What I don’t get are the dogs that like people but are are aggressive towards other dogs. They’re not always angry, but they do just hate all other members of their own species?

I don’t get it. Is the new icon funny somehow?

The incident mentioned in the article ended with the passport returned, but if there are other incidents of passports being taken and not returned then I would agree with you.

Actually, according to the article the main difficulty is just the lack of a passport. The article does mention that some legal residents of the USA might be worried that they would nonetheless be prevented from returning if they left the country to act as chaperones for these children, but that’s a purely hypothetical problem so far.

Are you aware that there is a significant population of white people in South Africa and a long history of racial conflict there between them and the black majority? The white minority ruled over and oppressed the black majority until the end of apartheid in the early nineties and the idea that the majority could now be persecuting the minority is not ridiculous per se the way that you imply it is, although the general consensus outside of the circles Trump listens to is that such persecution isn’t happening.

Ah yes, an “unauthorized modification”. It must have been the janitor pressing buttons accidentally while mopping the mainframe room.

That works out to an annual salary of about $62,500 for a full-time employee and my intuition is that the marginal value of the lowest-paid hotel employees to their employers is a lot less than that, but the nice thing about this being a local law is that LA can experiment on itself and the rest of the country can watch and learn. If this works well, other cities can do the same thing and if this doesn’t then the harm is relatively limited.

(I noticed that the law only applies to hotels with over sixty rooms. I already stay exclusively in Airbnbs when I travel because that’s cheaper. Is LA also one of those cities making it difficult to run an Airbnb or is this going to make large hotels even less competitive in that regard?)

Your interpretation of “subject to to the jurisdiction of the United States” is the one that would make this clause meaningless in the context of the amendment. A sovereign government has that sort of authority over everyone in the country, so presumably the amendment is talking about something different or otherwise there would have been no point in explicitly including the clause at all.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I admit that I’m not sure how to interpret this in a way that includes freed slaves, people born in the Confederacy during the Civil War, but not everyone else born on US territory, but the implication of having two separate clauses is still that a person may be born in the United States but not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. I think that the Trump administration’s arguments seem like a stretch, but so is asserting that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause means nothing.

So is referring to a woman as “Barbie” not sexist if she works for Trump, or is it still sexist but it’s ok to be sexist towards women who work for Trump?

(I’d ban Daily Beast links if I were in charge.)

Their true purpose is sinister.

“Compelled by law” isn’t a sufficient justification for Catholics in this case - they’re supposed to die rather than reveal something that was said to them in confession, like Saint John of Nepomuk.

Confession is a sacrament of the Catholic Church - pretty much the definition of “religion” in Europe for two thousand years. It’s clearly something the first amendment is intended to protect and this law is well over the line into unconstitutional.

readmit the priest after a penance

The priest actually has to repent - if he still thinks he did the right thing, he isn’t forgiven.

There is a very good reason for the super rich to support the rule of law: it secures their own wealth and power. Even if they may want to be aristocrats in a highly stratified society like, for example, 19th century Britain rather than a modern democratic welfare state, they don’t stand to benefit from the transition to a modern autocracy. 19th century Britain was very much a nation of laws where the government would protect the lives and property of the super rich whereas modern autocrats quickly co-opt them into personal lenders whose well-being is entirely at the mercy of the autocrat.

Thus, while some super rich individuals currently support populist autocracy either due to idiosyncratic personal beliefs or short-term political expediency, transitioning to it is not in the best interest of the super rich as a class. Rule of law isn’t the same thing as democracy but I don’t see a global movement towards rule of law without democracy - the two are in the present day apparently inextricable.

(China seemed like it could become a powerful example of rule of law without democracy, but Xi’s consolidation of power seems to have returned it to the standard autocratic track.)

Ah, Robin Hood (2010 film). That famous bulwark against oppression.

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I don’t think they stomped loudly (except when they ran) but I don’t see how they would be able to move through the undergrowth without snapping a lot of branches. (Or how they could move through dense forest at all.)

I have a hard time imagining a stealthy t-rex. He’s going to be making some noise even if he tiptoes.

I refuse to believe that Romans painted theirs. I mean, the evidence is clear that they did but it would look so terrible!