I don't know where you're coming from here. I suspect you think I'm 'blaming' Republicans for something and you're trying to shift the blame on people who want gay marriages.
I just said that society was going in a linear progression of giving rights to gay people. First it stopped entrapping and arresting them, then it explicitly legalized their behavior, then it decided that they shouldn't be hated for who they are, then it started including them in hate crime and anti-discrimination laws, and then...the Republicans lept in and wrestled with the legal train for a decade, delaying the next stop.
Meanwhile, society, as a whole, continued in exactly the direction they'd gone before, making shows with gay supporting characters, shows about gay people, etc, in basically the same way that they started doing with black people. We've just recently reached the point where gay people on TV are being treated as normal people, where they can be villains or heroes or right or wrong or whatever. Society kept 'moving', while the Republicans held the legal train at the last station by appealing the fringes.
Although, as I said, I don't think society really was 'moving'. But that, honestly, is a matter of perspective. Of course, if society is always moving to the left, then that raises some interesting questions, like why the right is even vaguely useful.(1) I don't think it's 'moving' as much as 'learning', but whatever. It was just becoming less ignorant through interaction with and exposure to gay people.
The people pushing for gay marriages are much more in sync with society than the people fighting them. It's just it's easier to get out a bunch of right-fringe voters to vote against gay marriages than it is to get a bunch of straight people who think it's an okay idea but don't really care one way or another to vote for them. But the people pushing for them are almost irrelevant to my point. We aren't at the point where society is pushing for them, society still doesn't give a damn one way or another.
And it's not just homosexuality that the Republicans managed to shove right for the past decade. Abortion is another big one. They managed to shove that so far right it got away from them and people start passing laws, which horrified them, because if they can't whine about it anymore, they can't get elected. And then, even worse, society realized how far to the right these loons were when people, well, refused to pass the laws, even in the reddest states.
1) Someone I don't agree with once said 'Name one social issue the right has been correct on since the 50s.', and I couldn't think of anything.
i may be naive but could it be a function of the median age of the u.s. and that of the house and senate?
Congress does tend to lag behind society, which is good. The Senate, especially, is supposed to be full of old wise men and women.
But where that falls apart is that the Democrats aren't really that much younger than the Republicans.
continuing on with my naivety. i am, as of yet, not convinced that bush/cheny intentionally lied or if they were just mis-informed or seeing what they wanted to see.
They already had plans to invade Iraq drawn up, and used 9/11 as an excuse. There were plenty of people telling them they were 'wrong', and they didn't listen to a damn word anyone said. Instead of using the CIA for intelligence gathering, they set up a White House intelligence group on Iraq to give them exactly the 'facts' they wanted. People who pushed back, like Valeria Plame's husband, got punished.
They possibly wanted people to believe they were simply mistaken, but in reality, no, they knew damn well what they were doing.
Of course, even if there were WMD, that wouldn't have a damn bit of bearing on, you know, the actual state of the war, which they didn't bother to make any plans for past the invasion. Except it'd be rather more dangerous, because US troops did not secure weapon depots very well, which is how half the damn country has a gun, and how half the 'improvised explosives devices' are just improvised timers and sensors tied to military detonators and military explosives. Just thank Allah or whoever Saddam didn't really have any WMDs, or we'd be in exactly the same situtation, getting hit with those.
Discovering that Bush lied, or even if he hadn't, about the reason for the road trip isn't very relevant when he took us in a car with no brakes and no gas. Even if we'd had a valid reason to be in Iraq, it'd still be a complete fuckup at this point, and that is entirely his fault.
But there are exactly two groups of people who think the American people are in favor of impeachment: The government, and the journalists who work in Washington.
Of course, I mean those are the two groups that think the American people aren't in favor of impeachment.
42% support impeachment two years ago if the President lied to get us into Iraq. (Which isn't, incidentally, even an impeachable offense.) 25% of Republicans wanted to.
Notice that was before Katrina, before the NSA wiretapping story really broke, and the war actually appeared winnable if you weren't paying a lot of attention. 42%.
It's two years later. The NSA is spying on us, FEMA was obviously broken, the war is, quite obviously, lost, the Republicans apparently covered up a creepy old man who hit on Congressional pages, the Attorney General is in deep shit, Bush's World Bank guy is in deep shit, the FDA is letting people be poisoned by wheat gluten because it's apparently run by an incompetent (1), and I'm sure I'm forgetting half a dozen things.
Oh, and Cheney has since shot some old guy in the face.
Impeachment may, indeed, not work, and if it does he still might not be removed from office. But there are exactly two groups of people who think the American people are in favor of impeachment: The government, and the journalists who work in Washington. The American people themselves appears like they would be pretty happy with it.
In fact, they appear very very happy with it, which is astonishing because the media isn't reporting it, which means there's really no bandwagoning going on. I don't have any current polls, because the media is, apparently, not willing to run them anymore. But, hey, in a week or so, there will be polls on Congress. Let's see if their ratings go up or down, shall we?
And Cheney, again, is a good deal less popular than Bush.
And I didn't say you were anti-Democrat. I said you were one of those fools who've bought the entire 'both parties are equally bad' and 'Because the Republicans impeached for obvious partisan reasons, the Democrats can't impeach' memes. One party constantly commits crimes, period. By definition, the other party has to be better.
The RNC decided, back when it decided it would operate however it wanted with no regard for the law, that instead of trying to make themselves appear better, they'd just constantly assert the other party does it to. It doesn't. Sure, you have the occasional William Jefferson, but if the DoJ had actually been investigating Republicans, we'd have a dozen of them gone now. (Just ask Carol Lam.) Even with their meddling, we still have like five times more of Republicans in trouble.
1) The wheat gluten is the news, the facts about just how bad the FDA completely fucked up the handling of it is not, yet. It will be.
But in addition, he will lose points with Independent voters, who basically decide the elections.
This is where you, and the political media in Washington, at flat out delusional. Sorry, but you are.
Cheney has almost negative approval. He is loathed. He's got all of Bush's disapproval, plus no one gives him the benefit of the doubt. If Kucinich could magically snap his fingers and remove Cheney from office, it wouldn't do anything but help Kucinich.
But he's, obviously, not going to do that. He is, instead, going to make Cheney come in and testify about his lawbreaking. If you think he's loathed now, just wait until Kucinich is done with him.
However, Kucinich still has almost no chance of wining the primary.
You are absolutely right. If the Democrats can refrain from doing it though, impeachment won't become "business as usual". And if the Republicans tried it again in the future when the Democrats didn't, the Republicans would come out looking horrible.
Boy, the Republican sure got to you, didn't they? Their 'Let's have constant investigations until we find something we can plausiable impeach over, so that no one will ever be able to impeach us' trick worked perfectly.
Nixon should have been impeached, over Cambodia, nevermind Watergate. Reagan and Bush Sr. should have been impeached over Iran/Contra.
The last three elected Republican presidents committed felonies in office (Well, Bush Sr. while VP.) by directly violating the law. The US started to impeach one of them, but that went nowhere. (No, you don't get to fucking resign from office after committing felonies.) All of them were pardoned, or had people who were to testify against them, pardoned, by Republican presidents.
Meanwhile, the only actual impeachment has been against Clinton. Yes, perjury sucks, and is probably impeachable over, but it shouldn't have even gotten to that point.
Frankly, I don't give a flying fuck if Bush's impeachment is seen as political. Republican presidents demonstratably, repeatedly, commit felonies in office and suffer no consequences.
We not only need to impeach them, we need to impeach their staff, to keep them from ever entering the oval office again. These are the same goddamn people enabling every criminal Republican administration.
You can dislike the Democrats and their policies all you want. They, at least, are not criminals.
I don't even know if people are moving left, or it's just they artifically got pulled to the right for a while, and so are heading back left.
Like with gay marriage. 'Not that there's anything wrong with it' was in Seinfeld in 1993. Gay people got ignored for quite a while, were made fun of for a bit, got demonized until maybe 1990, and then, well, people didn't like them but were willing to leave them be. Without the right constantly making an issue out of gay marriage, no one would give a damn and there'd be some sort of legal recognization of gay unions everywhere.
Thank God, the right has essentially painted itself into a corner on certain positions, and cannot move, at least not quickly. As they keep fooling less and less of the country, they will constantly lose support on everything as they appear more and more irrational.
This was going to take a few more decades, and, given long enough lead time, they would 'lose' those positions, and bow out of the contest, 'defeated'. Like the segregationists in the 50s, they'd go down fighting, some of them modifying their views enough they still fit in, and the next generation magically getter new beliefs. As the country stopped falling for the right-wing rhetoric about gays, the right-wing would leave the rhetoric behind. Within two decades they'd somehow have no problems with gay marriage, but would have a problem with cloning or something else.
It's a great political trick. Constantly lag a decade or so behind the country, and you have the full support of whatever idiots you can currently convince the country is going the wrong way. Yammer about it a lot, and then, when people start seeing through you, well, stop talking about it, instead talking about some new threat.
But then they picked their newest two positions, George W. Bush and the Iraq War, and threw their full support behind them, which is, quite possibly literally, the stupidest political move ever. They don't have time to get the new guard in position before the old guard goes down in flames. Many of them are living in a delusional universe and still supporting those things.
People predicted this cycle would speed up, thanks to the internet and various things, but I don't quite think anyone imagined it would go this fast.
That's not really true - while it's fairly popular to make multi-symptom cold medicines, with Sudafed, antihistamine, tylenol/aspirin, expectorant, and dextromethorphan, those aren't the ones that get advertised as non-drowsy. Sudafed and its relatives get sold by themselves as non-drowsy, and as you say they're stimulant. The other main non-drowsy allergy meds are things like Claritin, which is an anti-histamine that doesn't make you drowsy, and while they also formulate it with a stimulant decongestant, they advertise both of them as non-drowsy. Allegra's pretty much the same way, available by prescription either straight or with decongestant; I find it's a bit more effective for me most of the time.
Yeah, I should have clarified: The non-drowsy stuff you can get without a prescription is just stimulants put back in to keep you awake. The prescription stuff, however...some of that stuff doesn't work the same way, and thus isn't inherently a depressant. I don't really know a lot about the prescription stuff...I just try to be knowledgeable about the drugs I select myself, and assume, when the doctor selects them, he knows what he's doing.
Dextromethorphan cough suppressant doesn't make most people drowsy in the doses normally taken for cough suppression. It's also often packaged with an expectorant or decongestant or Tylenol.
Dextromethorphan, otherwise known as Robitussin, will not normally make people 'drowsy' using standard doses. It does make some people, me included, slightly disoriented. Whereas 'drowsy' allergy medicine has no effect on me.
And while it may be 'often packaged' with stuff, I wouldn't really know, because I deliberately don't buy 'multiple medication' stuff. I can add my own damn medicine together, thank you very much. People should grab the contents of their medicine cabinet, look up each 'active ingredient' on Wikipedia, and learn, roughly, what they do, and start purchasing allergy and cough and headache medicine based on the actual active ingredient instead of the fancy label. Buy the stuff with only one active ingredient, and when you go to the medicine cabinet you can add allergy+headache or cough supressant+allergy or whatever you actually need at the moment.
And this also will allow you learn exactly which ones work for you, and which don't.
As far as dentists using novocaine and nitrous when you've taken other drugs, novocaine's very localized, and dental patients are very commonly taking codeine or stronger relatives.
I know they sometimes give you multiple drugs, I was just surprised they'd give you a drug while you were under another drug they hadn't given you.
I don't know what you're talking about, they can work just fine.
They'll only work if your cough is caused by minor irritation of the throat, though. They work by depressing the nerves in your throat. If you're coughing for some other reason, or have major irritation of the throat, they won't stop you coughing, although they can, at least, make it feel better.
Just like any medicine, people should actually learn the active ingredients and learn which ones work for them at which times, and purchase medicine based on the actual active ingredient instead of randomly purchasing something that claims to be exactly what they need but does exactly the same thing as medicine they already have on the shelf.
Like most of the stuff that treats 'sinus and headache' is, literally, sinus medicine with Tylonol added.
Now it just needs: It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. Like someone drinking it if you're put a date rape drug in it.
They let you have novocaine and nitrous while you were on codeine? And let you have sudafed at the same time?
I don't know where you go to the dentist, but most anesthesiologists are really opposed to giving you any drugs when you are already on stimulants and depressants, regardless of their legality.
Incidentally, almost all 'non-drowsy' allergy and cough medicine has stimulants in it, too. That's how it's 'non-drowsy', they depress your system to make you stop coughing, but then add stimulants back to keep you awake! No thank you, I'll take normal cough medicine and just drink caffeine or something.
Poppy seeds sometimes do contain a very very very small amount of opioid alkaloids, but would require, in essense, a room full of them to produce a dose of morphine. Opium and opium derivatives come come from (ironically) the seed pods mostly, and the rest of the plant has enough that it's worthwhile to just process the whole thing.
It is trivial to demonstrate that seeds do not have usable amounts of opium in them: Sterile (They irradiate them) poppy seeds are not regulated in any way whatsoever, you can purchase them by the ton, yet it is easier to smuggle in heroin than to make it from them. Considering the amount of trouble it takes to make meth, I think we can assume if it was reasonable to turn poppy seeds into heroin or any sort of drug at all, drug dealers would be doing so.
This isn't unique to opium, of course. Any fruit more than a few hours old contains traces of alcohol in it. And with fruits, it's actually worthwhile to make alcohol out of them, yet they don't seem to have any problem selling fruit to minors.
Drug tests are designed to work, for opium, for a long period of time afterwards. Your body doesn't bother cleaning out the last traces of the opioid alkaloids after you shoot up with heroin, and it doesn't bother cleaning out the traces that poppy seeds put in you.
If drug tests attempted to test for past alcohol use, instead of currently being under the influence, they'd twig for all sorts of random things, like fruit. Quite a lot of people, right now, would blow 0.001 BAC (1/80th the legal level for driving) on a breathilizer, and can't recall the last drink they had, or don't even drink at all. There are stories of non-drinkers that constantly blow 0.01, high enough to register on the test. 'Alcohol' is just a organic chemical.
And, yes, poppy seed bagels do, indeed, have a taste. Or, at least, a texture. And a lot of people have a favorite kind of bagel...I quite enjoyed poppy seed bagels for a whole year, until I switched to blueberry.
I don't know why the GP took quite that low to realize why he was failing drug tests, though...I thought everyone knew poppy seed bagels could make you do it. Even if I didn't believe that to start with (And, really, it depends on the person and how their body works. Some people can have one three days earlier and fail, and some people can have one two hours before and pass.), after I failed my first drug test, because I don't use drugs, the first question I'd ask myself is 'Why did I fail that test?' and poppy seed bagels would spring to mind. I'm not entirely sure I believe this guy's story.
The drug test for heroin is idiotic anyway. Heroin abuse would be damned noticeable at any job. It's not like cocaine, where people can behave almost normally until they start tweaking out or start having anger control issues. And if they're just using opiates without abusing them(1), then their work will probably be fine.
1) Yes, you can use (some) drugs without abusing them quite easily. Soldiers used to get addicted to morphine and take a set dose for their entire damn life with no problem at all.
I hire people who are intelligent enough to realize that a substance saturated into Dr. Bronners' Soap is not going to be a very useful tool for assault.
No shit. Testing anything but powder or pill for drugs is flat out idiotic.
And, incidentally, I'd like to point to 'appeared to be trying to hide or conceal a wooden box'. Not as an actual justification for anything, but to expose that cops will say anything to justify their 'suspicions'. (Read: Prejudices.) He rather obviously wasn't trying to hid anything, yet here we have a cop, in a sworn report, that says he was.
Which is more likely, that he nonsensically tried to hid a wooden box (Which, reading the article, isn't even where the soap was.), or that the cops lied?
The real fun part of that story is that if he'd just had intercourse with her, he'd have been committing a misdemeanor and received a small fine. (Parental notification, really, being the point of that 'punishment'. Hey, parents, your 15 year old is having sex with this 17 year old. You might want to deal with that.) The age of consent here is 16, but if you're within 3 years of the same age and everyone's over, I think, 13, it's just a misdemeanor, subject to at most a year in jail, and that almost never happens. (And he's already served more than that.) And it's deliberately from being a 'sex offender' offense.
Except, and apparently no one realized this, they made the age 16 for sex, but forgot to do the same thing to the 'sodomy' laws, because everyone had been operating as if those laws were dead letter. The courts have held that you cannot legislate the private behavior of adults, but, quite obviously, you can of kids, and those parts weren't dead letter. The sodomy section doesn't include any exception for three years age difference. And because apparently someone doesn't know what 'sodomy' is, oral sex is included in there. (Although it wouldn't be much better if it was just actual sodomy.)
The Georgia Congress just fixed the law this, after this kid was found guilty, but didn't bother getting around to passing a 'And people arrested under the old law get should an adjustment of their sentence' statement. From what I understand, it wouldn't even have to be a law, just a statement that, on appeal, the courts should consider the new law. (Obviously, it can only do this if it's shortening the sentence.)
There have been some damn stupid op-ed in the newspapers about it, too, people yammering about child molesters and stuff, because approximately 40% of the people in this state are meth- or religion-addled morons. Oh, don't get me wrong, the stupids aren't opposed to the new law, which has already passed, just opposed to retroactively shorting people's unjust sentences for some reason. Sometimes people in this state are complete fucking imbeciles. And with this paragraph, I ruin all chances of running for local office.
And it is, literally, this one 17-year old guy, where some 15 year-old apparently got drunk at a party and decided to give him a blowjob. While the crime has obviously happened a lot, no one even realized the law could applied this way until it was, and the outcry fixed the law..
If the legislature doesn't get off their ass and get Genarlow Wilson out of jail, people are doing to start trying to get the governor to pardon him.
Second, while the Internet is designed to route around defects, this ability exists solely on the network level, not on the application level.
Please find the scientology OT3 documents.
Hey, look, you can, despite the fact you aren't 'supposed' to be able to. That sure looks like application level routing to me.
This is completely independent of any network-level routing.
And bitching about personification is being a ass. We all know the internet doesn't 'consider' anything, you moron. It's called 'personification', it's a fucking figure of speech.
and if you think that the Internet was designed to ensure your ability to download pr0n without anyone being able to interfere, you've only shown that you only have a very nebulous idea of how the Internet actually works.
I think it's you who've demonstrated a lack of understanding of the internet. As long as someone on one network connected to the internet wants to share something with someone else on a network connected to the internet, they can. That is, indeed, how the network was designed.
By 'replace Gonzales', possibly people mean that Hatch will take the place of Gonzales in being exposed as an incompetent party hack.:)
However, I love the idea that Republican morons think it would be vaguely a good idea to install that fool as AG. I love the idea.
The problem is, while Orrin Hatch is a imbecile and liar and incompetent and ignorant buffoon, he's not actually committing any crimes in his current position. I think, and this is a fairly radical idea, that if we put him somewhere where he will have to explain his decisions, especially to Congress, he will rather quickly lie to Congress or be exposed as an idiot and incompetent with really stupid ideas, and we can get rid of him.
Plus, we'd get him out of Congress, and attach him to Bush, and even Utahans are so dumb as to elect anything Bush-related again. So even if he's not scandaled-out, he'll walk out the door in two years and disappear.
Democrats, while you're punching holes in the Republican sinking-ship of a criminal administration, be sure not to stop any Congressional Republicans who want to climb onboard to 'help'. And I wouldn't be too willing to left anyone off the ship, either.
In the actual real world, when those hormones first start showing up, you run out and get a family and fend for yourself. That is what is hardwired, and it's hardwired not just in humans, but in all mammals.
When that is prevented, in modern human teenagers, is when they start acting weird and attempting to distance themselves from their parents.
That's also why teenagers are very self-conscious...they know they're supposed to be trying to attract a mate.
Humans stopped needing to evolve, because we evolved into extreme adaptablity, and then, thanks to the fact we lived in a lot of conditions and could communicate with each other, we took that even farther and started modifying our environment and other things that made it more likely to survive, starting with clothes and ending with open-heart surgery and vaccines. Genetically, having fur is a plus in cold environments and a minus in warm ones, but not having fur but having the knowledges and ability to make clothing is a bonus anywhere.
There have been abortive attempts to evolve in certain circumstances, usually as a result of disease. The Black Death immunity and sickle cell disease spring to mind here. There are some other changes, skin color is a pretty obvious one, but actually a pretty trivial genetic trick, but there are things like pygmy tribes and differing lung capacity for people living in high attitudes.
Evolutionwise, the only thing I'd bet on over the last hundred thousand years would be more brains and more nimble fingers. And there's a pretty good argument to be made that, by sexual selection, we invented breasts.
How on earth was a school operating an hour off? While that could be possible, it would rather have to be deliberate.
I think the only way this story makes any sense is if this kid calls at 8:15 or whenever and the caller ID equipment at the phone company is wrong and sends them a 9:15 stamp. An hour later, at 9:15, a bomb threat is called in, getting a 10:15 stamp, and the school evacuates.
When they look through the caller ID, they know when roughly the incoming call was, and match it up to this kid.
They then go to the phone company, and ask for phone records, and discover that this completely wrong. Or they don't, because they're a bunch of incompetent assholes. Competent cops are actually interested in finding out who actually committed crimes, instead of finding one suspect and stopping.
Now, it's possible the phone company didn't bother to inform anyone it was an hour off, and the police actually did go and check the records and they were in fact wrong(1) too, but that sounds not only like a lawsuit waiting to happen, it still shouldn't matter. The police shouldn't just assume their clock is accurate when their entire case depends on it, they should actually check it. It could have been ten minutes off, or who knows how much.
1) Which, incidentally, is flat-out illegal. If people have calling plans that include anything to do with the time, and a lot of people do, and even if they don't we had a month-changeover in there, you can't just decide you're going to randomly have the time off an hour and bill them wrong.
Well, that makes it that much weirder, as the second gun was, IIRC, a semi-automatic with a didn't-used-to-be-legal sized clip. (By 'second gun', I mean 'gun recovered from shooter'.) That would imply at the time the first person was shot, more murder was, indeed, planned.
But, like I said, in hindsight, sure, people say 'They should have done something', but the reality is that someone getting murdered in an apparently domestic dispute in a city the size of 25,000 is not a logical reason to shut down said city, and that's equally likely to have resulted in him opening fire in a dorm or the cafeteria or an off-campus bookstore somewhere that still had people in it. (And I don't know what notifying the students without shutting down the school is supposed to accomplish at all.)
If it's 95 it can feel like 130 degrees with 75% humidity. This happens repeatedly in the summer in Georgia. I'm sure Boston may get humid, but the South wins that little contest.;)
Not the coast, the coast always has cooling breezes, but the internal areas, especially the cities, get fairly hot and very humid. People from here go to the Midwest and West and hear 'The temperature is 110 degrees' and cringe in terror, as 100 is right at the very top of the maximum temperature we get and fairly unsurvivable, but then they walk outside and are like 'Wait, what? This feels like maybe 90.'.
I've always personally thought they should lower the edges of single store rectangular houses, to, for example, door height. I.e., build the house to exactly high enough to fit a door in, and then raise the attic up back to normal height. This would result in the same size everything except the walls along the outside of the house would slope inward (Because of the roof), and the attic would be a lot smaller.
They sometimes build second stories like this, but never first. They have A-frame houses, too, which is lowering the roof all the way down. But with what I said, you could put doors and windows on the two 'roof' sides without either buying weird doors and windows that are non-vertical or building a gable.
OTOH, I'm not actually sure that it would save any money, and, it almost certainly would take longer, because they sell boards exactly the right height to make existing walls.
Of course, Caller ID is trivially spoofed, and hence is not admisable in court. You don't find out who called where from caller id, you find out from phone records.
They've been wondering what evidence the school and police had to indicate that the shooter had left campus, which is why they didn't consider him a threat.
The presumed domestic shooter was not a student, and they couldn't find him in the dorms.
I don't know if they're reevaluating what they thought happened at the first shooting or not.
Honestly, if someone goes onto a college campus to shoot his girlfriend or someone he's jealous of, and then isn't there anymore when the police look for him, there's not a lot of reason to assume he's wandering around plotting mass murder. The police, I'm sure, were looking for him, and asking the students to help would be a) stupid, as he wasn't a student and was unlikely to be on campus, and b) dangerous if he actually was.
In fact, we don't know, to this point, if they were connected. Yes, it seems an incredibly coincidence, but we still don't know what happened. It's even possibly the first shooting triggered the second, that it caused someone to snap or that the person that got killed was important to the shooter.
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I don't know where you're coming from here. I suspect you think I'm 'blaming' Republicans for something and you're trying to shift the blame on people who want gay marriages.
I just said that society was going in a linear progression of giving rights to gay people. First it stopped entrapping and arresting them, then it explicitly legalized their behavior, then it decided that they shouldn't be hated for who they are, then it started including them in hate crime and anti-discrimination laws, and then...the Republicans lept in and wrestled with the legal train for a decade, delaying the next stop.
Meanwhile, society, as a whole, continued in exactly the direction they'd gone before, making shows with gay supporting characters, shows about gay people, etc, in basically the same way that they started doing with black people. We've just recently reached the point where gay people on TV are being treated as normal people, where they can be villains or heroes or right or wrong or whatever. Society kept 'moving', while the Republicans held the legal train at the last station by appealing the fringes.
Although, as I said, I don't think society really was 'moving'. But that, honestly, is a matter of perspective. Of course, if society is always moving to the left, then that raises some interesting questions, like why the right is even vaguely useful.(1) I don't think it's 'moving' as much as 'learning', but whatever. It was just becoming less ignorant through interaction with and exposure to gay people.
The people pushing for gay marriages are much more in sync with society than the people fighting them. It's just it's easier to get out a bunch of right-fringe voters to vote against gay marriages than it is to get a bunch of straight people who think it's an okay idea but don't really care one way or another to vote for them. But the people pushing for them are almost irrelevant to my point. We aren't at the point where society is pushing for them, society still doesn't give a damn one way or another.
And it's not just homosexuality that the Republicans managed to shove right for the past decade. Abortion is another big one. They managed to shove that so far right it got away from them and people start passing laws, which horrified them, because if they can't whine about it anymore, they can't get elected. And then, even worse, society realized how far to the right these loons were when people, well, refused to pass the laws, even in the reddest states.
1) Someone I don't agree with once said 'Name one social issue the right has been correct on since the 50s.', and I couldn't think of anything.
i may be naive but could it be a function of the median age of the u.s. and that of the house and senate?
Congress does tend to lag behind society, which is good. The Senate, especially, is supposed to be full of old wise men and women.
But where that falls apart is that the Democrats aren't really that much younger than the Republicans.
continuing on with my naivety. i am, as of yet, not convinced that bush/cheny intentionally lied or if they were just mis-informed or seeing what they wanted to see.
They already had plans to invade Iraq drawn up, and used 9/11 as an excuse. There were plenty of people telling them they were 'wrong', and they didn't listen to a damn word anyone said. Instead of using the CIA for intelligence gathering, they set up a White House intelligence group on Iraq to give them exactly the 'facts' they wanted. People who pushed back, like Valeria Plame's husband, got punished.
They possibly wanted people to believe they were simply mistaken, but in reality, no, they knew damn well what they were doing.
Of course, even if there were WMD, that wouldn't have a damn bit of bearing on, you know, the actual state of the war, which they didn't bother to make any plans for past the invasion. Except it'd be rather more dangerous, because US troops did not secure weapon depots very well, which is how half the damn country has a gun, and how half the 'improvised explosives devices' are just improvised timers and sensors tied to military detonators and military explosives. Just thank Allah or whoever Saddam didn't really have any WMDs, or we'd be in exactly the same situtation, getting hit with those.
Discovering that Bush lied, or even if he hadn't, about the reason for the road trip isn't very relevant when he took us in a car with no brakes and no gas. Even if we'd had a valid reason to be in Iraq, it'd still be a complete fuckup at this point, and that is entirely his fault.
But there are exactly two groups of people who think the American people are in favor of impeachment: The government, and the journalists who work in Washington.
Of course, I mean those are the two groups that think the American people aren't in favor of impeachment.
42% support impeachment two years ago if the President lied to get us into Iraq. (Which isn't, incidentally, even an impeachable offense.) 25% of Republicans wanted to.
Notice that was before Katrina, before the NSA wiretapping story really broke, and the war actually appeared winnable if you weren't paying a lot of attention. 42%.
It's two years later. The NSA is spying on us, FEMA was obviously broken, the war is, quite obviously, lost, the Republicans apparently covered up a creepy old man who hit on Congressional pages, the Attorney General is in deep shit, Bush's World Bank guy is in deep shit, the FDA is letting people be poisoned by wheat gluten because it's apparently run by an incompetent (1), and I'm sure I'm forgetting half a dozen things.
Oh, and Cheney has since shot some old guy in the face.
Impeachment may, indeed, not work, and if it does he still might not be removed from office. But there are exactly two groups of people who think the American people are in favor of impeachment: The government, and the journalists who work in Washington. The American people themselves appears like they would be pretty happy with it.
In fact, they appear very very happy with it, which is astonishing because the media isn't reporting it, which means there's really no bandwagoning going on. I don't have any current polls, because the media is, apparently, not willing to run them anymore. But, hey, in a week or so, there will be polls on Congress. Let's see if their ratings go up or down, shall we?
And Cheney, again, is a good deal less popular than Bush.
And I didn't say you were anti-Democrat. I said you were one of those fools who've bought the entire 'both parties are equally bad' and 'Because the Republicans impeached for obvious partisan reasons, the Democrats can't impeach' memes. One party constantly commits crimes, period. By definition, the other party has to be better.
The RNC decided, back when it decided it would operate however it wanted with no regard for the law, that instead of trying to make themselves appear better, they'd just constantly assert the other party does it to. It doesn't. Sure, you have the occasional William Jefferson, but if the DoJ had actually been investigating Republicans, we'd have a dozen of them gone now. (Just ask Carol Lam.) Even with their meddling, we still have like five times more of Republicans in trouble.
1) The wheat gluten is the news, the facts about just how bad the FDA completely fucked up the handling of it is not, yet. It will be.
But in addition, he will lose points with Independent voters, who basically decide the elections.
This is where you, and the political media in Washington, at flat out delusional. Sorry, but you are.
Cheney has almost negative approval. He is loathed. He's got all of Bush's disapproval, plus no one gives him the benefit of the doubt. If Kucinich could magically snap his fingers and remove Cheney from office, it wouldn't do anything but help Kucinich.
But he's, obviously, not going to do that. He is, instead, going to make Cheney come in and testify about his lawbreaking. If you think he's loathed now, just wait until Kucinich is done with him.
However, Kucinich still has almost no chance of wining the primary.
You are absolutely right. If the Democrats can refrain from doing it though, impeachment won't become "business as usual". And if the Republicans tried it again in the future when the Democrats didn't, the Republicans would come out looking horrible.
Boy, the Republican sure got to you, didn't they? Their 'Let's have constant investigations until we find something we can plausiable impeach over, so that no one will ever be able to impeach us' trick worked perfectly.
Nixon should have been impeached, over Cambodia, nevermind Watergate. Reagan and Bush Sr. should have been impeached over Iran/Contra.
The last three elected Republican presidents committed felonies in office (Well, Bush Sr. while VP.) by directly violating the law. The US started to impeach one of them, but that went nowhere. (No, you don't get to fucking resign from office after committing felonies.) All of them were pardoned, or had people who were to testify against them, pardoned, by Republican presidents.
Meanwhile, the only actual impeachment has been against Clinton. Yes, perjury sucks, and is probably impeachable over, but it shouldn't have even gotten to that point.
Frankly, I don't give a flying fuck if Bush's impeachment is seen as political. Republican presidents demonstratably, repeatedly, commit felonies in office and suffer no consequences.
We not only need to impeach them, we need to impeach their staff, to keep them from ever entering the oval office again. These are the same goddamn people enabling every criminal Republican administration.
You can dislike the Democrats and their policies all you want. They, at least, are not criminals.
I don't even know if people are moving left, or it's just they artifically got pulled to the right for a while, and so are heading back left.
Like with gay marriage. 'Not that there's anything wrong with it' was in Seinfeld in 1993. Gay people got ignored for quite a while, were made fun of for a bit, got demonized until maybe 1990, and then, well, people didn't like them but were willing to leave them be. Without the right constantly making an issue out of gay marriage, no one would give a damn and there'd be some sort of legal recognization of gay unions everywhere.
Thank God, the right has essentially painted itself into a corner on certain positions, and cannot move, at least not quickly. As they keep fooling less and less of the country, they will constantly lose support on everything as they appear more and more irrational.
This was going to take a few more decades, and, given long enough lead time, they would 'lose' those positions, and bow out of the contest, 'defeated'. Like the segregationists in the 50s, they'd go down fighting, some of them modifying their views enough they still fit in, and the next generation magically getter new beliefs. As the country stopped falling for the right-wing rhetoric about gays, the right-wing would leave the rhetoric behind. Within two decades they'd somehow have no problems with gay marriage, but would have a problem with cloning or something else.
It's a great political trick. Constantly lag a decade or so behind the country, and you have the full support of whatever idiots you can currently convince the country is going the wrong way. Yammer about it a lot, and then, when people start seeing through you, well, stop talking about it, instead talking about some new threat.
But then they picked their newest two positions, George W. Bush and the Iraq War, and threw their full support behind them, which is, quite possibly literally, the stupidest political move ever. They don't have time to get the new guard in position before the old guard goes down in flames. Many of them are living in a delusional universe and still supporting those things.
People predicted this cycle would speed up, thanks to the internet and various things, but I don't quite think anyone imagined it would go this fast.
That's not really true - while it's fairly popular to make multi-symptom cold medicines, with Sudafed, antihistamine, tylenol/aspirin, expectorant, and dextromethorphan, those aren't the ones that get advertised as non-drowsy. Sudafed and its relatives get sold by themselves as non-drowsy, and as you say they're stimulant. The other main non-drowsy allergy meds are things like Claritin, which is an anti-histamine that doesn't make you drowsy, and while they also formulate it with a stimulant decongestant, they advertise both of them as non-drowsy. Allegra's pretty much the same way, available by prescription either straight or with decongestant; I find it's a bit more effective for me most of the time.
Yeah, I should have clarified: The non-drowsy stuff you can get without a prescription is just stimulants put back in to keep you awake. The prescription stuff, however...some of that stuff doesn't work the same way, and thus isn't inherently a depressant. I don't really know a lot about the prescription stuff...I just try to be knowledgeable about the drugs I select myself, and assume, when the doctor selects them, he knows what he's doing.
Dextromethorphan cough suppressant doesn't make most people drowsy in the doses normally taken for cough suppression. It's also often packaged with an expectorant or decongestant or Tylenol.
Dextromethorphan, otherwise known as Robitussin, will not normally make people 'drowsy' using standard doses. It does make some people, me included, slightly disoriented. Whereas 'drowsy' allergy medicine has no effect on me.
And while it may be 'often packaged' with stuff, I wouldn't really know, because I deliberately don't buy 'multiple medication' stuff. I can add my own damn medicine together, thank you very much. People should grab the contents of their medicine cabinet, look up each 'active ingredient' on Wikipedia, and learn, roughly, what they do, and start purchasing allergy and cough and headache medicine based on the actual active ingredient instead of the fancy label. Buy the stuff with only one active ingredient, and when you go to the medicine cabinet you can add allergy+headache or cough supressant+allergy or whatever you actually need at the moment.
And this also will allow you learn exactly which ones work for you, and which don't.
As far as dentists using novocaine and nitrous when you've taken other drugs, novocaine's very localized, and dental patients are very commonly taking codeine or stronger relatives.
I know they sometimes give you multiple drugs, I was just surprised they'd give you a drug while you were under another drug they hadn't given you.
I don't know what you're talking about, they can work just fine.
They'll only work if your cough is caused by minor irritation of the throat, though. They work by depressing the nerves in your throat. If you're coughing for some other reason, or have major irritation of the throat, they won't stop you coughing, although they can, at least, make it feel better.
Just like any medicine, people should actually learn the active ingredients and learn which ones work for them at which times, and purchase medicine based on the actual active ingredient instead of randomly purchasing something that claims to be exactly what they need but does exactly the same thing as medicine they already have on the shelf.
Like most of the stuff that treats 'sinus and headache' is, literally, sinus medicine with Tylonol added.
Ah ha!
I'd been wondering why he hadn't done so already, and why no one seemed to be pressuring him to do so yet.
Now it just needs: It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. Like someone drinking it if you're put a date rape drug in it.
They let you have novocaine and nitrous while you were on codeine? And let you have sudafed at the same time?
I don't know where you go to the dentist, but most anesthesiologists are really opposed to giving you any drugs when you are already on stimulants and depressants, regardless of their legality.
Incidentally, almost all 'non-drowsy' allergy and cough medicine has stimulants in it, too. That's how it's 'non-drowsy', they depress your system to make you stop coughing, but then add stimulants back to keep you awake! No thank you, I'll take normal cough medicine and just drink caffeine or something.
Poppy seeds sometimes do contain a very very very small amount of opioid alkaloids, but would require, in essense, a room full of them to produce a dose of morphine. Opium and opium derivatives come come from (ironically) the seed pods mostly, and the rest of the plant has enough that it's worthwhile to just process the whole thing.
It is trivial to demonstrate that seeds do not have usable amounts of opium in them: Sterile (They irradiate them) poppy seeds are not regulated in any way whatsoever, you can purchase them by the ton, yet it is easier to smuggle in heroin than to make it from them. Considering the amount of trouble it takes to make meth, I think we can assume if it was reasonable to turn poppy seeds into heroin or any sort of drug at all, drug dealers would be doing so.
This isn't unique to opium, of course. Any fruit more than a few hours old contains traces of alcohol in it. And with fruits, it's actually worthwhile to make alcohol out of them, yet they don't seem to have any problem selling fruit to minors.
Drug tests are designed to work, for opium, for a long period of time afterwards. Your body doesn't bother cleaning out the last traces of the opioid alkaloids after you shoot up with heroin, and it doesn't bother cleaning out the traces that poppy seeds put in you.
If drug tests attempted to test for past alcohol use, instead of currently being under the influence, they'd twig for all sorts of random things, like fruit. Quite a lot of people, right now, would blow 0.001 BAC (1/80th the legal level for driving) on a breathilizer, and can't recall the last drink they had, or don't even drink at all. There are stories of non-drinkers that constantly blow 0.01, high enough to register on the test. 'Alcohol' is just a organic chemical.
And, yes, poppy seed bagels do, indeed, have a taste. Or, at least, a texture. And a lot of people have a favorite kind of bagel...I quite enjoyed poppy seed bagels for a whole year, until I switched to blueberry.
I don't know why the GP took quite that low to realize why he was failing drug tests, though...I thought everyone knew poppy seed bagels could make you do it. Even if I didn't believe that to start with (And, really, it depends on the person and how their body works. Some people can have one three days earlier and fail, and some people can have one two hours before and pass.), after I failed my first drug test, because I don't use drugs, the first question I'd ask myself is 'Why did I fail that test?' and poppy seed bagels would spring to mind. I'm not entirely sure I believe this guy's story.
The drug test for heroin is idiotic anyway. Heroin abuse would be damned noticeable at any job. It's not like cocaine, where people can behave almost normally until they start tweaking out or start having anger control issues. And if they're just using opiates without abusing them(1), then their work will probably be fine.
1) Yes, you can use (some) drugs without abusing them quite easily. Soldiers used to get addicted to morphine and take a set dose for their entire damn life with no problem at all.
I hire people who are intelligent enough to realize that a substance saturated into Dr. Bronners' Soap is not going to be a very useful tool for assault.
No shit. Testing anything but powder or pill for drugs is flat out idiotic.
And, incidentally, I'd like to point to 'appeared to be trying to hide or conceal a wooden box'. Not as an actual justification for anything, but to expose that cops will say anything to justify their 'suspicions'. (Read: Prejudices.) He rather obviously wasn't trying to hid anything, yet here we have a cop, in a sworn report, that says he was.
Which is more likely, that he nonsensically tried to hid a wooden box (Which, reading the article, isn't even where the soap was.), or that the cops lied?
The real fun part of that story is that if he'd just had intercourse with her, he'd have been committing a misdemeanor and received a small fine. (Parental notification, really, being the point of that 'punishment'. Hey, parents, your 15 year old is having sex with this 17 year old. You might want to deal with that.) The age of consent here is 16, but if you're within 3 years of the same age and everyone's over, I think, 13, it's just a misdemeanor, subject to at most a year in jail, and that almost never happens. (And he's already served more than that.) And it's deliberately from being a 'sex offender' offense.
Except, and apparently no one realized this, they made the age 16 for sex, but forgot to do the same thing to the 'sodomy' laws, because everyone had been operating as if those laws were dead letter. The courts have held that you cannot legislate the private behavior of adults, but, quite obviously, you can of kids, and those parts weren't dead letter. The sodomy section doesn't include any exception for three years age difference. And because apparently someone doesn't know what 'sodomy' is, oral sex is included in there. (Although it wouldn't be much better if it was just actual sodomy.)
The Georgia Congress just fixed the law this, after this kid was found guilty, but didn't bother getting around to passing a 'And people arrested under the old law get should an adjustment of their sentence' statement. From what I understand, it wouldn't even have to be a law, just a statement that, on appeal, the courts should consider the new law. (Obviously, it can only do this if it's shortening the sentence.)
There have been some damn stupid op-ed in the newspapers about it, too, people yammering about child molesters and stuff, because approximately 40% of the people in this state are meth- or religion-addled morons. Oh, don't get me wrong, the stupids aren't opposed to the new law, which has already passed, just opposed to retroactively shorting people's unjust sentences for some reason. Sometimes people in this state are complete fucking imbeciles. And with this paragraph, I ruin all chances of running for local office.
And it is, literally, this one 17-year old guy, where some 15 year-old apparently got drunk at a party and decided to give him a blowjob. While the crime has obviously happened a lot, no one even realized the law could applied this way until it was, and the outcry fixed the law..
If the legislature doesn't get off their ass and get Genarlow Wilson out of jail, people are doing to start trying to get the governor to pardon him.
Second, while the Internet is designed to route around defects, this ability exists solely on the network level, not on the application level.
Please find the scientology OT3 documents.
Hey, look, you can, despite the fact you aren't 'supposed' to be able to. That sure looks like application level routing to me.
This is completely independent of any network-level routing.
And bitching about personification is being a ass. We all know the internet doesn't 'consider' anything, you moron. It's called 'personification', it's a fucking figure of speech.
and if you think that the Internet was designed to ensure your ability to download pr0n without anyone being able to interfere, you've only shown that you only have a very nebulous idea of how the Internet actually works. I think it's you who've demonstrated a lack of understanding of the internet. As long as someone on one network connected to the internet wants to share something with someone else on a network connected to the internet, they can. That is, indeed, how the network was designed.
By 'replace Gonzales', possibly people mean that Hatch will take the place of Gonzales in being exposed as an incompetent party hack. :)
However, I love the idea that Republican morons think it would be vaguely a good idea to install that fool as AG. I love the idea.
The problem is, while Orrin Hatch is a imbecile and liar and incompetent and ignorant buffoon, he's not actually committing any crimes in his current position. I think, and this is a fairly radical idea, that if we put him somewhere where he will have to explain his decisions, especially to Congress, he will rather quickly lie to Congress or be exposed as an idiot and incompetent with really stupid ideas, and we can get rid of him.
Plus, we'd get him out of Congress, and attach him to Bush, and even Utahans are so dumb as to elect anything Bush-related again. So even if he's not scandaled-out, he'll walk out the door in two years and disappear.
Democrats, while you're punching holes in the Republican sinking-ship of a criminal administration, be sure not to stop any Congressional Republicans who want to climb onboard to 'help'. And I wouldn't be too willing to left anyone off the ship, either.
That's only because we invented 'teenagers'.
In the actual real world, when those hormones first start showing up, you run out and get a family and fend for yourself. That is what is hardwired, and it's hardwired not just in humans, but in all mammals.
When that is prevented, in modern human teenagers, is when they start acting weird and attempting to distance themselves from their parents.
That's also why teenagers are very self-conscious...they know they're supposed to be trying to attract a mate.
This article is confusing and somewhat stupid.
Humans stopped needing to evolve, because we evolved into extreme adaptablity, and then, thanks to the fact we lived in a lot of conditions and could communicate with each other, we took that even farther and started modifying our environment and other things that made it more likely to survive, starting with clothes and ending with open-heart surgery and vaccines. Genetically, having fur is a plus in cold environments and a minus in warm ones, but not having fur but having the knowledges and ability to make clothing is a bonus anywhere.
There have been abortive attempts to evolve in certain circumstances, usually as a result of disease. The Black Death immunity and sickle cell disease spring to mind here. There are some other changes, skin color is a pretty obvious one, but actually a pretty trivial genetic trick, but there are things like pygmy tribes and differing lung capacity for people living in high attitudes.
Evolutionwise, the only thing I'd bet on over the last hundred thousand years would be more brains and more nimble fingers. And there's a pretty good argument to be made that, by sexual selection, we invented breasts.
How on earth was a school operating an hour off? While that could be possible, it would rather have to be deliberate.
I think the only way this story makes any sense is if this kid calls at 8:15 or whenever and the caller ID equipment at the phone company is wrong and sends them a 9:15 stamp. An hour later, at 9:15, a bomb threat is called in, getting a 10:15 stamp, and the school evacuates.
When they look through the caller ID, they know when roughly the incoming call was, and match it up to this kid.
They then go to the phone company, and ask for phone records, and discover that this completely wrong. Or they don't, because they're a bunch of incompetent assholes. Competent cops are actually interested in finding out who actually committed crimes, instead of finding one suspect and stopping.
Now, it's possible the phone company didn't bother to inform anyone it was an hour off, and the police actually did go and check the records and they were in fact wrong(1) too, but that sounds not only like a lawsuit waiting to happen, it still shouldn't matter. The police shouldn't just assume their clock is accurate when their entire case depends on it, they should actually check it. It could have been ten minutes off, or who knows how much.
1) Which, incidentally, is flat-out illegal. If people have calling plans that include anything to do with the time, and a lot of people do, and even if they don't we had a month-changeover in there, you can't just decide you're going to randomly have the time off an hour and bill them wrong.
Well, that makes it that much weirder, as the second gun was, IIRC, a semi-automatic with a didn't-used-to-be-legal sized clip. (By 'second gun', I mean 'gun recovered from shooter'.) That would imply at the time the first person was shot, more murder was, indeed, planned.
But, like I said, in hindsight, sure, people say 'They should have done something', but the reality is that someone getting murdered in an apparently domestic dispute in a city the size of 25,000 is not a logical reason to shut down said city, and that's equally likely to have resulted in him opening fire in a dorm or the cafeteria or an off-campus bookstore somewhere that still had people in it. (And I don't know what notifying the students without shutting down the school is supposed to accomplish at all.)
If it's 95 it can feel like 130 degrees with 75% humidity. This happens repeatedly in the summer in Georgia. I'm sure Boston may get humid, but the South wins that little contest. ;)
Not the coast, the coast always has cooling breezes, but the internal areas, especially the cities, get fairly hot and very humid. People from here go to the Midwest and West and hear 'The temperature is 110 degrees' and cringe in terror, as 100 is right at the very top of the maximum temperature we get and fairly unsurvivable, but then they walk outside and are like 'Wait, what? This feels like maybe 90.'.
I've always personally thought they should lower the edges of single store rectangular houses, to, for example, door height. I.e., build the house to exactly high enough to fit a door in, and then raise the attic up back to normal height. This would result in the same size everything except the walls along the outside of the house would slope inward (Because of the roof), and the attic would be a lot smaller.
They sometimes build second stories like this, but never first. They have A-frame houses, too, which is lowering the roof all the way down. But with what I said, you could put doors and windows on the two 'roof' sides without either buying weird doors and windows that are non-vertical or building a gable.
OTOH, I'm not actually sure that it would save any money, and, it almost certainly would take longer, because they sell boards exactly the right height to make existing walls.
Caller ID doesn't record length of call.
Of course, Caller ID is trivially spoofed, and hence is not admisable in court. You don't find out who called where from caller id, you find out from phone records.
They've been wondering what evidence the school and police had to indicate that the shooter had left campus, which is why they didn't consider him a threat.
The presumed domestic shooter was not a student, and they couldn't find him in the dorms.
I don't know if they're reevaluating what they thought happened at the first shooting or not.
Honestly, if someone goes onto a college campus to shoot his girlfriend or someone he's jealous of, and then isn't there anymore when the police look for him, there's not a lot of reason to assume he's wandering around plotting mass murder. The police, I'm sure, were looking for him, and asking the students to help would be a) stupid, as he wasn't a student and was unlikely to be on campus, and b) dangerous if he actually was.
In fact, we don't know, to this point, if they were connected. Yes, it seems an incredibly coincidence, but we still don't know what happened. It's even possibly the first shooting triggered the second, that it caused someone to snap or that the person that got killed was important to the shooter.
If someone is shot in the dorms, why would you cancel classes, thus resulting in larger than normal amounts of people in the dorms?