Actually you will find you know jack and shit about this, since I did not limit it to private employers. Guess what anon-tard, when you seek a federal security clearance, as I have, you get asked about your arrest record, and you must disclose it all under penalty of perjury or NO JOB FOR YOU. State and local LE jobs are the same way, and there are probably other exemptions.
What does that have to do with marriage anyway? Or are you trying to demonstrate that your reading comprehension is as poor as your knowledge of employment law and practices?
I see a lot of claims, but not a lot of references, and you'll pardon me if I can't help thinking that your multitude of paraphrases exaggerates the degrees involved. It's just as likely that these were frank discussions of politically incorrect facts. Arrests and convictions of blacks are higher, that's a fact. That these rates are underpinned by a systemic failure at being objective about race when it comes to making arrest and sentencing decisions is a valid argument and concern, but that doesn't change that the rates themselves are still facts. When you shift these rates from areas where blacks are minorities to areas where they are a majority, it makes the crime rate seem even worse through that lens. At worst that can be characterized as disingenuous, but it's still true.
Furthermore, 'sensible political beliefs' is obviously a subjective matter, and boils down to 'do they agree with me or not' but does disagreement make somebody a racist? I rather doubt it.
For the record, my wife is black and I have two bi-racial children, so the impact of racism, especially through law, is of direct concern to me and my family. However, too often opposition toward 'racial positivism' and/or 'positive discrimination' is interpreted as racism. Whereas both my wife and myself believe that providing benefits based on race is just as racist as doing harm based on race. It's disgusting that so many black people have been brainwashed by the left into believing that it's good for them to get benefits based on race, even if it means essentially agreeing that the reason they are getting it is because they are inferior and can't compete on merit. All the while this distorts the reality of problems facing the black community. It might increase graduation rates, but once these kids are adults out in the world, how does lowering the standards help them? How many are not as effective as employees as others who were held to higher standards? Maybe that's what is leading to differences in career/pay achievement or job stability. When you introduce these variables of artificial equivalency instead of dealing with the underlying problems of each person and the community as whole (because that would be racist, to suggest that there are real problems), it further clouds the ability of society to properly assess the matter and move forward in a way that is maximally beneficial for minorities in the long term.
Funny thing is, the only credible material item I could find in that entire first screed that could be interpreted as potentially negative was that he refused to return a donation from some white supremacists, never mind that they are still citizens and still deserve to be represented. This is supposed to somehow be interpreted as rabid racism that will lead back to segregation and internment camps. And the alternative is a bunch of insubstantial feel-good puff. Wow, I'm so convinced.
The fact is the Jews call Ron Paul an antisemite because he wants to end aid to Israel, conveniently forgetting that he wants to end all foreign aid, and that it has nothing to do with Israel specifically.
Ugh. Hold up there professor of populist law.
Arrest and detention are legally different. In the first place, detention doesn't count when an employed asks if you have ever been arrested and does not appear in arrest records. People can be detained without being Mirandized, which usually works against those detained. The standards of evidence for detention and arrest are different. Detention is predicated upon RAS (reasonable, articulable suspicion) of being involved in a crime. Arrest is predicated on probable cause, which must exceed suspicion to include some kind of material evidence/witness.
Furthermore:
Tax: A government surcharge on a transaction that does not necessarily involve the government directly.
Fee: The cost of a government service rendered directly to the fee payer. While the service may or may not be mandatory, the fee payer initiates the transaction.
Fine: A punitive charge for violation of a government ordinance/law/regulation/etc.
While all are revenue generating constructs based on the legislative authority to tax, that does not remove the distinct nature of each.
I am not a lawyer, and the previous should not be considered legal advice.
The problem with these positive discrimination efforts is that they don't stop. Now more women are graduating with degrees than men (see table 279 of the US Department of Education's 2010 Digest of Education Statistics), and they dominate some industries/fields (see table 620 of the 2012 US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract), but do you see programs assisting men but not women? Do you see women-only advancement efforts ending? Nope, they don't want equality, they want dominance. They want the same sexist system as men once ruled in the past, but with them in charge.
Positive discrimination is still discrimination, and no truly equal system can ever come of it.
It's called diminishing returns, homeslice. Yeah, maybe sometimes a few other things would turn up if more time was taken or the tech had more experience, but is it worth it to the customer to pay x times more and wait y more hours to offset the potential harm that's z% likely? It's all well and good to take some kind of absolutist approach as some ideological, utopian abstract, but when the practical scenario plays out for real people, they don't care to spend tons of money and time on some decade old piece of crap that creates documents and browses the interwebs.
Where 'completely ineffective' means 'able to solve all problems experienced by customers' yeah, I'm ok with that. You don't need a CISSP to be an effective bench tech at a local PC shop. The customers can't afford it and don't need it. Get off your ridiculous high horse.
Autoruns, Rootkit Revealer. Granted, those are technically not for commercial use (giggle), but seriously, for SOHO stuff you really don't need anything else. This isn't exactly some DoD classified network here.
That would be in complete denial of trends in energy production then, because most of the plans for these replacements are based on clean, renewable sources, if for no other reason then it makes the bill easier to sell the eco-cultist public. While fossil fuel-based energy will still be used to keep up with growth, it remains undeniable that green energy sources make up a higher percentage of energy production every year.
None of which had the scientific method. The Mayans specifically would still be around if they knew anything about crop rotation.
Roman decline was primarily political and socio-cultural, with seasonal economic hardships helping but not underlying the decline (every ancient civilization had seasonal economic hardships).
Christ, the Aztecs? Really? So is the analogy you're going for here that aliens from space are going to show up and kick our ass, and that will fulfill Malthusian theory?
The Easter Islanders had very thin margins and no technology nor any method for its advancement. They were essentially a handful of stone age tribesmen in the middle of nowhere with nothing to use and no knowledge of what to do about it. They couldn't adapt because they had nothing to adapt with, economically or intellectually.
And when the rice bowl is empty, if the government is nonetheless "good", there is no revolution because the existing framework remains useful to overcoming the economic difficulty. Look up 'necessary but not sufficient'. One or the other is stable even though they are bad, both conditions are usually necessary to bring about violent change.
The unaddressed aspect in this is that these must necessarily be temporary problems brought about by logistical failings, otherwise no amount of government overturning would solve them. The very fact that states can and do rebuild themselves from periods of economic hardship indicates that there is no significant underlying problem, just bad and inefficient organization and governance which can be, and has been, ameliorated with proper measures after the fact.
You need to stop getting your 'science' from B movies. The reason that the Oxygen Catastrophe of the Siderian was able to change the atmosphere and the biosphere was that the cyanobacteria (over thousands of years) kept producing the gas as a product of their metabolism continuously and unopposed. The methane in ice/tundra is ultimately a mostly static value. Even if all of it were released instantly a) it wouldn't account for more than a fraction of a percent of the total atmosphere b) it would be subject to reabsorbtion by all the active environmental forces c) it would not increase further at any higher rate than is already established for lifeforms and geothermal activity that produce methane and d) there is no chance that it would catalyze some kind of methane-based/metabolizing/adapted lifeform because there would not be enough of it. (Among many other reasons.)
Holy shit people, The Day After Tomorrow is not a documentary, and shame on all the deluded twits modding you up.
HK generally speaking has fairly high standard of living, and the exceptions that exist are the same sort of exceptions that exist everywhere, just with a different culture spin (I don't see anybody whining about the Japanese pod hotels... just doesn't have the same dramatic impact of cages). Density is so high there because everybody wants it. There's plenty of empty space in the world, but people don't want to be in empty space. They want culture and amenities, and will go to great lengths to stack themselves on top of those.
Fertility rate has seen massive drops in almost every nation over the last several decades, so China's draconian measures are redundant to the world norm.
Blaming Arab Spring on food prices is utter nonsense. All the nations "afflicted" with these revolutions had one thing in common: single-party dictatorships in power for decades. People were not fighting over the price of rice, they were fighting because these states had imprisoned and killed their family members. That's what's happening in Syria right now. The most generous way this could be bent to your perspective is that it was the government response to popular discontent about economic issues that catalyzed these revolutions. But where these economic issues have afflicted states with more open governments revolutions have not occurred. It is the combination of poor government and poor economic conditions, not economic conditions alone, that result in these events.
The German situation was entirely political and doctrinal. Germany had in fact completely rectified its post-WWI economic issues before the opening of WWII. The whole German population could have lived in comfort and peace if it weren't for the political motives of Hitler and the rest of NSDAP leadership. (This is leaving out the more or less imminent thread presented by Stalin, where there is generally a consensus among historians that if Hitler hadn't started the war, Stalin would have in his stead.)
So yes, none of these constitute Malthusian catastrophe, especially since none have impacted more than a nation here or there (WWII I don't even count for the reason above.)
This is what happened to (neo-)Malthusianism. Every generation since Malthus has predicted disaster at some invented threshold, and over and over these thresholds are surpassed. Humanity is immeasurably adaptable, precisely because when the crunch comes previously impossible things are made possible by that adaptability.
I think that this move is particularly disingenuous and calls into question the group's whole integrity considering that the real, global effect of Fukushima has been nation after nation scaling back and drawing down nuclear power. I personally think it's retarded, but nonetheless it should be counted as one the most major changes in direction in the nuclear power industry in a generation, and this group thinks it has the opposite effect? There's just no pleasing some people, obviously.
Did you perhaps consider that VRE ridership might comprise a different specific demographic than the county as a whole? Talk about your confirmation bias. Too bad for you I have real data. 73% make $100k or more, and 20% make more than $175k.
Second, while wealth and influence overlap, they are not the same thing. Even if they're not millionaires, these are highly placed career civil servants, government contractors, and military commanders. There are so many top secret cleared persons on that train you could run half the government from it. They work throughout every level of Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and all the federal agencies in the surrounding area. Relevant to this discussion, TSA headquarters itself is one Metro stop away from a VRE station.
So yeah, I suggest you trust the knowledge and experience of somebody like myself who has been a federal contractor in this environment for several years.
MTBA operates commuter rail out into some pretty wealthy areas. Further, people who are wealthy that aren't pop stars generally get that way from managing that money well, so if it's cost effective to take a commuter train, they'll do it.
I ride a commuter train in northern Virginia, and the demographic breakdown of the ridership has shown that the median income of the riders is solid six figures. Trains like these are not being ridden by hobos.
My statement was more sarcasm than a rigorous and formal argument. Of course witch persecuting is far older than Protestantism, 'suffer not a witch to live' is in the Old Testament after all. It still happens today, by both Christians and Muslims, primarily in Africa and the Middle East.
Also your argument about unelected, life-long offices falls fairly flat considering that in the centuries that followed the reformation the state-sanctioned churches frequently had their heads appointed by hereditary secular rulers, and those appointed church heads would frequently serve for life. (Extensibly, this also means your claims about the Protestantism removing simony also fall flat, as it meant that church offices could still be bought by lobbying the secular government instead of the church directly. It was just driven back under the table.)
Church/state separation was not an immediate, nor even certain, result of the Reformation. Virtually every state in Europe retained an active state religion until after the Enlightenment centuries later (church/state separation in the US was a direct result of the impact of Enlightenment political theory). The Reformation was necessary but not sufficient to this process, and therefore I would argue it is not a direct catalyst.
Most of the mitigation of corruption by the Reformation was a temporary power vacuum that was filled by the secular aristocracy and bureaucracy for several more centuries. One nepotistic, graft-ridden autocracy was replaced with another, who cares? Real reform could not and did not come until greater suffrage/enfranchisement was granted to the whole citizenry, allowing them to hold their government accountable. In fact, as a demonstration of the irrelevance of sectarian differences, some of the most "progressive" states in Europe at the time of the Reformation were Catholic, the independent Italian city-state republics like San Marino, Venice, Lucca, Genoa, etc. This is not to say they didn't have their own problems with corruption, nepotism, and graft, but at least the people there were enfranchised to do something other than impotently petition some hereditary rulers (I realize states like Venice still had hereditary rulers, but they also had elected bodies who could veto the ruler).
My point remains that Christianity is just as 'nasty' after the Reformation as before it, and no 'sense' was directly injected aside from the doctrinal primacy of the Bible, which is only 'sensible' within the context of Christianity itself, since it was ridiculous to have a religion whose dogma wasn't even based on its own central text. None of this erased, nor could erase, the fundamental moral failings and contradictions of Biblical teaching informing Christianity, Protestant or otherwise.
The Protestant Reformation injected sense and threw out 'nasty' stuff? Like what exactly? They went from burning heretics to burning witches? Oh, and the Thirty Years' War was a barrel of laughs too.
The sticking part of the Sedition Act is this: "shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal [...] language about the form of government of the United States". This is where it essentially makes any opinion against the government criminal, and that is unconstitutional. Where this was moderated in modern American law is that it was narrowed down to 'overthrowing'. It is quite a different and more specific matter than the broad word 'disloyal' which was used in that period to charge and imprison many persons who did not advocate anything more than "radical" (relative to the American mainstream) ideologies or systems of government. The legal prohibition of advocating the overthrow of the government is constitutional because such an overthrow would necessitate illegal means (violence, coercion), whereas the earlier prohibition of 'disloyal language' effectively bars otherwise constitutionally protected activities of organizing political movements and voting for change within the existing political framework.
How's that for indefensible, condescending AC shitbag?
The problem is that it was unambiguous at the time it was written, but American English has evolved a little since that time. For example in the language of the era 'well-regulated' meant exhibiting good discipline. The fact that language is not forever static makes expository corroborating texts from the amendment's authors valuable.
However, some of the ambiguity is manufactured by political opponents. There is no need for distinctions about concealed or unconcealed. It says 'the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed'. Whether these arms are borne inside of clothing or outside is immaterial, and in fact regulations against concealed carry should be considered unconstitutional at face value, but that wasn't relevant to state and local laws until the Second Amendment was finally incorporated last year in McDonald v. Chicago. It's now possible (though unlikely, since the SCotUS is very reticent to hear 2nd Amendment related cases) that many local gun laws will be ruled unconstitutional.
*(A lot of this is being rendered moot by legislation like LEOSA, and reciprocity if it ever gets passed. As it is 80% of states are shall-issue, and I think Vermont-style will catch on when everybody realizes that concealed carry has always either reduced or had no effect on crime. Then we'll finally be close to the sort of freedom we're supposed to be guaranteed in the first place.)
The Constitution has been amended century after century, it's not set in stone. It's simply supposed to be hard to do, otherwise you'd have nonsense like CA's prop 8 where a simple majority voted away the rights of others. Since the Constitution is the nation's highest law, superseding all others at all times within the federal jurisdiction (and, when incorporated, in all jurisdictions), it is important that changing it not be taken lightly.
The intent of the authors (not always the founders, considering the post-18th century amendments) is important simply because it is neither practical nor healthy for the body politic to have a 'highest law' that is impossibly long and detailed for most people to understand and overly precise and restrictive so that courts would have no room to make common sense allowances.
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Actually you will find you know jack and shit about this, since I did not limit it to private employers. Guess what anon-tard, when you seek a federal security clearance, as I have, you get asked about your arrest record, and you must disclose it all under penalty of perjury or NO JOB FOR YOU. State and local LE jobs are the same way, and there are probably other exemptions.
What does that have to do with marriage anyway? Or are you trying to demonstrate that your reading comprehension is as poor as your knowledge of employment law and practices?
(Reposted due to accidental AC.)
I see a lot of claims, but not a lot of references, and you'll pardon me if I can't help thinking that your multitude of paraphrases exaggerates the degrees involved. It's just as likely that these were frank discussions of politically incorrect facts. Arrests and convictions of blacks are higher, that's a fact. That these rates are underpinned by a systemic failure at being objective about race when it comes to making arrest and sentencing decisions is a valid argument and concern, but that doesn't change that the rates themselves are still facts. When you shift these rates from areas where blacks are minorities to areas where they are a majority, it makes the crime rate seem even worse through that lens. At worst that can be characterized as disingenuous, but it's still true.
Furthermore, 'sensible political beliefs' is obviously a subjective matter, and boils down to 'do they agree with me or not' but does disagreement make somebody a racist? I rather doubt it.
For the record, my wife is black and I have two bi-racial children, so the impact of racism, especially through law, is of direct concern to me and my family. However, too often opposition toward 'racial positivism' and/or 'positive discrimination' is interpreted as racism. Whereas both my wife and myself believe that providing benefits based on race is just as racist as doing harm based on race. It's disgusting that so many black people have been brainwashed by the left into believing that it's good for them to get benefits based on race, even if it means essentially agreeing that the reason they are getting it is because they are inferior and can't compete on merit. All the while this distorts the reality of problems facing the black community. It might increase graduation rates, but once these kids are adults out in the world, how does lowering the standards help them? How many are not as effective as employees as others who were held to higher standards? Maybe that's what is leading to differences in career/pay achievement or job stability. When you introduce these variables of artificial equivalency instead of dealing with the underlying problems of each person and the community as whole (because that would be racist, to suggest that there are real problems), it further clouds the ability of society to properly assess the matter and move forward in a way that is maximally beneficial for minorities in the long term.
Funny thing is, the only credible material item I could find in that entire first screed that could be interpreted as potentially negative was that he refused to return a donation from some white supremacists, never mind that they are still citizens and still deserve to be represented. This is supposed to somehow be interpreted as rabid racism that will lead back to segregation and internment camps. And the alternative is a bunch of insubstantial feel-good puff. Wow, I'm so convinced.
The fact is the Jews call Ron Paul an antisemite because he wants to end aid to Israel, conveniently forgetting that he wants to end all foreign aid, and that it has nothing to do with Israel specifically.
Ugh. Hold up there professor of populist law. Arrest and detention are legally different. In the first place, detention doesn't count when an employed asks if you have ever been arrested and does not appear in arrest records. People can be detained without being Mirandized, which usually works against those detained. The standards of evidence for detention and arrest are different. Detention is predicated upon RAS (reasonable, articulable suspicion) of being involved in a crime. Arrest is predicated on probable cause, which must exceed suspicion to include some kind of material evidence/witness. Furthermore: Tax: A government surcharge on a transaction that does not necessarily involve the government directly. Fee: The cost of a government service rendered directly to the fee payer. While the service may or may not be mandatory, the fee payer initiates the transaction. Fine: A punitive charge for violation of a government ordinance/law/regulation/etc. While all are revenue generating constructs based on the legislative authority to tax, that does not remove the distinct nature of each. I am not a lawyer, and the previous should not be considered legal advice.
The problem with these positive discrimination efforts is that they don't stop. Now more women are graduating with degrees than men (see table 279 of the US Department of Education's 2010 Digest of Education Statistics), and they dominate some industries/fields (see table 620 of the 2012 US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract), but do you see programs assisting men but not women? Do you see women-only advancement efforts ending? Nope, they don't want equality, they want dominance. They want the same sexist system as men once ruled in the past, but with them in charge.
Positive discrimination is still discrimination, and no truly equal system can ever come of it.
Sounds more like the Occupy Movement... the funny thing is even as you don't like the fringe, I rather doubt you like the center either.
To be fair I haven't been a bench tech in retail SOHO repair for more than half a dozen years. I do database support for the government these days.
Though I like to keep current anyway, so I'll be looking into those tools. MBR-based malware has really risen the last few years...
It's called diminishing returns, homeslice. Yeah, maybe sometimes a few other things would turn up if more time was taken or the tech had more experience, but is it worth it to the customer to pay x times more and wait y more hours to offset the potential harm that's z% likely? It's all well and good to take some kind of absolutist approach as some ideological, utopian abstract, but when the practical scenario plays out for real people, they don't care to spend tons of money and time on some decade old piece of crap that creates documents and browses the interwebs.
Where 'completely ineffective' means 'able to solve all problems experienced by customers' yeah, I'm ok with that. You don't need a CISSP to be an effective bench tech at a local PC shop. The customers can't afford it and don't need it. Get off your ridiculous high horse.
Autoruns, Rootkit Revealer. Granted, those are technically not for commercial use (giggle), but seriously, for SOHO stuff you really don't need anything else. This isn't exactly some DoD classified network here.
That would be in complete denial of trends in energy production then, because most of the plans for these replacements are based on clean, renewable sources, if for no other reason then it makes the bill easier to sell the eco-cultist public. While fossil fuel-based energy will still be used to keep up with growth, it remains undeniable that green energy sources make up a higher percentage of energy production every year.
None of which had the scientific method. The Mayans specifically would still be around if they knew anything about crop rotation.
Roman decline was primarily political and socio-cultural, with seasonal economic hardships helping but not underlying the decline (every ancient civilization had seasonal economic hardships).
Christ, the Aztecs? Really? So is the analogy you're going for here that aliens from space are going to show up and kick our ass, and that will fulfill Malthusian theory?
The Easter Islanders had very thin margins and no technology nor any method for its advancement. They were essentially a handful of stone age tribesmen in the middle of nowhere with nothing to use and no knowledge of what to do about it. They couldn't adapt because they had nothing to adapt with, economically or intellectually.
And when the rice bowl is empty, if the government is nonetheless "good", there is no revolution because the existing framework remains useful to overcoming the economic difficulty. Look up 'necessary but not sufficient'. One or the other is stable even though they are bad, both conditions are usually necessary to bring about violent change.
The unaddressed aspect in this is that these must necessarily be temporary problems brought about by logistical failings, otherwise no amount of government overturning would solve them. The very fact that states can and do rebuild themselves from periods of economic hardship indicates that there is no significant underlying problem, just bad and inefficient organization and governance which can be, and has been, ameliorated with proper measures after the fact.
You need to stop getting your 'science' from B movies. The reason that the Oxygen Catastrophe of the Siderian was able to change the atmosphere and the biosphere was that the cyanobacteria (over thousands of years) kept producing the gas as a product of their metabolism continuously and unopposed. The methane in ice/tundra is ultimately a mostly static value. Even if all of it were released instantly a) it wouldn't account for more than a fraction of a percent of the total atmosphere b) it would be subject to reabsorbtion by all the active environmental forces c) it would not increase further at any higher rate than is already established for lifeforms and geothermal activity that produce methane and d) there is no chance that it would catalyze some kind of methane-based/metabolizing/adapted lifeform because there would not be enough of it. (Among many other reasons.)
Holy shit people, The Day After Tomorrow is not a documentary, and shame on all the deluded twits modding you up.
HK generally speaking has fairly high standard of living, and the exceptions that exist are the same sort of exceptions that exist everywhere, just with a different culture spin (I don't see anybody whining about the Japanese pod hotels... just doesn't have the same dramatic impact of cages). Density is so high there because everybody wants it. There's plenty of empty space in the world, but people don't want to be in empty space. They want culture and amenities, and will go to great lengths to stack themselves on top of those.
Fertility rate has seen massive drops in almost every nation over the last several decades, so China's draconian measures are redundant to the world norm.
Blaming Arab Spring on food prices is utter nonsense. All the nations "afflicted" with these revolutions had one thing in common: single-party dictatorships in power for decades. People were not fighting over the price of rice, they were fighting because these states had imprisoned and killed their family members. That's what's happening in Syria right now. The most generous way this could be bent to your perspective is that it was the government response to popular discontent about economic issues that catalyzed these revolutions. But where these economic issues have afflicted states with more open governments revolutions have not occurred. It is the combination of poor government and poor economic conditions, not economic conditions alone, that result in these events.
The German situation was entirely political and doctrinal. Germany had in fact completely rectified its post-WWI economic issues before the opening of WWII. The whole German population could have lived in comfort and peace if it weren't for the political motives of Hitler and the rest of NSDAP leadership. (This is leaving out the more or less imminent thread presented by Stalin, where there is generally a consensus among historians that if Hitler hadn't started the war, Stalin would have in his stead.)
So yes, none of these constitute Malthusian catastrophe, especially since none have impacted more than a nation here or there (WWII I don't even count for the reason above.)
This is what happened to (neo-)Malthusianism. Every generation since Malthus has predicted disaster at some invented threshold, and over and over these thresholds are surpassed. Humanity is immeasurably adaptable, precisely because when the crunch comes previously impossible things are made possible by that adaptability.
I think that this move is particularly disingenuous and calls into question the group's whole integrity considering that the real, global effect of Fukushima has been nation after nation scaling back and drawing down nuclear power. I personally think it's retarded, but nonetheless it should be counted as one the most major changes in direction in the nuclear power industry in a generation, and this group thinks it has the opposite effect? There's just no pleasing some people, obviously.
The only nerd comedian I can think of at the moment is Dan Telfer, but I'm sure there are more.
Did you perhaps consider that VRE ridership might comprise a different specific demographic than the county as a whole? Talk about your confirmation bias. Too bad for you I have real data. 73% make $100k or more, and 20% make more than $175k.
Second, while wealth and influence overlap, they are not the same thing. Even if they're not millionaires, these are highly placed career civil servants, government contractors, and military commanders. There are so many top secret cleared persons on that train you could run half the government from it. They work throughout every level of Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and all the federal agencies in the surrounding area. Relevant to this discussion, TSA headquarters itself is one Metro stop away from a VRE station.
So yeah, I suggest you trust the knowledge and experience of somebody like myself who has been a federal contractor in this environment for several years.
MTBA operates commuter rail out into some pretty wealthy areas. Further, people who are wealthy that aren't pop stars generally get that way from managing that money well, so if it's cost effective to take a commuter train, they'll do it.
I ride a commuter train in northern Virginia, and the demographic breakdown of the ridership has shown that the median income of the riders is solid six figures. Trains like these are not being ridden by hobos.
My statement was more sarcasm than a rigorous and formal argument. Of course witch persecuting is far older than Protestantism, 'suffer not a witch to live' is in the Old Testament after all. It still happens today, by both Christians and Muslims, primarily in Africa and the Middle East.
Also your argument about unelected, life-long offices falls fairly flat considering that in the centuries that followed the reformation the state-sanctioned churches frequently had their heads appointed by hereditary secular rulers, and those appointed church heads would frequently serve for life. (Extensibly, this also means your claims about the Protestantism removing simony also fall flat, as it meant that church offices could still be bought by lobbying the secular government instead of the church directly. It was just driven back under the table.)
Church/state separation was not an immediate, nor even certain, result of the Reformation. Virtually every state in Europe retained an active state religion until after the Enlightenment centuries later (church/state separation in the US was a direct result of the impact of Enlightenment political theory). The Reformation was necessary but not sufficient to this process, and therefore I would argue it is not a direct catalyst.
Most of the mitigation of corruption by the Reformation was a temporary power vacuum that was filled by the secular aristocracy and bureaucracy for several more centuries. One nepotistic, graft-ridden autocracy was replaced with another, who cares? Real reform could not and did not come until greater suffrage/enfranchisement was granted to the whole citizenry, allowing them to hold their government accountable. In fact, as a demonstration of the irrelevance of sectarian differences, some of the most "progressive" states in Europe at the time of the Reformation were Catholic, the independent Italian city-state republics like San Marino, Venice, Lucca, Genoa, etc. This is not to say they didn't have their own problems with corruption, nepotism, and graft, but at least the people there were enfranchised to do something other than impotently petition some hereditary rulers (I realize states like Venice still had hereditary rulers, but they also had elected bodies who could veto the ruler).
My point remains that Christianity is just as 'nasty' after the Reformation as before it, and no 'sense' was directly injected aside from the doctrinal primacy of the Bible, which is only 'sensible' within the context of Christianity itself, since it was ridiculous to have a religion whose dogma wasn't even based on its own central text. None of this erased, nor could erase, the fundamental moral failings and contradictions of Biblical teaching informing Christianity, Protestant or otherwise.
The Protestant Reformation injected sense and threw out 'nasty' stuff? Like what exactly? They went from burning heretics to burning witches? Oh, and the Thirty Years' War was a barrel of laughs too.
The sticking part of the Sedition Act is this: "shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal [...] language about the form of government of the United States". This is where it essentially makes any opinion against the government criminal, and that is unconstitutional. Where this was moderated in modern American law is that it was narrowed down to 'overthrowing'. It is quite a different and more specific matter than the broad word 'disloyal' which was used in that period to charge and imprison many persons who did not advocate anything more than "radical" (relative to the American mainstream) ideologies or systems of government. The legal prohibition of advocating the overthrow of the government is constitutional because such an overthrow would necessitate illegal means (violence, coercion), whereas the earlier prohibition of 'disloyal language' effectively bars otherwise constitutionally protected activities of organizing political movements and voting for change within the existing political framework.
How's that for indefensible, condescending AC shitbag?
The problem is that it was unambiguous at the time it was written, but American English has evolved a little since that time. For example in the language of the era 'well-regulated' meant exhibiting good discipline. The fact that language is not forever static makes expository corroborating texts from the amendment's authors valuable.
However, some of the ambiguity is manufactured by political opponents. There is no need for distinctions about concealed or unconcealed. It says 'the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed'. Whether these arms are borne inside of clothing or outside is immaterial, and in fact regulations against concealed carry should be considered unconstitutional at face value, but that wasn't relevant to state and local laws until the Second Amendment was finally incorporated last year in McDonald v. Chicago. It's now possible (though unlikely, since the SCotUS is very reticent to hear 2nd Amendment related cases) that many local gun laws will be ruled unconstitutional.
*(A lot of this is being rendered moot by legislation like LEOSA, and reciprocity if it ever gets passed. As it is 80% of states are shall-issue, and I think Vermont-style will catch on when everybody realizes that concealed carry has always either reduced or had no effect on crime. Then we'll finally be close to the sort of freedom we're supposed to be guaranteed in the first place.)
The Constitution has been amended century after century, it's not set in stone. It's simply supposed to be hard to do, otherwise you'd have nonsense like CA's prop 8 where a simple majority voted away the rights of others. Since the Constitution is the nation's highest law, superseding all others at all times within the federal jurisdiction (and, when incorporated, in all jurisdictions), it is important that changing it not be taken lightly.
The intent of the authors (not always the founders, considering the post-18th century amendments) is important simply because it is neither practical nor healthy for the body politic to have a 'highest law' that is impossibly long and detailed for most people to understand and overly precise and restrictive so that courts would have no room to make common sense allowances.