gehringer_2

I guess I don't see the point. The VA is a hospital system paid for by the gov. Medicare is a hospital system paid for by the gov. Both systems are large enough there is probably minimal economy of scale savings to combine them, and each is tailored to the constituency it serves. So what do you get by throwing the vets into the general public pool? If you close all the VA hospitals you are pushing an already limited national hospital capacity. If you convert them into the private system that has a lot of administrative transition cost associated. So just where is the beef here? This reminds me of the horror story I posted not too long ago about venture capitalists who bought a hospital system just to bleed it dry and take the profits on the real estate - IOW someone behind this push is looking at an ulterior profit motive they hope to cash in on and damn the public interest.

Verily, he hath borne false witness.

very kewl.

The last time we put in new smoke detectors I switched from ionization to optical (supposedly more sensitive) and they are definitely prone to dust issues even on the ceiling.

that's what the SO has been seeing.

It would cost a little money but if they wanted to stay just re-model the outside of the house so it doesn't look like it did in the series and at least most of the problem probably goes away. OTOH, *if* I could get that kind of premium for the house's fame I'd sell it too. It's just a house.

and just want to point out again that despite the confluence of these events, it's pretty clear Livelsberger wasn't trying to kill anyone but himself, because he certainly could have if he had wanted to instead of just creating a noisy show.

Interesting. Do Bleacher Report guys actually have any contacts?

Hey folks: Any recommendations on accommodations in Lakeland? We're thinking about doing a week at ST.

No, just making the point that you can't actually remove *any* kind of ideology or religion from the infosphere, the comparison being that removing one would be just as difficult as removing the other. Thus you need to figure out how to live with it being there - ergo, pointless to blame Jabbar on ISIS. His outcome is our problem.

If it was somebody in the system that helped Workman make the big reduction in his Ks, that would be the person to send Cartaya to.

ISIS is 10,000 miles away and there are 2 billion Muslims on the planet. If America cannot find a way to inoculate American born citizens culturally, emotionally, logically against ISIS's appeal or close the US to the existence of ISIS on the web, then I would submit that is 100% an American problem - because there isn't anything in the world we can do to get rid of Islamic radical theology (anymore then we can 'get rid' of US evangelical fundamentalism - ). So there we are.

did you know that you get longhorns to grow really long horns by castrating them? (stupid piece of data but somehow I found it amusing)

But to pick up on Rob's post that set this sub thread off, I think you would have to admit that guys like Johnson who wear their religion on their sleeve and constantly refer to it as the motivation behind their political actions, make it rather hard to go very far in a discussion of current US politics without running into religion in the subtext. In a more perfect world, people who take political stances for religious reasons could at least try to find non-religious, common good, utilitarian or other secular basis arguments to get those position so it would have some accessibility to the body politic as a whole. When my SOTH admits that he is governing as a member of a small religious sect whose concept of truth and reality may be quite different than mine, and that those imperatives are enough for him, I can't have a good feeling about that.

and no tele-prompters in those days.

Making rules is usually the 1st thing any organized church wants to do and it is also the seeds of the beginning of the end for them as soon as they do so. It's only a matter how long it takes the edifice of rules to come crashing down in the face of whatever reality they inevitably deny. Granted it can take a long time though, and a church may be just flexible enough to reboot itself as needed without ever actually looking like it (e.g the RCC).

This is the politics forum. AFAIK, the only thread here that's ever had discussion limits is "Investing."

Yup. It seems it can only continue to devolve into increasing chaos until one of two things happen - it will either be along the lines you've suggested: a player's union and a CBA; or Congress establishes a legal framework for amateur sports, though that would have been much easier before the intervening court decisions that have mucked everything up. There might be enough exhaustion in Congress around all the traditional political battles that I could actually see some erstwhile political enemies cooperating on something like this that has no obvious red/blue side to it. But probably wishful thinking.....

Not sure Fontes wanted one - or at least not very badly. He seemed pretty happy to walk away, but who really knows?

I'm just here to make sure everyone stays sharp.

that is why I did say "re-interpreted." Preachers in every era create their own pastiches from bits and pieces of scripture or whatever other 'inspirations" they have. I'm not sure how big a thing that particular trope is across Christianity as a whole or even evangelicalism as a whole. It's just one stroke on a pretty big canvas. I suppose it's because of their political cohesion in the US, but US evangelicals get far too much credit for speaking for all of Christianity, of which they are only a small part.

the use of the word 'rapture' come from the translation of the Latin (or maybe even the greek) for the word 'taken=raptus'. In english we see this root in the word "rapt" as in "rapt attention" or 'raptor' for bird of prey. It always bears repeating that none of the Bible was written in English! Not a single English word does or doesn't appear there.

I think Thomas Dolby tried that,

What is frustrating about the LasVegas incident being immediately, inextricably and wrongly linked to NOLA is that a situation where a man who served with distinction for something like 20yrs, and who was probably suffering PTSD, CTE or some other service related impact, is going to be swept under the rug with none of the issues implied aired.

I wouldn't say invented - re-interpreted perhaps. There are multiple allusions in the NT to those still alive "at the last trumpet" being converted or taken up into immortal from - 1 Thess 4:17 being maybe the closest image to the evangelical trope.