Though hyper edited, that was actually a very intelligent answer. Yes, defining someone as middle class is a little more complicated than merely taking your annual income. Higher education opportunities, which may be valued at tens or hundreds of thousands, also count.

You need to learn how to read a story. that is not what it said or implied.

The Republican party can only tale a back seat to Democrats on playing the race card.

Your 2005 article indicates:
"Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to one of the nation's largest black civil rights groups Thursday, saying Republicans had not done enough to court blacks in the past and had exploited racial strife to court white voters, particularly in the South."

Now where did it say Republican party courted racist for their vote. If that was the case They would have gotten Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson to join the Republican.

As you said "appealing to racists to boost their vote" and exploited racial strife are not the same.

The article went on to say:
"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

The root of the Southern Strategy"
"Mehlman's apology to the NAACP at the group's convention in Milwaukee marked the first time a top Republican Party leader has denounced the so-called Southern Strategy employed by Richard Nixon and other Republicans to peel away white voters in what was then the heavily Democratic South. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Republicans encouraged disaffected Southern white voters to vote Republican by blaming pro-civil rights Democrats for racial unrest and other racial problems.



To sum this up: Nixon Blamed Democrats for the racial mess of the mid late 60's in order to pull some white voters to switch from Democrat to Republican in order to gain votes.

And for that you call Republican Raciest??? Don't you really mean Democrats ?

After all Democrats were the south. Democrats kept the plantations. Democrats wanted to keep the salve system in place. Democrats started the KKK to keep blacks and whites from voting Republican.


I am sorry that if for some small amount to years that Republicans used race/ race baiting/ raciest to gain more Republican white votes is it is nothing to what Democrats have done. AT least they did not whip/ chain/ rape/ murder/ or lynch any one to gain or keep their vote.

Its true and YOU know it.

If ya wanna break the cycle Eric, you can always spend a weekend at ground zero in the Castro in San Fran-during the pride parade....OOOooops-43rd annual San Francisco Pride Celebration & Parade June 29-30 2013, you just missed your chance to get all man-kissy.

Because the Xbox 360 deal was pretty tolerable for it's time. Except for their ridiculous $50 annual fee to play peer-to-peer games online. . . Oh wait, Sony's doing that too now. Sony's just lucky that their dick move was completely overshadowed by Microsoft's incomparable dickery.

Well prepare to get irritated!!

During Tuesday's annual Webby Awards ceremony, GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) creator Steve Wilhite put to rest the question of the animated images' correct pronunciation. The simple answer: Much like the peanut butter brand, it's a soft "G."

http://www.realtechworld.com/gif-creator-sparks-outrage-by-revealing-that-its-pronounced-jif-inquirer/

Is this some annual crotch-rocket ride in Cali??

Soooooo...um....
So what?

People do this all the time. You can go right now and adopt a terminal dog from a shelter. My mother has had at least three, two with cancer, one of those with only 3 legs. Some people want to give a sick dog a comfortable life and every living creature deserves at least that. Still, not exactly material for an inspirational film, more like a nice footnote in your annual holiday card to the family.

If your great profound contribution to the world is showing empathy to a sick dog...then you live in a tiny world and you're more than likely oblivious to real suffering around you.


PS: I still upvoted because I'm probably just being cranky and taking it out on this video. Even though that music did make me want to smash things with my forehead until I pass out.

Around 5:45 Julian says that free-form strategy games cannot guarantee that the player will always have something interesting to do, and that, in his view at least, you couldn't get away with that sort of game anymore today.

Paradox Interactive with their Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis and Victoria franchises are still up and running. Hearts of Iron 3, in particular, seems more popular than ever, after the release of the third add-on, "Their Finest Hour". And if anything, HOI3 is even more of a sandbox than the original XCOM.

Similarly, Bohemia Interactive's Arma series as a comparable counterpart in the field of first person shooters is gaining massive popularity as well, even though it incorporates extensive "downtimes" for players.

You can't churn out annual iterations and expect AAA-rate numbers of sold copies, but the community is still large enough to warrent a couple of these franchises.

So we can't criticise Islam unless we live under a theocratic regime that doesn't allow us to criticise Islam?

Let me very clear. I believe that the vast majority of muslims (any figure would be a guess, but I'll go with at least 90%) are decent people who, deep down, are probably kinda embarrassed at some of the bullshit inherent in their religion (much as the majority of catholics are truly disgusted at their churchs handling of child rape cases).

But that does not stop me from criticising the ideology within the religion. This is not some hypothetical internet argument; the WHO estimates that 140 million girls have their genitals mutilated annually, most in the name of Islam. (I'm not even going to start on the socially accepted genital mutilation of males).

Finally, I take issue with the term "islamophobia", not because it's an *irrational* fear, but because it's a *fear*. I am not afraid of Islam. I object to parts of it on moral grounds.

So yeah, call me an "internet atheist" if you want. Unless you have some evidence to back up your specious little rant, I'm not interested.

"As of 2011, there is a 14 year waiting list for new memberships. The membership waiting list was re-opened in May 2012 after being closed for over a decade.[4] Corporate members pay an initiation fee of $27,500, and individual members pay $10,000 in addition to annual dues, which are about $6,100 or $3,500, respectively. Initiation and dues may change annually."

~wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_33 )

That link's actually a good read though, apparently you get a bunch of VIP stuff for being a VIP member, like free admission to the parks, valet parking, etc. So, if you have an extra 10 grand laying around annually, might be something to look at. /sarcasm.

Hey Stormsinger,

There are plenty of studies on how the diet affects heart and circulatory health. Here is a compilation of some of them:

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/105/7/893.full

They conclude:

The most important dietary recommendations are as follows:

Keep an energy balance, indicated by a body mass index below 25 kg/m2.

Consume <10% of energy from saturated fat.
Consume <2% of energy from trans fat.
Eat (fatty) fish at least once a week.

Eat ≥400 g of vegetables and fruits per day.

Limit salt consumption to <6 g/d.
If these recommendations are followed, coronary heart disease can be eliminated to a large extent in the population aged <70 years, and by implementing these recommendations at middle-age, there will be lower annual costs for medical care in older age.

The data continues to pour in that diet can prevent and reverse heart disease. To the extent people eat healthily, they can benefit from the truth those studies serve to illuminate.

You can do your own research if you really want to find the answer. From the research I've done, I've already established that the availability of guns does not guarantee a significant reduction in violent crime. If that were the case, DC's violent crime rate would be significantly lower than it is because they have very strict gun laws. I've also established that a ban on assault rifles would not have a significant impact on gun-related crime because the vast majority of gun-related crime is committed using pistols, not fully-automatic weapons. I've also established that the majority of guns used in gun-related crimes are obtained illegally, either stolen or obtained through unofficial means. The facts simply don't support the idea that banning assault rifles (or even all guns) would significantly reduce violent crime.

The current fixation on gun control is a purely reactionary response to recent shooting sprees (which comprise a negligible percentage of all gun violence). The only reason people care now is because these shooting sprees generally take place in middle and upper-class areas. Nobody cares when people get killed in poor areas, where the bulk of violent crime occurs.

I'm in no way a gun nut (I don't own nor plan to ever own any guns) but I'm not going to let my opinion of guns get in the way of facts. People who blindly believe that banning guns will solve all problems are just as bad as the NRA. Do your own research and don't ignore facts that contradict your own position. The FBI website is a great place to start, as they provide annual statistics on all crime in the U.S. and they don't have any reason to skew the numbers.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

In certain cases, this would cause an energy drain rather than boost. Infrared light is pretty much the electromagnetic form of radiant heat (thermal radiation). In many places in the world, it is usually the times of cold that more energy is used; as the heat deltas of a cold winter are much greater than the heat delta of a hot summer. So, heat from the sun, as sparse as it is in the winter, is still radiating into your house. Blocking it, and turning it into electrical energy, then turning that back into heat energy is most surely a loosing proposition. Depending on the needs of the user, this might inflict a greater cost than cost savings. So while there are times that blocking thermal radiation and turning into electrical energy would be of worth, it is a regional issue that has a lot to do with local climate swings and average annual temperature; the colder the average temperature, the more of a waste this could be.

A deep constitutional scholar such as yourself probably already knows this:

"For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”"

source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html