define the highest it's ever been historically as "normal").
What's busting the budget is a refusal to cut spending to match revenue (notice the trendline for tax receipts is flat, while the trendline for spending is climbing). This is primarily driven by growth of entitlement programs. The CBO has been warning us about that since at least 1998 (when I started reading the CBO reports).
And before you claim we should balance the budget by paying more taxes, consider that the tax burden in the U.S. is already among the highest in the world. People claiming U.S. taxes are low usually only look at Federal taxes, and fail to account for state and local taxes. U.S. tax burden is the third highest of the 20 largest economies in the world (only France and Italy have a higher tax burden). That's right, Americans pay more taxes (as percent of GDP) than socialist countries like Canada, the UK, Germany.
Summary even states that the main reason the U.S. dropped was because of low percentage of STEM college graduates. -
Re:I'm not responsible for your kids
What am I reading?
You're not reading. Your'e demanding to be lead by the nose. You're intentionally being dense in an attempt to make some point, without regard to the fact that you look like an imbecile.
They're your old people. Not mine. And neither I, nor "the internet", nor even a school, is responsible for [caring for] them.
Clear enough? Now? How about now? You seem to believe that "raising" is strictly limited to children. Wrong.
If you cannot be assed to take care of your old people, use rubbers.
Makes as much sense as the original comment. If you can't be assed to take care of your parents, which you certainly have, you may as well not have children, which are, apparently, "optional." Except in a societal sense that without children there's nobody to become the next generation of workers, and to support the previous generation of workers who have become elderly.
huh? apply that to old people?
-Social security
-Medicare
-Homestead exemptions
-other government "senior" assistance programsHappy to hear that you won't be using any of these since they violate a principle of "personal responsibility" that the the GP and, apparently, you hold so dear.
"They're your old people. Not mine." "Chuck 'em out in the snow." You'll change your tune, as soon as it threatens to get cold for you.
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Re:That makes me MAD!
I moved nothing. Redneck is a late 20th century innovation. More about marketing then culture.
And I was hoping we'd made progress. You're still myopically viewing it under the lens of the chic redneck culture of the mid 70s onward. I can assure you that rednecks existed as an identity long before that period, with long being defined as decades at a minimum. The current definition of redneck already existed at least in the 1940s. Here is a little article from 74 that discusses rednecks written by a self-professed redneck who was born in the late 1920s, which also documents the rough time of the "romanticized" notion of a redneck.
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Re:Supply and Demand
Texas? Are you refering to the state that has gone out of it''s way to hamper women's civil rights by enacting new barriers to abortion?
Or is it Texas - the state that has made it illegal for people who are legally women to use the women's washroom?
Or is it Texas - the state that just loves to hate on anyone not white?
Texax - where if you're not white and male, you're sh*t. No thanks.
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local rules by local rulers
Austin is a city. I say let Austin do what's right for Austin. They have a system to elect their council and a system to refer disagreements to the voters. That system is at work here.
I live a few hours from Austin. My (much larger) city has certain regulations on who's allowed to drive, too. It's a minor inconvenience to start driving and again every two years. It involves a background check including fingerprinting, a five-panel drug screening, a warrant check, and a vehicle inspection (including having a fire extinguisher within arm's reach of the driver). It's much, much less restrictive than being licensed to be a Houston taxi driver. From the link:
In theory, anyone can drive a cab. To get a license in Houston, you must have a valid Texas driver’s license, pass a written test to show you know twenty popular addresses, take a simple physical exam, and be free of warrants within the city. But practically speaking, you also need a medallion, the permit that allows the operation of one vehicle, and that is harder to come by. The city charges a $400 nonrefundable fee when you apply for one or more medallions. Applications are accepted only in even-numbered years, and not every application is approved, because the streets can handle only so much taxi traffic. Medallions can be resold or leased after a short waiting period, and they bring as much as $10,000 apiece on the gray market from independent drivers who have given up hope of obtaining one from the city
I'm not familiar with the exact regulations for a taxi driver in Austin, but I'd bet Uber and Lyft are complaining about their drivers only having to do part of what's required for a taxi driver there.
Let Austin worry about it. It's Austin's regulation for Austin's people. Now that it's going to a referendum the truest form of democracy you're likely to see on such a scale will take care of it in a locally agreeable way.
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Re:Education...
Take an actual look at the cancer statistics, it's not because Houstonians live so long that they finally get cancer, it's taking them earlier than almost anywhere else you might choose to live:
http://statecancerprofiles.can...
http://www.texasmonthly.com/ar...
I live in Florida, so, yeah, I like my air conditioning. And, on the whole, modern medicine is a good thing - even when taken with the drawbacks of modern life. On the other hand, living in a so-called backwards place isn't nearly as bad as being in a modern society stripped of the good stuff, like poverty can do.
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Nowhere But TexasNothing to see here.
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Re:Might want to reconsider paying the fine...
What about the drones used by activists to fly over industrial operations breaking the law and get footage of it?
Alas, Texas has already weighed in on that question.
Texas' unmanned aerial photography law basically says that it's illegal to "conduct surveillance" of other people's property without their permission -- and then goes on to explicitly say that if you do it anyways, the photographs can *not* be used in court, and the property owner can sue you for several thousand dollars for taking the pictures, and more for disseminating them.
This incident is probably what lead to that -- they wanted to protect companies from having their crimes be detected with them.
So
... you'll have to use a manned aircraft for that. -
Re:Corruption? In Russia?
Really? That's your example of something comparable to Roscosmos embezzling 10% of its annual budget? Operation Lightning Strike which turned out to be a big entrapment op that spent years trying to convince non-key players to commit crimes that they never would have otherwise, and a link that's anything but an endictment of NASA?
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Re:Looks like the prophet's gunmen
After the Paris "Charlie Hebdo" shooting, it was obvious that such an event, in Texas, would be well protected against similar attacks. Isn't that attack another proof that fanaticism == stupidity?
Of course even gun nuts themselves proved you needed to really protect something well to prevent an attack: “Charlie Hebdo Shooting Sim Shows More Than One Gun Is Needed” (or in other words, it takes at least "two of the gun enthusiasts at the event [...] to stop even one shooter")
Oh, well, goes to show that two amateur terrorists without the hint of actual training are no match for a couple of professional security guards. They would have fared better at a gun show, probably.
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wildlife crossing
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Re:There is another answer
So I would suggest just constantly invading the privacy of the rich. Hovering over their pools and outdoor parties, peering in their windows. Either they will get lopsided laws written that only prevent poor, citizens from using drones (which is entirely a possibility,) or a market will appear spurring the development of measures to thwart drones. Of course this could spiral out of control in many, many ways, from just private, semi-sanctioned police/security forces "protecting" their clients, to a robot vs human war (where maybe EMPs would be helpful.)
They already have lopsided laws on the books (like the law in Texas), but it is not rich people getting these laws, it is rich corporations. The Texas law was a direct response to a drone pilot embarassing a corporation by recording them dumping a river of blood into the environment. Why would corporations (or rich people) bother with expensive drone countermeasures when they can just buy some nice, cheap legislation? Our legislators have shown time and time again that they are for sale, and the price is incredibly low.
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Re:10-1 is another Blackstone Ratio
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Re:All data all the time
"[*] I remember ~10 years ago a redneck couple in Texas was going to blow up some chemical plant when the wind was blowing the right direction to kill everyone in the adjacent company town (for obscure reasons). Somehow an undercover cop was on to them, got recruited into their plot, and hid a microphone/camera in their dashboard. The news televised the footage of the three of them sitting in their truck on a hillside overlooking the plant, discussing the plot, when the men with handcuffs came to take two of them away."
Found it. It was in 1998. The couple in question were Shawn and Catherine Adams, who with a couple of other KKK members were supposedly going to blow up a sour gas plant (hydrogen sulphide mixed with natural gas) near Fort Worth, Texas. The undercover cop (and a whole team of law enforcement officers) were on them because another KKK member was aware of what these nutballs were going to do and was supposedly concerned for innocent lives. The explosion was supposed to be a distraction for robbing a drug dealer. More details here. The whole gang was pretty idiotic and apparently the gas plant they had in mind appaerntly wasn't really a sour gas one anyway, so the damage might not have been as much as claimed. I found the initial mention of that case at this rather lengthy and scary list of potential and actual domestic bombings and other violent or potentially violent events (e.g., someone with obvious mental health problems and a history of violence who had amassed hundreds of pounds of explosives), but it looks like that list has the still-exaggerated original estimate of what would have happened if these people had been successful.
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Re:To all those complaining about Ron Paul
So, I'm reading the Texas Monthly article where in an interview he is asked about racist statements published under his name in hist newletter: e.g. "If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."
I'm trying to understand, did he lie during his campaign? Did he let those statements be published even though he wasn't the author? He said his comments about blacks were in the context of current events. So they were his statements? What do Paul supports offer as the final word here?
Starts at 3rd paragraph from the bottom of link below and 1st paragraph of the next link.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2001-10-01/feature7-2.php -
Things you don't want to know about your friends
I'm thoroughly unlikely to use a system that ranks my search results based on the preferences of my friends. I know *I* never put anything but the most basic information about me online (name and website is all that's required by the Geneva Convention, right?). So anyone whose searches are based on *my* stated interests will find a bunch of Dixie Chicks stuff, and little else.
And what about my searches based on *their* interests? Do I even *want* to know what they're doing with their time online? Even if the results aren't personalized ("Jim would probably like this link"), I'd rather not do a search on sushi restaurants and learn to my dismay that one or more of my friends has interests that include tentacle porn. And I don't even want to *think* about what could happen on a search for a good plate of cabrito! -
Re:Bob Gates
Linky linky: Article on Texas Monthly
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Will farmers throw benefits for Willie Nelson?
You did single out Willie Nelson on purpose, right? Otherwise, your comment was amazingly ironic.
For those who don't know: for many years, (late 80's - 90's) Willie Nelson was just about the most financially troubled singers making the charts on a regular basis.
Such fundraising events were discussed by his fans and I believe some may actually have taken place.