caeron

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13jud...tml?_r=1&em Here is an unbelievable case about a couple of judges who cut a deal with a private company to run juvenile detention in their area... then proceeded to ship out tons of innocent kids to up the money that these companies got in exchange for kickbacks. This story seems like something out of some southern chain gang horror movie.

An amusing link to Bonobo sexuality: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?arti...281474976769203 Highlights include: "Male Bonobo do what is called 'penis-fencing,' in which two male Bonobo apes hang on a branch, face-to-face, while rubbing their erect penises together. In Bonobo society, this kind of same-sex behavior is regarded as another form of pleasurable sexual activity; sexual activity among the Bonobo is engaged in both for reproduction and for pleasure. Still with me? Bonobo apes also French kiss, engage in cunnilingus and fellatio and massage one another's genitals."

I think this contest, btw, must be from the style invitational: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5032501843.html I used to make this a weekly visit, and even won a few of the silly prizes. Some of the contests are great fun for people who like word games.

You make me wish upon a star That you'll get run over by a car. A kiss from you makes me quiver, Why did you have to have the liver?

I'm a season ticket holder here in portland, and they almost always produce mainstream stuff. Too bad, this sounds like it would be a stitch. The one good thing about the portland opera is that they do one chamber opera a year. An entirely different experience to have these intimate operas in a very small venue!

To date, I've had no complaints about the civility of debate here. I have no idea how much moderating actually goes on, but it seems to be working to me.

According to his wikipedia, he was 17 when the film was shot. I thought he was older. I'm surprised our freaky society didn't ban the movie as child porn.

Probably, but somehow I have a hard time imagining he blackmailed 7 students into sex without any of them complaining. And to have apparently collected nude shots of another 31. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm guessing some number of them weren't really complaining until the cops showed up and asked "Did he make you let him suck your dick?" The sensational stuff always splashes big. The rest of the story doesn't tend to.

This story doesn't read like the whole truth to me. I think there is more to it.

http://www.npr.org/templates/stations/stations/ lets you look up stations on-line streams. I listen to Oregon Public Broadcasting's stream at: http://www.opb.org/programs/streams/ I disagree about the sirius/xm merger being bad, I think this bankruptcy proves it. They weren't competing with each other, they were competing with regular and HD radio, ipods and the like. If there were still separate, this would have happened even earlier.

I like Dolly. Stealing from a couple of internet sites to refresh my memory -When asked her opinion of gay marriage, Dolly said joking that 'gay people should have the right to be as miserable as married straight people are.' and she helped produce the academy award winning Common Threads documentary on the AIDS quilt "Above all, Dolly is honest. She is the first to say that, like many of us, the emergence of the AIDS pandemic was foreign to her. "As you probably know, I came from the country in East Tennessee, and I suppose I was as naive and ignorant as anyone," Dolly says. "When I went to Los Angeles, I became best friends with my manager, Sandy Gallin, who is gay. Many of Sandy’s associates, friends, and creative teams were gay people. They are some of the finest, most creative folks there are. "Because I became friends with many of them–like Steve Rubell of Studio 54…in New York–it wasn’t long before I learned firsthand of the devastating impact of AIDS," she says. "I have lost many dear friends from it…both gay and heterosexual. That’s when I really began to understand and get involved in the fight." And get involved she did, though, in characteristic Dolly fashion, she downplays her own good works. "My Sandollar Productions Company [named for both Sandy (Gallin) and Dolly] was responsible for the public awareness production of the Common Threads quilt program that traveled all over the nation," Dolly says. "I guess I could have been more prominently involved, but I helped. It was Howard Rosenman, Carol Baum, and Sandy that really led the project."

Furries I'd heard of. Clown fetish I've heard of. But Ballons and sneezes are new ones for me. But in the interest in keeping the thread going: http://www.doubleviking.com/bullet-points-...hes-6984-p.html Gut Flopping and Dinner Smashing both made me laugh.

But he sure doesn't! I think she's started to look like a goat as she's aged. I must get to Brazil this year.

I love the Frick. I think it's my favorite Museum in NYC. It's such a cool venue for a museum. It's in Henry Clay Frick's mansion for those who don't know.

I listen to NPR streaming at work, but have never tried this "make your own radio station" Sounds very intriguing, I'll have to try it. Thanks for the tip.

I loved Kate Winslet. She played a great character that was kind of twisted, that didn't ask for sympathy, but earned some understanding as the story went on. I thought Ralph Fiennes' character a bit inexplicable though. I didn't get his motivations from the trial on.

I have no personal animosity towards the other site. I was a member there for years. I just got tired of what I view as the sniping that goes on. Maybe this place will end up that way and I"ll get tired of it too. As some posters have said here, they enjoy the witty repartee. I posted why I didn't enjoy it. Different strokes. I wasn't on the receiving end of much of it, so I'm not invested over it. Perhaps other posters here who got into it more are. I don't think you can have that kind of conversation though, and then complain when some people develop hard feelings about it. If that's what you want, suck it up when people call you mean girls and the like.

I'm one of the people who said the other site was rude. I used to participate there, I don't any longer. I don't think there's anything rude in stating such an opinion. But perhaps you were referring to several of the posts that laid the blame on the moderator(s)?

I don't think he wants any protectionism, but some congress critters are trying to stuff things in there that require "buy american". While there's a noble sentiment there, it's the first step down a extremely slippery slope.

I wish I'd had either of you two as a guide last time I was in Dallas. I missed all the fun apparently.

He really looks like a pretty fag, doesn't he?

On that, I have no idea, since you can just sign up with any email address. It is odd that they can identify them. Perhaps because of the attorney generals they were capable of tracking back all the email addresses to their registrations.

For another look at the willy nilly stigmatization of sex offender registries, read this. http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail..._offender/6726/ There's an academic paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1100663 to quote from their results, which match my bias against large scale notification laws: our findings imply that a state should always employ a registry (the optimal size of the registry depends on the shape of the relationship between sex offense frequency and registry size). On the other hand, our results also suggest that notification laws are only attractive when the size of the registry is relatively small. We estimate that putting a notification law in place deters -1.07 yearly sex offenses per 10,000 people, but a notification law that covers 14.79 sex offenders per 10,000 people (the sample mean) leads to 1.3 additional recidivist sex offenses per 10,000 people. Basically, they're saying that offenders should be required to register with the police who can watch them, but that public notification about sex offenders INCREASES their recidivism, which makes perfect sense to me. If you turn these people into total pariahs, their lives are already fucked up, there isn't much upside to behaving. Sorry if this is a sidebar for people, but I think we need to be careful in our stigmatization of sex offenders. Not all of them are serious crimes and even for the serious crimes, if we give them no way out, then they are going to keep offending. If you care about this much, I suggest you skim the results and conclusion section of their paper, it's more nuanced than my pull quote. For instance some level of notification, while it increases recidivism among registered offenders, decreases reports of first time offenders.

I tend to agree with you about the protectionism. We could do the global economy a lot of sustained damage by starting down that road. I think cleaning up the bad debt is the key to this problem. I don't mind real infrastructure spending either, since I think we've neglected a lot over the years, but much of the rest just strikes me as pork which drives me nuts.

Hhaha. The image of Eliot Spitzer being a weasel about using condoms strikes me as very funny for some reason. Thanks for the update.