I take it then you haven't seen the movie? Mild spoilers then I guess, but they are all connected rather directly.

Is it possible that we have missed important signs of global warming wherever it has caused local weather to be uncharacteristically mild and pleasant for extended periods of time?

It actually takes three of these events in close succession to make any claim that orthodox thousand year periods were violated. Perhaps it took a thousand years to wait for the first one, and now it will not happen for another thousand years again. Who knows.

Your right, the original video is way more interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0QVXVgcdhs

I guess the business insider version is edited to be mildly interesting in a muted facebook stream.

It is very different and poppy compared to previous stuff for sure. I like it in the context of the song, even though overall I prefer Tool's prog/metal melding.

I'm not a Maynard whisperer / expert, but my guess is that there are 2 motivations for the sound of this song/album compared to other stuff.

1) Although Maynard is the vocalist for Tool, APC, and Puscifer (which I haven't listened to much), he kinda wants to keep all those projects distinct. Tool is more dark and heavy, APC is a bit more rock, and Puscifer trending towards some electronic stuff. But that kinda oversells this, because mostly he is putting vocals down onto musical tracks that the members of those bands have already recorded without much or any input from him...

2) From my interpretation of the song itself, he's being (mildly) critical about getting caught up in triviality of celebrity gossip and nightly news instead of paying attention to stuff closer to home. While simultaneously accepting that we all do that, and that sometimes it takes the death of a far-off idol from our adolescence that we'll never meet in person to get us to consider our own mortality.


So the poppy sound with that dark edge right around the corner really fits -- at least to me.

NSFW is putting it mildly. That trailer was more brutal than most entire movies I've seen.

It's pretty *dark too.

Plus, the scent of burning axe body spray is a mild improvement.

I completely disagree with you about being inspired by her is like being inspired by Hitler. Hitler's philosophy was a complete sham on every level, and contradicts itself numerous times. Objectivism's foundation works well on many levels. Personal aspiration, bettering yourself, valuing logic and knowledge over emotions, those types of things are valuable to an extent.

Objectivism is ultra-logical in the end, very much the same as Social Darwinism. Fundamentally, those ideas have value in some situations and settings. A business for example, in the end, if an employee is not doing his or her job, it's not necessarily the business's job to figure out why unless it's within their self-interest to do so, and they shouldn't have to think that stuff through in every single instance. They should have the flexibility to fire someone in that instance without a second thought about the social ramifications.

It ultimately is a societal problem though that this employee be taken care of as a member of society, which is where Objectivism falls on its face, among other areas. Another one is Objectivism really has terrible implications in many aspects of parenting, to put it mildly.

I was personally inspired by Ayn Rand in high school quite honestly. She made me care about philosophy, about achieving the most I could achieve via hard work and self-determination, to learn how to critically think and use reason, to be OK to not conform necessarily to group think, etc. Just like every ideology, it's not perfect, and following it to a T just doesn't work, just like any other ideology and philosophy we may encounter and blend into our own as we age and grow. But it made me want to learn more, achieve more, and think more.

You can do a lot worse than that, IMO, you know, like Fascism. :-)

Interesting take with the robot being an alien. I never saw the original series. Getting a mild Mass Effect inspiration from it.

That seems like a relatively mild and controlled impact for such a catastrophic break of a big bone.

Ed: Oh yeah, also. Ew, gross.

I'm honestly rather confused about the NRA stance (or lack thereof) with regards to mental health.

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people." OK. So... Wouldn't it make sense to go after those people that are the problem, then? Crazies with guns equals pressure to take away the guns from everybody, which is exactly what you don't want. Wouldn't mild inconvenience of background checks / licensing be better than bans? (from NRA perspective)

Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

There isn't one single statement in this post that I don't support 1000%. Period.

It's just nothing to do with the point I'm making.

Rape is a crime. A violent assault.

Groping is a crime. Less violent, but still assault.

Patting someone on the butt is wrong, but is unlikely to be pathological behaviour like the above. It's condescending. It's disturbing to the person being marginalized. It creates embarrassment mostly when yes, there should be outrage. I just feel it's a lack of knowledge that should be informed, not a power-based assault requiring punishment.

My personal view is, how would I react to a specific action being used on my mom, sister, girlfriend or wife. If I'd kick the guy's ass so hard he'd have to undo his collar to take a shit, I don't do it. Hell, if I found it mildly irksome I'd avoid it too.

Usually, I find people wiping out mildly amusing. My schadenfreude is rather low I guess. This isn’t in any way funny to me. Empathizing too much.