Free Republic

The cause of the affliction is unknown, butt researchers think...

ROFLMAO!! I don't know whether "butt" instead of "but" was intentional, but I thought it was hilarious!

Bottom line: don’t talk to a witch doctor psycho-ologist.

Exactly! Beat me to it.

“many on Capitol Hill fear it could lead to a brain drain”

LOL! You mean the same "brains" that concocted the steaming pile of communist crap that IS the "Affordable Care Act" (a.k.a. - the Communist Affordable Care Act - CACA)? Sounds like "brains" we can not only afford to lose, but SHOULD lose.

Then there are the "brains" in Congress that think too many people on one end of Guam might "capsize" the island. I could go on.

It's typical arrogance on the part of the privileged, indoctrinated elitists who rule over us that obviously they are the "brains," and that the rest of us mere peons somehow cannot live without them and their brilliant central planning and hard left meddling in our lives.

Comments from last night's premiere postings on another thread...

All in all my wife & I liked it - really good story and character development actually, and good casting - especially Superman. I liked it a lot more than expected.

However, for a 2:28 minute movie they could have cut out at least 28 minutes of gratuitous property and building smashing and explosions, still had tons of such action left, and the movie would have lost nothing.

I swear if they'd smashed another couple dozen buildings more than the couple thousand they smashed throughout the movie, I would have lost it. Toward the end when they got tired of trashing all the cities on Earth and decided to take the fighting into orbit and start smashing satellites, I almost started laughing.

Regardless, a good movie overall and probably the best Superman movie yet. I'd recommend it.

I can’t find the link, but an article on Breitbart the other day talked about how a visit to a clergyman is a major plot point in the movie.

Yep, saw it last night. He goes to a minister in a church for advice. I'd forgotten about that part.

The majority of naysayers seem upset because Henry Cavill isn't Christopher Reeve...

Just saw the movie, and IMHO Henry Cavill was a WAY better Superman than Christopher Reeve. Thought he was really well cast.

I have to admit... I hate movies that are 90% action and 10% story... which is seemingly what Man Of Steel may be...

Just got back from seeing it with the wife. All in all we liked it - really good story and character development actually, and good casting - especially Superman. I liked it a lot more than expected.

However, for a 2:28 minute movie they could have cut out at least 28 minutes of gratuitous property and building smashing and explosions, still had tons of such action left, and the movie would have lost nothing.

I swear if they'd smashed another couple dozen buildings more than the couple thousand they smashed throughout the movie, I would have lost it. Toward the end when they got tired of trashing all the cities on Earth and decided to take the fighting into orbit and start smashing satellites, I almost started laughing.

Rosie O'Donnell is an actress. A little hair dye, and I think she'd be great for this part!

Suggs is infamous for claiming to have attended "Ball So Hard University." Now we know why he likes that so much.

He returned to the field after being injured last year, and basically "sucked" big time (no pun intended :). Hopefully he'll get cut soon and he can prance off into the sunset.

That was the goal - they didn’t want to join the Scouts, they wanted to destroy the Scouts.

Just as in the marriage issue - they don’t really want to get married, they want to destroy marriage.

I have come to totally agree with you on both counts. What's more, they're becoming wildly successful at incrementally destroying both at this point, as these two institutions continue to decay and move toward oblivion and irrelevance.

Just in case anyone was wondering how Robert Redford is looking these days, here's a recent photo...

Female bashing aside, I do have to wonder why there aren't more buxom, over-endowed female protagonists in the console role-playing, adventure and first person shooter type games. Especially considering the predominant young male audience, and the extent to which these main characters are graphically depicted on-screen in various outfits and such.

For instance, I know a lot of young guys build and level female characters in MMORPG games like WoW. The explanation goes something like, "well if I'm going to have to stare at my own character's @ss for hours on end, I'd like to have something decent to look at!"

ALGORE is full of S*$T

Exactly, which is why he's a "purveyor of the dirtiest underwear on Earth."

Prediction - it will be called the “stovepipe” or the “silo” by detractors, terms in the industry that have somewhat of a negative connotation implying proprietary, closed and/or difficult to expand architectures. Now it looks the part as well.

Congressman King reminds me of Dr. Frankenstein - complicit in the creation of a monster (the surveillance state) that he will defend to the death, all the while deluding himself into thinking that he and his fellow conspirators at violating our constitutional freedoms can somehow control it.

Per Snowden's interview, which is very believable on the face of it, there are no controls on many analysts who are free to delve into recorded data on the lives of anyone they feel like for whatever reason, including personal vendetta or whatever. I personally find this to be very believable. And anyone who thinks this alleged minimally supervised power wasn't being used in a nefarious way by the Chicago thugs in this regime on a daily basis is deluding themselves. All enabled by either delusional, monster-protecting dupes, or criminals (you pick), like King.

They just suddenly wouldn't come on anymore.

There were *tons* of Samsung TVs with this problem - plagued with a design defect and inferior parts in their power supply units. There are numerous DIY videos on youtube and how-to-fix-your-Samsung TV web sites showing you how to fix them simply by taking them apart and replacing a few defective caps.

I ended up fixing a 40" Samsung I had with this problem by replacing three 1000uF radial capacitors that had electrolytic leaking from them - rated at only 10V in a circuit that called for 12V-15V. Three new 25V rated parts from Radio Shack at $1.50 apiece, and it's been working good as new over the past couple years.

Granted, the fact that Samsung shipped SO MANY defective TVs with this problem is pathetic. But, at least it was easy to fix yourself if you had the inclination.

Obama campaigned against all of this, and Bush paid a huge political price for enacting much of it, but the over-reach of big government with these programs pales in comparison to anything that Bush/Cheney ever could have dreamed of...

Bush put this evil system in place after 9/11, starting the surveillance state in earnest, in effect opening Pandora's Box. Then along come the unscrupulous thugs from Chicago, and they've been like kids in candy store with the new toy Bush handed them, evidently ramping it up into an out of control, unsupervised monstrosity to be used for their own political gain.

BSA voted for organizational death - it’s time to accelerate the process now. Sooner or later, they’re done for as a viable organization. Might as well be sooner.

Hopefully Santa’s workshop & castle is transportable. At this rate it’ll be in warmer climes soon if not.

It helps us to know what to eat and how much and all that. We like being told...

Sorry, a logical thinking and free minded person is not going to accept the illogical leap of faith from "it helps us" to "we like being told." That's a complete paradigm shift, not just incrementalism.

I'm not a complete anarchist. In a modern non-agrarian society I don't trust full laissez-faire markets when it comes to very important things like buying food to feed my family. If my kid has a severe reaction to peanuts, I want to know which foods contain them. Same for aspartame in milk, added sugar or high fructose corn syrup, or other food ingredients someone in my family may be allergic to or need to avoid for whatever reasons we decide - not the government.

In terms of the legitimate functions of a limited government, food/beverage manufacturer mandates to provide information only on what is actually in the food & beverages my family buys and consumes is definitely on my list of legitimate functions. However, illogical leaps beyond pure information flow that allows free consumers to decide for themselves what food they want to buy, whether some idiot bureaucrat thinks it's good for you or not (could care less - that's for ME to decide), to instead "being told" or "must be warned" or "not allowed" or some other more onerous overstep of FDA/government power, is quite another thing.

...and that, folks, is how and why mind control works. Each step is a step in the process.

Extending the coverage of FDA mandated nutritional labels on food and beverages that we put into our bodies as consumers hardly seems like sinister incrementalism on par with gun control, creeping socialism, or what have you. Kind of an extreme comparison if you ask me.

Yeah it would be nice if food/beverage vendors supplied this information on their own, since it IS highly useful to many consumers/customers and would presumably provide a competitive edge at this point in time if vendors were to start removing it. But not much of an impact in this case, since vendors already print and apply labels to their products. The extra cost is a one time hit up front, to determine what's IN each of the products they make and sell to the public, which I sincerely hope they're aware of anyway and have good quality control over.

The perps. Idiot scumbag white guys for once.

What is a serving anyway?

I wish they'd just list the total number of calories, carbs, fat, etc., contained in the entire container/package the label is on. A "serving" is usually completely arbitrary and pointless anyway on these things, and doesn't seem to be normalized across like products.

Regardless, no matter whether it's a "serving" in a package that contains N servings, or the entire package, which you're going to consume 1/X of or whatever, you're going to have to do some math - if you care. Either multiplication based upon tiny pointless servings, or division based upon the entire container/package - to figure out what you're actually consuming if it matters.

Actually, I don’t have a problem with this at all. These labels are required on just about every other food item we ingest, so why not on alcoholic beverages? I’ve looked on a number of them for this kind of info, to support periodic runs on low-carb diets, and am always disappointed at not finding it. Nutrition info would be helpful for sure when you’re on a diet, for instance to know which drinks are lowest/highest in carbs or calories, alcohol content, etc.

One can of beer = 1/6 of a serving.

LOL! Good perspective.

The hood is infuriating ... it's completely unnecessary. It actually makes sense on a tablet (although even there it looks ugly and unfinished) ... but all the world is NOT a tablet. I use these bloody things for WORK. I usually have a dozen or so windows open at any given time ... the desktop makes sense, tiles that take over the entire display do not.

Yeah, I have a new Nokia Lumia 928 windows phone running WP8, and really like it & the metro interface.

But on a PC with a 24 inch monitor w/no touch screen that's too far away to touch anyway while sitting in a nice comfy chair, while using a mouse & keyboard - I DEFINITELY think NOT. Dumb as dirt. I recently bought 2 PCs mail order, and ordered both with Windows 7.

I don't doubt the underlying OS itself is an improvement, but a common default UI for both a PC vs. a small touch device is just stupid.

Perhaps dumber yet - where are the "Windows?" Isn't that the name of the OS after all? I still find the paradigm of having a virtual "desktop" with multiple sheets of resizable and stackable papers/windows on it to be highly useful when you have real work to do. Especially so when you have more than one big screen monitors to get real work done. Microsoft had a past product that launched all apps by default in full screen mode on a PC. It was called DOS. Now we're back to that again?

I sincerely hope Windows 8.1 reinstates the desktop/paper windows paradigm & features, re-enables desktop icons/shortcuts (don't care about the "Start" button), and ditches the default/forced giant (on a big monitor) kindergartener looking metro tiles for the PC platform. They make sense on my cell phone, but NOT on my PC.

It was a regrettable statement... I'm sure he wishes he could take it back. But, c'mon... it was said at a moment when "America" had just voted off two of his best performers..... the comment was directed at the process, and the voters.. not the country.

I've watched most of the shows this year and last. Adam and Blake are both terrific.

You're right - it was just an off-the-cuff reactive remark that has been totally blown out of proportion. The "country" had just decimated this team of 3 down to only 1 left, so he said he "hated" the general stated source of his team's destruction ("this country"). Kind of like when a friend or family member does or says something annoying, and some people might respond with "I hate you" in an instinctive, not-really-serious manner.

This being said, Sarah needed to go. Despite the potential you could hear in her voice, she always mangled every song to sound like some sort of deviant Alanis Morissette knock-off with hideous runs, trail-offs, mumblings and "stylish" on-purpose off-key notes in an attempt to sound "progressive." Despite the obvious potential, most of her performance were horrible from a singing standpoint.

Judith should have stuck around longer for sure, but frankly her performance the night before was not very good - all dancing/performing and very little melodic singing. Bad song choice. The "Voice" is supposed to be a singing competition after all, not a dancing & performance gimmick competition.

Wife & I will shortly be upgrading to the new WP8 Nokia Lumia 928 phones that just came out today from Verizon. They look pretty good, all things considered, and our best fit. Pretty much the same as a Lumia 920, which is AT&T only, but with a few minor improvements exclusive to Verizon.

The new path to effective prohibition.

I’m sorry, but while these apps will probably sell very well for those using iPads, they will not be “Microsoft Office killers”. The iPad will never replace desktop computers in the office, which is where the bulk of Microsoft Office is sold.

Agreed. To kill off MS Office, they'd have to infiltrate and begin to replace the huge PC desktop/laptop base throughout the corporate world. Sorry, but corporate IT groups are not going to replace their existing PC base with a bunch of proprietary Apple computers that cost 2X what open PCs cost, just so they can run some new Apple office suite.

My favorite...

This is classic. Smart @ss trouble maker monkey kid pushes his brother/sister in the river, mom scoops him/her right up, and dad pushes the trouble maker behind him as if to say "get out of here you idiot!" This is all very human like behavior and hilarious.

[Live Weather Channel reporter screaming into the microphone to be heard over the cicadas]: Category five Cicada Story Cynthia is still pounding the east coast or the fifth straight week. Trillions of cicadas have emerged from the earth to wreak their noisy vengeance upon the world.

Followed by a Weather Channel exclusive report on how this all affects the Obama Administration... This NBC-owned network is increasingly going political with garbage propaganda like this.

Obamao: We're going to have to pass some common sense reforms to protect Americans from these never-ending cicada plagues to put a stop to them once and for all. I've signed an executive order to authorize the creation of an insect exchange run by the new Insect & Cicada Kontrol (ICK) agency. The ICK agency czar will report directly to me as a new cabinet level position. Companies with cicadas on their property that threaten the innocent citizens in their communities can buy and exchange bug credits on our new government run exchange to fulfill their obligations to society. This new government investment will keep all our free American citizens safe from the thread of insect swarms in the future.

Currently , I use a Lumia 900 and the wife uses a Lumia 920.

I'm *finally* going to ditch the dumb phone and upgrade to a smart phone - just as soon as Verizon makes the Nokia Lumia 928 available. Supposedly a couple weeks out yet. It's a Windows Phone that's supposedly very similar to the 920, which gets excellent reviews.

All in all, I decided a WP8 based phone was the least of the evils in terms of Apple vs. Google vs. RIM vs. Microsoft, and probably my best fit.

I have a couple of iPods, including an iPod Touch, but that's it on the Apple front. Not an Apple fan, because I don't like the lib's favorite company, I've always found their products a bit feature-poor (designed for easy use, not power users), and mostly because they are HIDEOUSLY overpriced. Not a big fanboi bandwagon jumper either.

I've come to detest Google as a company - the worst of the pro-socialist uber-lib tech corps by far. I recently ditched all Chrome browser installs on my Windows PCs, and started using Bing as a search engine. From all indications the Android-based devices are the most CPU intensive and thus power/battery hungry, with the preponderance of Java based apps no doubt contributing to the problem. I do have both Kindle Fire & Kindle Fire HD tablets, which run Android, but they're Amazon-flavored & not full-blown Google spy-ware ridden devices (I hope anyway).

I have a Blackberry, which is standard issue where I work. It's functional for email, but blows for most everything else. Not a viable option for personal use IMHO.

So this leaves Windows phones. I've always had Windows PCs and have been fairly happy with them, so I'm hoping a Windows Phone will offer some advantages in terms of feature extension, file sharing and/or interfacing with them from a network or skydrive perspective - over an iPhone at least (since I don't own any overpriced Macs). I have a work-issued Windows XP laptop (soon to be upgraded to Win7). Plus, all 4 of my home PCs run Windows 7 (w/high end graphics for gaming), one of which I recently purchased from an on-line store that still allowed it to be configured with Win7 instead of Win8, which I skipped on for now. The Metro interface looks pretty good for a Windows phone or tablet, but I think it's a beyond stupid hard-to-unconfigure default UI for a PC with a mouse and huge monitor where I typically have multiple windows open at any given instant (not just 1 or 2). Maybe when Windows Blue (8.1) is released later this year I'll consider an upgrade on one of my home PCs to see how it is.

Here's the coverage map for this year's brood II (2).

Plus, the map for the much larger "great eastern brood" X (10) due again in 2021.

We get these things EVERY YEAR! So what is the B.S. about a 17 year cycle?

Check out the periodical cicada broods web page. It's really interesting. It shows the 12 active 17 year broods and the 4 active 13 year broods, and which cycle each is on. It includes which year each brood comes out, how many, and a map of where each cyclical brood pops up. The ones popping up this year are brood II (2).

This won’t be the Baltimore one. We had them in 1987 and 2004. Won’t have them again until 2021.

Yeah, that's brood X (10), a.k.a. the "great eastern brood," and in the MD area it's WAY bigger than brood II (2) this year. I still vividly remember brood 10 from 1970 when I was in elementary school - really scary at that time - and from 1987. I moved from central to northern MD later, and in 2004 there were only a few pockets of brood 10 in this area. I don't really remember any other significant broods besides brood 10 in MD - the *really* big one - which as you say isn't due again until 2021.

“Islam is attractive to women that the feminist movement left behind,” says Haddad.

More like women with no sense of self worth, no self esteem, and/or no common sense. Otherwise, why convert to a "religion" where women are 2nd or 3rd class humans that are fundamentally the property of 1rst class men, like their dog or their goat.

Frank Luntz, the media-friendly Republican consultant and word wiz, told a group of college students this week that Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio are "problematic" for the GOP and partly responsible for the stark polarization within the nation's political discourse.

He's right, but not in the way he meant. Conservative radio and alternative new media IS problematic for the GOPe, which is not conservative at all. If it weren't for alt media sources like Limbaugh, Levin, etc., there wouldn't be any "polarization" because one entire pole would be missing. It would all be either hard left with the MSM and Democrats, or soft left with the GOPe. If this is "problematic" then we need more of it.

Another interesting phenomenon of physics is that if you look from outer space, you can tell where Michael Moore is by looking for the dent in the earth.

Here's another. Michael Moore is already dead. It's just that his mass is so great that he's warped space-time around him to such an extent that we perceive him at an earlier time when he still lived.

Plus, it IS nice to have actual resizable/stackable windows on an OS called "Windows," vs. full-screen or half-screen only apps w/o windows (i.e., Metro phone/tablet UI) that look like they were designed for kindergartners.

And another thing. I remember the last Microsoft operating system that had a default user interface (UI) that launched all new apps to be full screen with no window frame. It was called "DOS."

Windows 8 does the same thing, yet it is supposed to be an advancement somehow? Yeah the underlying OS itself is, but the UI is highly regressive.

Just bought a new mail-order desktop last week. I ordered it with Windows 7.

I'll consider an upgrade to Windows 8 sometime in the future only if they release a service pack update that natively supports an easily configurable alternative desktop-friendly UI, rather than the handheld Metro UI that I think is ludicrous for a desktop computer w/large monitor & mouse instead of touch screen.

Yeah, I know you can go through hard-to-find gyrations or install 3rd party apps on Windows 8 to get a decent desktop UI back again, but it's the principle of the thing. Given that MS has basically said "screw you" to desktop users with their new OS, I say screw you back.

Plus, it IS nice to have actual resizable/stackable windows on an OS called "Windows," vs. full-screen or half-screen only apps w/o windows (i.e., Metro phone/tablet UI) that look like they were designed for kindergartners.

What an idiot RINO. Still kissing Obamao’s @ss instead of kicking it, like he should have been all along. Perennial loser.

Yeah, pretty funny. I just ordered a PC yesterday too from a mail order company I usually get them from. I configured it for Windows 7. I was glad to see that was still an option.

A touch screen oriented interface for a desktop machine I plan to use for gaming & internet access with a large monitor that I sit back from in a comfortable chair is the last thing I want, and the legacy desktop option or whatever they're calling it sounds like a kludge. I'll wait for Windows 9 or a new Windows 8 SP update, when they hopefully provide a decent user interface alternative as a built-in option, and get rid of those stupid default UI chiclet things designed for touch devices rather than desktops.

Sorry Cruella De Vil. You and your fellow demoncrat communists own this disaster.

The Boy Scouts of America needs to pull out of California. That sewer has been lost.

Yep. If they cave on this one, they might as well sign their own death warrant. I would never send a son of mine to be sodomized or indoctrinated by some known gay scout leader. A gay friendly BSA won't be long for this world.

I thought Anus in the Morning was long dead.

Malloy reminds me of a “jackass in a barn.”

The Devil took over my body.

I see. Well justice demands that worms take over his body next.

That was me, but instead of shooting me, why don't you just get your fellow Zep fan to order up a drone strike?

Well, obviously they were doing some reconnaissance first :). If you look closely, you'll see that John Paul Jones is holding a covert laser, getting ready to light up the target whilst feigning joviality with the One.