All fence-riding does is offer your ass more splinters-I'm all for grass-roots disobedience-Imagine the power people would realize they wield with the simple experiment of an entire town, city, or state spending an entire day sitting in their lawn chairs using no gas, electricity, or monopoly money?
The real power lies with the individual's ability to short-circuit their robotic impulses to bend over and take it up the ass

America could be transformed overnight if ineffectual peeps put the slightest amount of foot-to-ass -Otherwise, we get the brown-shirts again and unfortunately, that scenario appears inevitable. Media and her pundits are a poisonous elixir of henbane and dogshit and to continue to derive your world view from the available sources is simply retarded.

The empire has no clothes and holds very few cards, simply stop listening to their bullshit and watch them scatter like cockroaches....

The criteria for employment with the local constabulary in the U.S. uses at least a 90 I.Q. as a baseline....Cops don't need to be that bright. Most cops actions are dictated by the survival circuit and are motivated by their hind-brained impulses. You don't really exercise wisdom winding-up a fight-or-flight neanderthal.

gwiz665, are you that naive? If the world was all fluffy kittens and the sky were made of cotton candy then police would be helpful assistants in our societies with duties like earning, old-lady street-crossing assistance badges and traffic-directing patches. Oh, for a joyous world without firearms with puppies and kitties!!

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.-Isaiah 11:6

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.-Isaiah 2:4

I have serious issues with authority of any kind, especially uniformed thugs employed by cities or counties. The state of law enforcement in America is absurd-I do not believe you can remain a cop with noble ethics or morality; YOU WILL compromise any noble intentions you had to"protect and serve" eventually.
I never give police factual information when I do not absolutely have to. I will of necessity or impulse, reaction or response, engage injustice when I see it, regardless of personal safety or violation of statutes.

I don't know you, don't strike a woman in my presence: I don't care if she hit you first and don't need any "whys", I won't stop pummeling you until you are unconscious.

I have met about 5 fair cops in the hundreds I have ever had to engage.

Sorry porky, you chose a douchbag profession. Sorry Velocity5, I suppose I simply don't have my "life" together enough to appreciate Mr. Badgy. I do however get wood when I consider the noble fireman or EMT. Used to hang out at the firehouse with my son once a week in Durango. You can't "hang out" at a police station....If you did, some dickhead would start asking questions and probably arrest you for loitering. Fuck the PO-Leece.

I'm still worried about phase. The argument is that he can represent any phase he wants. I challenge him to represent different phases of his Nyquist frequency without the reconstruction losing power. He keeps saying "band limited", which I don't believe to be exactly true. I agree, the ear can only detect powers at frequencies below 22.1k, I'm not convinced it's ability to detect phase shifts is limited in the way you would expect with a digital signal with a cutoff at that frequency. For instance, the human ear can localize an impulse with accuracy down to about 10 microseconds. I can't see how a Dirac function can be localized that accurately by a sampled wave unless the system acted like a 100K sampled system. The latter, IMHO, is supported by the neuro-anatomy. There are different mechanisms for identifying pitch and onset. The quote-unquote Calyx of Held neurons carry the phase information, and are designed to fire with astonishing precision. Much more temporal precision than would be predicted from the "nyquist frequency" of the place coding subset of 8th nerve ganglia. I understand that this is what he was trying to address with his bit at the end, but he kept insisting on "band limited" inputs. Pressure waves aren't band limited dodge-rammit.

If you listen to the director's commentary (I saw him talk at Siggraph 2012), he basically agrees with you up until the point where he quits his job. The director says that the main character is being a wimp and hasn't done anything to deserve the woman until he shows the courage to really go after her.

Of course, that's just the fairy tale logic. Yes it's a bit stalkerish and impulsive.

You are an a-godzilla-ist and that is entirely a practical concession to the fact that you can't really afford giant monster insurance considering recent statistics for giant lizard attacks and indeed going through life avoiding Tokyo at all costs is just kinda a bummer - imagine all the fresh sushi you could miss out on.

You can't actually prove that there never was a Godzilla or that there never will be a Godzilla and you can only assume (not demonstrate) that there is not a Godzilla planet orbiting one of the stars a few galaxies down the way.

All you can really say is that Tokyo is still standing and that all the various accounts of Godzilla's antics across the myriad of B-movies and hollywood blockbusters that feature him as a character seem to have no basis in reality for various reasons. You move on with your day, smile a bit and never really bother to duck for cover.

And that's all we're saying about God. To my knowledge, that is the bleeding edge of audacious claims being made by anyone who is even vaguely respected - simply that we can't take religious claims seriously any more, so we are going to move on with our lives, only dealing with religion directly when it decides to be a bit too influential for our tastes.

But fine, based on the secondary predicate principle and a lengthy philosophy 101 essay with no shortage of verbal meandering through Descartes, et al., atheists kinda sorta make a claim of some sort. What's your point.

And if you think that the atheist experience simply trawls the bottom of Christian intellectualism then who would you have them debate, Ray comfort? Matt Slick? Perhaps you?

More than anything, the most disgusting trait of Christianity is that it equates child rapists and children as equally sinful in the eyes of God. There are certainly various arguments saying that different consequences will be felt here on earth, or perhaps that there is an arbitrary age of innocence, etc... But almost universally, Christians agree that the following scenario is at least possible:

Rapist rapes child, we'll start with that.

The child struggles through the resultant torturous anguish across a lifetime, starts a support group, mans a hotline, works in the community to support fellow victims, increases awareness and so on while loving his/her family and friends, making mistakes periodically and occasionally letting loose at a concert or something. The child (now an adult) is unfortunately just a minimally observant Jew and never really gave Jesus any consideration, so when he/she gets hit by a drunk driver at the unfortunate age of 34, he/she is tormented in hell for the rest of eternity.

The rapist, meanwhile, goes on with his (statistically probable) life, perhaps he rapes some more children (also statistically probable) and maybe he then stops at some point, realizing it is wrong and maybe even feels guilty about it. Ridden by guilt, the preaching of a wayward street preacher catch his ears one day. He ventures into church for the first time. He is moved. He proclaims his belief in Jesus and the resurrection. He feels his sins are forgiven and he can feel years of guilt being washed away. Maybe he even admits his history as a rapist to a sympathetic inner circle of confidants, spiritual advisors and friends. He dies of a heart attack, and spends eternity in heaven.

That is disgusting and a god that sets such a system up is disgusting.

Many compassionate people are blinded into thinking this is just and good in an effort to tenaciously preserve their own sense of eternal safety and cosmic worth at all costs. That is less disgusting just because it is an understandable impulse, but it is disgusting nonetheless.

Ha, thanks.

I was actually regretting that I didn't go for my original impulse and ask whether this might be a clip from JJ Abrams old childhood home movies.

Because the chicks horribly flat and incurably soulless. The cat on the Gretsch?? He's mediocre at best...Nice guitar collection though, I am certain he would rather showcase that that his flat voice or less-than-stellar acoustic skills. Sorry man. As a musician I am my own worst critic as well!

My first impulse was to downvote but I am trying hard to make fewer enmie this go-round, and folks get testy when an "arggh" vote comes!!

I'm a neuroscientist. I get it. I'm not saying it doesn't suck for this kid. Lots of things that happen suck for lots of people. I'm saying one cop tasering one kid doesn't constitute national news. People get tasered all the time. This one is particularly jarring because it's a kid. Thus, it's a heartstrings story, not one that will help you inform your decisions in any way whatsoever.

>> ^Murgy:

I'm not sure you understand what it is like to be shot with a taser, my friend.
To give you a very brief picture, I can pretty well guarantee that this child wouldn't have noticed the puncture wounds from the electrode prongs until long after the incident itself.
In a nutshell, an electroshock weapon seeks to exploit the way the nervous system works to make the brain think electrical impulses are being send from every muscle in the affected are to contract, even if a pair of said muscles are in direct opposition to each other. Obviously muscles pulling against each other is quite a painful thing. Hell, if an adrenaline release has occurred, these conflicting muscles can literally tear themselves off of the bone with a long enough shock.
At the time, though, much of the real pain comes from the simple interaction of sensory nerves and electricity. For the sake of simplicity, we'll call prong one A, prong two B, and motor nerve pathways C.
For the brief moment that said energy moves from point A to point C, all affected sensory nerves send the maximum amount of electrochemical signals as possible in response to what the nerves think is a harm causing force far greater than an electric shock actually is. This manifests itself as the greatest possible amount of pain from an extremely localized area, the amount of possible pain being proportional to the concentration of sensory nerves in the affected area. This then repeats itself during the transition from point C to point B.
>> ^bmacs27:
They aren't exactly knocking on doors or digging through leaked memos here. This story doesn't really address any of the real issues we're facing. It doesn't address unemployment, or our economic crisis. It doesn't address the global clusterfuck we're in the midst of. It isn't telling us anything we need to know about our elected officials, or how we're being governed (really, unless you consider some local cop to be governance). In the end it's just another piece about some asshole cop because that's what gets eyeballs from lefties. Same shit, different patriotic backdrop.

I'm not sure you understand what it is like to be shot with a taser, my friend.
To give you a very brief picture, I can pretty well guarantee that this child wouldn't have noticed the puncture wounds from the electrode prongs until long after the incident itself.
In a nutshell, an electroshock weapon seeks to exploit the way the nervous system works to make the brain think electrical impulses are being send from every muscle in the affected are to contract, even if a pair of said muscles are in direct opposition to each other. Obviously muscles pulling against each other is quite a painful thing. Hell, if an adrenaline release has occurred, these conflicting muscles can literally tear themselves off of the bone with a long enough shock.

At the time, though, much of the real pain comes from the simple interaction of sensory nerves and electricity. For the sake of simplicity, we'll call prong one A, prong two B, and motor nerve pathways C.
For the brief moment that said energy moves from point A to point C, all affected sensory nerves send the maximum amount of electrochemical signals as possible in response to what the nerves think is a harm causing force far greater than an electric shock actually is. This manifests itself as the greatest possible amount of pain from an extremely localized area, the amount of possible pain being proportional to the concentration of sensory nerves in the affected area. This then repeats itself during the transition from point C to point B.

>> ^bmacs27:

They aren't exactly knocking on doors or digging through leaked memos here. This story doesn't really address any of the real issues we're facing. It doesn't address unemployment, or our economic crisis. It doesn't address the global clusterfuck we're in the midst of. It isn't telling us anything we need to know about our elected officials, or how we're being governed (really, unless you consider some local cop to be governance). In the end it's just another piece about some asshole cop because that's what gets eyeballs from lefties. Same shit, different patriotic backdrop.

>> ^renatojj:

@Kofi if 200 billion is not enough, wouldn't that amount increase if government didn't take away so much from it? If people were allowed to keep more of their money, I think they would have more to likely donate to charity.


Well if you look at "charity" breakdown, it's only about $35B that goes to anything like disaster relief.

So let's use that real number. And then let's pretend that it's not already spent on ongoing everyday problems, and then let's pretend the ~$60B in tax revenue that these "charities" are exempted from costs nothing.

Are you seriously claiming that you could put together a lean-mean non-profit relief org that could manage to be prepared for, and provide aid in any arbitrary situation like hurricane Sandy for $35B a year? What about the next thing? What if you go a Katrina instead?

>> ^renatojj:


Also, I'm sure you'll agree that just throwing money at a problem is not a solution, whether it's 200 billion or 2 trillion, the amount isn't everything. Just look at how much more money government takes and how poorly it does its job. Wouldn't charity, without the wasteful middle man of government, improve the situation?
Besides, wasting money is the opposite of charity, because it's money that won't go into productive employment, goods, services, and investments. So society is worse off, and while most of us can still go on with our lives, those who are needy and poor are the most affected by any amount of wasted resources.


Large Organizations are wasteful, if they are for-profit, charity, or government, having a large enough infrastructure to address large problems is costly, that is not a government problem.

We live in a high infrastructure technological society. We don't form bucket brigades when someone's house catches on fire, we have professionals, with effective equipment, who show up and solve this problem more quickly and efficiently, and at a lower aggregate cost to society.

The same is true of disaster relief, we pay for the maintenance of a professional disaster relief infrastructure, and it's cheaper than either doing it ad-hoc, or not having anything in place at all.

Kindness and charity are good and real human impulses, but they are not preparedness, we have organizations for that, we call them governments.

Looked like a rottweiler cross. Just another example why dogs initially bred for their ferocity, tenacity, and fighting ability, should be totally banned. Chipping and/or licensing will not work, they will be ignored. And PLEASE don't drag out the old argument that it is the owners fault. Of course, any dog can be made vicious, but these dogs are not bought by owners who want a companion. They have owners who want them for protection, intimidation and status. These dogs are highly strung, impulsive, unpredictable, and give little, if any, warning that they are about to strike. How many adults, children, police, or other dogs, need to be maimed before action is taken? Look at the statistics on the breeds that attack. The latest one shows that guide dog attacks have gone up to 8 a month and the breeds, generally, responsible are fighting dogs. I own a Tamaskan (A big dog derived from sled dog ancestry). There are four bull terriers in my neighborhood and when we pass EVERY one of them strains, snarling and growling to get at him. I pray each time that their leads don't break.

I'm Black and I don't have much interest in where my ancestors came from. My brother & sisters don't either (& I mean my actual brother & sisters). I can't think of any of my black friends who have any interest in a pilgrimage to their homeland. Some of them pop back to see the relatives sometimes, but that's about it.

However if I go to any big city over here in Europe it's brimming with, mainly American, people who've come to the old country to trace their roots. And I've met people of many shades and nationalities who've arrived here to do that. It's not the bastion of any one race. Don't take a common human impulse you've observed in people who by coincidence are black and tag it to them alone to form part of a 'but black people is weird innit' narrative. This kind of thing makes me sleepy.


>> ^wraith:

A question that always bothered me and that has almost nothing to do with this video: Why do so many African Americans think they have to go to Africa to find their roots? In Europe, in all countries except France, 99% of African people are really first or second generation immigrants from one of the dozens of Nations in Africa.
They have relatives living there.
I understand that.
African Americans have their roots as much in "Africa", as I have my roots in....I don't even know...Germany? France? Russia? Hungary?
I don't even know where my ancestors lived three hundred years ago.
And I don't care.
I don't get it.

Holy shit...

Seeing this and clicking through on impulse just sent me on a pretty fascinating two hour journey through the bowels of youtube.

Saw MIB3 this weekend on impulse. It was okay, wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you want a seriously breezy and disposable movie. Definitely better than the 2nd one, which is not hard to do. If they make another one they need to open up the scale a bit. This movie's budget (admittedly with marketing) is reported at $250 million. That is insane. There are only two real money sequences: a chase to end act 2 that looks like the Obi-Wan and Darth Grievous chase in episode III, and the climax which takes place at the launch of the moon mission at Cape Canaveral in 1969 and looks a lot like Apollo 13.

This movie has some really dumb and small-scale choices. Smith's character is equipped with a device that requires him to plunge from a height in order to gain enough speed to "time-jump". The movie climaxes with Smith literally standing on top of the saturn rocket lifting off for the first manned moon landing. You'd think they'd have a money shot with Smith jumping off the rocket as it lifts off. Those things went pretty slow to start, you could survive the first 30 seconds it takes to get up to any kind of speed, and then jump off for an awesome looking stunt. Or, hell, if I were writing the movie, have him just stay on the rocket until it reaches the necessary ascent speed (something like 100 MPH or some shit.. I remember thinking it didn't sound far from 88MPH), which wouldn't take long after the rockets fire. Then Smith is transported into the future thousands of feet in the air and you have a post-climax gag where he's falling apparently to his death only to have Jones' character sweep in at the last second and save him in a flying car or flying alien bubble pod more likely. Smith's character would be like "How in DA HELL you know I was gonna falling through the air over Florida man!?!?" and Jones' character would put up the video feed that only MIB had access to of Smith riding the rocket and disappearing from 1969's POV. "We had a lot of eyes on that mission" or some shit. Do I have to write this crap for you Hollywood? It flies out of my butthole effortlessly. Instead Smith's character jumps into an evacuation basket and rides it down a zip-line... and this is not even filmed in an interesting way. A whole lot of this movie looked sort of non-commital, like 2nd unit did the whole thing.

They added a "poignant twist" to the time travel aspect which is the same problem with so many movie series these days... Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-Man.. in a sequel, everything is revealed to have been previously connected.. connected from the start in fact! Oh yawn... more than 30 years later people are still trying to re-create the "I am your father" buzz from Empire Strikes Back. Always at the expense of cheapening the overall franchise and sapping meaning from the actions the characters took in preceeding films. What's worse, they layered on some spiritual/karmic hokum to support another cliche forced by executive interference.

It's crazy to think the first movie turns 15 years old this year. I thought it would be an eternal classic, but the last time I watched it, which might actually have been when MIB2 was coming out a whole ten years ago, it did not hold up.