>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
>> ^longde:
That is objectification of women, whether or not you agree with it.
There are no superhero plumbers in the real world, unlike women.

This isn't a real woman, nor is she in a real world. It's a fantasy land of make believe...doesn't objectification have to be of a real object?


No "to present as an object, esp. of sight, touch, or other physical sense; make objective; externalize.".

It doesn't matter if it's a real woman or not, this is a representation of a woman being presented as nothing but a plaything, and object to be looked at and prodded. This IS objectifying women. It's showing a woman not as a person but as an object... don't try and pretend that it's all fun and games, because really, it's kinda sick.

I personally have no issue with 'sex games' as long as the game doesn't make sex at all costs with no concern for the female character the aim. If it is presented as consensual and the woman is enjoying things too, then that's ok. It's these objectifying and rape type games that freak me out and scare me.

Really, how downtrodden, emasculated and powerless do Japanese men feel such that they need these outlets?

Japanese culture is often heralded as some shining beacon of perfectness, but underneath the sheen of 'respect' and order there seems to be an awfully sick and prevalent underbelly of a real need for power over women.

There is a conspiracy that there is a Kenyan muslim terrorist who stole the US Election to become president of the United States (and may actually be the anti-christ heralding the end of times)...

He has a secret agenda to destroy America and it's good people by bankrupting the treasury and turning the country into atheist communists who hate freedom and capitalism. He hates god and wants your children have abortions and be gay in the army - all the while giving free health care to illegal immigrants while executing white people in front of 'healthcare' death panels.

More people believe in Aliens OR vote republican?

... but David Icke is crazy because he suggests Glen Beck might be a reptilian Shape shifter?

"If my sons did not want wars, there would be none." - Gutle Schnaper, Mayer Amschel Rothschilds wife.

-

"I am one of those who do not believe the national debt is a national blessing... it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country."

Andrew Jackson, Letter to L. H. Coleman of Warrenton, N.C., 29 April 1824

-

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had mens views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913), Doubleday

-

"From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."

Winston Churchill, "Zionism versus Bolshevism", Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920, pg. 5

-

"The people must be helped to think naturally about money. They must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few."

Henry Ford, My Life and Work, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922

-

"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing or decreasing deposits and bank purchases. Every loan, overdraft or bank purchase creates a deposit, and every repayment or bank sale destroys a deposit. And they who control the credit of a nation, direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."

Reginald McKenna, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressing the shareholders as Chairman of the Midland Bank, at the Annual General Meeting in January 1924.

-

"The present Federal Reserve System is a flagrant case of the Governments conferring a special privilege upon bankers. The Government hands to the banks its credit, at virtually no cost to the banks, to be loaned out by the bankers for their own private profit. Still worse, however, is the fact that it gives the bankers practically complete control of the amount of money that shall be in circulation. Not one dollar of these Federal Reserve notes gets into circulation without being borrowed into circulation and without someone paying interest to some bank to keep it circulating. Our present money system is a debt money system. Before a dollar can circulate, a debt must be created. Such a system assumes that you can borrow yourself out of debt."

Willis A. Overholser, A short review and analysis of the history of money in the United States, with an introduction to the current money problem (1936), p. 56

Refreshness on theoretical physics should be always welcome , however to be technically careful with new proposals is mandatory !
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 6:02PM GMT 14 Nov 2007
Comments 596 | Comment on this article

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
• Garrett Lisi: This surfer is no Einstein...
• Test tube universe hints at unifying theory
• Surfer Dude's Theory of Everything - The Movie
Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

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In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
• Is this the fabric of the universe?
• Are we missing a dimension of time?
• Quantum genesis: How life was born on Earth
The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."
Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
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What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.
The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."

>> ^imstellar28:
There may be a time in my life when watching a video this like doesn't evoke emotion, of anger or sadness; emotion which maybe erases what sense of rationality I may have.
I hope that day never comes.


lol... Why does this remind of those overly dramatic Spanish soap operas? I can see you saying this with long pauses and ending with the back of your hand resting on your forehead.

I know you are serious, but how did you think it is a good idea to demean what happened to that girl so that you can connect it to your personal issue?

We all lose rational thought to passion or emotion at times. It's important to note that passion is different than emotion. Losing rationality to emotion isn't a virtue. It's a fact of life, but not one to be heralded as a positive attribute. Or at least in my mind.

Atheists just don't like Kim Jong-il because his birth was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

But Ms Werbeloff has been forced to admit her "eyewitness" account was bogus.

As she prepared to tell all on Nine's A Current Affair, detectives told The Sun-Herald last night Ms Werbeloff's account of the shooting of Justin Kallu, 27, the so-called "skinny wog", was made up.

"We have interviewed her and she has not witnessed the shooting," said acting Kings Cross Police crime manager, Detective Inspector Matt McQueen. "She has admitted to making it all up and has not witnessed the shooting."

Summon something in my mind
summoned strength I try to find.
I hold on tight and try to fly
relaxed, defeated, I start to cry.

Alas this life is has beaten me,
Beyond a pulp, though I can’t see.
I crane my neck to see the light,
I claw and scrape and try to fight.

I slip, and slide back down the bank,
I dig and scream, my life is rank.
I stand and herald a life that’s torn,
My life, these shackles that I’ve worn.

Hold me down and weight me under,
Shake my soul and crown like thunder.
Waves of passion suck me dry,
I lose my mind and start to die.

I don’t know how to shirk this weight,
For I am strong, but it is great.
I falter as it shuts me down,
And forever wear my tarnished crown.

ahoy! I replied to this note, and attempted to maintain civility. cheers!

In reply to this comment by BansheeX:
Forget about stupidity on both sides, you people always pick a punching bag who can't defend their position to make your own dumb viewpoint seem like the right one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/co2_fairytales_in_global_warmi.html

CO2 is a fundamental building block of life, and current levels are NOWHERE NEAR where they have been in the past. Moreover, the correlation of CO2 and Earth temperature is deeply flawed. It's far more likely that temperatures rise and fall in the short term as a result of solar cycles or some other phenomena, and that increased CO2 levels are a corresponding RESULT of temperature change rather than the cause. That's what gives the idiots that nice correlating graph where they can claim the opposite. A more detailed look at ice core graphs show us that temperature changes occur BEFORE changes in CO2 levels. The global warming crowd has it completely reversed that CO2 is driving temperature.

Moreover, the last century's warming trend has been a mere .8 celsius, well within natural expectations given the last 1000 years. I suppose the vikings were also somehow responsible for the even larger climactic swing in temperature known as the Little Ice Age from 1000 to 1200 AD? From 1940 to 1970, there was a cooling trend which led to a global cooling scare. We were all supposed to be frozen in ice by now.

The idea that mankind is capable of affecting earth's temperature is just laughable. If it was even possible to have globally banned coal and oil the last 200 years, the only thing you'd have accomplished is a complete eradication of 200 years of human progress towards cleaner, more efficient technologies like nuclear (which you luddites have also blocked while countries like China and France kick our freaking asses).

http://www.dailytech.com/Chinas+Nuclear+Power+Efforts+Surge+Ahead/article14911.htm

So what exactly are we supposed to do? We can't do nuclear because you boneheads don't want to recycle or store the voluminously small captured waste, you'd rather burn your fuel and disperse it into the atmosphere than put something in a single mountain for a thousand years until we jettison it into the sun. You herald wind power, which takes massive amounts of steel, land, and maintenance for relatively little power output. You'd have to cover an area the size of Montana with windmills just to meet TODAY'S domestic power demands. That's how bloody inefficient it is relative to nuclear, and unless you magically discover a magical material like steel that is way cheaper and 1% as heavy, it's going to hit a wall pretty soon. Wind is fine for the wind belt and rural areas in Iowa, solar is fine for the desert in Arizona. But to say that wind and solar can themselves provide even a majority of our national need for cheap power is pure insanity. It's pure insanity, and anyone who's looked at the numbers knows it.

Forget about stupidity on both sides, you people always pick a punching bag who can't defend their position to make your own dumb viewpoint seem like the right one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/co2_fairytales_in_global_warmi.html

CO2 is a fundamental building block of life, and current levels are NOWHERE NEAR where they have been in the past. Moreover, the correlation of CO2 and Earth temperature is deeply flawed. It's far more likely that temperatures rise and fall in the short term as a result of solar cycles or some other phenomena, and that increased CO2 levels are a corresponding RESULT of temperature change rather than the cause. That's what gives the idiots that nice correlating graph where they can claim the opposite. A more detailed look at ice core graphs show us that temperature changes occur BEFORE changes in CO2 levels. The global warming crowd has it completely reversed that CO2 is driving temperature.

Moreover, the last century's warming trend has been a mere .8 celsius, well within natural expectations given the last 1000 years. I suppose the vikings were also somehow responsible for the even larger climactic swing in temperature known as the Little Ice Age from 1000 to 1200 AD? From 1940 to 1970, there was a cooling trend which led to a global cooling scare. We were all supposed to be frozen in ice by now.

The idea that mankind is capable of affecting earth's temperature is just laughable. If it was even possible to have globally banned coal and oil the last 200 years, the only thing you'd have accomplished is a complete eradication of 200 years of human progress towards cleaner, more efficient technologies like nuclear (which you luddites have also blocked while countries like China and France kick our freaking asses).

http://www.dailytech.com/Chinas+Nuclear+Power+Efforts+Surge+Ahead/article14911.htm

So what exactly are we supposed to do? We can't do nuclear because you boneheads don't want to recycle or store the voluminously small captured waste, you'd rather burn your fuel and disperse it into the atmosphere than put something in a single mountain for a thousand years until we jettison it into the sun. You herald wind power, which takes massive amounts of steel, land, and maintenance for relatively little power output. You'd have to cover an area the size of Montana with windmills just to meet TODAY'S domestic power demands. That's how bloody inefficient it is relative to nuclear, and unless you magically discover a magical material like steel that is way cheaper and 1% as heavy, it's going to hit a wall pretty soon. Wind is fine for the wind belt and rural areas in Iowa, solar is fine for the desert in Arizona. But to say that wind and solar can themselves provide even a majority of our national need for cheap power is pure insanity. It's pure insanity, and anyone who's looked at the numbers knows it.

You wanna some REALLY weird middle-name stuph?

WAYNE

The Classic Middle Name (all-new!)
Arrested Recently and Awaiting Trial for Murder: Kevin Wayne Dunlap, Hopkinsville, Ky., October; Richard Wayne Smith, Marietta, Ga., January; Joshua Wayne Cubbage, St. Helens, Ore., February; Timothy Wayne Murray, Slidell, La., convicted on a 2005 cocaine possession charge in March 2009 while awaiting trial for a 2006 murder. Indicted for Murder: Arnold Wayne McCartney, Lewis County, W.Va., March; Arthur Wayne Blood, Pendleton, Ore., March. Convicted of Murder: Michael Wayne Charles, Beaumont, Texas, October; John Wayne Graves Jr., Lancaster, Pa., November; Michael Wayne Sherrill, Charlotte, N.C., February; Douglas Wayne Hall II, Richmond, Ky., February. Sentenced for Murder: Charles Wayne Warden, Brownsville, Texas, January. Murder Conviction Upheld on Appeal: Thomas Wayne Weaver, Gastonia, N.C., February. Executed for Murder: Kenneth Wayne Morris, Huntsville, Texas, March. Died in Prison Awaiting Retrial for Murder: Michael Wayne Jennings, Martinez, Calif., convicted of murder in 1984 but granted a retrial in 2002. Dunlap: [Times Leader (Princeton, Ky.)-AP, 10-27-08] Smith: [Marietta Daily Journal, 1-12-09] Cubbage: [South County Spotlight (Portland, Ore.), 3-4-09] Murray: [Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 3-3-09] McCartney: [MSNBC-WBOY-TV (Clarksburg, W.Va.), 3-4-09] Blood: [KTVZ-TV (Bend, Ore.)-AP, 3-5-09] Charles: [Beaumont Enterprise, 10-30-08] Graves: [Lancaster New Era, 11-7-08] Sherrill: [Charlotte Observer, 2-20-09] Hall: [Lexington Herald-Leader, 2-28-09] Warden: [Brownsville Herald, 1-30-09] Weaver: [Charlotte Observer, 2-25-09] Morris: [United Press International, 3-5-09] Jennings: [Contra Costa Times, 3-3-09]

And this is not a one-off phenomenon - the site lists murderers with Wayne as a middle name every few weeks.

Creepy.

>> ^grinter:
With all of those particles being ejected, it is not hard to believe that the huge amounts of lead bullets of depleted uranium shells could lead to health hazards for families living in a war zone (beyond the obvious health hazards, of course).


Heheh little misspeak there, lead bullets are lead, and depleted uranium bullets are made from depleted uranium

"In a three week period of conflict in Iraq during 2003 it was estimated over 1000 tons of depleted uranium munitions were used mostly in cities.[7] While any radiation exposure has risks, no conclusive data have correlated DU exposure to specific human health effects such as cancer.[8] Yet, studies using cultured cells and laboratory rodents continue to suggest the possibility of leukemogenic, genetic, reproductive, and neurological effects from chronic exposure.[9] In addition, the UK Pensions Appeal Tribunal Service in early 2004 attributed birth defect claims from a February 1991 Gulf War combat veteran to depleted uranium poisoning.[10][11] Also, a 2005 epidemiology review concluded: "In aggregate the human epidemiological evidence is consistent with increased risk of birth defects in offspring of persons exposed to DU."[12]"


7 ^ a b c Paul Brown, Gulf troops face tests for cancer guardian.co.uk 25 April 2003, Retrieved February 3, 2009
8 ^ Health Effects of Uranium. "Toxicological profile for uranium". http://fhp.osd.mil/du/healthEffects.jsp.
9 ^ Miller AC, McClain D. (2007 Jan-Mar). "A review of depleted uranium biological effects: in vitro and in vivo studies". Rev Environ Health 22 (1): 75–89. PMID 17508699.
10 ^ Williams, M. (February 9, 2004) "First Award for Depleted Uranium Poisoning Claim," The Herald Online, (Edinburgh: Herald Newspapers, Ltd.)
11 ^ Campaign Against Depleted Uranium (Spring, 2004) "MoD Forced to Pay Pension for DU Contamination," CADU News 17)
12 ^ a b c d Hindin, R. et al. (2005) "Teratogenicity of depleted uranium aerosols: A review from an epidemiological perspective," Environmental

A quick wiki shows it is controversial at least. One would suppose that it would be at least somewhat harmful. Did you ever hear about that illness soldiers were coming back with from the first Gulf war? It wasn't really talked about much and I remember it being later attributed to the burning oil fields, perhaps this is a more likely culprit.

As far as digital goes, seeing as so many of you in the States use cable, then I would imagine the switch wouldn't mean as much.

Here in Australia, we still aren't up to the full switch over date, but I've been using digital set top boxes/pvrs for the past few years and am UTTERLY sold on digital transmission vs Analogue. Why?

Upsides
* Reception: Much better reception. With the same signal strength that would provide fuzzy, ghosting images in analogue, the digital signal is crystal clear. A friend's moved into a house and was getting only a couple of channels, and those poorly. When I went over I discovered that there was no aerial cable, just the cord going into the wall which would end in an open termination. I gave her an old set top box... voila, all stations in great quality... using NO AERIAL, just the aerial cable connected to nothing!

* Clarity: Over and above the better reception, the image, whether SD or HD, is just clearer and more vibrant... very nice to watch.

* EPG: The channels transmit up to a week's worth of program information, so you can bring that up, find the shows you want and set them to tape automatically on your....

* PVR: Having a digital signal means it's far easier to record to a digital media... hence PVRs, hence no more tapes, hence having a nicely catalogued set of recordings... hence, we pretty much never watch anything 'live' on TV anymore... record everything and watch it when we have free time.

* More channels: Sort of... here in Australia we only have 5 main stations (ABC (government run), SBS (multicultural etc.), 7,9,10 (commercial stations)). Now, the ABC has ABC2 with extra shows, many great, and the other stations sometimes actually show different things on their HD channels vs their SD channels (although things are about to change). The much heralded ability to have multiple views of sports etc. has never eventuated... could have been used to GREAT effect during the Beijing Olympics, but noooo, one channel, forced to watch what they want you to... so this plus point is only minor. (Although ABC2 is great)

Downsides?
* Rather than having a slow degradation of image quality if you don't have signal strength, you instead get digital breakup, which is far worse.

I love digital tv, and only wish the stations would use it better than they do.

Box of Dub: Dubstep & Future Dub Vol.1&2 are both very good examples of today's dubstep movement.

BBC Radio One's very own Mary Anne Hobbs debuts a lot of the newest dubstep releases, and has a pretty intense back-catalogue of in-studio live performances and DJ mixes from a lot of today's most heralded dj's and producers of the genre.

Si Begg and Cursor Miner have been releasing a lot of dubstep recently. Obviously Burial has been the recent breakthrough artist, but I think his first LP was much better than his most recent.

Jeff Bezos heralded the Segway as something that would transform how cities were built.