I say we acknowledge Duran's claim. And once the sun is her's, she's completely reponsible for all damage caused by it. Every case of skin cancer, she pays for treatment, plus wrongful death suits from those who die of it. When a sunspot disrputs satellites, she's pesonally responsible for any lost business. And so on.

With great power comes great responsibility.

I went to high school in Missouri with a girl whose family lived inside the levee - it flooded for weeks at a time every spring. They sank a telephone pole in to the ground and built their house on a river barge, with a large iron ring at one end (around the pole). When the river went up, the house went up. When the river went down, the house went down. The only issue they had was the propane company refused to put the first tank on the barge. After it floated off down the river, they saw the light, and put the second one where it belonged.

If, on the other hand, we make a different pulled-out-of-our-ass guess, and compare it to five times the wages of the typical state governor in modern America, we find that he wasn't all that well paid at all, compared to modern atheletes.

When the health inspectors get threatened with guns for enforcing valid laws, the police get sent in. After that happens a few times, guess what: the police get sent in right away.

Just because all you have is a hammer doesn't mean that none of your problems are, in fact, nails.

I suspect the basic problem is that she drives a little faster than most people. A lot of animals get hooked on the adreniline rush of playing chicken with moving cars, and if you're driving a little bit faster than they're used to, they will misjudge things, and get hit.

When I was in high school, I hit a *lot* of birds (crows do this) and rabbits, who definitely do, though part of that was an unusually low A-frame on my car (they'd be OK between the wheels on most cars, where mind would smash their head).

While there is certainly a point to be made regarding proper licensing and inspections for food producing and selling businesses, health departments in southern California has a long history of being unreasonble, theiving dicks. If you throw enough money at them, they'll leave you be, but it will be more money than you can afford.

(And the reason this was done at gun point is that small, independent businesses in southern Ccalifornia have had it with corrupt health departments. Peacemakers, in Costa Mesa, ran a health department inspector out literally at gun point, and told the cops they'd be delighted to get in a shootout, kids and all. And they meant it. It too over two years for any arrests to be made, because the store was bacially an armed bunker. It was, however, open for business the entire time.)

Certainly this should be taken in to account at sentencing. If the criminal violence is in the guy's DNA, then clearly, it's beyond his control. Which means it is not safe to *ever* let him out. Anyone who uses such a defens should automatically be commmitted to a maximum security mental hospital for life.

There are reasons why this works. The market is still so weak that most foreclosures aren't even offered for sale for months or years, so there's no pressure to evict the former occupant. And if they don't complete the foreclosure, the association fees keep going to the owner of record. And if they let someone live in the house, it's not empty, and is less likely to be vandalized.

As to who is to blame, and irresponsible, there's plenty of blame on both sides. Before it all collapsed, banks were seeing out people they *knew* couldn't afford the mortgage, and lies to them, knowing they didn't know enough about finances to understand they couldn't afford it.

And a lot of people have lost jobs, through no fault of their own.

I've never seen a chain lock that would let you get your entire hand through the door. Plus, they shows you how they modified the chain.

"Since disasters like that are rare in daily life, responding to them wouldn’t likely be something our ancestors were hard-wired to "know" how to do."

And yet, pretty much all animals know to run away when the forest catches on fire. It's almost like they were hard wired to do so.

Roanoke was pretty definintely solved by Josh Berstein's "Digging for the Truth" episode, in which they collected DNA samples from several local native tribes, and compared it to known relatives of the colonists from Scotland. The colonists were absorbed in to several local tribes when their colony failed (because it was too small and too poorly supported).

Cahokia is also not all that mysterious, really. Normal story of too many people living too closely together for too long, and depleting the land to the point where they just couldn't grow enough food locally with the technology they had. Imported food is expensive, so everyone moved away. (Yeah, it's a lot more complicated, and more violent, than that, but that's the basic story.) Cahokia was local to me in high school. As a side note, the locals in the area, Missouri and Illinois, will latch on to *any* chance to extract money from tourists, and Cahokia is certainly a good attraction, and that much better if it's somehow mysterious. Shoulda been there with one of the locals convinced the barge lights on the underside of the clouds over The River were UFOs. T-shirts and beer stands in the streets!

Andrea hit the nail on the head. Since this ritual, like all the rituals, were used for crimes that we know today are ridiculous, like witchcraft, and thousands of people were convicted, we know, with certainty, that the system did not work rationally.

Criminals today, and criminals hundreds of years ago, are notoriously stupid, and think they can beat "the system." And if the judges are mainpulating the outcome, make no mistake, people know, and will learn how to mainpulate the judges.

Nice theory, but useless in the real world.

Not really fair to Ernie Chambers, though he is a well known wingnut in Nebraska. His point with that particular suit was, in fact, how ridiculously easy it is to sue anyone over anything at any time. He made his point.

It wouldn't remain stationary, it would fall to the ground, having no lift.