I'm from Texas. I support Abortion. No contraceptive is 100% effective, not even if you combine them. If you don't understand that, study how percentages work.

Secondly, kids are hormonally driven creatures. They are literally under the influence of natural chemicals driving them to procreate.

Not every school or parent teaches them about contraceptives. In fact, you will find most 'Christians" only support abstinence. This is the equivalent of telling a chemically dependent addict to "Just Say No!" How well did that work in the drug war back in the day? (Hint: However, despite DARE's bold claims, research has shown that the program has failed spectacularly.)

Third, the people who are most affected by this new law are the people that can least afford the better contraceptives or having a child in a non-stable family environment. This won't bother a middle class or rich family at all, they can just send the kid off to an "aunt" in another state until the issue is resolved. Those kids from poor families will just be forced to have the kid and likely it will ruin their lives. This doesn't even take into account that the new law doesn't have ANY exceptions for rape or incest.

Fourth, the USA was founded on religious freedom. In other words, you get to believe what you want and others get to do the same. This means that if a religious person tells another person that something they are doing is forbidden due to morality contained in their religion, that other person can tell you to fuck right off. Church and State are supposed to be separate, but the Christian right think they should be able to legislate their religious ideas on others. Do you not see the hypocrisy here?

I'm nominally a conservative. Sadly that means that I get lumped in with you ultra far right wackos that want to turn the USA into a religious state like Iran or Afghanistan. I'm not leaving my home state because some religious nut jobs think it is OK to kill adults by lethal injection but that it is BAD to kill some cells that are multiplying.

Btw, the cardiac activity detected on ultrasound at six weeks is not a true heartbeat. It results from electrical activity, but the valves of the heart have not yet formed. And the sound does not indicate the pregnancy is viable. Women typically don't notice they are pregnant until they miss a period. So if they are unlucky, they may already be close to four weeks pregnant. That leaves them two weeks to confirm it with a doctor, since home tests are not 100%, get together money for the abortion, find a clinic, and schedule an appointment that falls within the remaining time period. Since this law will cause even more clinics to close in Texas, you can add travel and patient backlog to the time. A teen could do everything right and still miss out on the lottery for an appointment, dramatically changing their life for years.

But at least some smug religious person can sip their coffee and be proud they enforced their morality on some evil women that dared sleep around out of wedlock.

Such sceneic route, now but a vastness of devastation.

When we can just tone the down the incessant over consumption for the sake of driving up "economic growth" and not do a thing for the environment and concentrate of quality-of-life?

D’oh! Numbers are out….from Trump’s first to last month in office, GDP raised 1.6% per year, the worst since Hover in the Great Depression. So much for being an economic genius, he’s literally the worst on the economy in living history.

How many more ways will he be determined to have been literally the worst? Already judged the worst by lack of leadership, abundance of division, worst economically, worst at public health, worst at trade deals, worst on the environment, worst at telling the truth, worst at civility, worst/most criminal convictions of any administration, …..what’s left?

https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-pay-1-million-blind-passenger-arbitration-discrimination-ada-2021-4?amp
> Uber employees who investigated possible incidents of discrimination were "trained ... to coach drivers to find non-discriminatory reasons for ride denials" and even to "'advocate' to keep drivers on the platform despite discrimination complaints."

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-uber-lawsuit-cruising-cap-20190920-5uvfu3q6czgyndcxbbgcxite74-story.html

Fuck UBER! deplorable and despicable company! Not just what was mentioned in this video, but also everything their CEO and management have done, encourage drug use, creating environment which tolerates and encourages sexual harassment, doxing reporters, doxing victims of rape by uber drivers, creating software to spy on customers, drivers, celebreties, gov't officials, drivers of competing services, etc etc etc

Why does James May (or anyone else for that matter) have a
£100k car standing parked for months? A: hes got too much money and cars, thats why. its obscene. if he doesnt drive the fucking thing, sell it, rent it out or better yet, loan it out to someone in need. he'll be helping someone, saving the environment, and get rid of his stupid battery problem, which, if he can afford to have a tesla sitting unused and charged in a garage, he could afford a mechanic to fix for him.

The top gear assholes succeeds to disappoint again, like the time they faked problems with the tesla roadster to give it a thumbs down.

Fuck off , James May.

this mask isnt for stopping the spread of infection. its for training in low oxygen environments or at altitude, so you perform better when surrounded by more oxygen.

Yeah, bring a standard flat plastic comb when you're in environments like that. A lot easier to get them out that way.

looked "mostly peaceful" to me - why is this so abhorrent when burning of city centers and attacking municipal buildings is considered acceptable protest?

They are both incredibly wrong and sanctimoniously defending one while disparaging the other only adds fuel to the decisiveness that permeates our political environment.

I think a good thing to point out in the astronaut example is how many people got the job who WEREN'T hard working, in line with what @vil says, and in general no hard work + luck doesn't help you unless it's a no competition environment (like winning the lottery or being born to the right family/country).

These people risk their lives because you won't stop eating meat.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7 (they say less because they've lost faith in humanity. If they say no meat, then people will just give up and not listen.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49238749

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat-free-diet




....cue the excuses, ad hominens, and undermining of legitimate science. (I've heard it all before, I won't be reading them, I'm just here to remind you are putting these people in harms way for no good reason)

My youngest son lives a couple of miles from Bemidji along with my 6th grandchild, a girl. Drove up there about a month ago to see her for the first time in person. She is almost 2 years old. It was great to see her but with the pandemic it was a little heartbreaking because I couldn't hold her or squeeze her little feet.

I've been to Bemidji a few times. I used to do Over The Road Vehicle Testing for a company that is owned by Jack Roush back in 2013. One of the offices is at the Bemidji airport. We would drive the vehicle from Florida to that office for more testing in the cold environment then fly back to Florida after drop off. Sometimes we would have to drive another car back.

I loved that job. Got to see a lot of the country with that one, all expenses paid.

It's amusing that he would try and claim he's protecting the environment and national parks when he appointed a coal stooge to the head of the EPA and is trying to mine national monuments.

That's arguably an overreaction and the airline might kick both out.

Last year I went on a vacation, caught some nasty bug on the plane on both flights. An hour into the flight my nose starts running badly and eyes tearing up. Back to normal after a night's sleep.

Airplane interior are nasty anyway at the best of times. Germs & virus on the surface and recycled air environment. Mask should just be mandated.

Dumb-asses that believe in hoaxes & fake news that "masks cause brain damage" should be banded from clinics & hospitals. By their logic, since all nurses & doctors wear mask everyday at work, thus they're all brain-damaged zombies. And who would want to be treated by zombies huh?

One of the ways in which Martin Luther broke from the Catholic church was by not seeing marriage as sacramental: he wanted to be able to acknowledge marriage between non-Christians rather than just marriage between Christians. Thus, from the perspective of Protestant theology, it's not clear that the church should have much to do with marriage. (This was most succinctly summarised for me thus: have a civil wedding, and then come back to the church for potato salad and a party.)

What about the civil arrangement, then? For me, the clearest argument for a non-paternalistic state granting some people preferable treatment (e.g. untaxed inheritance, etc.) is that those people are reducing the burden on the state somehow. In the 'traditional marriage', they do this partly by providing (on average) a more stable environment in which to raise children (thus, raising somehow more productive - on average - citizens for the state), and partly by caring for each other in their old age (thus, saving the state costs). From this point of view, whether or not they have sex, on whatever basis, with each other is irrelevant: an adult son living with and caring for his elderly mother is saving the state in the same way that an wife caring for her husband is. Thus, when France introduced its 'pacte civil', I thought that they missed the opportunity to get right out of the bedroom.