Wrath of Dagon

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/eliminate-armed-guards-president-vice-president-and-their-families-and-establish-gun-free-zones/6RDGkxLK?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

Because it's a light, convenient gun, and can be used in many contingencies. There has been some talk about banning all semi-autos, which is what my comment mainly referred to.

Semi-automatic pistols are much safer than revolvers (for the owner) because you can keep them loaded but not chambered and then there's no way it can shoot accidentally. Plus they normally have a safety while revolvers don't have. It's also much safer to keep it that way if a small child accidentally gets hold of it, because they're not strong enough to chamber a round.

Electric shirt : http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509766/nanotubes-turned-into-super-fibers/

More polarized than ever : http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/01/07/why-no-one-wants-to-compromise/

Obamacare mess is just going to collapse of its own weight. People are expected to buy their own insurance but they can't afford it. From what I understand just buying catastrophic coverage is no longer an option, which will drive up the costs even more. Medicare is already collapsing and taking the country with it. We do desperately need medical reform, unfortunately no one's come up with anything like a solution yet.

No, they were claiming Bush tax cuts overwhelmingly favored the rich. They only changed their tune a couple of years ago when the tax cuts were about to expire. If you have less than 50 employees Obamacare shouldn't affect you, unless you want to take a tax credit for providing employee insurance. To 2009 rate you mean. All that's happened is the idiotic payroll tax holiday expired this year and wasn't renewed. To me that's actually the best part of the deal, I was afraid once that giveaway happened you couldn't get rid of it. Also the "rates" only go up for $400k and up, but deductions will be reduced for $200K and up.

The far right/tea partiers in the House will do anything they can to sabotage it. These are people who were voted into government on the promise that they'd destroy the government from the inside, after all. The House is set to vote for the bill without amendments. It's obvious that this is the best deal Republicans could have gotten. One could even argue it's a big victory for Republicans. After a decade of attacking the Bush tax cuts as benefitting only the wealthy, the Democrats finally agree to make almost all of them permanent.

Sanity breaks out in Washington as a compromise on taxes is reached in the Senate. Hopefully the House will follow soon.

The issue isn't the military. The military is mostly from the South and woudn't fight their own. The issue are pro-government goons and brown shirts (see Nicaragua).

If they have a problem with your wife, that's their problem. Don't make other people's problems your own and don't pick fights when you don't have to.

M16's are fully automatic. AR's are less powerful than hunting rifles, they use what's called an intermediate round, in between a pistol and a rifle. This assault weapons bull is all about cosmetics.

Loony scientists try to prove we live in a computer simulation : http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/whoa-physicists-testing-see-universe-computer-simulation-224525825.html#more-id

Not really. Some decisions are forced on by the publisher. Like that fugly skill based aiming circle in AP. So it is not everything on Obsidian. Mind you, I am also not speaking them free of all mistakes. Just in case that comes up now... You certainly can't blame Obsidian that KOTOR II is unfinished if what Feargus Urquhart said is true. Telling a developer that they have an extra year, then taking it back is a ****ty thing to do. Some of the things, like pulling out a project at the last minute, it's almost as if they're trying to make developers go under. This is why I'm supporting KickStarter projects more than published games, because publishers can't keep behaving the way they do, I'll quit gaming before I have to put up with the stuff they're pulling. Actually it was more like extra 3 months, I think it was supposed to release in the spring. Feargus said he didn't know what happened, but at the time it was reported that Republic Commando was supposed to be the big LA Christmas release, but since that was what they were betting on and since it couldn't be ready in time they delayed it and pulled K2 in to take its place at Christmas.

Fermi's Paradox refers more to the idea of interstellar travel. Not according to Wikipedia :

Here's a good analysis of the election: http://news.yahoo.com/todays-politics-coalition-transformation-vs-coalition-restoration-060008398--politics.html

That's not the point, the odds are the same for a typical lottery with a jackpot of several million.

I said impossible for all practical purposes, not impossible in fact. Try a thought experiment. Let's say I filled a huge barrel with 16 million jelly beans. I mark one of them and bury it in the barrel. Then I tell you to reach in randomly and get it. Would you say that's an impossible task?

Here are some pretty extreme Democrats: http://news.yahoo.co...-191355793.html Edit: Also people like Michael Moore. Well, he's actually a communist, he just pretends to be a Democrat to be more popular

The difference being that the more extreme Democrat base does not hold, unlike extremist Republicans, completely and utterly insane views. May be you don't consider them insane because they're closer to your own. People are pretty serious about it though, it may yet become a movement, at least in Texas. There's a Huffpost poll that something like 28% of Americans support their state seceeding.

I was talking about a person's life, not "life" in general. And I'm not sure about the plentiful part, isn't there something called Fermi's Paradox?

It comes down to whether you believe life is random or not.

People don't vote because they don't know anything about politics or don't care. If there were all these latent libertarians that you imagine then libertarians would actually be viable instead of getting 1% or less. If they can actually replace the evagelicals, why don't they vote in the primaries and take over the Republican party? I mean Ron Paul tried, but obviously his support is no where near the conservatives. I know you read a lot, but you don't really understand Americans politics or the American population. Btw, having to pander to the extreme in the primaries and then move to the center is not unique to the Republicans, Democrats do that too (hence Hillary lost). The party activists who are the most influential are normally more extreme than the party.

Are the Evangelicals are just going to vote Democrat if the Republicans are less hardliner for some of the religious concerns? The issue here, IMO, is the primaries. In order to become the Republican candidate you need to win over the Republican voters, of which the Evangelicals will have a larger piece of the pie. This results in candidates trying to win those votes by catering to them, and then on the national level they have to rescind those hardline perspectives. If Republicans don't support their isues, they'll simply stay home and not vote. "The problem is the primaries" is like saying "the problem is democracy". These people are the Republican party. The party can choose to distance themselves from those candidates, which they didn't seem to (but they didn't draw them closer at the same time). King is still in office, but all of the others were rejected. With Atkins they actually asked him to step down so someone viable could be substituted, but he just didn't care. Well, a lot of them used to. Before religious issues were really pushed all that heavily in national politics, there was a creature in Washington known as the "Southern Democrat." They caucused with the Dems because no true son of Dixie was going to join the party of Lincoln and Grant, but they functioned essentially as a centrist 3rd party, mostly positioned between the Democrats from the rest of the country (like the Kennedys) and the GOP. The Republicans managed to pry these folks away from the party of their granddaddies by emphasizing social issues-- first Civil Rights, then religious issues like school prayer and abortion. But, more likely, they'll just vote less. The mobilization of evangelicals as a political force is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the GOP started working hard to reach that audience, they didn't vote at particularly high rates. If someone has a staunch "I'll never vote for a candidate who allows abortions to happen in this country" position, and if neither of the major parties put forth a candidate that speaks to their particular concerns, that kind of voter might prefer to disengage from national politics. Actually Southern Democrats were often very conservative and very religious. Historically they hated Republicans so much they were called "Yellow Dog Democrats", because the saying went they'd vote for a yellow dog if it was on the Democratic ticket. Back then there were also Eastern Establishment Republicans who were quite liberal. Over time the parties re-aligned into their current liberal/conservative molds, which is why the country is so polarized and ideologically locked in now.

I wouldn't say rapidly, it's more that less religious people are becoming even more secular. Now the examples you give are mostly a few morons who aren't even smart enough to keep their trap shut, and care a lot more about themselves than how much they are hurting the entire party and all that it stands for. Nothing the Republicans can do about them anyway since they were selected by the voters, it's not like they're picked by the party establishment.