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Incredibly Fantastic Motorcycle Accident

visionep says...

I think that momentum was slowed by his head hitting the back of the car and was also converted into rotational energy which flipped him around.

There is so many factors that came together for this video though that it is either a really amazing timing/coincidence or it could be a very well setup stunt/cg demo.

Either way it looks real enough for me so call me impressed.

Grimm said:

Fake? The motorcycle was going considerably faster than the car he hit. Wouldn't he have continued at the same speed (or close to it) once he was airborne?

Little League World Series Coach Gives Moving Speech to Kids

eric3579 (Member Profile)

RhesusMonk says...

You thought right.

In a fitting coincidence, today was the last day of prep before my first class of students arrives on Monday. I took a job as a high school science teacher at a school for kids who have been kicked out of their zoned schools for academic and behavioral issues--students others have written off and worse. I've been watching and passing around the Taylor Mali and Rives performances all week. After years fighting what I now believe to have been my destiny all along, for the first time in a long time, I feel I am doing what I am supposed to be doing.

Thanks for the heads-up on the link.

eric3579 said:

Think you might dig this . Its pretty awesome. http://videosift.com/video/TED-Clint-Smith-The-Danger-of-Silence

Bill Nye: You Can’t Ignore Facts Forever

dannym3141 says...

@Trancecoach - respectfully leaving this discussion based on the following:

"You are actually going a long way to make my point that those who are "believers" in climate change are missing the value and indeed necessity for ongoing skepticism"

I don't understand how you can say that after i was the person that investigated the source of the first link you gave out. You hadn't even bothered to look into it, so i did, and you can say with a straight face that i'm a "believer" who has lost his scepticism?

You didn't even check completely through the second lot of links you posted, because the one i did check (on YOUR ultimate recommendation) ended up being written by a guy who saw climate change as one of mankind's top 10 problems. You've shown yourself twice now to be using sources that you haven't even fucking looked at, evidenced by a half hour investigation by me! You didn't even put a half hour into it!?

I remain open to evidence that climate change is not a man-made concern, or that it is not a concern. I'm not going to sit here and relay exactly how each of us think the scientific community works. You can read how it works on the scientific method and scientific consensus pages i linked earlier, anyone can. It's not open for debate; there is an overwhelming majority of scientific evidence in favour and there is not enough and not significant enough scientific evidence against. It isn't a coincidence that ~99% of the research points in one direction, and it isn't some conspiracy.... that isn't how science works. It's not perfect, a lot of shit science gets through because it's so hard to read and so relatively few people want to trawl through shite, but that's why it's better to look at the consensus - what is the AVERAGE opinion of ALL the clever people? It's a community that i consider incorruptible - because even if you paid off 10 research centres, there's still millions of individual scientists, individual institutions, so many people dedicated to keeping it pure because we know that's the only way we get the most from it. And ... the science and maths speaks for itself, the models are not "just models" as the moron associated with your latest link says. They are the best representations we have and they do represent parts of physical reality, and by using carefully considered techniques we can extract information about things. The alternative is to consult a Ouija board!?

By the way, nice 240 page pdf document for me to refer to. I didn't ask for a single link, i asked for a single point about which we were in disagreement... usually papers are cited to reinforce a point. You don't just cite something and go "there you go, read all of that, whatever you see that agrees with me; that's what i'm talking about!"

40 Stars Before They Were Stars Auditioning

Sycraft says...

No kidding. The audition is notable because he nailed the American accent so well that the director forgot/didn't realize that it was Hugh Laurie, but he was quite well known before that. In fact he was on location filming a movie, and he apologises as that being the reason for his haggard appearance. Another happy coincidence, as they decided such a look was great for House.

messenger said:

And Hugh Laurie before House. He'd become a star about 30 before.

Bill Nye: You Can’t Ignore Facts Forever

A-Winston says...

What an idiot. Yes, the temps have been up for a while. Just like we've had mini-ice ages and mini-bumps throughout history. Look at geology reports (oh, wait, he's only a mechanical engineer.) Nothing new here, folks. Yes, we're pumping out carbon dioxide. So did volcanos in the distant past. So what? We've got a lot of buffer called the ocean. Lastly, Dr. Nye, two coincident facts don't show causality. Oh, you wear a bow-tie, you must be smart. See? Classic example of two facts that are coincident but not related. Except for the you're being smart part. That part isn't true. Michael Crichton had it right in State of Fear.

Doctor Disobeys Gun Free Zone -- Saves Lives Because of It

modulous says...

Yes it's a coincidence. That's the most likely outcome from trying to draw conclusions from the position of a single data point. I'm not sure if you think that the culture of a Spanish speaking Caribbean colony a thousand miles from the mainland is representative of the US as a whole, but that seems a strange position to take.

In any event, you have shifted the discussion from spree killers to killers in general. The video here is about a guy who might have stopped a spree killer (but almost certainly didn't), and did shoot a mentally ill person. You raise European comparisons, so let's do that. Let's look at Europe's recent spree killers (from wiki)
Borel, Eric, 1995, legal weapons stolen from family
Leibacher, Friedrich Heinz, 2001, legal weapons
Bogdanovič, Ljubiša, 2013, legal I believe
Izquierdo, 1990, legal I think
Radosavljević, Nikola, 2007, legal
Zavistonovičius, Leonardas, 1998, legal
Durn, Richard, 2002, legal
Harman, Ľubomír, 2010, legal
There's the top 8 by deaths (excl. the UK ones already mentioned). All using legally held weapons. There may be a pattern emerging here...

Trancecoach said:

Your "refutations" are, for the most part, self-defeating, so I will allow others to do their own research and come to their own conclusions rather than addressing each one. Suffice it to say that gun-control, in the U.S. at least, starts as an anti-minority measure (not unlike the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty") and spurs on a "dark economy" (or "underground economy"), not unlike what (eventually) felled the Soviet Union. It's not dissimilar to what's going on in Puerto Rico and, to some extent, the Bay Area (except NorCal doesn't have the feds all over them like Puerto Rico does, so violent crime is high in PR and low in Mendocino).

Is it purely a "coincidence" that Puerto Rico has a higher murder rate than almost anywhere else in the U.S, while citing as many as 50%+ of the people on "public assistance," is an epicenter on the "war on drugs" and has about the strictest gun control laws of anywhere in the U.S.?

But don't worry! Here's some good news!
"They found that a country like Luxembourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. . . . The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, conceded that the results they found in their report was not what they expected to find."

I guess they didn't account for the fact that outlaws don't really care about laws! The nerve of some people...

Doctor Disobeys Gun Free Zone -- Saves Lives Because of It

Trancecoach says...

Your "refutations" are, for the most part, self-defeating, so I will allow others to do their own research and come to their own conclusions rather than addressing each one. Suffice it to say that gun-control, in the U.S. at least, starts as an anti-minority measure (not unlike the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty") and spurs on a "dark economy" (or "underground economy"), not unlike what (eventually) felled the Soviet Union. It's not dissimilar to what's going on in Puerto Rico and, to some extent, the Bay Area (except NorCal doesn't have the feds all over them like Puerto Rico does, so violent crime is high in PR and low in Mendocino).

Is it purely a "coincidence" that Puerto Rico has a higher murder rate than almost anywhere else in the U.S, while citing as many as 50%+ of the people on "public assistance," is an epicenter on the "war on drugs" and has about the strictest gun control laws of anywhere in the U.S.?

But don't worry! Here's some good news!
"They found that a country like Luxembourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. . . . The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, conceded that the results they found in their report was not what they expected to find."

I guess they didn't account for the fact that outlaws don't really care about laws! The nerve of some people...

modulous said:

<snipped>

Doctor Disobeys Gun Free Zone -- Saves Lives Because of It

Trancecoach says...

You seem to think that eliminating guns will somehow eliminate mass shootings. However, there is zero correlation to the number of legal gun ownerships with the number of homicides. In fact, here are some statistics for you:

At present, a little more than half of all Americans own the sum total of about 320 million guns, 36% of which are handguns, but fewer than 100,000 of these guns are used in violent crimes. And, as it happens, where gun ownership per capita increases, violent crime is known to decrease. In other words, Caucasians tend to own more guns than African Americans, middle aged folks own more guns than young people, wealthy people own more guns than poor people, rural families own more guns than urbanites --> But the exact opposite is true for violent behavior (i.e., African Americans tend to be more violent than Caucasians, young people more violent than middle aged people, poor people more violent than wealthy people, and urbanites more violent than rural people). So gun ownership tends increase where violence is the least. This is, in large part, due to the cultural divide in the U.S. around gun ownership whereby most gun owners own guns for recreational sports (including the Southern Caucasian rural hunting culture, the likes of which aren't found in Australia or the UK or Europe, etc.); and about half of gun owners own guns for self-defense (usually as the result of living in a dangerous environment). Most of the widespread gun ownership in the U.S. predates any gun control legislation and gun ownership tends to generally rise as a response to an increase in violent crime (not the other way around).

There were about 350,000 crimes in 2009 in which a gun was present (but may not have been used), 24% of robberies, 5% of assaults, and about 66% of homicides. By contrast, guns are used as self-defense as many as 2 and a half million times every year (according to criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University), thereby decreasing the potential loss of life or property (i.e., those with guns are less likely to be injured in a violent crime than those who use another defensive strategy or simply comply).

Interestingly, violent crimes tend to decrease in those areas where there have been highly publicized instances of victims arming themselves or defending themselves against violent criminals. (In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of home burglaries occur when people are in the home, whereas only 9% of home burglaries in the U.S. occur when people are in the home, presumably as a result of criminals' fear of being shot by the homeowner.) In short, gun ownership reduces the likelihood of harm.

So, for example, Boston has the strictest gun control and the most school shootings. The federal ban on assault weapons from '94-'04 did not impact amount and severity of school shootings. The worst mass homicide in a school in the U.S. took place in Michigan in 1927, killing 38 children. The perpetrator used (illegal) bombs, not guns in this case.

1/3 of legal gun owners obtain their guns (a total of about 200,000 guns) privately, outside the reach of government regulation. So, it's likely that gun-related crimes will increase if the general population is unarmed.

Out of a sample of 943 felon handgun owners, 44% had obtained the gun privately, 32% stole it, 9% rented/borrowed it, and 16% bought it from a retailer. (Note retail gun sales is the only area that gun control legislation can affect, since existing laws have failed to control for illegal activity. Stricter legislation would likely therefore change the statistics of how felon handgun owners obtain the gun towards less legal, more violent ways.) Less than 3% obtain guns on the 'black market' (probably due, in part, to how many legal guns are already easily obtained).

600,000 guns are stolen every year and millions of guns circulate among criminals (outside the reach of the regulators), so the elimination of all new handgun purchases/sales, the guns would still be in the hands of the criminals (and few others).

The common gun controls have been shown to have no effect on the reduction of violent crime, however, according to the Dept. of Justice, states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate. A 2003 CDC report found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws reduced gun violence. This conclusion was echoed in an exhaustive National Academy of Sciences study a year later.

General gun ownership has no net positive effect on total violence rates.

Of almost 200,000 CCP holders in Florida, only 8 were revoked as a result of a crime.

The high-water mark of mass killings in the U.S. was back in 1929, and has not increased since then. In fact, it's declined from 42 incidents in 1990 to 26 from 2000-2012. Until recently, the worst school shootings took place in the UK or Germany. The murder rate and violent crime in the U.S. is less than half of what it was in the late 1980s (the reason for which is most certainly multimodal and multifaceted).

Regarding Gun-Free Zones, many mass shooters select their venues because there are signs there explicitly banning concealed handguns (i.e., where the likelihood is higher that interference will be minimal). "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns," says John Lott.

In any case, do we have any evidence to believe that the regulators (presumably the police in this instance) will be competent, honest, righteous, just, and moral enough to take away the guns from private citizens, when a study has shown that private owners are convicted of firearms violations at the same rate as police officers? How will you enforce the regulation and/or remove the guns from those who resist turning over their guns? Do the police not need guns to get those with the guns to turn over their guns? Does this then not presume that "gun control" is essentially an aim for only the government (i.e., the centralized political elite and their minions) to have guns at the exclusion of everyone else? Is the government so reliable, honest, moral, virtuous, and forward thinking as to ensure that the intentions of gun control legislation go exactly as planned?

From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary. Do they really want to deprive those who are culturally acclimatized to gun-ownership, who may be less fortunate than they are, to have the means to protect themselves (e.g., women who carry guns to protect themselves from assault or rape)? Sounds more like a lack of empathy and understanding of those realities to me.

There are many generational issues worth mentioning here. For example, the rise in gun ownership coincided with the war on drugs and the war on poverty. There are also nearly 24 million combat veterans living in the U.S. and they constitute a significant proportion of the U.S.' prison population as a result of sex offenses or violent crime. Male combat veterans are four times as likely to engage violent crime as non-veteran men; and are 4.4 times more likely to have abused a spouse/partner, and 6.4 times more likely to suffer from PTSD, and 2-3 times more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, unemployment, divorce/separation. Vietnam veterans with PTSD tend to have higher rates of childhood abuse (26%) than Vietnam veterans without PTSD (7%). Iraq/Afghanistan vets are 75% more likely to die in car crashes. Sex crimes by active duty soldiers have tripled since 2003. In 2007, 700,000 U.S. children had at least one parent in a warzone. In a July 2010 report, child abuse in Army families was 3 times higher if a parent was deployed in combat. From 2001 - 2011, alcohol use associated with domestic violence in Army families increased by 54%, and child abuse increased by 40%. What effect do you think that's going to have, regardless of "gun controls?"
("The War Comes Home" or as William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies said, "A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.")

In addition, families in the U.S. continue to break down. Single parent households have a high correlation to violence among children. In 1965, 93% of all American births were to married women. Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women (a rate that rises to 53% for women under the age of 30). By age 30, 1/3 of American women have spent time as a single mother (a rate that is halved in European countries like France, Sweden, & Germany). Less than 9% of married couples are in poverty, but more than 40% of single-parent families are in poverty. Much of child poverty would be ameliorated if parents were marrying at 1970s rates. 85% of incarcerated youth grew up without fathers.

Since the implementation of the war on drugs, there's a drug arrest in the U.S. every 19 seconds, 82% of which were for possession alone (destroying homes and families in the process). The Dept. of Justice says that illegal drug market in the U.S. is dominated by 900,000 criminally active gang members affiliated with 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities, many of which have direct ties to Mexican drug cartels in at least 230 American cities. The drug control spending, however, has grown by 69.7% over the past 9 years. The criminal justice system is so overburdened as a result that nearly four out of every ten murders, and six out of every ten rapes, and nine out of ten burglaries go unsolved (and 90% of the "solved" cases are the result of plea-bargains, resulting in non-definitive guilt). Only 8.5% of federal prisoners have committed violent offenses. 75% of Detroit's state budget can be traced back to the war on drugs.

Point being, a government program is unlikely to solve any issues with regards to guns and the whole notion of gun control legislation is severely misguided in light of all that I've pointed out above. In fact, a lot of the violence is the direct or indirect result of government programs (war on drugs and the war on poverty).

(And, you'll note, I made no mention of the recent spike in the polypharmacy medicating of a significant proportion of American children -- including most of the "school shooters" -- the combinations of which have not been studied, but have -- at least in part -- been correlated to homicidal and/or suicidal behaviors.)

newtboy said:

Wow, you certainly don't write like it.
Because you seem to have trouble understanding him, I'll explain.
The anecdote is the singular story of an illegally armed man that actually didn't stop another man with a gun being used as 'proof' that more guns make us more safe.
The data of gun violence per capita vs percentage of gun ownership says the opposite.

And to your point about the 'gun free zones', they were created because mass murders had repeatedly already happened in these places, not before. EDIT: You seem to imply that they CAUSE mass murders...that's simply not true, they are BECAUSE of mass murders. If they enforced them, they would likely work, but you need a lot of metal detectors. I don't have the data of attacks in these places in a 'before the law vs after the law' form to verify 'gun free zones' work, but I would note any statistics about it MUST include the overall rate of increase in gun violence to have any meaning, as in 'a percentage of all shootings that happened in 'gun free zones' vs all those that happened everywhere', otherwise it's statistically completely meaningless.

Kiefer Sutherland Reveals the Origin of Jack Bauer's Damn It

Transformers StopMotion Attack On Giant

ChaosEngine says...

I saw the first one when it came out, more out of curiosity than anything else. I was a big transformers fan as a kid, but I wasn't expecting much from Bay. Even my low expectations weren't met.

Tonight, by coincidence, Dark of the Moon was on TV. "Maybe I'm being too hard" I thought. I mean, they're only glorified toy commercials anyway, right? Maybe I'm guilty of just jumping on the Bay-hate band wagon...

Nope.

Aside from being a completely un-fucking-watchable mess, it was just boring. How the hell do you spend that much money (and the money clearly didn't go on writers or actors), have that many explosions and still have it be boring?

I didn't like JJ Abrams new Star Trek movies, but at lest he was in trying (in his own half-assed, ham-fisted way) to pay homage to the property. Bay clearly hates this whole concept. He hates the characters, the design, the plot lines, he's not even really interested in the central concept of robots that bloody transform. And to top it all off, you couldn't even let kids watch this. Instead of the noble, if naïve leader of the 80s, Optimus is just a dick here. And a psychopathic one too. He flat out murders his defeated enemy at the end.

FFS, if it's a terrible movie and you can't use it to sell toys to kids..what is the goddamn point of its existence?

ant said:

It beats all of Michael Bay's movies too!

lurgee (Member Profile)

radx says...

If you're still interested in emerging details of the NSA/GCHQ story, keep reading. If not, feel free to delete the comment.

As you might have heard, a parliamentary investigative committee was set up in Germany to shed some light on at least some of the claims made by the press. They don't want to pay too close attention to it, given that our own intelligence services are just as bad, but that's another discussion.

Today, two expert witnesses were supposed to testify, William Binney and Thomas Drake, Everything was to be broadcast, as is custom, but they decided not to broadcast it after all. Given that recent interviews with both Binney and Drake indicated that they were planning to reveal quite a lot about shady cooperation between NSA/GCHQ and our own services, a set of rather embarassing details might have emerged. What a coincidence... [see footnotes]

Additionally, one of our public broadcasters, in cooperation with Jacob Appelbaum, revealed a piece of source code from a selector of XKeyscore. Hardcoded within, for some reason, we find the IPs of all servers running a TOR directory authority, once of them owned and maintained by a German student. So now we have the names of two German citizens under surveillance, and it'll be significantly harder for our Attorney General to find ways not to open up an invenstigation into espionage.

Also part of the revealed code was a confirmation that using TOR gets you labeled as an "extremist" and your ass is now amongst those whose activities will be monitored, constantly. A Google search for it is enough to land on their shit list, same for Tails.

That's the day so far, and it's not even 1pm.

Edit #1: Binney and Drake are considered witnesses, their statements are exempt from broadcast/streaming. Opposition forced a vote on it, government prevailed, no stream available.

Edit #2: I'll provide a summary of the juicy bits once they are done.

Edit #3: Members of the US Congress present, curious to see some (yet unmentioned) names.

Edit #4: Well, 0:20 and they're finally done for the day. Here's a summary of today's session, though the source can sometimes be a bit of a mouthpiece for the government.

Russell Brand " Is Fox News More Dangerous Than Isis? "

billpayer says...

Wrong. The US gov needs shrills like FOX to keep the public 'on-board'. Classic example being the whole WMD charade. The US public needs to think they are 'spreading freedom'. If they were ever aware of the terrorism it's own government dishes out, the American psyche would collapse and there might be actual protests (and more). Which is why I like Brand's debunking of said propaganda and war mongering.
Do you think it's a coincidence the bitch is brown ? I even think they darkened her a bit.
CNN also did it with some other war mongering Lebanese cunt recently.
Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZKqxxoUoYs

Yogi said:

The US was going to do that whether or not Fox News was involved.

Exploring Man of Steel

CrushBug says...

I was about to write a big long post about my feelings on the movie, and that is when I noticed that RFlagg said everything I was going to say. Well done. =]

In a total coincidence, I just borrowed Man of Steel from a friend and it is sitting beside me at work right now.

RFlagg said:

I never had a problem with the killing of Zod. I never got those who complained how this movie killed Zod and praised the original '78 movie for the same reason he points out here, the he kills Zod in the '78 film and it is just laughed off while here he shows real remorse. My biggest pet peeve of the movie is that people complaining about him killing Zod... Never got why that upset people.

I did and still do have issue with the wholesale destruction of Metropolis in the fight, but can accept the premise of the video. But it should have been demonstrated more effectively in the film. Clark/Superman should have tried to lead the fight away from the city, then we see Zod ignore him and return to the destruction of humanity, forcing the fight to continue in the city. That simple little scene would have pulled it together and made it obvious that Zod wouldn't allow the fight to happen anywhere else but the city.

All the other issues he mentions and explained I thought were obvious and didn't need an explanation.

How to make a Batarang like "The Dark Knight"



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