Wine reviews are much like movie reviews.  It's more important to find a wine reviewer who shares your tastes.  It's a subjective art for the most part, but there's some set pieces and general standards.

A surprise pregnancy would be a great opportunity to seriously consider marriage, but only in the same way that unexpected and serious events tend to focus our attentions on what matters.  But alone, a surprise pregnancy isn't sufficient to get married.

Legalism, there oughta be a law against it.

In the case of martyrdom the canonization process is a bit different.  This is an evolution from early Church practice of veneration of public martyrs during periods of persecution.  Historically only the local bishop's approval was required.  Today no evidence of miracles is require in the case of martyrs.  All that is required is an investigation into the character of the martyr, that the martyrdom took place, and that the martyrdom took place for the Christian faith.  A well attested event such as the 800 in question is not really controversial.

I can't agree more.  Art was always a representation of nature.  What we've managed to do is destroy nature.  So, oddly enough, the same truth is spoken to.  Art still represents nature, but as our grasp of nature deteriorates, so too do our representations.

It makes you wonder how we managed for all these millennia of recorded history without a bunch of busybody nannies running other people's lives.

I looked into Bitcoin about a year ago.  I had considered setting up a mining operation, basically a bunch of high end video cards crunching away at the crypto-currency, but decided against it in the end since it seemed too risky, and my landlord would probably wonder why his power bill went up a lot.

Bitcoin isn't a fiat currency because its necessarily finite, and beyond state influence, since everyone, and no one, controls monetary supply.  And Bitcoin is immune from the bad monetary policy, but it is also immune from good monetary policy.  This is to say that all fiat currency is necessarily bad, it's just very easy to abuse, as we see happening now.

I see Bitcoin not as a viable long-term currency, but as a kind of John-the-Baptist precursor.  Our money is too easy to abuse by bad actors, and Bitcoin exposes this weakness.  Bitcoin won't be the final destination of currency, but it's a "proof-of-concept" of sorts.

My hope is that some government embraces a similar currency style and goes about replacing its fiat paper with something more controlled.

The rich are getting richer in this faux-recovery because of cheap dollars.  The closer you are to the financial sector, the better you're doing because the money is cheap.

So yeah, some rich are getting richer, because interest rates are nothing and the fed can give interest free loans to itself for the time being.  It won't/can't last forever, but for now the financial sectors, and those who can leverage a bunch of cheap money, will do pretty well.

What the rich aren't getting rich doing is hiring more employees to expand their buisness for a variety of factors.  The money is better spent elsewhere, or held as cash for now.

Law and Order: Night Court

Thing about money is it's fungible, even aid such as food stamps frees up cash for other purposes, like lotto tickets and beer, or in this case explosives.  So any time the state gives money to someone who turns out to be a criminal, that money can be said to have enabled the crime.

In response to your last paragraph.  Yes, some writers really think that the awareness of social inequality will cause the proletariat uprising and then the utopian classless society, etc.  This concept is known as Historical Materialism, or just good ol' Marxist History.

So everything the Marxist needs to do, at least ostensibly, to make this happen is to show the proletariat that they are members of a universal working-class who are being oppressed by the bourgeoisie, then (?????), then profit.  This is why they think awareness matters.

But to an observer of history unburdened by the deeply flawed tenants of Marxist thought this is ridiculous, and inequality is nothing compared to absolute quality of life.  Which turns out to have been the death knell of Marxist thought.  They could not have foreseen the lower classes' quality of life rise to such great heights.  Although the inequality of absolute wealth became much greater, the lower social strata had it much better off, and it turned out they didn't much care to overthrow their employers who made this way of life possible on the whole.

The whole ideology is bunk, but it's very attractive for a variety of reasons.

What you mean it's hard to get laws passed when you can't bribe people to vote for your legislation with other people's money?  Who'da thunk it?

Sick Pay policies wind up making the workforce less productive as well.  I'm sure many of us have experienced a "use or lose" sick day or holiday, which you can't sell back to the employer, so you use it, even though you'd rather work and sell the balance for cash.  I'd just as soon have unpaid holidays/sick leave and a slightly higher salary, which I can discuss in the negotiating stage of a job interview.  I understand the desire for paid sick days for certain employees, but let that be a negotiation between employer and employee.

The left's framing has been largely successful on health care, and education.  They framed these things are rights rather than privileges that cost money.  Health care, while it surely has vast costs, is not perceived as such, as the true costs of health care are mostly hidden from its largest consumers.  Rather "Health Care" is more a fundamental human right that all decent nations with such wealth as ours ought to provide for everyone, rather than something you pay for because it's worth it.

The employer-pays model many Americans have enjoy actually harms us in the long term.  When the true cost of something is obscured from the people actually incurring them, it engenders waste and fraud.

I'm confident that as the public gets to know ObamaCare, they will re-evaluate their opinions on this model of health care.  But this will only occur when the consumers exposure to the costs of health care increase.  When they are forced to buy something they really don't want, in order to subsidize the unhealthy behavior which drives up the costs of Health Care for everyone under this model, the public will demand a better solution.

The only real difference between today's politicians and yesterday's is that now they bribe the people with the people's money.  Time was they had the dignity to bribe you out of money they legitimately earned, stole, or looted.

I admit the optics are bad on this.  But I have to think that a position essay assignment in which you play the devil's advocate is a really good assignment, especially when you play devil's advocate for a party, who might actually be the devil.

I'm not convinced this is bad teaching.  I'd like to have seen the reception of this assignment in the broader public if it had included a disclaimer of sorts.  But then again, playing the devil's advocate is much more fun when you don't tell anyone you're doing it.