PN-G bamatex

Interesting topic to post late at night.   Has anyone actually seen something out there? I've gone with friends about six times. I only saw something worth mentioning the first time, and it still wasn't significant enough to be considered "ghostly" or "paranormal." The rest of the time, it's been a gravel road with too many people around and too many sets of headlights in the distance.   The last two times I went out there, some friends and I even devised an amateur "investigation" which, not surprisingly, turned up nothing. We also ventured into the woods on the north side of FM 1293 beyond the railroad tracks trying to find something noteworthy. So, I'm curious to know if anyone else has seen anything or if this is just local legend.

Men won't ask for directions, but could point in each of the cardinal directions and get their general bearings from there under virtually any conditions.   Women don't know east from west and can't tell you which side of the landscape the sun will set on, but they'll ask for directions.   Who's smarter here?

Do we have to ruin it for everyone? Can we just ban specific posters from this part of the board?   This site has been a resource in the past. I write for the UA student newspaper, and I frequently participate in public debates. I've utilized this site to discuss topics of interest so that I could consider things from different perspectives, figure out what the "other sides" are thinking and anticipate what I might run into in the real world. On occasion, I've literally copied and pasted from my posts on this board to use things I've already written in papers and articles. It's also allowed me to refine points and have a centralized collection of sources and data. I would really hate to lose that.

Forums typically have built in censorship routines that block or change profane words. Could we add routines for terms like "teabagger," "low information voter" and so on?

I suggest both of you stop. Now.

I'm personally for a (semi-)flat tax with a small deduction for charitable donations and no other deductions at all. The more complex the tax code, the more easily it can be taken advantage of and the more corruption sets in. It's easier to hold people accountable when the laws are simple.

  Finally! Validation!  :D

    How much less they pay their minority staffers? You realize the GOP's last chairman was black, right?

  I don't know about DeQueen, but Memorial wasn't designed well as I understand it. To make a long story short, too many offices, not enough classrooms. If the're doing anything at Memorial, I would imagine it would be correcting that problem.

  If you have a set number of people you would like to debate, then do what I do and only respond to their posts. Instead, you're just egging it on with those sarcastic remarks.   I want you to go on your profile and click the link to all of your posts. Look at the last fifty or so, and then ask yourself who you're responding to in those posts. If you really only want to have a debate with the prescribed list you've given above, you sure aren't acting like it.

  I already told you how to end this. You won't stop perpetuating the cycle. You're every bit as much to blame here as they are.

  You know, it's hard for me to take your "commitment" to "real discussion" as the actual reason behind your constant trolling when you've completely ignored legitimate responses to your posts and questions about your premise while making posts like those above.

Just how are we talking about taxing them? Extra income taxes?

[Hidden Content]   I have a question for the legal experts. John Hinckley, Jr., was found not guilty by reason of insanity of all of the counts against him, including the attempted murder of James Brady. Since this has now been ruled a homicide, he couldn't now be charged with murder, could he? It would be a different charge, but wouldn't that still violate the double jeopardy clause?

  Last I had heard, LSCPA wanted Woodrow Wilson, but PAISD wasn't interested in selling it. They wanted to make it a performing arts center or something along those lines.

Judging Fox News by Bill O'Reilly's talk show is like judging CNN by Piers Morgan's talk show or CBS by Dave Letterman's talk show. If you want to challenge the objectivity of a media source, stick to its news shows, not its talk shows.

[Hidden Content]   Some neat hypotheticals there. Especially that ninth one.   With all the tension in the room, y'all just need to go ahead and get it over with.  :D

    These are all of the schools in the SEC and the Big XII with their academic rankings, per US News & World Report:   SEC:   #17 Vanderbilt #49 Florida #60 Georgia #69 Texas A&M #86 Alabama #91 Auburn #97 Missouri #101(T) Tennessee #112 South Carolina #119 Kentucky #128 Arkansas #135(T) LSU #142(T) Miss State #150 Ole Miss   Average Ranking: #97   Big XII:   #52 Texas #75 Baylor #82 TCU #101(T) Oklahoma #101(T) Kansas #101(T) Iowa State #135(T) Kansas State #142(T) Oklahoma State #161 Texas Tech #170 West Virginia   Average Ranking: #112   Texas is the top dog, academically speaking, in the Big XII. In the SEC, it would be outranked by Vanderbilt and Florida, with Georgia not far behind. The worst school in the SEC, Ole Miss, ranks ahead of the two worst schools in the Big XII, Texas Tech and West Virginia. The average SEC ranking is 15 spots higher than the average Big XII ranking. If what you're saying is true and Texas would refuse to join the SEC because of academics, it's because Texas wouldn't want to play second (or rather, third) fiddle.   Now, I agree that the higher-ups in the SEC might want to make an exception to their rule about not adding schools in states that are already represented for Texas because, as you pointed out, Texas is the most profitable brand in college athletics. Having the nation's most profitable athletic department in the nation's most profitable conference would seal the SEC's dominance among collegiate athletic conferences. And, on that note, I think a lot of the officials in Austin would see the benefit of that as well, regardless of what the "academics" think. As big as the burnt orange brand is, think how much bigger it would be if UT was playing A&M and Arkansas again every year, along with the likes of Alabama, LSU, Florida, Auburn and Georgia. Frankly, that would be the greatest level of competition UT has ever had in a conference, and that kind of competition would likely only breed more fandom, and thus more merchandising.

[Hidden Content]   Uh, what?

[Hidden Content]

I wouldn't mind making cheap forms of birth control available in housing projects and perhaps even certain federal offices. But I agree with Trojan; they probably wouldn't be used as often as I would like, and I think the birth rate would probably only fall incrementally.   If we really want to stop the propagation of people on welfare, tell them we'll only pay for the kids they have when they enter the welfare rolls. If they have more children, we'll provide Medicaid, but no new food stamps and no extra cash. You don't get a raise when you have kids, so why should someone on welfare?

  Gay marriage and abortion have already been addressed to some degree, so I'm going to leave those two alone.   To answer the questions, I'm going to get really abstract for a minute and then come back to the issues. Before I get started, forgive me if some of the details are incorrect; it's been two years since I took a political theory class where we discussed any of this in depth, so I may be a little rusty. Also, kind of like my comment on affirmative action, this is written by an undergraduate political science student who only knows so much about these subjects because it's a lifelong interest.   If the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence contained references and a "Works Cited" page, the works they would refer to would be the writings of a core group of political philosophers the Founding Fathers based their entire system of beliefs on in one way or another. Those philosophers are John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Hobbes, who was Locke's mentor. All three had kind of covered different aspects of political philosophy (Rousseau did more with democracy, Locke did more with individual rights and liberties) and all of them had their own ideas about the optimal forms of government (Hobbes, for instance, basically spent all of Leviathan trying to justify the monarchy, and Rousseau was really a socialist at heart who accepted property and capitalism as necessary evils). But the one thing that formed the foundation of all of their beliefs was the state of nature - the original environment in which man first lived, from which we, and everything we know, evolved.   In that state of nature, they theorized that man was perfectly free. A person was accountable only to himself, and could do anything he wanted without any unnatural consequences imposed by any authority of any kind. It was pure and unlimited freedom. And thus, man being perfectly free in nature meant that man had a natural right to be free, according to their reasoning.   Of course, the reality of that, as recognized by all three of them, was chaos. When you remove the structure of morality, community and government and tell people they can do whatever they want without consequences, the result is anarchy, death and destruction. Thus, they reasoned that man gave up all or part of that natural right of freedom to achieve peace and order in the course of social and political evolution. As I mentioned in parentheses earlier, Hobbes spent all of Leviathan expounding on this very concept; the actual "leviathan" was the power embodied in a king amassed from all of those individual rights given up collectively by his subjects to create order, stability and security.   The reality of that, on the other hand, was tyranny. Giving up all natural rights to a single power left too much room for abuse, and that was the typical result. That's where Locke comes in and starts talking about the concept of liberty. To try and break that down succinctly, liberty is the balance between ordered tyranny on one end, and chaotic freedom on the other. It basically tries to give us the best of both worlds. The natural freedom gets broken down into more basic rights that are secured to us with certain limitations to ensure we can maintain domain over our own lives, while the government still receives the minimum amount of power necessary to maintain peace and stability. In essence, it's the maximum amount of freedom we can have without killing, robbing or maiming each other.   So how does that relate to prostitution and drugs? Well, what it comes back to is whether we can have those two things without increasing the level of chaos in society.   When it comes to prostitution, I think we can now. At one time, the public health concerns that came with prostitution might have been enough to justify an outright ban absent of any moral arguments. In fact, I think it's fair to say that if we had allowed prostitution without any checks two thousand years ago, AIDS would have exterminated the human race by now. But, with today's technology and resources, I think we could probably legalize it and regulate it effectively enough to minimize, if not nearly eradicate, the risk. Not to mention that taxing it could bring in some extra revenue and we would have a new, legitimate form of employment. Anytime we can expand freedoms without risking public safety, especially with those benefits, I'm all for it, even if I find the practice reprehensible on a personal level.   Drugs, on the other hand, are a different kind of issue. Drugs, to varying degrees depending on the specific drug, deprive a person of his ability to think rationally and reasonably. The only way we can have a society that is both free and peaceable - the only way we can achieve the delicate balance of liberty - is to have reasonable, rational citizens. Along those lines, the risk to the public safety of legalizing certain drugs like marijuana may be debatable, and an appropriate balance might be achievable through compromise. When it comes to other drugs, though, the risk is simply too great. For instance, you'll never be able to justify legalizing PCP - it makes people too aggressive and too likely to do something that may jeopardize the safety of others. So, to sum things up, each drug has to be evaluated individually to determine the correct course of action.   Hopefully that makes things more clear, although probably not.   Also, on an aside, Karl Marx completely rejected the "state of nature" concept, which is why he ended up with such radically different conclusions after his own analyses and ramblings. Typical of a communist to ignore human nature and substitute his own views.  :D

  Giving marriage back to the church doesn't mean throwing consent laws out the window with it.  :D

  That's where I was going to go with the abortion issue depending on the answer to the question.   As for gay marriage, I believe marriage is a religious institution at its core, and thus can't be redefined by a government entity. It wasn't instituted by government, it was instituted by religion and then the government basically tried to take it over. The first time it ever became a government issue was when the king of England decided he wanted a divorce, and even then, he split the churches to be able to do it. A couple of centuries later, several states, Alabama being one of them, only started issuing marriage licenses as a way of regulating the institution to prevent interracial marriage, and many others only instituted marriage licenses for tax purposes.On that note, in this state, marriage licenses weren't even issued until the 1960s; both of my sets of grandparents received marriage certificates from the Methodist church, not marriage licenses from the county.   My thoughts are that there never should have been any marriage licenses. Leave marriage to the churches to sort out. Some of them, undoubtedly, will be willing to confer the institution of marriage on same-sex couples, and some won't. At the end of the day, however, it's up to he individual churches, thus preserving religious freedom and the separation of church and state.   And no, for those who are wondering, I don't have anything against polygamy, either.