This is an old article, but how relevant! I love that phrase- "A Flood of Biblical Proportions."

New Orleans - A flood of Biblical Proportions

The default reaction to the Rave bust in Utah from a number of people has been of the form "blah, blah, Republicans, blah, blah, Bush, blah, blah, Police State." This is more then a little annoying. Raves have been targetted federally by a bipartisan coallition led by Democrats. Yes, Virginia, Democrats have jack boots too.

In 2002 Democratic senators Biden, Leahy, and Durbin along with Republicans Grassley and Hatch proposed the Rave Act of 2002. Biden was the primary sponsor.

This law included a findings section, essentially a list of justifications, which is basically a collection of paranoid rantings that have little or no connection to reality. For example:

Many rave promoters go to great lengths to try to portray their events as alcohol-free parties that are safe places for young adults to go to dance with friends, and some even go so far as to hire off-duty, uniformed police officers to patrol outside of the venue to give parents the impression that the event is safe.

There is no way they might actually have a legitimate interest in hiring security guards!

Because rave promoters know that Ecstasy causes the body temperature in a user to rise and as a result causes the user to become very thirsty, many rave promoters facilitate and profit from flagrant drug use at rave parties or events by selling over-priced bottles of water and charging entrance fees to 'chill-rooms' where users can cool down.

You'd think maybe people who were dancing at an all night party would, you know, not want to drink a lot of alcohol, need bottles of water, and want to chill out, irrespective of whether or not they were on drugs, wouldn't you? Furthermore, I've been to a LOT of raves and I have never ever seen a separate fee charged for access to a chill room!

Apparently Leahy and Durbin dropped their cosponsorship, possibly when they started getting angry faxes. But Biden pushed on. He was joined by Presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and everyone's favorite Democratic Senator, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The thing was rolled up into s.151, an omnibus protect the children law that, among many other things, calls for 2-4 year prison terms for anyone who puts sexually explicit material on a "misleading" internet domain name. It is now law.

Now, yeah, people do drugs at Raves. Some aspects of the rave culture are drug related. However, the same thing can be said of any pop culture in the past 50-80 years including Rock, Jazz, HipHop, etc... These laws don't target drugs specifically. They target Raves. They specifically target culture.

When I left Atlanta in the late 90s there was a vibrant rave culture in the city with a real community that corrdinated online and threw parties. Its completely gone. There is nothing left but a few high priced clubs that play similar music. This website stub is all thats left of a once vibrant mailing list of people who threw parties on a regular basis that I participated in for years. The police wiped it out. They wiped out a culture. They did it with strong support from the Democrats.

Yep, the left side of the fence is guilty on lots of things like this. People forget that the PMRC came out of Tipper Gore. They've done all sorts of other stupid things too. Political Correctness came from the left. Hillary is currently leading the screaming about GTA:SA. None of those was a good thing. No one is especially innocent when it comes to the culture fight.

FOXNews.com - Views - Straight Talk - Raving Lunacy

For the bibliophile, what to do with the books is life's central decorating issue, an ongoing discourse, a debate, and often an outright decor war, between aesthetics, the practicalities of storage and the consuming mindlessness of passion.

I've got a mere 1600 or so books here in my living room - that pales in comparision to the 20k these people are talking about. Decorating? I'm a hermit so no one sees it but my family anyway - plastic utility shelves have proved the most capable of holding the most books for me, so I have several shelves of those.

As for WHY SO MANY BOOKS - I do have a few huge personal collections that I hold as an investment. My occult book collection has about 500 volumes. I recently sold one - it brought 70.00 more than what I'd bought it for a few years ago. I didn't want it anyway.

I am an avaricious reader, but lately I've been selling my collection off, and culling it down. I am scared that the books might fall on my head one day otherwise.

When you're buried in books

"Christopher Paolini is 21 now, and he's had his Letterman gig and his Time magazine interviews and the thrill of seeing his fantasy novel, "Eragon," ride the best-seller lists for 100 weeks, in one version or another. There's even a Hollywood film in the works.
...He has an avuncular, precociously adult manner of speaking -- like a tweedy professor with elbow patches. The effect is startling but ultimately charming, because Paolini is so genuine, with a matter-of-fact self-confidence that's rare for his age. For that, he thanks mom and dad, who homeschooled him and his younger sister, Angela.

"I certainly give credit to my parents," Paolini said, "because they taught us never to be afraid -- to stand up and speak our mind, to talk to people as equals even if they are quite a bit older.

"My sister and I have never been in public schools. We never had the experience of being put down, of being told not to stand out. We were who we were." "

Homeschooled boy's books score big - movie deal for next year

""The standard for disclosure in medical and scientific journals is not your politics. There's no obligation to tell people what your mind-set is ... as long as the data is sound and gathered objectively," said Dr. Alan Leff, a University of Chicago pulmonologist and editor of the Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society.

Anti-abortion groups say the authors' affiliations are crucially important."

"Still, the distrust of science now seen in our culture is distressing."

Yep, and that is probable because it is also a sign of fascism.

When Science and Politics collide

"No citizen should be subjected to criminal charges for a crime he might commit. This is a fundamental principle in our society: One does not take blame for what might happen, only for violations of the law that he actually commits."

Utah Rave - Question of Need for Permit 9 hours vrs 12

"PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- The U.S. Mint seized 10 Double Eagle gold coins from 1933, among the rarest and most valuable coins in the world, that were turned in by a jeweler seeking to determine their authenticity."

...Sounds like more fascist BS to me....

US Mint Seizes Rare Coins

ACT scores released

Average National ACT Score Unchanged in 2005; Students Graduate from High School Ready or Not
• Average national composite score is 20.9, unchanged from 2004
• More students consider college-record number of test-takers; sizeable increase in minority test-takers; Hispanic test-takers rise 40% since 2001
• New College Readiness Benchmark in reading suggests only half of test-takers have adequate college-level skills in reading
comprehension
• Majority of graduates still missing college-ready skills in math and science

See http://www.act.org/news/data/05/pdf/t11.pdf for comparison of
educational demographics.

HOME SCHOOLED: 8075 Average ACT score: 22.5

Homeschooled students score about national average on ACT

terratogen wrote:

Mike the Usurper wrote:
Okay, it's wrong, but so what.

1804.

My son played this all night long. He ended up getting a kitten over 12,000 feet. He was howling with laughter. Thanks- the link made his night.

RE: Kitten Cannon - Presented by Addicting Games

I suppose the folks in Utah want to learn how to 'apply patches' to the machines like the folks in Georgia do.

Utah officials observe Georgia voting