AdamSmith

One of my all-time faves...

Good for these parents. One hopes a huge judgment in their favor can help end these, as you imply, medieval brutalities.

LOL. Yes, I would think made-in-China chocolate would mostly be hazardous to humans. Just as it was their dog food and dog treats that were toxic to doggies. http://www.fda.gov/animalveterinary/safetyhealth/recallswithdrawals/ucm129575.htm http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/23/fda-nearly-1000-pets-sickened-by-china-made-dog-treats/

Fair enough. True enough.

The Lord's truth, that. For latest example the way Barack, not content out-W'ing W, now seems to be finding his Inner Nixon.

Not a joke, as dog owners will know. Our dog more than once got hold of chocolate thanks to the ex's carelessly leaving it lying within reach. This meter would have been helpful for judging whether, and how fast, to rush to the vet: http://www.petmd.com/dog/chocolate-toxicity?icn=petMD-utility_bar&icl=3_choco_meter#.UZKvysqXyGs

That would be a good enough outcome for this moment in history, all things taken together. Wonder if that could be what Ginsburg was hinting aglance in her recent comments that Roe as handed down shut off a debate and process among the polis?

So you have time to propose to Garrison Keillor!

That, or something like, is true of many of our behaviors adown the ages. Is it therefore necessarily a recommendation in their favor?

Should I...? No, any reply would just be too easy.

Yes! That is the one time all that grease and starch really hits the spot. And that blessed soft drink the size of your bathroom sink.

Thus it is. But not really through Nixon's doing, surely? Deng & other developments don't seem much tied to the opening he and Henry crafted. In 2005 I heard a US economist who lives in Shanghai remind us that to the Chinese, 300 years only begins to be the "long view," and that their relative weakness on the world economic stage for the last 2 or 3 centuries was a short-term aberration in their 2.5 or so millennia previous as a or often the dominant global trading power.

I do respect, and share, your ideals. What I honestly have never understood is why they need to be encapsulated in a religion.

You think? How come? Just curious.

Each time I succumb and eat there, I like the first three bites, then it turns disgusting. Of course I finish it anyway, vowing ne'er again.

So not a joke after all! http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/13665-google-does-it-again/

What if Nixon Could Read Your Emails? In Enemies: A History of the FBI, Tim Weiner says the bureau has changed since Nixon and Hoover. But some practices have endured.—By Adam Serwer | Wed Apr. 18, 2012 3:00 AM PDT Mother Jones Oliver F. Atkins/National Archives On the heels of a 1939 Supreme Court decision outlawing wiretapping, President Franklin Roosevelt handed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secret authorization to spy on Americans, telling himself that the high court couldn't have meant to extend the prohibition to matters of national security. In 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-acting Attorney General James Comey led a small rebellion against George W. Bush's warrantless spying. Their defiance culminated in a confrontation in John Ashcroft's hospital room, as Bush's White House counsel and chief of staff, Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card, attempted to get around Comey by pushing Ashcroft, then recovering from surgery, to reauthorize the program from his sickbed. The contrast, highlighted in Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author Tim Weiner's recent book Enemies: A History of the FBI, leaves one with the impression that the arc of history bends towards a more lawful and accountable national security state, and the hope that, Weiner writes, "in a time of continual danger Americans might be safe and free." As FDR's attorney general Francis Biddle once wrote, however, "the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president," and just about every president since has found himself at war, if only against an abstract concept like crime or terrorism. Still, Weiner has a point. Much of what the FBI does is no longer secret, though how it performs some of its duties remains so. The FBI director no longer gathers intelligence on a president's political enemies, a practice that reached its zenith during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations. In response to the Watergate scandal, the Senate Church Committee of the 1970s established congressional oversight concerning the activities of America's national security agencies. The bureau no longer contains a section that works to purge gays and lesbians from government positions—state, local, and federal. An attorney general like the Theodore Roosevelt administration's Charles Bonaparte, who thought vigilante mobs were an appropriate check on labor protests, probably couldn't make it through a Senate confirmation hearing. Probably. The bureau's history, though, is riven with lawlessness, and that is a legacy it has not entirely shed. Though a civilian agency, the history of the FBI is intimately tied to the American habit of declaring war on nouns. The forerunner of the bureau was created by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, who acceded to the presidency after William McKinley was assassinated in broad daylight by an anarchist. He established this forerunner to the FBI in defiance of Congress, which initially said no because lawmakers feared the establishment of an American secret police. Yet Roosevelt bragged to a British politician in 1908 that as president he possessed more power than "any great republic or constitutional monarchy of modern times." The lawmakers' fears were well-founded. For 48 years, the FBI was indeed a covert police organization run by a man whose efforts were frequently focused on policing the political beliefs and private behavior of American citizens—not just busting crime or thwarting terrorism. Hoover's FBI broke the law casually and frequently; its tools of "law enforcement" routinely included warrantless wiretapping, blackmail, and burglary. Hoover's wiretaps and break-ins weren't sanctioned by law. For 50 years, Weiner notes, Hoover just turned the wiretaps off before testifying before Congress so when they asked whether he was wiretapping anyone, he could say "no" and be technically stating the truth. And Hoover protected his authority—and criminal ways—for decades by sharing the fruits of his illegal and pervasive surveillance of US citizens with presidents who craved dirt on their political foes. Hoover hunted Soviet spies (sometimes effectively and sometimes not) and big-name gangsters, but he "saw no great distinction among American radicals—Communists, Socialists, anarchists, pacifists," Weiner writes. "They were enemies of the state." Though his powers allowed Hoover to record Martin Luther King Jr. having sex in his hotel room—Hoover believed the civil rights movement was just an extension of the communist plot to subvert the United States—Weiner shows that Hoover's FBI often was inept at solving the acts of terrorism that justified the bureau's existence, like the 1920 Wall Street bombing that remained the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil until Timothy McVeigh destroyed the FBI building in Oklahoma City. Hoover's FBI dismantled the Ku Klux Klan and ended its reign of terror in the South, but only after being directly ordered to do so by President Johnson. After all, it's not like they were communists. There are major distinctions between the Hoover FBI and the Mueller FBI. The bureau is certainly no longer a tool paranoid chief executives can impulsively deploy against their political enemies. Congressional oversight exists. The bureau has developed a culture of integrity that has led officials to oppose not just Bush's warrantless wiretapping, but its use of torture. In between sensational headlines describing FBI orchestrated sting plots that were never going to come to fruition, the bureau has managed to prevent crimes in addition to investigating them. Yet much of what the FBI once did illegally is now simply legal. The end result of Mueller and Comey's rebellion was that Congress passed a law legalizing warrantless surveillance, with the support of then-Sen. Barack Obama. Technology has made the old FBI black bag jobs an anachronism, since the Patriot Act allows its agents to acquire much of the same kind of information with less effort. Weiner quotes former FBI Director William Webster expressing concern in 1984 following a sting operation targeting an assassination plot against Indian prime minister Rajiv Ghandi; Webster was worried that stings could turn the FBI into a "Gestapo organization." Yet, as Weiner notes, such operations have become the bureau's primary weapon for fighting domestic terrorism, even to the point of infiltrating mosques absent any concrete evidence of connections to terrorism. The attorney general does set legal limits on the FBI's ability to snoop on Americans—but today those limits allow agents to consider race and religion as "factors" in beginning investigations. Peaceniks are apparently still a national security threat. Hoover drew up a secret list of "thousands" of "suspected subversives" in America who might be indefinitely detained in the event of a "national emergency." Today's Terrorist Watchlist reportedly contains over a million. Despite Congress' oversight of the bureau, not even Nixon was as adept at maintaining official secrecy as the current president, so it's hard to know how well that oversight is actually working. Weiner's Enemies leaves the reader with the impression that today's FBI is more effective and less lawless than it's ever been. This is no doubt true. But given that once-illegal activity has become legal, it's less comforting. In the end, we didn't banish Hooverism entirely. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/tim-weiner-enemies-history-of-the-fbi-review

"OUR NIXON" SYNOPSIS: Throughout Richard Nixon's presidency, three of his top White House aides obsessively documented their experiences with Super 8 home movie cameras. Young, idealistic and dedicated, they had no idea that a few years later they'd all be in prison. This unique and personal visual record, created by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin, was seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation, then filed away and forgotten for almost 40 years. OUR NIXON is an all-archival documentary presenting those home movies for the first time, along with other rare footage, creating an intimate and complex portrait of the Nixon presidency as never seen before. OUR NIXON begins in 1969. While many young people are demonstrating or dropping out, we meet three squares who have just started new jobs at the White House. Their loss of innocence and their betrayal by the President is the story of OUR NIXON. Their story sheds new light on larger historical themes at a key moment in American history when the age of Aquarius gave way to the age of Nixon. Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chapin filmed over 500 reels of home movies from 1969 to 1973, capturing the prosaic and the profound. They filmed big events: the Apollo moon landing, historic anti-war protests, the Republican National Convention, Tricia Nixon's White House wedding and Nixon's world-changing trip to China. They filmed world leaders and celebrities: Nicolae Ceausescu, Chou En-lai, Barbara Walters. But they also filmed each other and everyday life: Ehrlichman eating dinner off a tray on Air Force One, Chapin's wife and kids meeting the Easter Bunny on the White House lawn, Haldeman riding a bicycle at Camp David. Ehrlichman was especially fond of filming hummingbirds. They filmed to have something to show their grandchildren. They filmed because they thought that Nixon's presidency would change the world forever. The tragedy is that they were right. http://www.ournixon.com/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2282662/

Another not-joke...

"If she ain't good enough for her own kinfolk... ...to eat!"

There has of course been considerable speculation that other than Prince Charles's genes swirl in Harry's jeans, and pate, and elsewhere.

The anthropophagous implications are perhaps best passed over. This preacher reaches a fascinating answer through Genesis-based genetics: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/who-was-cains-wife

Moreover, where did their sons' wives come from?