Posts made by Spintendo

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The RSA went from apartheid to gay marriage in just 10 years, an incredible achievement. Here in the USA that same process has taken much longer. That's because having the 14th amendment written is simply not enough. The process you must go through is to show harm, prove cause, and seek remedy.

Here in the USA, people cannot sue the government―only other people. So to enforce any amendment you must prove that you have been "harmed" by another person's actions. Where I live in California that opportunity came when our last governor started to enforce Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage which violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the amendment. Now this is why, as you mentioned in your post, it has taken so long: the people suing him and his successor must pass through three different court levels. Only when they pass the third level do they―and by extension all Americans―gain remedy. They might finish by July 2013.

Summer of 2012 was very busy with regards to legal action against DOMA, with two US District Courts ruling that Section 3 was unconstitutional. Now although they won both, the plaintiffs in both cases have asked the US Supreme Court to accept review.

One ruling was issued July 31st 2012 by the US District Court in Connecticut in the case of Pedersen v. Office of Personnel Management, et al., which was brought by several same-sex couples who were legally married under the laws of Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire. Although the plaintiffs won, on August 22nd 2012 they filed for a writ of certiorari in the US Supreme Court, arguing that the case merits consideration by the Supreme Court without further proceedings in the lower courts, most likely because an appeal by the government was inevitable. Because the Obama administration has opted not to defend DOMA, the case is being litigated on behalf of the federal government by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the US House of Representatives (BLAG), a group consisting of House Speaker John Boehner and 4 other house members.

On June 6th 2012, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York reached a similar decision in Windsor v US. Applying the same “rational basis” test used in Pedersen, the judge found that Section 3 of DOMA violates the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment. Windsor has been appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals; oral arguments were scheduled for September 27th 2012. In addition to Pedersen and Windsor, there are two other DOMA challenges with certiorari petitions pending before the US Supreme Court, which is expected to accept at least one of the cases for the term that begins October 2012. If that occurs, the Supreme Court could decide the issue sometime in 2013.1

1DOMA Update - Law Office of John S. Palmer - Bellevue, Seattle. Estate Planning, Family Law, Trusts, Guardianships, Probate and More - Law Office of John S. Palmer - Bellevue, Seattle. Accessed from web 1 Oct., 2012.  hxxp://www.palmerlegal.com/blog/2012/9/doma-update/

@leatherbear:

She is kind, she is smart, she is funny and she works hard promoting the arts."

Her ability to choose funeral service locations could use some polishing.

@underlvr:

After I seeded the new one, I then restarted all of my old torrents to keep them active.  This specific torrent had at least one other seeder at that time, so I stopped my seed, so that the other seeder(s) would receive the upload credit if anyone wanted the torrent.

It appears that this is exactly what later occurred ― namely that another user, perhaps even that last lone seeder you mentioned leaving when you stopped your seed, continued to "share" that very same file, albeit in "promoted" form. Owing to a haphazard handling of the file's death and eventual resurrection―coupled with the growing sense of detachment you experienced as your file continued to "live-on" without you―it was at this point that your altruism turned to indignation.

The zero-sum game of file sharing can create feelings of personal betrayal. But what you intended at first (for another to benefit) and what then later occured (others did benefit) are differences of circumstance, not substance. Sensing and accepting the idea of fairplay inherent in all file-sharing communities is essential for maintaining the more positive feelings of altruism that you already show in abundance.

Since politics is the art of the possible, it's interesting to imagine all the barriers and red tape that lawmakers are slow to traverse, when they could do so much more in an expeditious manner if they so desired. This must be due in some degree to the bias that lawmakers may have against other types of relationships. They may even believe that those types of relationships are wrong ― and unworthy of their fervent support.

If only they could open their hearts and their minds to the wonderful variety of relationships available to people, and do their best to make laws that instead of holding people back, set them free.

The good news: Hyaluronic-acid injections have been used safely in humans for over 25 years. The bad news: As with all experimental medical research procedures―including this one done in Korea―before any of the human trials began, this very same procedure was conducted in canine subjects. In any event, here are some photos from a 2003 study by the same individuals who released the study you mentioned (Effects of Penile Girth Enhancement using Injectable Hyaluronic Acid Gel).

The hyaluronic acid gel is injected subcutaneously about 1/3 of the way down from the tip, in a circular fashion (called the 'fan' injection technique).

This is a small-glans penis patient (a) pre-surgery, (b) during surgery immediately after surgery, and (d) 1 year post surgery.

This patient has iatrogenic small glans penis, and underwent penile girth enhancement by dermofat graft. A & B are presurgery dorsal and lateral views respectively. Note the indentations at the back of the penis head are no longer elevated, and the reduced skin folds disappear in the post-surgery dorsal and lateral (d) views.

Reference

Kim, J. J., Kwak, T. I., Jeon, B. G., Cheon, J. J., & Moon, D. G. (2003). Human glans penis augmentation using injectable hyaluronic acid gel. International Journal Of Impotence Research, 15(6), 439-443. Department of Urology, Korea University College of Medicine, Korea. doi:10.1038/sj.ijir.3901044

Kansas Law on Sodomy Stays on Books Despite a Cull
By A.G. SULZBERGER of The New York Times
January 20, 2012

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Gov. Sam Brownback created the Office of the Repealer to recommend the elimination of out-of-date, unreasonable and burdensome state laws that build up in any bureaucracy over time. For gay men and lesbians, there seemed one particularly obvious candidate: Kansas Statute 21-3505. That would be the “criminal sodomy” statute, which prohibits same-sex couples from engaging in oral or anal sex. The law was rendered unenforceable nearly a decade ago by a United States Supreme Court ruling, but it remains enshrined in the state’s legal code.

But on Friday, when Mr. Brownback, a conservative Republican, released a list of 51 laws to recommend to the Legislature for repeal, the sodomy statute was not among them. The decision, despite public and private lobbying, has angered gay leaders here. “We were pretty much the first in line with our request to have this unconstitutional ban on gay and lesbian relations repealed,” said Thomas Witt, chairman of the Kansas Equality Coalition. “This isn’t just some archaic law that’s sitting on the books and isn’t bothering anyone,” Mr. Witt continued. “It’s used as justification to harass and discriminate against people, and it needs to go.”

Mr. Brownback, who is a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage on religious grounds, declined to comment, and his spokeswoman would not say whether he would support repealing the law against same-sex sodomy, a misdemeanor that officially carries a prison sentence of up to six months. Dennis Taylor, the secretary of the State Department of Administration, which assembled the list, declined to discuss why the law was not included. “What we’ve proposed is what we proposed,” Mr. Taylor said.

Though declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down an antisodomy law in Texas as an invasion of privacy in a ruling viewed as a crucial victory by gay rights organizations, these types of laws still exist throughout the United States. Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation for Lambda Legal, a national gay rights advocacy group, said that more than a dozen states had antisodomy laws at the time of the ruling, but she did not know how many were subsequently repealed. Those that remain, said Ms. Sommer, have a stigmatizing effect on same-sex relationships and can sometimes be wrongly cited by law enforcement officers unaware that they are no longer enforceable. “Keeping these laws on the books can still do a lot of mischief and cause a lot of harm,” she said.

Mr. Brownback has moved aggressively to push this Republican-dominated state further to the right since he was elected after serving in the Senate. He has made the Office of the Repealer a popular part of his small-government pitch. “Nothing is ever subtracted from the system,” he said after he proposed the office. The first list of recommendations, culled from more than 500 suggestions after a listening tour was conducted around the state, represented the most obvious candidates for repeal, Mr. Taylor said. Many include eliminating regulations the administration has deemed unnecessary, such as a requirement for physical copies of county assessor rolls that are now often stored electronically. In the anachronism category: rules for reinstating a sheriff removed from office because a prisoner in his custody was lynched.

A second list of recommendations for repeal, to be introduced as soon as this year, Mr. Taylor said, “will be more interesting and probably a little controversial.” The antisodomy law, he added, remained under review with many others. Paul Davis, a Democrat and the house minority leader in the State Legislature, said he supported repealing the law but thought it was unlikely that Mr. Brownback would make such a recommendation.

“He’s trying not to run afoul of a very socially conservative constituency,” he said.

You have stated that open relations dont work, and yet you have failed to prove how they dont work, you have failed to prove why they dont work, and finally ―  and most importantly ―  you have failed to prove what it is about open relationships that is wrong.

As someone who has never been in an open relationship, nor ever plans to be in one, I fail to see what it is that you can bring to the table in any discussion about open relationships, other than your admonition that "I don't go out with whores," as well as your belief, not expounded upon, that these relationships are wrong ― viewpoints that in the light of day are hardly helpful or nor insightful.

@trentreviso:

I left the other place at the request of a moderator, who felt I was too opinionated.

@raphjd:

We like opinions here.

Glad to hear it. ;D

@raphjd:

I'm evil and fucked in the head because I'm not a whore

No, you're intolerant and pejorative of whores because their lifestyle choices are sub-human in your eyes, worthy of only disdain and disgust ― when in fact those types of relationships and the human beings who are in them are seperate from you, have nothing to do with you, and don't require your pity.

You mentioned that you practice serial monogomy. Would you want perfect strangers to pity this relationship of yours just because it wasn't their type of relationship, before there was understanding of how these two differing types of relationships either work, or don't work, for the people involved in them? If you wouldn't want a whore's pity, it's reasonable to assume they wouldn't want yours, either. A mutual desire for respect may be the only thing you find that you have in common with a whore, but its still something.

Is three a crowd or can a relationship between three people work? To ensure that it can't, there are certain "requirements" that must be met:

@raphjd:

Read the bible some time and you'll see that 1 man and many women was the normal type of "marriage" in the early days.

A requirement that the previous 250,000 years of human existence and their relationship trends/data cannot be variables which matter in any way.

@raphjd:

Because I'm not a whore and don't want a whore for a partner, that means, according to you, that I need to posses my partner?!

A requirement that you possess something that is, for you, the one-and-only idealized type of relationship. Nothing else will do… and not just for you, but alas! it shouldnt do for anyone else either! Reserved unto you, are the powers of deciding which relationships are worthy, and which ones are trash. Heavy indeed is the head that wears a crown.

@raphjd:

People will say and do anything to make their partner happy, even if it makes them miserable.  It's part of human nature and the thing we call love.

That this requirement of selflessness need not apply to you personally is assumed, if you believe that any misery you would possibly face could never be worth anyone's happiness.

@raphjd:

It does seem by some of your responses that you are a bit desperate to make this the normal type of relationship.

To sustain a desperate argument requires opponent as well as proponent; which without your help would have been impossible.

It can be unsettling at times to have the safe and secure world of what we comprehend placed so closely next to and compared with what others comprehend. The usual response to this upset of our own ethnocentric ideas on a topic such as open gay-relationships is stress, anxiety, and the urge to cling tighter to our own epistemological underpinnings of these views.

But be assured raphjd, that this type of response is patently maladaptive. Your idealized relationship does not lend itself to entertain even for an instant any narrative which is alien to your own. Somehow, instead of exploring other's ideas about these relationships, you've taken to hybridise the topic of open gay relationships with that of plural marriage (or, more accurately, "forced" plural marriage) in a conceptually bizarre manner; probably because framing it to the content and conventions of your own internal relationship-schema is a safer, more familiar, and more appropriate manner for you – and god help anything that readily contravenes this idealized narrative that you've identified with for so long, and with which your chimeric-arguments protect at all costs.

I mean really...what does a woman being stoned in Isfahan have to do with Kyle's wanting to sleep with Derik & Sean together in San jose?

@raphjd:

"Just because they say they agree, doesn't mean they actually did, as my point showed.  I'm god.  Does that mean I am really god or believe I am?  Nope, it just means I said it. "

I'm going over this last point of yours again because I feel it's a very important one that you've made – one for a suspension of belief -- and it deserves more than just a passing glance from me. Your assertion is that we should suspend our belief of people who say they weren't coerced because they may be "just saying that" and not really meaning it. Thus, (and duly noted by you above to have been shown before) anyone who says they weren't coerced should not be taken at face value - because we cannot know for sure if they're telling the truth. More importantly though, and I suggest overlooked by you, is that this line of reasoning requires us also to "not believe" people who say that they were coerced, and offer this "not-believing you" equally amongst the other people who said that they were coerced - because your line of reasoning requires us not to- and makes mandatory the suspecting of anything that anyone says because they may "just be saying it." In other words, the only knowable thing about a given is that it can never be known, a proposition of yours that I would argue is absolutely correct.

Now if i have followed you correctly (and I hope that I have) is what I've paraphrased above right? Or is it more your point (and I'm guessing that it probably is) that anyone who says that they were coerced should always be believed while anyone who says that they weren't coerced is a liar.

@raphjd:

Just because they say they agree, doesn't mean they actually did, as my point showed.  I'm god.  Does that mean I am really god or believe I am?  Nope, it just means I said it.

If these same people said that they didn't agree, wouldn't that also mean that pro rata the same people could have just "said" that they didn't really want it, but really did? Couldn't it also mean that they actually did agree and didn't mean it simply because "they just said it"?

@raphjd:

It's not a straw man until you prove that all three willingly entered into the "three" relationship.  Just because they say they agree, doesn't mean they actually did.

What is it about coercion-free open relationships that is wrong?

@raphjd:

If these "three" relationships are so great, then why have they failed to take off

If the benchmark for a type of relationship's usefulness is that it continues to occur, then open-type relationships are continually useful to some segment of the population.

@raphjd:

Historically, we know that multiple partners existed, but died out.

Multiple partner-type relationships have died out? This is news to me.

@raphjd:

Humans are by nature very jealous.  This is a primitive biological imperative, to make sure it's our seed that is spread and not every other male's seed.

I think you're confusing jealousy with avarice, which is the desire to possess. As long as avarice remains the top goal of humanity, attempts at entering into and sustaining open-type relationships will continue.

@raphjd:

"Open" relationships are 2 people where one or both can whore around.

This definition is correct. The key word you're using is "can" meaning both have agreed, in honesty, that one or both "can" (without reservations) fool around. One of them being "forced" does not equal a "can."

@raphjd:

This "three" relationship is a hoax.

I can see where the relationship you're describing is a hoax (one of the partners is not being honest about their level of commitment). But what about an open relationship where both partners agree wholeheartedly? What is it about this type of relationship that is a hoax?

@raphjd:

I'll tell you about one couple I knew in an open relationship…..  Fred didn't want this but grudgingly accepted it to make Chris happy.

You've chosen the straw man fallacy:  In place of arguing against a position, construct a similar, more-easily assailed position (the straw man) and attack it instead. Here we have one that's very easy to condemn: a relationship that one of the individuals was coerced into entering (the straw man). What about relationships where coercion isn't an issue?

@raphjd:

Most of the couples I know that have "open" relationships, one of the partners only grudgingly agreed to it.

A relationship where one of the partners lies about their level of commitment to admit a third ― a choice supposedly made by the three of them together in honesty ― does not meet the definition of an "open" relationship, and should not be counted in any argument against such relationships.

Any problems encountered by that type of relationship are to be attributed to the first person's decision to mislead the other two about their level of commitment, not to any choice itself of being in a relationship of three.

Many people in these types of relationships view the excessive restrictions on monogomous relationships as less than desirable, as such restrictions can be used to replace trust with a framework of ownership and control. From the standpoint of logic it can be argued that if one person can have love for two parents equally or for two siblings equally then the same should hold for two boyfriends or girlfriends equally.

From my understanding, in those relationships it is preferred to view the third partner in terms of the gain to the first and second, rather than as a threat. This compersion is similar to the joy that parents feel when their children get married, or the happiness felt by a person when one of their best friends finds someone to go out with. In that way, jealousy and possessiveness are viewed not so much as something to avoid or structure the relationship around but as responses to be explored, understood and resolved within each individual, with compersion as a goal. With that kind of detail, i've never been surprised at the level of maturity and confidence needed to pull off such a thing. If being in a relationship is like painting a picture, than these people are the Rembrandt's and DaVinci's of their trade.

:cool2::hug:

We've passed the point of no return: the inflection point (the spot where the red and blue lines meet) starts off at (A) opposition of gay marriage softens and becomes less popular, which leads to (B) it is no longer politically advantageous for candidates to oppose same-sex marriage, which brings (C) they will disengage from the issue, which in turn brings us back to (A) softening of opposition. The trend accelerates, creating a sort of progressive feedback loop.

BPA Lurks in Canned Soups and Drinks
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR of The New York Times
November 22, 2011

Harvard researchers have discovered that people who ate one serving of canned food daily over the course of five days had more than a tenfold increase of levels of bisphenol-A, or BPA, a substance that lines most food and drink cans. Most of the research on BPA, a so-called endocrine disruptor that can mimic the body’s hormones, has focused on its use in plastic bottles. It has been linked in some studies to a higher risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, and health officials in the United States have come under increasing pressure to regulate it.

The new study, which was published Tuesday (November 22nd, 2011) in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to measure the amounts that are ingested when people eat food that comes directly out of a can, in this case soup. The spike in BPA levels that the researchers recorded is one of the highest seen in any study. “We cannot say from our research what the consequences are,” said Karin Michels, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study. “But the very high levels that we found are very surprising. We would have never expected a thousand-percent increase in their levels of BPA.”

As part of the study, Dr. Michels and her colleagues recruited a group of 75 staff members and students at the Harvard School of Public Health, split them into two groups, and then followed them for two weeks. During the first week, one group ate a 12-ounce serving of vegetarian soup from a common brand of canned soup every day for five days; the other group, meanwhile, ate 12 ounces of vegetarian soup made from fresh ingredients each day. Then, after a two-day soup-free “wash out” period, the groups switched roles and were followed for five more days. At the end of each five-day period, the subjects provided urine samples. Dr. Michels noted that all the participants were fed amounts of soup that were smaller than what people probably would consume on their own. “One serving of soup is a not a lot,” she said. “They were actually telling us that that wasn’t even enough for their lunch.” In general, most studies have found that urinary BPA levels in typical adults average somewhere around 2 micrograms per liter. That was roughly the levels the Harvard researchers found in the subjects after a week of eating the soup made from fresh ingredients.

After eating the canned soup, though, their levels rose above 20 micrograms per liter, a 1,221 percent increase. Dr. Michels said that her co-authors, including one researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who regularly analyzes BPA levels in studies, were stunned when the results came back. “She called me and said something’s funny with these levels,” she said. “She didn’t know what she was looking at.” Dr. Michels said that the increases in BPA were most likely temporary and would go down after hours or days. “We don’t know what health effects these transient increases in BPA may have.” But she also pointed out that the findings were probably applicable to other canned goods, including soda and juices. “The sodas are concerning, because some people have a habit of consuming a lot of them throughout the day,” she said. “My guess is that with other canned foods, you would see similar increases in bisphenol-A. But we only tested soups, so we wouldn’t be able to predict the absolute size of the increase.”

Many companies began phasing out BPA in baby bottles and other plastic food containers in recent years to ease public anxieties, but it is still widely used in the linings of metal cans because it helps prevent corrosion and is resistant to high heat during the sterilization process. “I don’t know how important bisphenol-A is to the lining of these metal cans,” Dr. Michels said. “Can you make the lining to protect the contents of the can without bisphenol-A? If this is the case, then we would suggest taking it out, because then you would eliminate the problem.”