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.

Who wants proven innocent blacks executed anyway because, based solely on their skin color, he believes "they mugged someone"? Mr Don Trump- Trumpublican

Who wants to shove more "thugs" (his word for blacks) in prison for longer sentences? Mr Don Trump-Trumpublican

Who complained loudly that the Biden crime bill didn't lock up enough blacks for long enough? Mr Don Trump-Trumpublican

Who wants to execute way more "thugs" (blacks), but wants something less "comfortable" than lethal injection (like slow public hangings)? Mr Don Trump-Trumpublican

Who thinks white supremacists, treasonous confederates, and neo Nazis are "good people" who shouldn't serve time for rioting and attacking peaceful anti-racism protesters? Mr Don Trump-Trumpublican

Who still holds these beliefs and has never once apologized for them? Mr Don Trump-Trumpublican

You are so dishonest and desperate.

The way it's presented here, yes, his own words are edited and selected with other words/statements omitted to create right wing propaganda. Where are the parts where he admits he was wrong and apologized over and over?

How about Trump's own words, and Trump's own position then. He said the Clinton/Biden crime bill was way too soft and lenient. Here's a taste from Trump's book....

"The perpetrator is never a victim. He’s nothing more than a predator. (pages 93-94).

A life is a life, and if you criminally take an innocent life, you’d better be prepared to forfeit your own. My only complaint is that lethal injection is too comfortable a way to go. (pages 102-103).

Criminals are often returned to society because of forgiving judges. This has to stop. We need to hold judges more accountable… The rest of us need to rethink prisons and punishment. The next time you hear someone saying there are too many people in prison, ask them how many thugs they’re willing to relocate to their neighborhood. The answer: None. (pages 106-107)."

If that doesn’t sound like support for mass incarceration and the death penalty with little chance for criminal justice reform in sentencing, I’m not sure what does.

https://observer.com/2019/06/trump-crime-2000-book-biden-1994-crime-bill/

How about the Central Park 5? Trump paid for adds calling for the death penalty for these wrongly accused boys. Despite DNA evidence and a confession by the real rapist and restitution from the state in the $40000000 range Trump STILL insists they're guilty of something (he doesn't know what they did, but they're definitely guilty) and deserve the death penalty.....clearly forgetting he's bragged about doing what they were wrongly accused of....sexual assault.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/19/what-trump-has-said-central-park-five/1501321001/

Biden has admitted his position was wrong, and repeatedly apologized. Trump has NEVER done that, even about calling for the death penalty for the proven innocent.

*facepalm. You still don't understand that some people have a longer memory than a gnat, and we can recall that no matter the topic, Trump's position was worse than Democrats at the time, and his current position is worse than their current position.
*D'Oh*

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If there's irrefutable evidence that a suspect is guilty, a trial is an utter waste of time and taxpayer money. Executions themselves don't have to be expensive either. Get rid of death row, get rid of fancy lethal injections. Just break the criminal's neck and dump him in a hole or incinerate him. That would be far, far cheaper than providing him with food, shelter, medical care, etc, for the duration of his sentence.

The reliability of our judiciary system is another matter entirely and separate from the matter of punishment. It's definitely flawed and would need to be reworked before enacting any of the changes I've proposed.

Good points, Redsky.

However, there hasn't been nearly enough research on the effects of rehabilitation to claim that it consistently reduces recidivism. You mention Scandinavian countries in particular. How many of those rehabilitated prisoners were guilty of violent crimes? If you want to reduce recidivism, the death penalty will offer guaranteed results.

As for the U.S.'s murder rates, they aren't the highest among first-world countries. Higher than European countries, sure, but Europe is tiny. Russia is more comparable to the size of the U.S. and it has almost double the murder rate. China claims to have a 1.0 but I'd question the reliability of any data provided by that government.

I'm also pretty sure that most criminals recognize the severity of their crimes. If they aren't insane, they'll know that jaywalking will result in a far lesser penalty than murder. What it comes down to is risk versus reward. If breaking the law is the most convenient way of getting what they want and the likelihood of them getting caught is low, they'll break the law. That's rational behavior. It's the reason why people people slow down when they see a cop on the freeway instead of speeding like they would normally do. It's the reason why people won't hesitate to download a pirated movie but would think twice before trying to steal a movie from Best Buy. If someone wants to rob a liquor store and they see a cop inside, they will most likely not rob that particular liquor store. Not all criminals are psychotic murderers. On the contrary, most criminals are perfectly sane and break the law on a regular basis. They just make sure that the risks are low enough so they don't get caught.

Severe penalties mean nothing if they aren't enforced and increasing surveillance increases the likelihood of enforcement. Increasing surveillance wouldn't be cheap but then, rehabilitating criminals isn't cheap either. Getting rid of the prison system entirely and replacing it with efficient executions (nothing overly elaborate like lethal injections) would cut costs dramatically and allow for greatly expanded surveillance and enforcement, in addition to dramatically increasing the risk for any given crime. If the penalty for speeding was death and there were more cops patrolling the roads and freeways, I guarantee 99.9% of drivers would stop speeding. There's no hard data for this, of course, but that's because no country has ever attempted it.

Venezuela currently has over ten times the murder rate of the U.S. It was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty. Now, the country is riddled with corruption. Laws have no meaning because they are not enforced so criminals do whatever they want without fear of reprisal.

I dunno about any need for a sarcasm tag here -- I think if I was on death row and I could choose the method of my own execution, "death by large quantity of explosives" sounds pretty good.

Guillotine and hanging might be lowest on my list. Electric chair not much better. Lethal injection a bit higher. I think if I could make my own suggestions, I'd ask for cannon / howitzer aimed at my head. Barring that, I guess I'd order "the Cobain" -- shotgun to the brain. Basically, I figure that the more thorough and quick, the better.

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Putting someone in prison isn't harsh enough. There should be a zero tolerance policy with automatic death penalty, which would need to be carried out efficiently. No more prisoners sitting on death row for years. No more ridiculously expensive lethal injections. If someone commits a crime and there's sufficient evidence of their guilt, they are killed quickly (broken neck, slit throat, cattle spike into the head, etc) and cremated. Boom, no more overpopulated prisons and no more wasted taxpayer money on feeding and sheltering criminals who will likely break the law again as soon as they are released.

Enforcing the law is always the trickiest part, since we don't have constant surveillance of every citizen. Therefore, in the absence of surveillance, we have to rely on fear. There's a reason why people don't think twice about speeding, jaywalking or littering. Not only are they very unlikely to get caught, the penalty when they do get caught is negligible. If you gave the death penalty for the above crimes, I guarantee people would think twice before committing them.

As for Norway, they certainly do have a comfortable prison system. If I were to go on a shooting rampage, I would definitely do it in Norway because their prisons don't seem that bad. In fact, their prisons are probably nicer than the living conditions of most criminals. The point of punishment is to deter people from breaking the law in the first place, not make them happier and less likely to do so after the fact.

Naturally, I don't believe in capital punishment, but it seems to me their lethal injection procedure is too complicated for its own good. A massive opiate overdose (which could be delivered subQ or IM) would initially be euphoric, the person would fall asleep, stop breathing and then die of asphyxiation. There are caveats, of course (like they might not actually die and just end up severely brain-damaged from lack of oxygen), but these could be sorted with an additional injection of something more directly lethal once they were unconscious.

When it comes down to it, though, there really isn't a "humane" way to kill someone. Perhaps more or less "humane" ways, but it's still well down the "humane" spectrum.

Anyways, capital punishment seems to be more about vengeance than justice or problem solving. Also, given that it's not possible to undo, and the embarrassingly large number of cases overturned by DNA evidence as of late, it's just not worth it. People that truly are irredeemable psychopaths should just be given a lifetime sentence with no chance of parole. This wouldn't be a problem if they would stop incarcerating drug users for stupid-long periods of time. Prison should be for people incapable of living in society without causing harm to others. That's a case of mental illness, and should be treated as such.

Privatized prisons wouldn't like that, but if you eliminated all the incarcerated people who could be redeemable with the right treatment, we could direct our resources to maintaining and attempting to treat the truly criminally insane.

Bit of a rant, but the system seems to be broken and getting more broken all the time.

A lot of questions here..I think I can answer a few of them by going back to the beginning..

When God created the world, it was perfect. There was no sin, and no evil. Man and God dwelled together in perfect fellowship. Mans only job was to tend the garden, and populate the world. They also had one rule, which was not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

What does the fruit of that tree represent? Well, it's important to understand that up until that point, Adam and Eve had no innate knowledge of good and evil. They were created in innocence and purity. They were not, however, totally ignorant to the concept. They knew two basic things about good and evil. One, that God is good. Two, that eating the fruit was evil, and would lead to death.

So, what the fruit represents is knowledge, specifically knowledge about right and wrong that only God had. The reason that God withheld that knowledge from them is the same reason we don't tell our children everything that goes on in the world. At that point, Adam and Eve were completely reliant on God to know anything at all. I believe because He wanted to mold them in His own particular way. Having that knowledge for themselves would mean they would lose their innocence and start making their own decisions independent from God.

But He had to offer them at least one choice. So, why did He offer them that choice? For the simple reason of free will. If God had simply led them by the nose and caused them to love Him, they would be nothing more than robots. He had to offer them the honest choice to reject Him to be able to form a meaningful relationships with them. God offered them the choice between His will, and self-will.

So, no, these weren't random rules. There is a deeper wisdom here than is apparent from a superficial study of the text. Neither were they set up for a fall..it was their choice, freely made. God gave them enough information to make an informed decision. God is the responsible for the fact of freedom but we are responsible for our acts of freedom.

As far as the moral outrage going on here, I can understand where you're coming from. Who can get behind stoning? Jesus actually stopped the jews from stoning a woman, as someone pointed out. However, this is all very situational. If the text said they killed him by lethal injection, would you admit that God is righteous? None of this is about the way the man died. It's about whether God has the right to take someones life for disobeying His commands. I've already made the argument about why sin is serious enough to warrant such a punishment, but so far no one has addressed it.

God could have killed Adam and Eve and wiped the slate clean, but He didn't. God isn't interested in killing people. He is interested in saving people, which is why He sent His Son. He didn't leave us without a way to be forgiven, and He didn't with the jews either. The man was punished for his crime, but it doesn't mean that he went to hell.

Think about it this way..if life is a gift from God, and it is only through His efforts that you're drawing breath right now , and your purpose here is part of His plan, then why doesn't God have that right? Since it's up to Him where we're born, then the same goes for when we die.

Someone mentioned that the deterrence didn't work, because people still sinned. To which I ask, how do you know how much worse it could have been? Take a look at this study to see why its a valid theory:

http://www.inquisitr.com/262882/believing-in-hell-equals-lower-crime-rate-study/

As I said, the quote is my own, from another video on the subject.

As for the toxicity of ammonia, here is a link to the Health Effects portion of the CDC's Toxicological Profile for Ammonia.

Lots to read, but basically it shows that, except in huge doses of concentrated ammonia, ammonia is readily converted by the liver into urea (hence the ammonia smell of urine). Ingesting ammonia in quantities that are harmful (though still not fatal) causes burns, and ulceration of the mouth. Obviously if there was that much in the food, there would be a problem.

The report points out, "In a study of volunteers, ingestion of a single ammonium chloride tablet (approximately 15 mg NH4+/kg/day) led to a small transient increase (33% above fasting levels) in arterial blood concentrations of ammonium ion in 11 out of 20 subjects (Conn 1972); no change was noted in the remaining nine subjects in this group.[...]These data indicate that ingested ammonia is readily absorbed from the digestive tract and that the liver plays a large role in removing it from the blood (Conn 1972).



Basically, the FDA allows the use of ammonia to sterilize food products because, 1. the quantities needed to harm a human would cause said humans not to eat the products and 2. being naturally occurring, and necessary for life (for the provision of nitrogen for amino acid synthesis), the ingestion of ammonia in these quantities has no long-term health effects.

I'm not trying to argue that eating that pink goo is good for you - but the obsession with the ammonia is the wrong approach to attacking it. Phosphorus, sodium, potassium, magnesium, etc. are also poisonous in the right quantities, and they are also all necessary for human life.

If there is any common thread to my rants here on the sift, it's that people attacking the wrong subject, regardless of their intentions, makes them look stupid and reduces their credibility to those of us who care to know the truth. I completely agree with Maher's point that the republicans just attack anything the liberals support, but when he makes that point using misleading/wrong information, he's just as bad as them.>> ^Yogi:

>> ^Skeeve:
While I don't disagree with Maher's point, I'm getting really sick of people screaming about the ammonia used to treat the pink goo that is turned into chicken nuggets. As I said regarding another video:
"ammonia is a natural chemical that is necessary for human life. The amount of ammonia one would have to ingest to be harmful to a human is huge, and actually ingesting that much would be unthinkable because of the horrendous taste it would impart to the food."

This is like seeing someone sprinkle some sodium-free salt on their food and saying, "OMG that's potassium chloride! That's the lethal chemical in a lethal injection! That's going to kill you!!"
People just don't seem to care that a lot of chemicals that are popularly considered "toxic" are necessary for life or require unfathomably large doses to be harmful.

Where the hell is that quote from and is there any truth to it is what needs to be asked. To me that sounds like something a PR person would say, like in that video about Global Warming where they made the point that "CO2 is natural".
You've got more to answer for Skeeve and if you don't I'm bidding you a hearty GOOD DAY To You Sir!

>> ^Skeeve:

While I don't disagree with Maher's point, I'm getting really sick of people screaming about the ammonia used to treat the pink goo that is turned into chicken nuggets. As I said regarding another video:
"ammonia is a natural chemical that is necessary for human life. The amount of ammonia one would have to ingest to be harmful to a human is huge, and actually ingesting that much would be unthinkable because of the horrendous taste it would impart to the food."

This is like seeing someone sprinkle some sodium-free salt on their food and saying, "OMG that's potassium chloride! That's the lethal chemical in a lethal injection! That's going to kill you!!"
People just don't seem to care that a lot of chemicals that are popularly considered "toxic" are necessary for life or require unfathomably large doses to be harmful.


Where the hell is that quote from and is there any truth to it is what needs to be asked. To me that sounds like something a PR person would say, like in that video about Global Warming where they made the point that "CO2 is natural".

You've got more to answer for Skeeve and if you don't I'm bidding you a hearty GOOD DAY To You Sir!

While I don't disagree with Maher's point, I'm getting really sick of people screaming about the ammonia used to treat the pink goo that is turned into chicken nuggets. As I said regarding another video:

"ammonia is a natural chemical that is necessary for human life. The amount of ammonia one would have to ingest to be harmful to a human is huge, and actually ingesting that much would be unthinkable because of the horrendous taste it would impart to the food."


This is like seeing someone sprinkle some sodium-free salt on their food and saying, "OMG that's potassium chloride! That's the lethal chemical in a lethal injection! That's going to kill you!!"

People just don't seem to care that a lot of chemicals that are popularly considered "toxic" are necessary for life or require unfathomably large doses to be harmful.