1) what part of that is a joke?
2) not all Cons are racists, but almost all racists are Cons.
3) All cons may not be blatant racists, but they all are willing to stand with blatant lifelong racists and support them and are willing and eager to support blatantly racist policies if the racists will support their candidates. You know a man by the company he keeps.
4) I rented 1/3 of an acre with utilities in California for $250 for 7+ years, when estimated rent would be up to $1500+Utilities, in order to give a needy person a home. After 7 years I raised rent to $300, 1/5 market value. Keep in mind my wife and I have lived on $30k a year +- for decades so she can work at a non profit blood bank helping the community. We could have used the money. Kindness isn’t monopolized by any one side/group, but it’s more rare from cons., as this video demonstrates.
5) if your siblings can’t afford to be that generous, you certainly shouldn’t force them to sell at that discount, and you should not take a dime. You control the estate, but you have a responsibility to distribute it evenly and fully, not give it away, not donate it to an elderly couple. You will ruin your family and your father’s legacy and they will be right to be mad at you for stealing their inheritance. Maybe offer it for $75k and take nothing yourself if you want to make a gift of it, absolutely don’t sell it at a discount without everyone’s agreement in advance. Trust me, I’ve been there.
6) are elderly people who need discounted rent really going to have $55k to buy even a discounted house? No bank would loan them money, they can’t pay it back. Is that a real offer?

Your video, 3 Men Help Elderly Couple Into Car in Touching Moment, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Really, we have her because she's just trouble. An elderly couple had her as a small kitten, and she would stalk and viciously attack them, nearly toppling the man repeatedly, and they had to get rid of her for safety.
I didn't help by play fighting with her as a kitten either.
Yeah, there's no stopping the offending behavior at this point. I've tried for years to no avail. She also seems to think I'm nuts and I just go off on her for no reason....clearly attacking me is long standing accepted behavior, so what's my problem?

Your video, Elderly couple run into a cloud of flies., has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

@Darkhand, the problem is that the police already said: "We can find no reason to arrest or charge Zimmerman." That's the issue that started the whole thing. The talk about racism and gun laws and bruises is all incidental to the fact that the shooting came to light specifically because the prosecutor had no job to do. The whole thing was ready to be closed until enough people complained that the Dept. of Justice got involved.
Now it looks like Zimmerman is going to have a trial, and it's all thanks to the fact that people, who were not a part of the criminal justice system, were arguing over the specifics of the case. The courts might never have node anything if the details weren't driving people crazy.


I agree with you on that. I'm glad public pressure is helping to ensure that justice is served. What I'm saying is after it reached the national stage the anger could have been scaled back a bit. People putting out prices on his head and that elderly couples life was put in danger because of irrational people.

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

>> ^rougy:
That's pretty messed up. Something doesn't seem right there.


I agree. The State of Texas should secede so it can spare its citizens from the abuses of the State of Texas.

There was also a cartoon on this very subject. It was about an elderly couple living in the countryside and their preparations for the bomb aswell as their reactions and behaviour after it's been dropped. If you find it, please let me know and you'll get yourself another upvote!

From M.I.T.'s The Tech publication:



THE SECULAR CASE AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE

Adam Kolasinksi

Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason to grant them the costly benefits of marriage.

The Tech, Volume 124, Number 5
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

The debate over whether the state ought to recognize gay marriages has thus far focused on the issue as one of civil rights. Such a treatment is erroneous because state recognition of marriage is not a universal right. States regulate marriage in many ways besides denying men the right to marry men, and women the right to marry women. Roughly half of all states prohibit first cousins from marrying, and all prohibit marriage of closer blood relatives, even if the individuals being married are sterile. In all states, it is illegal to attempt to marry more than one person, or even to pass off more than one person as one's spouse. Some states restrict the marriage of people suffering from syphilis or other venereal diseases. Homosexuals, therefore, are not the only people to be denied the right to marry the person of their choosing.

I do not claim that all of these other types of couples restricted from marrying are equivalent to homosexual couples. I only bring them up to illustrate that marriage is heavily regulated, and for good reason. When a state recognizes a marriage, it bestows upon the couple certain benefits which are costly to both the state and other individuals. Collecting a deceased spouse's social security, claiming an extra tax exemption for a spouse, and having the right to be covered under a spouse's health insurance policy are just a few examples of the costly benefits associated with marriage. In a sense, a married couple receives a subsidy. Why? Because a marriage between to unrelated heterosexuals is likely to result in a family with children, and propagation of society is a compelling state interest. For this reason, states have, in varying degrees, restricted from marriage couples unlikely to produce children.

Granted, these restrictions are not absolute. A small minority of married couples are infertile. However, excluding sterile couples from marriage, in all but the most obvious cases such as those of blood relatives, would be costly. Few people who are sterile know it, and fertility tests are too expensive and burdensome to mandate. One might argue that the exclusion of blood relatives from marriage is only necessary to prevent the conception of genetically defective children, but blood relatives cannot marry even if they undergo sterilization. Some couples who marry plan not to have children, but without mind-reaching technology, excluding them is impossible. Elderly couples can marry, but such cases are so rare that it is simply not worth the effort to restrict them. The marriage laws, therefore, ensure, albeit imperfectly, that the vast majority of couples who do get the benefits of marriage are those who bear children.

Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.

One may argue that lesbians are capable of procreating via artificial insemination, so the state does have an interest in recognizing lesbian marriages, but a lesbian's sexual relationship, committed or not, has no bearing on her ability to reproduce. Perhaps it may serve a state interest to recognize gay marriages to make it easier for gay couples to adopt. However, there is ample evidence (see, for example, David Popenoe's Life Without Father) that children need both a male and female parent for proper development. Unfortunately, small sample sizes and other methodological problems make it impossible to draw conclusions from studies that directly examine the effects of gay parenting. However, the empirically verified common wisdom about the importance of a mother and father in a child's development should give advocates of gay adoption pause. The differences between men and women extend beyond anatomy, so it is essential for a child to be nurtured by parents of both sexes if a child is to learn to function in a society made up of both sexes. Is it wise to have a scoial policy that encourages family arrangements that deny children such essentials? Gays are not necessarily bad parents, nor will they necessarily make their children gay, but they cannot provide a set of parents that includes both a male and a female.

Some have compared the prohibition of homosexual marriage to the prohibition of interracial marriage. This analogy fails because fertility does not depend on race, making race irrelevant to the state's interest in marriage. By contrast, homosexuality is highly relevant because it precludes procreation.

Some argue that homosexual marriages serve a state interest because they enable gays to live in committed relationships. However, there is nothing stopping homosexuals from living in such relationships today. Advocates of gay marriage claim gay couples need marriage in order to have hospital visitation and inheritance rights, but they can easily obtain these rights by writing a living will and having each partner designate the other as trustee and heir. There is nothing stopping gay couples from signing a joint lease or owning a house jointly, as many single straight people do with roommates. The only benefits of marriage from which homosexual couples are restricted are those that are costly to the state and society.

Some argue that the link between marriage and procreation is not as strong as it once was, and they are correct. Until recently, the primary purpose of marriage, in every society around the world, has been procreation. In the 20th century, Western societies have downplayed the procreative aspect of marriage, much to our detriment. As a result, the happiness of the parties to the marriage, rather than the good of the children or the social order, has become its primary end, with disastrous consequences. When married persons care more about themselves than their responsibilities to their children and society, they become more willing to abandon these responsibilities, leading to broken homes, a plummeting birthrate, and countless other social pathologies that have become rampant over the last 40 years. Homosexual marriage is not the cause for any of these pathologies, but it will exacerbate them, as the granting of marital benefits to a category of sexual relationships that are necessarily sterile can only widen the separation between marriage and procreation.

The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage. If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis cant it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction that love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos.

Adam Kolasinski is a doctoral student in financial economics.

I admit it - I downvoted.

You pasted the wrong description.

Instead of pasting the description for "#7. - Listen Up" you pasted the description for "#9. My Lil' Reminder".

Here it is:

Listen Up, a hearing aid for people who can't admit they need a hearing aid, has the added bonus of endowing users with super-hearing so that they can eavesdrop and generally hear things they aren't supposed to.

Hey, that's the My Lil' Reminder chick. The poor dear must have tried playing back her audio recordings only to discover that she was going deaf, too.

The hyperbole:
It starts with the old guy listening to the TV and then his radio too loud, then getting totally owned by his harpy of a wife. He takes it surprisingly well (his grin is slightly maniacal), perhaps because he couldn't hear what she was saying.

Then the whole thing strays into the reprehensible, when it boasts that you can eavesdrop on people's private conversations from "Up to 100 feet away."

Then there's a shot of an elderly couple using it in church. We found it weird that they would market their product to both eavesdroppers and church-goers in the same ad. But then isn't God the biggest spy there is?

The reality:
The false advertising is blatant. For example, the guy at the football game can apparently hear the quarterback call plays in the huddle from the stands. Unless the Listen Up is capable of some fancy Fourier analysis for isolating specific sounds, and you can be sure that it is not, then he would bleed from the ears due to amplified crowd noise before ever hearing a single call. The only reason his ears aren't bleeding is because, as the customer reviews can tell you, the piece of crap doesn't work:

"But the next minute or next day or next month it could have been. We are talking criminals here. Since when do they deserve any rights at all? They're human? No. They're animals. When they turn their backs on the law the law should turn its back on them."

woah, now. They stole a bag of valuables and would have made the robbery-victims feel less safe in their own home... its not like they kidnapped a child, or murdered an elderly couple, or stole thousands of people's pensions ENRON-style.

I got a speeding ticket a few months back; should the cop have just pulled me over, told me to dig my own grave and offed me right there? or would other drivers have been in the right to aim a gun out their car window as I passed them and tried to shoot out my tires if I were speeding?