"A founding member of Driving Force Club, an elite New York City group of luxury sports car enthusiasts, bragged on Facebook about a "very fun" run last month with NFL running back Brandon Jacobs, who is wearing a New Jersey State Police vest.

The photo was posted March 30, the same day two State Police troopers allegedly escorted a caravan of luxury sports cars at speeds in excess of 100 mph down the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City. The occupants included former Giants running back and sports car enthusiast Jacobs, according to a source with knowledge of the trip.

In the complaints, obtained by The Star-Ledger, witnesses said that in the early afternoon, they saw two State Police patrol cars with their emergency lights flashing driving in front of and behind the southbound caravan, which included dozens of Porsches, Lamborghinis, Ferraris and other vehicles, all with their license plates covered with tape."

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/04/former_giants_star_brandon_jac.html

>> ^CaptainPlanet:

>> ^budzos:
But Joker doesn't care what anyone thinks or feels. Not even Batman. He only cares for his own amusement and he's mostly amused by people dying .

each reboot has brought with it varying interpretations of these characters. the unequaled cruelty and sadism portrayed in TDN makes ledger the most memorable villain of all (to me)


Yeah sometimes people seem to get all tangled up in the analyzing and defamation of one iteration of a series or another. It doesn't ever bother me, I just watch what I want to watch and I either like it or don't. I didn't really like the American version of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but only because it changed a character dynamic that drew me into the series in the first place. I still think it's a good movie, it's just not for me...the difference is I'm not going to go around telling everyone how it's shit and they suck if they don't ONLY like the Swedish versions.

No one has done that here I'm just saying, it's something people do that annoys me...particularly with the Star Wars movies.

>> ^budzos:
But Joker doesn't care what anyone thinks or feels. Not even Batman. He only cares for his own amusement and he's mostly amused by people dying .


each reboot has brought with it varying interpretations of these characters. the unequaled cruelty and sadism portrayed in TDN makes ledger the most memorable villain of all (to me)

I love Ledger's performance and TDK is a great movie (if overrated due to a mess of a 3rd act).

But I always say the writing of The Joker in TDK felt off to me. He seems to want to make statements and affect people's feelings. But Joker doesn't care what anyone thinks or feels. Not even Batman. He only cares for his own amusement and he's mostly amused by people dying (unless you're doing the crime-boss version of Joker who is basically that but aims his sick plans at making money). To me Jack Nicholson's joker is closer to the real spirit of the character... a true psychotic clown who "kills people until art happens".

For the record I also think The Killing Joke sort of screws up the character, despite being a brilliant comic in and of itself.

>> ^radx:

He's rather nervous, isn't he? Admittedly, if there's something to it, he'll be floating down the Thames soon enough.
Normally, I'd say noone is stupid enough to try a fraud based on these blatantly preposterous figures. Then again, they did find $6T worth of fake US bonds last week, so anything goes, apparently.
I bet those 750 thousand tonnes of gold were shipped and Somali pirates snatched 'em.
Or maybe they were FedEx'ed and Tom Hanks and Wilson are now building a mansion with it on some godforsaken island in the middle of nowhere, like Guernsey.


Jesus turned the gold to paper, then Heath Ledger collected it into a large pile and burnt it all.
I submit my proof: http://videosift.com/video/Everything-Burns

that was more heath ledger's joker, than a drunk nerd.

edit: well joker and a bit of chris farley.

Looks hokey to me

But I was in the minority that didn't particularly like The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger was fantastic, no doubt, but the movie was just meh.

Meh. After the great performances by Heath Ledger as the Joker and Aaron Eckhart as Twoface, Bane and Catwoman seem like a letdown. But I'll probably go see it anyways, based purely on the strength of the previous movies.

OH MY GAWD!!

To quote the source "You can't make this shit up."

"As it turns out, the gays get their revenge... the jacket Rick Perry wore in the ad? Heath Ledger wore it in 'Brokeback Mountain.' "

photo proof here:
http://elections.americablog.com/2011/12/perrys-jacket-in-anti-gay-ad-heath.html

@bmacs27 I've been wanting to come back and reply for a couple days now, but didn't have the time. Now I hesitate to messing with the good conversation that followed, so I'll just touch on the points I'm interested in from the whole conversation. If I skip something you really wanted me to answer, let me know!

For one, I do tend to have an odd mix of pro-market and anti-market beliefs. On unemployment, my answer is that in an ideal world, I would want people entitled to some sort of minimum guaranteed income, no matter whether what they do. I like unemployment insurance because it's kinda like that, only with pragmatic real-world strings attached (it's limited in duration, and you've gotta be looking for work and not finding anything, and it stops when you get a new job...).

heropsycho already gave the more economics-minded answer I would've given about unemployment benefits helping prop up demand, and keep the economy from shedding even more jobs. I'd go along with your "you get unemployment, but we're going to make it contingent on you attending free job retraining", but I'd also go along with a WPA-style "we won't pay you unemployment, we'll just directly hire you" sort of arrangement, especially in a jobs market full of laid off construction workers.

heropsycho also gave the succinct answer I was going to give about hoarding labor -- worker salaries and benefits are always on the "cost" side of the company's ledger, and people often get fired long before they become an outright loss to the business. Usually it's because you've become less profitable than what they think they could make by replacing you with someone else (or by just by making other workers work more hours).

And no, I'm not a protectionist who wants to see unions and/or government forcing companies to employ people who're losing them money, I'm in favor of having a social safety net so there's no moral issue with companies laying people off (that's why I like the idea of a minimum guaranteed income).

On the topic of whose economic theories we've followed post-Volcker, for the most part, it's been Monetarist-style monetary policy, coupled with ideological right-wing fiscal policy. Namely, a targeted package of policies aimed at redistributing wealth from the poor and middle classes to the rich. That still leaves things a bit blurry, because the only economic justifications for debt-fueled tax cuts are Keynesian, and modern (New) Keynesians have largely adopted monetarist notions of monetary policy.

But the big disagreement between modern Monetarists and modern Keynesians is about fiscal policy -- Monetarists say it can't work, Keynesians say it can. Part of what confuses people a bit, is that Republicans adopt whatever economic theory justifies what they started out wanting to do. Keynes is right when they want to borrow money to cut taxes, Monetarists are right when Obama wants to pass a stimulus program, and Austrians are right when the Fed tries to help the economy by printing money when a Democrat is in the White House.

Corporate America: We're plugging the leaks and burning the bridges, and there's nothing you dirty commie hippies can do about it, so just go home and be happy to exist on our ledgers, where you belong.

Mark Hamill is a better Joker than Heath Ledger. Not "different", but actually better.

I think i prefer this joker to ledgers, but Mark Hamil is the best.
I guess both Nicholsons and Hamils are less psyco and more, well, joker.

The five members of a New Jersey National Guard unit who nearly drowned trying to drive underwater are not receiving punishment for what officials described to The Star-Ledger as their "over confidence."

According to a National Guard spokesperson, the two trucks were en route to another part of the state when they were dispatched to Manville. Unaware of the water depth and the 46-inch fording depth of their LMTVs they proceeded deeper and deeper into the water until they were stuck forcing other rescue units to rescue the rescuers.

"The chain of command is taking the incident seriously," the spokesman said. "They know the soldiers went in with the best intentions. They were perhaps a bit too confident."

Modern interpretation of the "Turn the other cheek also" bit and the rest of the "sermon on the mount" ignore cultural context. There's tons of commentary about it if you Google it. Jesus was teaching passive resistance. Not that he necessarily existed at all.

Anyway, he goes on whith the old trope about aksing contrition allowing wrong-doers to do more wrong without consequence. The point of contrition is that if you have to openly, verbally acknowledge your sins, you become more aware of bad things you do, and are less likely to do them again. Raised Catholic myself, until I left the church, I avoided doing bad things because then I'd have to confess them. People who delight in others' suffering aren't the type to get all contrite about it. It's a strawman argument. He equates, "cleansing of unrighteousness" with forgiveness, though they're not the same thing. Unrighteousness is the defect that causes you to do bad things. If you sincerely believe you have been cleased of it, then you will have to choose to act against your god to reoffend. It's a pretty smart system. He also assumed that forgiveness also wipes away contrition. It doesn't. It just clears your heavenly ledger of sins that will be counted against you when you die.

And he really goes wrong with, "Love your neighbour as yourself." He's not commanding people to have loving feelings towards their neighbour or themselves. That's impossible to comply with. It's not love as a feeling, it's love as action. He's commanding people to treat everyone well rather than to harbour grudges and be a bitch, which only leads to escalation. If everyone treated everyone else decently, the world would be a much more comfortable place to live, and we'd all prosper more easily.

Further, it means if someone does something bad, and you show them love, it's more likely to change them in a good way. If you show them hate and contempt and "take pleasure in their suffering", it's just going to make them a worse person, and someone who has already shown a tendancy to do bad things is exactly the wrong person to make worse. You can love someone while protecting yourself. It's way, way out of the Western concept, but it's common in other places to punnish someone, even severely, with love.

The worst is the selective interpretation of "...as yourself." This means "Love your neighbour as well as yourself." It's an extention of your own love to you. When you love yourself, you'll treat yourself better, take care of yoruself more, show yourself more understanding. The result will be your having more love to share with others. I'm totally down with that.

So, you and I are talking about confirmation bias in another thread. Do you think that as an anti-religious person in general, you feel satisfaction when you are shown fault in religious teachings? Does it satisfy you to the point where you might not really analyse what's being said? Looks to me that's what's happened here. You were looking for someone to agree with you, and someone slamming Jesus' main teachings hit the sweet spot. I dislike religions too, and enjoy people like Hitch and Tyson, and to a lesser degree Dawkins doing their thing, but this is really weak soup.

>> ^hpqp:

Quote mine: fallacy of quoting out of context.
Care to illustrate how his citation of Bible verses is such?
As for recycling other people's arguments, that's pretty much what everyone does, some with more eloquence than others of course.
>> ^messenger:
He quotemines the bible and recycles others' arguments only to demonstrate that Jesus wasn't a very good god.