Funny, that never seems ot work when the elementary school teacher also dances at the local strip club. Then it's never about non-discrimination based on job performance and all about your employer's right to not associate with you anymore. Let's face it, you've picked some attributes that have hardly anything to do with your job performance like race, religion, sex etc. and "blessed" them while other equally irrelevant attributes can get you fired on the spot.

I'm not sure why you need to put "forced" in quotes. If you're a white supremacist running a self-owned bakery and wouldn't serve a black customer voluntarily, then clearly it's involuntary aka forced. As forced as the health and safety regulations and paying your employees minimum wage I guess, but it's something the government tells you that you must do. Now I know certain libertarians try to make great leaps of logic to act like they're different, but fundamentally they're not. If you want to throw out all government regulation, you also throw out what keeps the baker from refusing to serve the black guy.

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time," and that's all a politician needs.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA

We have enough money to fuck with other nations' politics, bomb brown people, and build jets that nobody needs. You're full of shit.

I don't vote party, except that I avoid both D and R whenever there's a candidate who doesn't want to put half the people I know in prison for smoking pot.

If anyone but Bruce Rauner had run against Quinn I would have voted for the Republican, becuase Quinn just wasn't a good governor. I think Rauner will be even worse, maybe even as bad as Ryan(R) or Blago(D), both were crooks. I don't know if Rauner is a crook but his policies are terrible. There were only two named on the ballot, so it was indeed a choice between two evils.

Look, Republicans are against the Social Security I paid into all my life and am now enjoying, against unions, without which I would have no pension, against the single payer health care system which has countries with it in place enjoying half the costs we face with far less infant mortality and longer life spans (Obamacare is really Romneycare in disguise); against the Medicare I again paid into and will get in a couple of years; against food stamps (that's simply un-Christian, yet they claim to be Christians?); against taxes (again, an un-Christian stance). Tell me, what Democrat views that the Republicans don't share are detrimental to me, a middle class retired guy?

But both parties are against pot legalization, for our insanely long copyrights, and quite a few more where there really isn't a valid choice.

Well, when a child says bye-bye, it sounds like a contraction (b'bye), but bye-bye is not a contraction. It's more like Cory Doctorow spells sidewalk: side-walk. Wnat contraction uses a hyphen instead of an apostrophe? Not bye-bye, it isn't a contraction of anything.

As to "SyFy", that's a trademark, not a word. It only applies to that bad cable channel. Hi-fi and sci-fi aren't contractions of high fidelity and science fiction, but new words made out of old ones.

I guess that could argue the validity of e-mail and e-books, though.

Your argument sounds roughly like the one I heard was common after WWI, after millions dying in static trench wars they thought barbed wire and machine guns would basically end war since any attacker would be sending their troops into a massive suicidal bullet rain. At the time it was probably true, remember the car was in its very infancy. Except over the next 20 years the Germans created Panzers and Blitzkrieg tactics outmaneuvering and overrunning France in six weeks.

So maybe in the 1950s or 1980s you could send ICBMs and have them reach their destination, but they're always working on laser weapons, missile-destroying missiles like the Patriot missile and a host of other highly classified projects. In case you missed the memo NATO has been working on a ballistic missile shield, allegedly against rogue nations like Iran and North Korea but Russia is also not amused. There might come a time where the "mutually" part of "assured destruction" is no longer valid, it's not like we invented nukes and war is now over, forever. Then you're being extremely naive.

Neither of those things answer the question though. Why did the bombs have to be used on civilian targets? For that matter, why was it necessary to fire bomb Tokyo? In Europe both sides attached each other's cities because it was total war with one side standing to lose everything, but the US was never in any real danger of being invaded or losing to the Japanese.

This is the fundamental problem with all attempts to justify the atomic bombings. There were alternatives, they were not even tried. That's why many people consider the bombings to be tests the US conducted with the expectation that in the next major conflict its own cities would be suffering the same fate, creating a need to study the effects.

As for uninhabited and low population areas, Japan has many islands and remote areas. Just take a look at the map, there are many inland areas and points along the coast away from major population centres. Nowadays many of them have nuclear power plants precisely because they are away from major cities. Fukushima would have been a lot worse if it had been in a highly populated area. Off-shore islands would have been even easier targets and extremely effective demonstrations.

I watched Firefly again last year, it's as good as ever. That kind of show doesn't really age, and it is genuinely well written and acted.

Awful and getting worse.

!!

I'm with you on this one. So that's one thing the Romans have done for us.

Ugh. The Future Of Food, pls. srsly.

Frack that...

Complete with institutionalized sexual abuse

There would be more, but the government allowed the automobile companies to buy up and shut down profitable railway and streetcar lines to quell competition.

They spent more preventing people from going there during the "shutdown" than it costs to keep them open. And don't get me started on mismanagement of BLM land, which is what, a quarter of the country? By eye, anyway.

With money lent at dramatically above the rates the banks are charged, making the people a profit center.

The EPA is a curious beast which only occasionally exhibits a spine and which is almost completely toothless.

See above

Pretty good, although there's some severe privacy problems regarding records retention when it comes to access to modern media. So the Romans have done two things for us, eh?

The worst cheating is written right into the law, I hope this is what you mean by 'dodgers'.

"better than HP" does not mean "fantastic". You've got to be better than the high-end Toshibas and Lenovos of the world, not just HPs. HPs have never been known for being particularly good, only for HP being willing to pack the highest-end parts into the machines. Their case design is usually beyond awful. That's one place Apple shines, but they're not the only ones.

You won't know if it's first until it's observed.... and it's not :(

X-Files or Firefly? Keep in mind if you say the wrong one I'll have to kill you.

That's odd because Japan was on the brink of surrender anyway. It also doesn't explain why the bombs had to be used on civilians instead of purely military targets or some uninhabited place where their power could be demonstrated without killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Surely if the concern was saving the maximum number of lives it wouldn't have made sense to then bomb civilians when there were other options. Why start with a city when there were plenty of uninhabited or low population areas?

but nano looks like wordstar

If the cops aren't required to arrest everyone who commits any arrestable defense, then by definition you have selective enforcement. Our entire system of law is actually designed for it.