Okay, who here (besides me) already knew that today is Robbie Burns Day?  

Fun facts:

• In Ottawa, you're likely to get your haggis for the celebration from a French-Canadian butcher if you don't make it yourself.
  
• There's a Scottish butcher shop and bakery in Whitehorse, Yukon that's expecting to sell 200 lbs. of haggis today.
  
• And there's a butcher in Calgary that sells 300 pounds of haggis each day in January.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyath...in-church/

The basic gist of it is an attempt to replace 100% of the mentions in Missouri state law of "marriage" with "contract of domestic union". Including converting all marriages done in the state into "contract of domestic union", with the added idea that churches can choose if they report they've performed a marriage to the government.

The bill is a Death Star sized document. I can see several problems with it.

First: The idea that only a church can do a marriage. This is in part because marriage is a legal identity, with a lot of benefits attached to it through a large body of law, both common and explicit, while domestic/civil union doesn't have such.

Second: This is a deliberate and radical misalignment of state law from federal law. This potentially yanks out the rug from under anyone who's married in Missouri in terms of things like taxes and other Federal institutions. Doubly so with the attempt to make it 100% retroactive, which would at minimum annoy a lot of bureaucrats and lawmakers.

Third: I haven't even tried to find how they handle out of state marriages. Do they merely recognize them as "contract of domestic unions"? Or are they going to decide to no longer recognize such because the language no longer aligns?

I'm fairly certain the "marriage is only a church thing" is kind of a gimme for challenges, and is really intended to be struck down, with the hope that they can retain the "it's domestic unions now" and basically do the whole, "blame the gays, they're the reason we had to burn the whole legal framework to the ground."

I'm not saying this just as a problem because I'm in a same sex marriage right now... I'm also considering that my parents will be affected by this (45+ years, married in Missouri).

It's audacious, but I'm not surprised that someone's finally attempting to "take the marriage ball and go home", with little to no regard to HOW MUCH DAMAGE it will do to just about everyone in the state. And given that I'm not sure what the interactions are like legally, I'm thinking Missouri just added about ten years to my desire to avoid the place.

I have UBlock on, and it claims this site is running a cryptominer, but it must be a false positive.

Was wondering if anyone else got a similar message.

A few weeks after Democrat Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore in a special election for an Alabama Senate seat, the Republican majority in the Alabama House of Representatives voted to end special elections.

Purely coincidental, I'm sure.

Private rocketeers snuck their own “star” into orbit, and it will be visible from earth.

Here's the CBC article, which draws on multiple interviews with David Frum.

Quote:"With Donald Trump, it's not a sudden seizure, not a heart attack, it's gum disease," says David Frum, who is now a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine.

"You can die from gum disease, but you don't die right away. Your body just corrodes and it begins to emit toxins, and the toxins get into the bloodstream and those toxins eventually affect the heart and you can die."

Quote:"The whole system of the United States was supposedly designed to keep people like Donald Trump away from power and if they somehow slipped into power, control them while there. That system is failing. Trumpocracy is the mode of government that's grown up in the failure of the American system."

With the new name "Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership", fewer sticking points for the developed countries to dislike, and the USA nowhere to be seen.

All that lovely, lovely trade money ... and the isolationists aren't going to get one thin dime of it.

This also means that NAFTA has suddenly become less important to Canada.

... You know, before moving to my own platform here, I never appreciated how much work ezBoard and Yuku did in keeping random spammers out of the boards.  Now I've got more than a few things in place to do the same, but every once in a while someone gets to the approval stage and I just can't be sure.  Iii was one, and at the same time (s)he asked to join the board, we had a couple others who either were spammers or didn't care to reply to my "just say hi back to me and I'll approve you" emails.

We've got another one.  I've already dispatched the "Hi!  Where'd you hear about my board?" message, but if they're a real person maybe someone here will recognize them and save us a little time:

"tina10", with an email address that starts with "sarachauhan" at gmail, and an IP address in Pakistan.

Does that ring a bell for anyone?

Instead of getting Mexico to pay for the border wall, why not get PETA to pay for it? They want to advertise on it.

Funny how one needs to go into the Wayback Machine to get that blog post instead of going to PETA's "live" website, though...

A fellow using the handle "tom bruggem" made several comments, most of them acerbic and some very cleverly so, appended to this Washington Post article about the embarrassing ambassador we sent to the Netherlands.  My favorite was when Mijnheer Bruggem took exception to another commenter describing President Windrip as "the Orange Combover."  He responded testily, "As a Dutchman I would appreciate it if you stopped defaming our national color by using it to describe Donald Trump."