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[justinlee999]

I bought into my dad's advice where I should feel disgusted over "sexual immorality" (AKA ANY SEXUAL ACTS THAT IS NOT VAGINAL HETEROSEXUAL SEX). But after a while, I found no problems with many of those "sexual immoralities". After all, it's just people having fun, no one got traumatized, only rape traumatizes people, and we Christians as "loving people" choose to blame it on the victim. And people quoting Leviticus to bash homosexuality while eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics, and all those other things are just plain blind and stupid. So I decided it's safe to say that, since the Old Testament laws are batshit insane, homosexuality is okay .

I still do have some homophobia left over from my past, but I do try my best to treat them like normal people. It's pretty sad how a young child's mind absorbs illogical ideas so easily and it's hard to get rid of them later in life.

[EveryZig]

Whenever I hear someone criticizing something for being 'unnatural', I want to ask them what species of tree they live in, because obviously they wouldn't abide by one of those fiendish 'house' contraptions.

[SalmonGod]

I wrote my college thesis on the housing market (focused on rentals) even before these meetings took place. While I won a competitive cash prize award for my equation modeling, I was called an "alarmist." I was predicting a massive housing crash due to over extension of credit causing what I called then an "overheated housing market...." They thought it was funny.

The fed didn't get it in 2006 and I saw this crap coming well before then as a student doing dedicated research but was sorta told not to worry about it....

I dunno, did I just get lucky? Was it merely a gut instinct of "these houses aren't worth that?" Who knows....

You weren't lucky and they weren't stupid.  I believe the answer is that you saw through the bullshit.

[Levi]

Whenever I hear someone criticizing something for being 'unnatural', I want to ask them what species of tree they live in, because obviously they wouldn't abide by one of those fiendish 'house' contraptions.

No kidding.  I despise it when people use unnatural as an argument for anything. 

[Truean]

Whenever I hear someone criticizing something for being 'unnatural', I want to ask them what species of tree they live in, because obviously they wouldn't abide by one of those fiendish 'house' contraptions.

No kidding.  I despise it when people use unnatural as an argument for anything.

We "naturally," die at about 30 and half those old people are going to have replacement body parts. They can all shut up about "unnatural." Either that or you die much sooner and refuse to let them use those "unnatural" medical things like hip replacements, pacemakers, most modern medicine, etc. Either way I'm fine with the results of having homophobes shut up or die sooner.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
http://news.yahoo.com/son-boss-crackdown-lands-supreme-court-182400708.html
The IRS wants to retroactively impose a 6 year statute of limitations for going after blatant tax cheats, instead of a 3 year one.

Let me cut straight through the bullshit and say what this isn't about and then say what it is about. It has nothing to do with the "founding fathers, (a sign the person talking knows nothing about law or is trying to pull wool over eyes)" or even the constitution, beyond administrative law. It has nothing to do with if the current tax code is fair.

Issues: A.) What is the proper statute of limitations for the IRS to audit and under what circumstances. B.) Who sets the statute of limitations, and C.) can it be changed retroactively/is that being done here?

Background: So the IRS has been on Congress's ass to actually do something for quite some time now, because it really is the rich fucking over our country via cheating on their taxes. The IRS said 3 years was simply not enough time to investigate complicated illegal tax shelters that try to pull more accounting tricks than Enron. Yes, we're talking dummy corporations, false losses and made up bullshit to cheat the government out of the taxes it is owed. As an oversimplified illustration, the lawyers for the taxpayers Jenkens & Gilchrist, has closed. Two of its partners were found guilty of tax evasion in May 2011. These are crooked bastards and it takes a long, long fucking time to catch them.

Fuck what your civics teacher told you, all three branches of government legitimately make law in one way or another, effectively. Legislative is easy. The executive branch has "agencies" (or departments or whatever) that Congress has delegated rulemaking power to. Yes, those administrative policies have force of law and can be sued over in the right cases. Finally the courts have adjudicatory power and saying they can only "interpret" law is a meaningless distinction, especially given that law cannot predict all problems and the courts simply can't punt the problem and just "not address it." It doesn't have that luxury, though the judge would like nothing more than a case cleared off the docket quickly by throwing it out if at all possible. This case is about who makes the law regarding how long the IRS has to catch tax cheats using complex scams.

What this means: B.O.S.S. "bond and option sales strategies." shelters using involved fraud creating paper losses to offset real gains. This avoids paying the government the taxes it is rightfully owed and tracking down people who do it is difficult as hell. The people doing this are screwing the government (that would be us) out of $Billions of dollars while bitching that people on welfare are fraudulent (hahaha). No one person on welfare has ever cost the government billions of dollars and certainly not on purpose, but that's exactly what we're dealing with here. Owing billions in taxes means you are making billions. The IRS needs to be able to take these people out.

[ChairmanPoo]

Since I arrived to this city eight months ago, four locals in my street have closed down. The crisis is looking dire. And the so-called austerity measures being undertaken by goverments are not helping at all. (There's a good reason why three different Economics Nobel Prizes have spoken against these policies: trying to weather down the crisis by cutting down spending and sitting on a pile of money makes about as much sense as fighting poverty by printing money and giving every homeless man one million dollars. What the economy needs are measures that favor the flow of capital and production, not strategies that lead to further stagnation.)

[MonkeyHead]

Tesco executive in shady financial transaction...

O.K, so not illegal. But still dodgy.

[Frumple]

Personally, I'm curious what sort of "necessary family expenditure" takes 200k to finance.

E: Which is another way of saying, "I call bullshit," if that implication wasn't obvious.

[Sheb]

Truean, is it me, or did you fail to address point C)? Isn't changing "laws" (even of the kind made by the executive) retroactively a bad thing?

[Truean]

Truean, is it me, or did you fail to address point C)? Isn't changing "laws" (even of the kind made by the executive) retroactively a bad thing?

Sometimes, depends on the law and type of law. This is kind of why we don't know/what the Supreme Court is going to determine here. There isn't an answer to those specific points, which is, and I mean this in all honesty, what the Supreme Court is going to determine. The lower (district) court sided with the IRS on that and the appeals court sided with the taxpayer. No one knows how the Supreme Court will rule in advance.

Personally, I'd argue it's a good thing here, because the specific law here is procedural (as long as they followed the APA procedure for rule making properly). Congress has also been saying "O we will get around to it," for years and years really. Here, we're dealing with extreme cases of fraud in the Billions of Dollars. They are systematically trying to use this rule to their advantage/their only defense, because they know they are doing something wrong and their only chance is to be so confusing about doing it that you can't unravel it in years.....

They not only bribed contributed to the campaigns of congress for billions in stupid, unnecessary, but technically legal tax breaks, but they probably also kept congress from letting the IRS properly do its job and relied upon this as the only way they could get their illegal tax breaks.....

Not a single one of my criminal clients has ever taken three years to prosecute, much less six, because their crime was so complex that they've tied up the entire police department. That's what they're doing with the IRS....

[Heron TSG]

RON PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUL!

I don't understand his supporters. A topic that just came up in support for him: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paul voted against it. His supporters say that this is a good thing because the government shouldn't tell people what to do. I... how...? They say that it causes 'other kinds of oppression'. I read through the text, and couldn't find any.

I have not found a Ron Paul supporter yet who has been anything but a zealot. It confuses me.

[Darvi]

That's because non-zealous Paul-supporters don't reveal their political affiliation, out of fear to be associated with aforementioned zealots.

At least I think that's a plausible explanation.

[SalmonGod]

Many of the zealous Ron Paul libertarian arguments make sense to some extent, but fall apart when you factor in how common human flaws will factor into their vision on a large scale.

The 'other kinds of oppression' would be things like forcing people in charge of a private business to serve customers they don't want to serve, which they see as an unjustified sort of coercion.  They believe that people should be left alone as much as possible, so long as they aren't actively causing harm to others.  I halfway agree with them, except I go the extra step in recognizing how cultural feedback loops reinforce people's prejudices until they eventually manifest into harmful action.  I believe in free association, but at the same time recognize that people tend not to learn to get along unless forced into circumstances where it's necessary to do so.  So it may seem on the surface like an unnecessary infringement on a guy's rights to tell him he can't operate an openly racist pub, but it prevents the overwhelming likelihood of far greater rights infringements that occur when racists have a safe haven retreat where they can go to reinforce and embolden each other's prejudices.

And then there's the economics... where they believe endless competition is the answer to everything.  If everything were dictated by market forces without artificial constraints, then there would be greater freedom due to consumer choice between competing businesses.  If one business does something dirty that harms someone else for their own profit, then consumers respond by taking their business elsewhere.  This operates completely on the assumption that capitalism is a competition which can't be won, which is very, very clearly false.  Also the assumption that consumers are practically omniscient and eternally diligent.  Finally, that consumers will even care, if they are indeed aware, when a business that operates in many communities abuses one in order to gain advantages in others (globalization).

They say that government intervention hinders natural competition and creates monopolies.  I say that such things are a natural result of businesses gaining enough power to exert influence through government, and are a symptom of the 'free market' being an unsustainable synonym for Turn 1 in the game of Monopoly.

[Nadaka]

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/01/14/233203/dhs-monitors-social-media-for-political-dissent

Are you prepared to be horrified?

This is very very bad.

[Heron TSG]

According to the post I saw in that, they were looking for topics that reflected poorly on the US, which I guess makes sense from a foreign relations point of view. Where does it say they're targeting political dissenters?