Such religious ferver, attacking something I did not say and do not believe, while ignoring what I did say. You truly believe the Holy Gospel of the NRA, that all those who do not worship the NRA wish to destroy every last gun.

Again: the NRA is a religion and does not represent the desires of the majority of its adherents. It perpetuates itself by convincing gullible people that if they do not support the NRA then evil forces will throw them into Hell (a gunless society). You believe this in the absence of all evidence and against all evidence (blind faith).

So your theory is that unlike every other religious organization, the NRA does what its members want rather than the members doing what the NRA wants. Nice theory. Every religious zealot believes that their religion is different; every non-zealot sees that they are largely identical.

Though the gun manufacturers are part of it, a much larger part is that the NRA only exists as long as they can whip people up into a frenzy to donate money. So even though gun control laws have been completely gutted in the USA, the NRA has to keep on whipping up the masses or else the organization will fade away. See also: Greenpeace.

The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.

You're right. For example, laws against polluting only stop those who are not polluting. But so what? Do you think the laws against polluting should be repealed? Do you think that when the laws were passed that polluting did not decrease?

Are you claiming that gun control laws are useless if one person ignores them? Australia passed laws in 1996 to greatly limit firearms. The number of firearms and the number of violent deaths in Australia both suffered major declines in the years since then.

Somalia isn't actually used as an example of a place with no government. Somalia is used as an example of what would actually happen if you get rid of a central government the way that many libertarians want. Somalia is used by many (including me) to mock those idiots who actually want "anarchy". Sure, in the US we'd likely end up with some form of corporate oligarchy disaster rather than a Somalia-type disaster if the Ayn Rand worshipers ever get what they want (and if the Rand-worshiping politicians ever did what they claim to want rather than what they actually do).

But yes, Cody is an idiot.

I find it amusing that Anarchy will supposedly spring forth from a technology that depends on highly refined, multi-disciplinary engineering and built from precision materials that are only manufactured and sold at affordable pricing in the context of a highly ordered society.

I've got my TI-36 Solar sitting on my desk here right now. I use it almost daily. The top cover of the vinyl case ripped off just last year.
I have my late 70's vintage TI SR-50 working at home. I had to replace the original Ni-Cad batteries but it still works fine with that 10 digit red LED display. It isn't as rugged as the TI-36, though, the slide switches for On-Off and Deg-Rad are feeling soft.

Dumbass? Is that a dialect of Brainfuck?

Contradiction in terms.

"No state will ever give up land willingly" Two counterexamples: The USA found itself in possession of several previously Japanese territories after WWII, most notably Okinawa; it was returned to Japan in 1972, 27 years after the war ended.
The USA found itself in possession of Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War; both were granted independence sometime afterward (Philippine independence took a long time and was interrupted by Japanese occupation of WWII).

There are at least two reasons for his opinions.
1. Corrupt or power-tripping cops.
2. The rest of the cops that protect them.

I teach my kids to always be polite to policemen, but try to avoid any contact with them if possible.
Mostly because they are the most dangerous gang around.

And please forgive me for being skeptical about your claims.

Will you ticket a fellow police officer if you observe them break the law? (Say, speeding without having their flashing lights and/or siren on)
And if so, will the ticket stick?

And yet, some people go around proclaiming that they know all about The Programmer's goals, motivations and rules just because somebody handed them a "programming for dummies" book.

If physicists don't have a proper answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing" then they should stop pretending they do by the deceit of changing the definition of "nothing".

The issue of whether anyone has a "proper" answer -- indeed, if there is a "proper" answer -- turns on the ambiguity of the word "why". We use that word in three very different senses.

When we ask, "why is the sky blue?", we are asking "by what lower-level phenomena is the sky seen as blue?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that is static (or very short duration) in time and varies over the reductionist depth of phenomena: photons are scattered by air molecules, some of them enter your eye, trigger certain receptors in the retina, this is processed by the nervous system causing a sensation that your brain has been culturally trained to associate with the symbol "blue".

When we ask, "why did the Challenger explode?", we are asking "by what causal chain of events, one after the other, did the Challenger explode?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that extends over time and is fairly static in reductionist depth: politics prompted a launch in cold weather, cold weather caused the O-ring to warp, the warped O-ring caused hot gas to leak, boom. We want a time sequence that (in this instance) stays at the level of everyday experience, doesn't go in to the quantum mechanics of the O-ring or the grand historical narrative of humanity's existence.

When we ask, "why did Alice go the dance with Bob?", we are asking "what motives and values prompted Alice's decision?" We want an explanation of the desires and actions of intelligent agents, not a story about the atoms that make up her body.

When we ask "why is there something rather than nothing?", some people are looking for "God did it" -- the third type of answer. But there can't be an intelligent agent before there is something, so the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

Some people are looking for the second type of answer: they want some cosmological causal chain of events as to how space and energy came to be. But any causal chain of events would be a thing, not nothing, so again the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

What we have here is a proposed answer in the first sense, lower-level phenomena.

If you're looking for cause-over-time or motive as an answer to "why is there something rather than nothing", you've fallen into a linguistic trap around the ambiguity of the word "why".

You are supposed to read it and think "people should act this way",

Yes, with the genocide and the slavery and the misogyny and the mock executions of sons by their fathers, what a fine world it would be if we followed the moral example of the Bible.

Colbert noted. "I see the Norwegians gave Snowden 30 Nobel Prize nominations. The guy's practically a war criminal - I don't understand how they could put him up for the same prize they once gave to Henry Kissinger."

That whooshing sound you hear? That's Colbert's satire going right over your head. If the Kissinger/peace prize reference didn't tip you off, consider that he said it at the same event that he said "I'm sure that under enhanced liberty you can have all the privacy that you want, just like under enhanced interrogation you can breathe all the water you want."