StrangeSox

Failing upward: Graham Spainer given a nice government job relating to national security. Maybe they liked his policies on secrecy.

QUOTE (farmteam @ Jul 27, 2012 -> 12:49 AM) This has been bugging me too. I get it that it's the first time he or anyone else so high up in the company has explicitly said stuff like this, but did anyone think this wasn't what Chik-Fil-A's view would be? It's been known that they donate to anti-gay groups for a while.

I don't know why this blew up so much. This isn't new for them.

QUOTE (Reddy @ Jul 26, 2012 -> 03:51 PM) that was 1) 1977 and 2) not about racial stuff, it was political. i understand given the time period, socialism was a big deal, but hate speech isn't protected. Dude, it was the NAZI party of the US. It wasn't about socialism, it was about jew-hating. edit: it doesn't matter if it was 1977 or 1877. It was the SC ruling on what restrictions can be placed by governments based on unwanted speech. The answer is "very little." Hate speech isn't illegal. Speech calling for violence isn't even illegal.

The ACLU is also stepping up on behalf of CFA and against the alderman: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/26...al-experts-say/

QUOTE (Reddy @ Jul 26, 2012 -> 03:45 PM) yeah, the more i read up about it the more i'm realizing there's not much legal ground to stand on with these cases... it's just a shame, since i'm sure no one would think twice about boycotting or refusing a zoning permit to a company that actively and vocally supported the KKK or another anti-black group... what's the difference? This has actually come up before. You cannot deny a group access based on their speech. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Soci...llage_of_Skokie

well he's backing down now anyway: http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view...leid=1061147182

He essentially said they wouldn't be welcome in Boston, but I don't believe they're actively trying to expand there now so there wasn't a specific threat.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 26, 2012 -> 10:31 AM) Because in the NCAA money, not kids or academics, comes first. Bingo.

QUOTE (Reddy @ Jul 23, 2012 -> 09:21 PM) getting back to monsanto and GMO testing for a second... StrangeSox, however did they test for something like that if it only affects you over a long period of time? The NIH has a little fact-sheet about artificial sweeteners. The original findings were based on increased cancer in lab animals, and IIRC these lab animals were given huge dosages, far more than any person would reasonably consume (when taking into account body weight etc.). There's never been any definitive link between them and cancers in humans.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 25, 2012 -> 08:10 PM) I would have rather seen that versus the other penalties. Under this format, they still get to fill their football stadium. agreed

Mitt Romney's campaign doesn't believe that Obama is "Anglo-Saxon" enough.

http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resou...ut_voter_fraud/ Voter fraud remains not a real thing while voter suppression from laws ostensibly designed to combat a non-existent thing remains real.

It was incredibly hot but they made that a fun game to be at.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Jul 25, 2012 -> 02:27 PM) Unless Chick-Fil-A is discriminating against gay customers or employees, rather than just promoting a political view, I don't see how anti-discrimination laws apply.

Right, because there is evidence of systemic problems even if industrial actors cannot always be blamed. But we also can name a lot of individual actors, too, so the comparison doesn't work. On the other hand there's still no evidence that in-person voter fraud is a real problem.. Also the "right to invest" isn't a fundamental, constitutional right.

Except that there's no evidence at the aggregate level of voter fraud actually happening, especially in-person voter fraud. You can demonstrate a high likelihood of fraud having occurred without being able to specifically identify examples of fraud. This is done by comparing voter roles, precinct vote totals, exit polls and I'm sure other data to ensure that they match up. This is how real vote fraud is detected and, when it is detected, is investigated. It never turns out to have been in-person fraud because of the incredible difficulty and risk of systematically exploiting that. It's a hell of a lot easier to stuff the box afterwards, commit fraud via absentee voting or simply buy votes than it is to organize enough people to register and then go vote as someone else. At least in Illinois, you don't just grab a ballot off the stack, fill it out and shove it in the box. You have to be registered in advance, which requires identifying material. You have to go to the correct precinct. You have to sign and your signatures are compared. The logistics of in-person fraud simply don't work out. It's really not a plausible scenario and we really have no reason to believe it's something that happens more than incredibly rare isolated events. Which is why voter ID laws that place burdens on hundreds of thousands in various states make absolutely no sense from anything but the "disenfranchise the people who will vote against you" angle while ignoring every other source of possible election fraud and setting the ID rules in favor of your voting groups (no college id's but gun registrations are ok!).

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jul 24, 2012 -> 09:34 PM) Got the job offer I have been waiting for the last 4 months! I had a few follow up questions via e-mail. Got those answered, and now I am ready to accept it. Probably going to call them on Thursday. 'grats!

QUOTE (Wanne @ Jul 24, 2012 -> 07:18 PM) Did you ever dig into the Norway shootings? I'm guessing you think Lee Harvey shot Kennedy too?...like I said Occam's razor. Yes, Occam's razor, exactly. One person deciding to go on a killing spree is much, much, much more simple than a government conspiracy involving many people. The same is true with the Norway shootings, JFK's assassination, 9/11, the London bombings and all sorts of other conspiracy theories.

Yes, that is the key statement. We have no evidence of individuals actually doing it, and, on top of it, we have no aggregate data to detect a pattern of voter fraud. This is not the case in corrupt democracies around the world where poll monitors can and do detect patterns of vote fraud even if they do not catch individuals committing it. In the US, it isn't a real thing. It's an imagined problem to justify solutions that harm political opponents and disenfranchise voters.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 24, 2012 -> 01:58 PM) Kinda hard to prove fraud when you have no way to prove who someone was when they voted. Which is the whole idea. It must be true because we believe it to be true! No matter how difficult it would actually be, no matter how many other forms of voter fraud are more likely and much easier, we must pass these laws that just happen to impact our political opponents' voters the most. There's no detectable pattern of in-person voter fraud. There's no realistic way to organize this type of fraud at an impactful level. There's no evidence that this happens more than a handful of times across the country over the course of a decade. Sometimes, the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence.

The simple story is a lone gunman who went crazy, not a big conspiracy over a UN treaty vote.

In-person voter fraud continues to remain a fictional thing. This is an agreement between the state of Pennsylvania and those suing them over their new voter ID law which states that there has not been in-person voter fraud and they don't expect it in the future. Same as what the judges found when they upheld Indiana's law: this is not a real issue.

Thought that was one of the weakest episodes of BB in the series, but it was setting up an awful lot.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 24, 2012 -> 12:02 PM) Police frighten you, but you want to know if it is OK to shoot a guy who is just standing there? Or beat him to death with his hands or a bat.