Carefully cleaning the udder and teats, and very quickly refrigerating raw milk should significantly reduce the risks of bacterial contamination and growth. This is not done in most cases though, so raw milk usually carries a much higher risk of listeria.

Having had listeria once–contaminated green beans–I very much do not recommend it.

It took a porn star dying after porn makers in the 2000s forced a horse to rape a woman

Uh. You’re going to need to cite a source on that. I’m aware of a man that died after he was mounted by a horse, but AFAIK that was a case where the man was entirely willing because he some really fucked up fetishes.

Average people simply didn’t have access to information at the scale we now enjoy at that time. Leaders of countries and militaries might know, but unless it was being reported by wire services and in local newspapers, the average person would have had no rational way of finding out about it.

Trucking used to be a way a person could provide for their family, remain independent, and feel in control.

Still can. There are still owner-operators, and they have significant control over how they do their job, as long as they aren’t caught cooking their books (…which is what most drivers used to do before there were crackdowns, because you got paid per mile). They usually get paid a lot more than fleet drivers, because fleet drivers aren’t responsible for the maintenance of the truck.

InRangeTV and A Better Way 2A.

I’ve met other supporters of both groups, and they’ve all been pretty cool people.

I’m strongly considering supporting Galen Druke’s GD Politics now that FiveThirtyEight has been shuttered.

Yeah, I’m there for it.

I’ve already had well over 100 piercings, what’s a few thousand more?

Hmmmm.

So what does it mean if I enjoy practicing hojojutsu on my consensually non-consenting partner…?

I believe that most other countries call them provinces rather than states. But yes, if you live in a country that has a normal police force, and you don’t have to worry about out-of-uniform cops using no-knock warrants to kick your front door in, then this is definitely not going to apply to you.

No, castle doctrine exists in all states. You do not have a duty to retreat when it’s inside your own home in almost all cases.

Shooting plainclothes cops that execute a no-knock warrant on your home.

Seriously.

All states–ALL states–have a castle doctrine that allows you to use lethal defense to protect yourself inside your home. A no-knock warrant being executed by cops out of uniform means that you have a reasonable belief that your home is being invaded, and that your life is at immediate risk. Now, admittedly, you probably aren’t going to survive that exchange of gunfire. But the state is going to have a really hard time charging you with shooting at/killing a cop if you do.

Samsung and Roku are bad for this.

You’re buying the hardware; they provide the software as a service. Oh, sure, no agreeing to a unilateral change of conditions on the software means that your hardware is rendered worthless, but still… And yeah, that’s pretty much the way that actually works.

IP law can start getting pretty strange.

A coworker that got pissed when things didn’t work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company–hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss–was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just… Didn’t show up.

This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a ‘bad attitude’ because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn’t work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)

…But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.

Sadly, I have no way to import a KMR L–02 Orca OR, since the ATF makes it such a pain in the ass to import onsey-twosey, and the tariffs mean that if they ever get a US distributor, it’s going to be out of my price range.

But I did get a CZ Shadow 2 Compact a week ago, and that’s going to be my carry and competition gun for however long these tariffs last.

I’m going to have to get a few pounds of powder, primers, and a few thousand bullets (the projectile part), because all of that is going in increase in costs, too. I was quoted a price of $315 or so for 8# of Vihtavouri N-135 powder; I’ll probably try to get 16-24#, 15,000 small rifle primers, and at least 8-12# of Ramshot Silhouette powder. About half of the raw materials to make bullets–lead, copper, brass, nitrocellulose, etc.–end up being imported, because we simply can’t keep up or don’t have the mines.

I spent $7/dozen on cage-free, free-range blue eggs a few days ago. They were delicious on my gyudon.

Stoning for being gay is mentioned all over the bible…? There’s a mistranslated part in the old testament that says that it’s an ‘abomination’, but textual analysis indicates that it was a condemnation of pederasty–which was common among the Greeks at the time–rather than a condemnation of being gay. Paul def. had a problem with gay people, but that appears to be a revulsion with Roman practices and customs, rather than anything strictly religious. Jesus said nothing about it directly. On the other hand, Jesus DID say that you should gouge your eyes out rather than look at a woman in lust, and yet, evangelicals elected an unrepentant, thrice married, multiple-adulterer as president.

For starters, you actually join the League of Nations you proposed at the end of WW1.

…Which doesn’t address the issue. How, EXACTLY, do you enforce anything without the willingness to use force? Have you seen NATO Peacekeepers? They rarely–if ever–use force, and as a result they are almost entirely ineffective at preventing shit.

Open borders, international business ties, and populations with international relations deaden the enthusiasm for interstate military conflicts in between neighboring states.

Tends to, but the accords that ended WWI required Germany to pay absolutely ruinous reparations; even with open borders, international business ties, etc., the economic depression caused by that treaty would have laid the foundation for WWII. Moreover, I note that both the US and the EU had fairly solid trade ties with Russia prior to their invasion of Crimea, and that has done pretty much fuck-all to temper Putin’s imperial ambitions.

So, again: how do you enforce ANYTHING without being willing to use force?

Arguably, the biggest deterrent to a Chinese naval invasion of Taiwan

Do you really believe that? Or is it maybe that the US always has a naval detachment close by, and has pledged to use military force to ensure that Taiwan remains free? Because China has certainly been ratcheting up their insistence that Taiwan is theirs, and that they intend to take it.

Christians have already de facto decided that parts of the bible aren’t a good basis for laws; otherwise, we wouldn’t have laws allowing someone to declare bankruptcy. As far as I can tell, most countries that are majority Muslim allow for bankruptcy procedures when a person or business is insolvent and will be unable to pay their debts. Israel also has bankruptcy laws that dissolve debts.

The number of countries where a debtor must pay back every single farthing they owe, regardless of solvency or ability to pay, and the debt passes on to heirs, is vanishingly small.

And how, exactly, do you enforce the accords–the accords and reparations that directly led to WWII–without the use of military force?

People want to be safe

I think that, in order to make it work, you also need to have a national single-payer healthcare system so that when someone does get infected with an STI, they can get treatment without breaking their bank account. But you also need to ensure that they aren’t unable to pay their expenses during a course of treatment, and you certainly don’t want prostitutes infected with HIV working until their viral load is so low that they’re effectively unable to infect other people. (And yes, free PREP would help, but given that a number of sex workers are prostituting themselves in exchange for drugs, I don’t think that worrying about exposure to HIV or getting PREP is very high on their priority list.)

I do think that a bare minimum would be for cops to have to take reports of sexual assault against prostitutes seriously. …Which would require major criminal justice reform…

Relationships come with boundaries and limits though, right? You’re treating monogamy as ownership, but that’s backwards. My partner free to have sexual relationships with whomsoever they want; however, they aren’t free to have any relationship at all with me if that’s a choice they make.

I affirmatively chose my partner; when I made the choice for them, it meant that I made a choice to give up my sexual and romantic autonomy to pursue the relationship with them. I can take my autonomy back at any time, but if I do, I also permanently give up the relationship that I have; that is a boundary that they set, and I knew that when I chose the relationship.

I have been in polyerotic/multiamorous relationships. What is lacking in them is depth. Building relationships takes time, and time is always more limited in poly relationships. The more partners you have, the shallower each relationship gets. Oh, yes, I know that poly people will say that love is infinite. And perhaps they’re even correct. But the time you can spend with each person is very definitely finite.