His sign just might cause a potential burglar or home invader to instead choose your unsigned house to invade and do his rape/kill thing, which is what he's hoping to avoid for himself.
You're not paying attention. There hasn't been a crime in that neighborhood since the Roaring '20s. There are more police than squirrels in that neighborhood.
Chimneys, satellite TV or ISP dishes, HDTV antennas, wind vanes, flag poles, roof-mounted security lights, rain gutter systems, skylights, solar panels.
You forgot these things we should also get rid of, just to be fair.
But not the lawn jockeys. I love the lawn jockeys and garden gnomes. They can stay. ]
I especially hate the roof-mounted security lights. I lived in a neighborhood with zero crime. I mean, the place was stupidly safe, because a Chicago alderman and the chancellor of the University of Illinois lived on the block and we were two blocks from the police academy, so there were constant police patrols, and even an unmarked at the end of the alley behind the chancellor's house. But one of my neighbors still had to put up one of the motion-controlled security lights because he was a jagoff. I verified he was a jagoff because he had a sign on his door that said, "This house protected by Smith & Wesson", even though nothing and nobody was ever going to threaten the sanctity of his house. I mean, I'm all for responsible gun ownership, and I'm a gun owner myself, but to put a sign up to announce it just means you're a raging asshole, which is his right as an American (Trump 2016). Anyway, I'd be walking the dog at night and coming home down the alley and his fucking klieg light would go on, blinding me and scaring the ever-loving shit out of my dog. I lived in the neighborhood for 25 years before this guy and his klieg light and Smith & Wesson sign moved in. All of a sudden he's got to make the place unpleasant. Fuck him. I hope on Halloween he goes out in black face and brings a gun and one of the cops in the neighborhood shoots him, thinking he's guilty of actually being black.
China's Atomic Clock in Space Will Stay Accurate For a Billion Years
The key to successful journalism is understanding that adding "...in space" to anything makes it more interesting. If I say, "I just drank a bottle of beer", it's boring. If I say, "I just drank a bottle of beer...in space" it's suddenly more interesting.
Try it yourselves at home. Make a boring declarative statement and add, "...in space" to the end and see if it hasn't become more interesting.
Now that I think about it, adding "...for a billion years" will have the same effect. If I say, "I just took a nap on the sofa", it's like, who cares? But "I just took a nap on my sofa...for a billion years" and it gets your attention.
Now, having said all that, this Chinese clock...in space that will last...a billion years, like who the hell is going to check that this clock is going to still be accurate in a billion years? You might as well say, "a Chinese clock built in space will turn into a galaxy-sized replica of a vagina in...a billion years". You would be approximately as accurate as this stupid-ass headline.
What's with rich people any more? They're all giving hundreds of millions to each others' charities and patting themselves on the back. At least Donald Trump has the right idea. You get people to donate to your foundation, put most of it right in your pocket, give your wife and kids a little taste, bribe some state attorneys general to not prosecute you for fraud, and then use the rest to buy a six-foot oil painting of your self. That's the kind of avarice I can relate to as a patriotic American.
Dude. If someone want to shake up education to try something new, and wants to give a boat load of money - what's not to love?
There have been charter schools for over a decade and they suck even worse than public schools. They're little more than a siphon for moving wealth upwards. Even worse, they're bringing down successful public schools. If you want to fix schools, you have to disconnect their funding from property taxes.
From what I can see, there's a correlation between being religious and being conservative, and also a correlation between being progressive and donating.
You're making this assumption thanks to the fact that the conservative religious are the noisiest (and the noisiest about their "charity"). The most charitable successful person I ever met was an extremely liberal Episcopalian who gave a ton of her money away to charity (like 20%) and never took a single tax deduction for it. I didn't even know about her giving until after she died and I was the executor of her estate and found letters.
Remember, the hard-core conservative members of the "American Civil Religion" are really a minority, and in most cases, even their charity is just charity to their own mega-churches where the money ends up going to a campaign to keep gays from basic human rights or to bogus "feed the children" charity scams.
LGW, we don't agree on much, but we agree on this. Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers, and by "best", I mean, really walked the best meaning of their faith. I'm talking about Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. The whole lot. People whose first response to others was, "What can I do to help?" Now, I've also known some really wonderful non-believers, but it almost seems as if they are more susceptible to the worst impulses of humanity: Objectivism, neoliberalism, and the faux-Libertarianism that is infecting current discourse. If you should encounter a really horrible person online, say on a forum or Twitter or something, chances are very good that they're atheists. Not because atheism made them that way, but because being horrible almost requires non-belief. While there are horrible people of faith (Family Research Council and Westboro Baptist Jackoffs, for example), they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves.
Now, people of faith have their own pitfalls to watch for. One is the "blessings on me but not thee" kind of tribalism which ends up in an evangelical Trump supporter, who has to twist their faith into knots to justify their actions in the world and the "American Civil Religion" which is the "God & Country" horseshit. You will not find any instance in the Bible of Christ displaying nationalism, in fact, just the opposite. For Him, the pilgrims & refugees went to the head of the line.
As you say, there are bad recipes and good recipes, but belief seems to have the properties of a good ingredient. [Note: while I'm not a particularly religious person, I've encountered a lot of Daoism in my work and martial arts study, and I guess it's a spiritual system in which I find congruence, especially the more esoteric aspects of what's sometimes referred to as Chinese alchemy. Oh yeah, that reminds me, I've also met several really first-rate human beings who have belief systems way outside of the mainstream. It's almost as if the part that makes you better is the process, more than the specifics of any faith tradition.]
I said that the GOP have launched an investigation, I did not say that the congressmen demanding the documents were GOP.
No offense taken.
As we've seen with the Benghazi and Emailgate congressional investigations, there is a big difference between holding a congressional investigation and actually wanting to get to the truth about something. The way I understand the story, after having read several in-depth articles about it, is that the GOP House committee held hearings in order to pretty much make sure that nothing useful came out of the FCC while Barack Obama was president. That's the EFF's take, at least, as well as a few independent journalists and FCC-bloggers. Until Congressman Cummings (D-Maryland) started writing letters and busting balls (which is how he rolls because like the honey badger, he too old to give a fuck) this entire exercise in FCC oversight was little more than organizing the sock drawer to look busy. It was the congressional equivalent of a Boss Key.
Apple doesn't sell DRM protected music anymore (and hastened it's demise).
That's not strictly true.
But let's falsely pretend that Apple is only off to make a buck off people and every decision they make is to lock people down with DRM and make money off them.
You've got to be joking. Why do you think Apple exists? Do you believe they're the fucking United Way? OF COURSE THEY'RE ONLY IN IT TO MAKE A BUCK OFF PEOPLE, YOU GOOFBALL.
The 3.5mm jack is nothing but a conduit for your stolen media, so suck it up. And you there with the 5000 CD collection. Don't be a commie and buy all that music again in iTunes, willya?
The Earth is not getting warmer, though the temperature record is being doctored by those with financial interests.
The problem is those crooked scientists are using liberal thermometers and corrupt mathematics.
When I'm president, we'll have the greatest thermometers and mathematics you've ever seen, OK? It'll make your head spin, the mathematics we're going to have. American mathematics, none of that fruity foreign calculus and so-called "partial differential equations". Leave it to liberals. I'll get the best people to change all the partial differential equations to FULL differential equations, because we're Americans and we don't accept partial stuff. Sad!
I got a '75 Monte Carlo that I've been restoring and I look forward to making it self-driving so I can send it to get me a fucking gelato, a fifth of Johnny Walker and a carton of Chesterfields.
We're not talking about profits here but rather federal $$$ for crony capitalism.
Remember, you can't have crony capitalism without the capitalism.
And where were you when the Bush/Cheney Administration was pouring a trillion dollars into Haliburton and other connected contractors? Do you think the fact that Cheney had been the CEO of Haliburton had anything to do with those contracts (some of which ended up killing American service personnel through shoddy business practices). We're not talking about a few hundred million for a green energy startup. We're talking about over a trillion going to cause death and destruction in the world and to Americans while lining the pockets of the Bush buddies.
So don't even try that weak shit about "green energy" with me. At least it didn't turn into flag-draped coffins, and just maybe some of that seed money will turn out to do some good, unlike the money poured into Haliburton's pockets which only served to cause suffering in the world.
You could start with "green energy" money. The Obama administration has been very good to some of its donors in that regard.
All of the money ever made in the green energy business doesn't add up to what the fossil fuel industry spends yearly on hookers and coke for lobbyists and "researchers".
The truth is that the killings and suffering in Vietnam increased tenfold after the Americans were gone and the civilians were left to face the Communists.
The funny thing is that the "bloodbath" that was expected after the fall of Saigon never happened. Yes there were South Vietnamese forces sent to prison for helping the Americans. There's a guy who teaches Math at UIC who is one of them and he's told me the story.
According to the Red Cross, the transfer of sovereignty to the Republic of Vietnam was less violent on those collaborators than the liberation of France in WWII.
So no, the killings and suffering in Vietnam did not increase tenfold after the Americans were gone. In fact they lessened a great deal. Now all we have to do is get rid of the 80,000,000 unexploded cluster bombs from the 250,000,000 that the Americans dropped on Laos between '64 and '73, but I suppose you're going to tell me that Laos got more violent after the Americans left, too.
Sounds like Clinton supporters started it. You wiling to take claim you are a racist because you and others like you who support Clinton are racist? OR now you have facts you realize that maybe it isn't the case.
I don't "support Clinton" and yes her 2008 campaign's birther stuff was racist.
Actually, no. Kim Phuk was bombed by South-Vietnamese bombers; that hardship was inflicted on Vietnamese by Vietnamese.
The South Vietnamese were the clients of the US. The bombers came from the US and the napalm came from the US. The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not paying attention. There hasn't been a crime in that neighborhood since the Roaring '20s. There are more police than squirrels in that neighborhood.
But not the lawn jockeys. I love the lawn jockeys and garden gnomes. They can stay. ]
I especially hate the roof-mounted security lights. I lived in a neighborhood with zero crime. I mean, the place was stupidly safe, because a Chicago alderman and the chancellor of the University of Illinois lived on the block and we were two blocks from the police academy, so there were constant police patrols, and even an unmarked at the end of the alley behind the chancellor's house. But one of my neighbors still had to put up one of the motion-controlled security lights because he was a jagoff. I verified he was a jagoff because he had a sign on his door that said, "This house protected by Smith & Wesson", even though nothing and nobody was ever going to threaten the sanctity of his house. I mean, I'm all for responsible gun ownership, and I'm a gun owner myself, but to put a sign up to announce it just means you're a raging asshole, which is his right as an American (Trump 2016). Anyway, I'd be walking the dog at night and coming home down the alley and his fucking klieg light would go on, blinding me and scaring the ever-loving shit out of my dog. I lived in the neighborhood for 25 years before this guy and his klieg light and Smith & Wesson sign moved in. All of a sudden he's got to make the place unpleasant. Fuck him. I hope on Halloween he goes out in black face and brings a gun and one of the cops in the neighborhood shoots him, thinking he's guilty of actually being black.
The key to successful journalism is understanding that adding "...in space" to anything makes it more interesting. If I say, "I just drank a bottle of beer", it's boring. If I say, "I just drank a bottle of beer...in space" it's suddenly more interesting.
Try it yourselves at home. Make a boring declarative statement and add, "...in space" to the end and see if it hasn't become more interesting.
Now that I think about it, adding "...for a billion years" will have the same effect. If I say, "I just took a nap on the sofa", it's like, who cares? But "I just took a nap on my sofa...for a billion years" and it gets your attention.
Now, having said all that, this Chinese clock...in space that will last...a billion years, like who the hell is going to check that this clock is going to still be accurate in a billion years? You might as well say, "a Chinese clock built in space will turn into a galaxy-sized replica of a vagina in...a billion years". You would be approximately as accurate as this stupid-ass headline.
What's with rich people any more? They're all giving hundreds of millions to each others' charities and patting themselves on the back. At least Donald Trump has the right idea. You get people to donate to your foundation, put most of it right in your pocket, give your wife and kids a little taste, bribe some state attorneys general to not prosecute you for fraud, and then use the rest to buy a six-foot oil painting of your self. That's the kind of avarice I can relate to as a patriotic American.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...
There have been charter schools for over a decade and they suck even worse than public schools. They're little more than a siphon for moving wealth upwards. Even worse, they're bringing down successful public schools. If you want to fix schools, you have to disconnect their funding from property taxes.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/sch...
That's kind of the point.
So you make my point. Jesus specifically denounces nationaism in 15:22-28.
You're making this assumption thanks to the fact that the conservative religious are the noisiest (and the noisiest about their "charity"). The most charitable successful person I ever met was an extremely liberal Episcopalian who gave a ton of her money away to charity (like 20%) and never took a single tax deduction for it. I didn't even know about her giving until after she died and I was the executor of her estate and found letters.
Remember, the hard-core conservative members of the "American Civil Religion" are really a minority, and in most cases, even their charity is just charity to their own mega-churches where the money ends up going to a campaign to keep gays from basic human rights or to bogus "feed the children" charity scams.
LGW, we don't agree on much, but we agree on this. Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers, and by "best", I mean, really walked the best meaning of their faith. I'm talking about Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. The whole lot. People whose first response to others was, "What can I do to help?" Now, I've also known some really wonderful non-believers, but it almost seems as if they are more susceptible to the worst impulses of humanity: Objectivism, neoliberalism, and the faux-Libertarianism that is infecting current discourse. If you should encounter a really horrible person online, say on a forum or Twitter or something, chances are very good that they're atheists. Not because atheism made them that way, but because being horrible almost requires non-belief. While there are horrible people of faith (Family Research Council and Westboro Baptist Jackoffs, for example), they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves.
Now, people of faith have their own pitfalls to watch for. One is the "blessings on me but not thee" kind of tribalism which ends up in an evangelical Trump supporter, who has to twist their faith into knots to justify their actions in the world and the "American Civil Religion" which is the "God & Country" horseshit. You will not find any instance in the Bible of Christ displaying nationalism, in fact, just the opposite. For Him, the pilgrims & refugees went to the head of the line.
As you say, there are bad recipes and good recipes, but belief seems to have the properties of a good ingredient. [Note: while I'm not a particularly religious person, I've encountered a lot of Daoism in my work and martial arts study, and I guess it's a spiritual system in which I find congruence, especially the more esoteric aspects of what's sometimes referred to as Chinese alchemy. Oh yeah, that reminds me, I've also met several really first-rate human beings who have belief systems way outside of the mainstream. It's almost as if the part that makes you better is the process, more than the specifics of any faith tradition.]
No offense taken.
As we've seen with the Benghazi and Emailgate congressional investigations, there is a big difference between holding a congressional investigation and actually wanting to get to the truth about something. The way I understand the story, after having read several in-depth articles about it, is that the GOP House committee held hearings in order to pretty much make sure that nothing useful came out of the FCC while Barack Obama was president. That's the EFF's take, at least, as well as a few independent journalists and FCC-bloggers. Until Congressman Cummings (D-Maryland) started writing letters and busting balls (which is how he rolls because like the honey badger, he too old to give a fuck) this entire exercise in FCC oversight was little more than organizing the sock drawer to look busy. It was the congressional equivalent of a Boss Key.
Did you notice who's the one demanding the documents from the GOP FCC commissioners? It's not a Republican, FYI.
Does your iTunes Match collection belong to you? Do you think Apple is above deciding your music no longer belongs to you? It's happened before.
That's not strictly true.
You've got to be joking. Why do you think Apple exists? Do you believe they're the fucking United Way? OF COURSE THEY'RE ONLY IN IT TO MAKE A BUCK OFF PEOPLE, YOU GOOFBALL.
The 3.5mm jack is nothing but a conduit for your stolen media, so suck it up. And you there with the 5000 CD collection. Don't be a commie and buy all that music again in iTunes, willya?
The problem is those crooked scientists are using liberal thermometers and corrupt mathematics.
When I'm president, we'll have the greatest thermometers and mathematics you've ever seen, OK? It'll make your head spin, the mathematics we're going to have. American mathematics, none of that fruity foreign calculus and so-called "partial differential equations". Leave it to liberals. I'll get the best people to change all the partial differential equations to FULL differential equations, because we're Americans and we don't accept partial stuff. Sad!
I got a '75 Monte Carlo that I've been restoring and I look forward to making it self-driving so I can send it to get me a fucking gelato, a fifth of Johnny Walker and a carton of Chesterfields.
To be fair, when the Bank of America analysts were asked this, they were all high on designer drugs after celebrating their record bonuses.
Colin Powell never should have talked shit about Donald Trump. You mess with the bear and you get the h4xx0rs.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politic...
Can you give examples of Lenin and Stalin committing atrocities in Vietnam?
Remember, you can't have crony capitalism without the capitalism.
And where were you when the Bush/Cheney Administration was pouring a trillion dollars into Haliburton and other connected contractors? Do you think the fact that Cheney had been the CEO of Haliburton had anything to do with those contracts (some of which ended up killing American service personnel through shoddy business practices). We're not talking about a few hundred million for a green energy startup. We're talking about over a trillion going to cause death and destruction in the world and to Americans while lining the pockets of the Bush buddies.
So don't even try that weak shit about "green energy" with me. At least it didn't turn into flag-draped coffins, and just maybe some of that seed money will turn out to do some good, unlike the money poured into Haliburton's pockets which only served to cause suffering in the world.
Have you ever seen the "community" over at YouTube?
https://youtu.be/n8M6m5UiDaI
Enjoy the comments over there, but don't blame me if you end up drinking rat poison.
All of the money ever made in the green energy business doesn't add up to what the fossil fuel industry spends yearly on hookers and coke for lobbyists and "researchers".
The funny thing is that the "bloodbath" that was expected after the fall of Saigon never happened. Yes there were South Vietnamese forces sent to prison for helping the Americans. There's a guy who teaches Math at UIC who is one of them and he's told me the story.
According to the Red Cross, the transfer of sovereignty to the Republic of Vietnam was less violent on those collaborators than the liberation of France in WWII.
So no, the killings and suffering in Vietnam did not increase tenfold after the Americans were gone. In fact they lessened a great deal. Now all we have to do is get rid of the 80,000,000 unexploded cluster bombs from the 250,000,000 that the Americans dropped on Laos between '64 and '73, but I suppose you're going to tell me that Laos got more violent after the Americans left, too.
I don't "support Clinton" and yes her 2008 campaign's birther stuff was racist.
The South Vietnamese were the clients of the US. The bombers came from the US and the napalm came from the US. The war (and the atrocities) doesn't happen without US imperialism.