tvashtarkatena

Those spring shots are gettin' me sprung.

Tough shit. Welcome to the 21st century pal.

...or an oversimplifying dogmatist with a very poor grasp of the complexities of the subject at hand, the dynamic nature of what is good for the environment (and thus, those who must make a living off of it), the climate-based ephemerality of the "Green Revolution", or which way the trends in third world agriculture are actually heading.

You can add about 50 million voting morons (x 2, actually) to this short list of the prescient.

That's what happens when you forget the facetious emoticon in your postings... Talkin' 'bout my gen-ration.

We just had some home grown spinach and asparagus last night. My savoy style spinach leaves are thick, the size of dinner plates, and have a crisp snap when you bite into them. The asparagus is sweet and really makes your pee reek. Just thought I'd rub that in while the rest of you fuckers argue about where to get your veggies.

So THAT's what's wrong with Quincy....

Throughout it's history, the Supreme Court, which is not an elected body, has generally deferred to the Legislature, which is. This results in more, rather than less, democratic outcomes. Instances where the Supreme Court has disagreed with the Legislature in their rulings are few and far between. Democratic outcomes are not always just ones, however. Slavery was upheld for decades by the Supreme Court, again, in deference to existing legislation, which was enacting the will of the people (those who could vote, that is) at the time. The bottom line is that if you have a democratic society full of assholes, you get assholish legal outcomes. Hence, the past six years. We're reaping what we've sown. The Supreme Court struck down the military tribunal system in large part because it was not adequately supported by legislation. The executive branch and fuck head Republican congress then dissected that loophole and filled it with enough bullshit to delay or circumvent another adverse Supreme Court ruling for a while. As a result, the CIA and private contractors may still torture people, the President may still unilaterally 'interpret' the Geneva conventions, attorney access to detainees is still very limited, and evidence or confessions, obtained through torture in other countries, such as Syria, is still admissable in these kangaroo tribunals, and habeus corpus is still in the trash can. There are still multiple lawsuits pending on behalf of many of the detainees at Guantanamo, so stay tuned. Of course, in their latest manuever, the shitheap currently stinking up the Whitehouse is calling for limited attorney access to detainess, for reasons of 'national security'. The last (Australian) terrorist they let go on a face saving plea bargain to a minor charge went home without jail time...a real threat to national security. Riiiiighhhhht.

Round out yer food knowledge by reading "The Botany of Desire" and "Fast Food Nation". You'll be planting your own veggies afterwards in short order.

Guess you had to be there. You weren't. Drive by the place sometime and let me know how responsible you think the landlord is afterwards.

Since the situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq has continued to deteriorate despite our presence, I would say our presence is either a neutral or negative factor, not a positive one. Either argues for an immediate withdrawal. The mentality that we can 'fix our mistake' in Iraq is an interesting one. I liken it to shooting your spouse, then trying to 'undo' your mistake afterwards. Very American (Oops, I spilled...sorry!) Good luck with that. An irreversible chain of events was set in motion the day we said 'Let's roll' (remember that bumper sticker? Where are they now?). We destroyed a society, which immediately began to factionalize, a process which continues today. Now, what we have in Iraq is a viral movement of continued factionalization (first the Sunnis, now the Shiites), each group with either its own competing agenda or no agenda other than to wreak havoc, and each group successfully feeding off of the chaos. This decentralized process is now a force of its own. It will continue until it burns itself out or the local powers that be force or negotiate a solution. It also interesting to note that the process is spreading throughout the region; to Pakistan and Afghanistan, most notably. As the perpetrators, invaders, and outsiders, we have not, and cannot, help in the reversal of this trend. We are, to borrow a phrase, 'failing upward'.

Sounds like a real Big Boy outing. Is this photo good enough to draw your route on and repost? Dat wood b kool.

Few people outside of mental institutions still believe that the Bush administration did not purposefully mislead the American people on numerous occasions. Still, the question remains: Why? The answer is simple really. Like all of us, they simply wanted to be loved.

An opinion from the far bottom.

browned out underwear = hard mixed alpine climbing

More Dragontail prOn: from the big wind storm 2 weeks ago: 2 climbers bail out of the Hidden Couloir What they were bailing from 3 shots of Colchuk in the wind storm

We need to put Bush on Mars before we can fund the Extraterrestrial Planet Finder, which could determine whether or not there might be plant life on this rock. Normally, I'm not much for manned space flight, but in this case....

It's apparently been a while since Layton's posted a video link

At 2x earth gravity, I can see myself as a SCUBA instructor....

Too bad they can't pin down a day length on this mofo. What if the day is longer than the year? THAT would fuck with Outlook, for sure.

Birthday hangover every 2 weeks. Ouch. And the gift buying! What a shithole.

That's my point DC; guns are regulated and, nearly all of the time, those regulations do work to protect public safety. When the system fails, however, it's always good to take a good hard look at why and discuss possible solutions. There won't always be a fix to every gun death, just as there isn't for every auto related death, but to respond to an incident such as what just happened at Virginia Tech with "there's nothing we can do about it, shit just happens", or "more guns, less crime!" as some have done here, seems simplistic and irresponsible to me, particularly when there were regulations in place that could have prevented this shooter from obtaining firearms. I'd say preventing those people who cannot responsibly own and handle a firearm from obtaining one is the number one way to reduce gun related violence and accidents. Upon looking around, that would seem to include most of our population.

That what will never change? Who you talkin too? You bet, and that arguement has been used quite sucessfully as well to show that the media can and should be restrained especially in their active depiction of violence, which is ruinous to society and has been proven to cause more violence. Nobody is saying that the media should be banned or regulated, rather that it should have the most eggresious abuses which they repeatedly display checked a little. To obsensiously tighten up and improve our society just a bit: only the most eggrious books should be banned. Maybe responsible people like yourself can register to check them out with a special permit after a background check. Not all books or all media. Remember that the biggest amount of people murdered via a domestic terroism act were not killed by guns anyway. By ideas picked up from the internet. That's what we learned from Tim McVey. He learned how to make a bomb. After all, don't you agree that only a criminal would object to having to register with the police or ask to keep them out of his house, and only unpatriotic Jews would refuse to register and wear the pretty yellow stars..... Right, what's the big deal? We can and should fix society so that we are all safe. Bill's equating of our 1st and 2nd amendment rights here seems a bit far fetched to me. He suggests that to regulate gun ownership would open up the possibility of also regulating free speech and a free press. This line of argument is fundamentally flawed on several counts. 1) Speech and the press ARE regulated. False alarms (yelling 'fire' in a theatre), threats, obscenity, false statement, violating national security; these and more are heavily regulated in the name of public safety and well being. I could stop here, because Bill's slippery slope argument is already DOA, but... 2) Equating the direct and proven threat that homocidal gun owners present to society to the indirect and unproven threat of 'media induced violence' (which has never been proven by any study) is a bit of a stretch. Our society already regulates and sometimes bans access to potentially lethal machines to a segment of the adult population: it's called a revoked driver's license. I can think of no compelling reason why a similar standard should not be applied to gun ownership in the interests of public safety. From this post, it sounds like there are no rules attached to gun ownership whatsoever. This is simply untrue. It probably only sounds that way to a 'dumb cunt'.

estimate of 1.5 X Earth's diameter, if I recall correctly. You're looking at more than doubling your Earth weight. Definitely a place where taun tauns would command a premium. Plus, a 13 day long year. Ice climbing one weekend, beach volleyball (helium filled) the next.