You are citing the usual legalistic

Because it's true, and been around for a very long time.

There's a whole list of things he didn't say anything about, including homosexuality and abortion and women being subservient and on and on.

On that, you are completely wrong.

In Matthew 5:17 Jesus is quoted as saying: ""Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."

In other words, Jesus himself is saying that he isn't changing the moral law. Things that were immoral (homosexual activity being just one of many) is still immoral and thus sinful. On abortion? Here's another one, to Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."

Note that Jesus is confirming the message of the prophets, meaning He is saying that yes, He knows us while we are still being formed in our mother's wombs.

It's becoming pretty clear that you have neither read, nor understood, the Bible. More recently, of course, there are great doubts about whether Paul even existed at all.

Saul of Tarsus (Paul) most certainly existed, and he was beheaded at the order of Nero.

There were three types of law in the old Jewish custom -- ceremonial, civil, and moral. Some things were intended to be guidelines -- for example, pork and shellfish. This is an example of God watching out for His people, as the primary fuel for cooking in the desert was camel chips. Largely undigested grass, camel chips, much like cow chips, are very flammable. The problem is, that they burn very hot, and burn much to hot to reliably "slow" roast pork to a proper internal temperature. Shellfish -- good idea ot avoid for the same reason, plus you also have the problem of severe food allergies.

That law, however, was a civil law, not a moral one.

For stoning, well, Christ Himself stopped that practice -- Let he among you who is sinless cast the first stone...

For the last one... dude, really? You want to have sex with a woman while she's on her period? That's pretty nasty.

I'd continue, but pearls before swine and all that...

until He comes back. Until then, we will continue our march into a depraved, degenerate society fully embracing the culture of death.

That Left vs. Right is only or mostly a distraction is a Leftie/Libertarian tactic. They are of course highly distinctly opposing philosophies, even if the extreme divide between the philosophies is not fully represented in Congress.

I don't know about the banks, but corporations are only trying to buy favor in regulations and subsidies, so that they can be more successful. This is tyranny in that it's anti-competitive and hurts the average citizen, but is nowhere near where the vast majority of the tyranny we're experiencing nowadays is coming from: The GOP's progressivism towards more and more perfect national security, and the Left's progressivism towards more and more perfect outcomes in almost everything in general.

TL;DR: That cartoon pushes the standard commie line that the institutions of capitalism are our biggest problem.

p.s. What it does get right is that, since neither major party cares one whit about libertarianism, in that sense it's meaningless which one you vote for, because neither will advance that cause. (But then that's hardly the only meaningful factor, whereupon there becomes a huge difference between the parties.)

Another thought is this: I've written my share of T-SQL in the same spirit as this. And that is, what I have come to philosophically consider to be doing too much on the database side. An RDBMS's strong suit is retrieving data, not string manipulations. And your requirements for the data to be built into a string and of a certain format is really a business rule, where even if you're not doing a tiered architecture physically, it isn't a best practice to mix business layer concerns into what is logically the data layer.

I'm to the point where I consider the T-SQL language's non-DML/non-DDL stuff to be only as a last resort, such as needing to send already formatted data into say SQL Server Reporting Services, where you might not have middle tier(s) and the luxury of processing the data via any other means before it gets presented. But for application work, I want to start using the database to do just enough calculating to identify what data I want retrieved, and then the rest of the crunching that needs to be performed being done in C# or whatever (which will typically be more expressive and efficient for this).

Then in your case you wouldn't have the recursion going on in the database side to construct the string.

p.s. Over time the DBA's can alter the indexes on tables, and the SQL Server query analyzer can adopt different cached data access plans depending on the amount of and distributions within the data. So timings can change, so if you were already close to a limit...

In SQL's order of operations, ORDER BY is done after SELECT, where in that 2nd query the string is built up, and then somehow some sorting is supposed to happen. It could be harmless or fouling things up, and it might not be what you want judging from the 1st query where the string is built in Sequence order.

...scientist Chen thought his results were fake but accurate?

And therefore, in his mind, and according to popular thinking, would still be worthy of dissemination. That is, if he felt it was an important enough truth, that needed to be gotten out.

IOW, in a world where the mindset of "the ends justify the means" has taken over, can he be blamed? If the world tells him that that's nothing to be ashamed about in other cases, why would he and other scientists see it as unethical in science?

I hold him less culpable, and society more culpable. And even more than society, I hold people of integrity, however few there might be left, culpable for this aspect of modern society.

As a libertarian-minded Conservative, people have a right to do what they want, but they don't have the right to not be called out as the unwise that they are. We let those who are morally, spiritually, and intellectually compromised, who flock to (or rather who are driven to, re: RG's mentioning of who is ultimately behind the degradation of the human conscience) positions of influence over society, have their says without it being answered.

I blame the silence of the good. Imagine if every stupid and/or dangerous idea, that started to get traction, was swiftly followed up by people pointing out exactly how ridiculous and wrong it was, and thoroughly debunked it. Doesn't mean there still wouldn't be casualties, as far as lost souls and lost moral compasses and lost reason. I just don't think there'd be so many, if we didn't let B.S. prevail.

Good to see you again fustakrakich.

Swing and a miss, Ratzo.
It took a millennium and a half for the reformation to try to straighten out Scripture.
The point I made was that Luther incorrectly removed this.

So which would you use to inform your life and society? If you said, "The Bible", then even God thinks you're a moron. Because, way before there was scripture, there was man's ability to reason.

Read the Gospel; specifically read how Jesus reacted to Thomas' skepticism, and his message about those who haven't seen and still believe.

Man's ability to reason is deeply flawed. Man's "reason" once told the Egyptians it was OK to use the Hebrews as slaves. Man's "reason" today says it's OK for women to butcher their children in the womb.

I'm attacking liberalism as a demonic religion, I'm not attacking religion in general. I, for one, am a proud Catholic and will always remain one.

google broke into internet search with the page rank algorithm whose essential purpose is to combat "search engine optimization."

Yeah. They destroy legitimate businesses with their wonderful algorithms...

SEO isn't a legitimate business. If your website is getting pushed into the search-result basement, odds are you're doing it wrong.

Typo -- above should read: Martin Luther removed them from his Bible, and also wanted to remove a few other books as well --- James, for example.

Those books were part of the Bible until the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther removed them from his Bible, and also removed a few other books as well --- James, for example.

But... But... Chicago is a gun-free utopia! No guns are allowed there, so everyone is safe and no one has to worry about getting shot. /sarcasm

I think most doctors believe its beneficial but I also think they somehow see acetaminophen opiate formulations as some kind of bulwark against abuse. Either because they believe it is so much more effective paired with acetaminophen and you'll be inclined to take less overall or that people "know" acetaminophen is bad in quantity and it will serve as a deterrent to excessive dosage, especially people with a history of drug abuse.

Also, the DEA watches doctors who prescribe opiates very carefully. If some government goon believes a doctor's handing them out like candy, the doctor's most likely going to be called in for some very uncomfortable questions. See chapter two of Three Felonies a Day for some examples.

The way scripts for opiates are handled is also quite different. My wife's oncologist was able to submit the vast majority of prescriptions to her preferred pharmacy electronically; they would be ready for pick-up a short time after. The one time she was prescribed straight oxycodone (or whatever opiate), it was printed on security paper to thwart attempts at altering or copying. It was signed, and some sort of DEA ID number issued to the doc was printed in the header. I had to deliver the prescription to a pharmacy. Her usual pharmacy didn't have it in stock, so I had to find another that did. Once it was filled, I had to sign for it in a logbook (similar to when you buy products containing pseudoephedrine).