I live in Windsor, the Canadian city just across the river from Detroit... I've been witness to the sad decline of the city for my entire life, but it has recently reached just jaw-dropping proportions. Detroit is just an ugly city in a lot of ways and I think it must have been unpleasant to be in even at its height.

The people in the suburbs think they've escaped, but the reverse is more likely to be true in the long run as gas just keeps getting more expensive. That's why the M-1 light rail line is a good idea: precisely because transportation infrastructure for a focused, coherent urban core is more viable over the long term than continuing to build out a sprawling suburban road network that no one will be able to afford to use in a world where gas costs $10 or $20 a gallon. The suburbs will fail in their turn, and everyone who doesn't go elsewhere will move back into the city core where at least you won't spend half your income just travelling back and forth to get your groceries. (Once they get around to building any grocery stores in the city, that is.)

Anyone interested in Charlie LeDuff should check out his book:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15811520-detroit

"Listen STALKER, we can do this easy way.... or hard way, eh?"

EDIT: Assuming all of this went down as it was described, that was awesome. Kind of wish instead of beating them they would have only flipped the car over, but that no one died I can still hope they learned their lesson. Nice camaraderie and sense of street justice.

Russia is the urban wild-west come true.

There's no caretaker for the wildwestshow channel anymore since choggie got banned-It states very clearly in the channel's criteria for inclusion, "anything that speaks fondly of some less, pussyfied times"...These two seem to be exhibiting signs of urban pussification, for crissakes it's a frikkin' milk cow, dudes....Bossy won't harm you.

On a daily basis, politicians, like Obama, and pundits in the lamestream media mindlessly bump their gums about global warming, uh... "climate change" (the term employed when the earth stopped warming), without having the slightest idea what they are talking about. Most simply parrot the line about a "so-called "consensus of scientists," without the slightest knowledge of the science or data, or point to extreme weather events as “proof.” Al Gore and Henry Waxman have become masters at this. Noam Chomsky should stick to linguistics. Once he ventures outside of his specialty, he’s just a run-of-the-mill leftist loon.

Science does not operate on the basis of consensus, but provable fact and hard DATA that is replicable. No one can prove that C02 causes warming, apart from the other forces that are chiefly determinative of climate--solar output, cosmic rays (and their effect on cloud cover), the earth's elliptical orbit, its axial tilt, etc. The earth's climate cycle has been in place for eons and is not being altered by any significant degree by anthropogenic CO2. In fact, 99% of the people who believe in the "global warming crisis" cannot even tell you what the current globally-averaged temperature is, nor how much it may have risen over the past century (or any other time frame for that matter). Nor do they know that the current globally averaged temperature is 1-2 degrees C below what it was during the Medieval Warm Period, when human activity could not have been a factor.

Neither temperatures nor sea level rise are accelerating. Temperatures haven't risen since 1997. And even the U.N. predicts just an 8.5" to 18.5" sea level rise by 2100 (2007 IPCC Report), far below the 20 feet predicted by Al Gore, or the 35 feet predicted by Joe Lieberman in 2002. In fact, sea levels have been rising at a rate of about 7" per century since the end of the last age 12,500 years ago, so the U.N.'s predicted range is likely to fall at the low end.

Weather stations around the world are notoriously unreliable, many placed in locations now near asphalt parking lots, etc., replicating the urban island heat effect. Calculating the globally averaged temperature in an enormously complex task. compounded when scientific frauds like Phil Jones and Michael Mann (of the infamous "hockey stick" graph) hide, and would not supply, their data because it does not support their predetermined conclusions of anthropogenic global warming. (Climategate). This is not surprising, however, since thousands of scientists stand to collectively lose billions in federal research grants if the hoax is exposed (more than $80 billion has already been spent on such research, nearly 500 times what oil companies have spent to fund so-called “skeptics”), a fact totally lost, or grossly misrepresented, by global warming religionists.

The fact is: even if the earth's temperature is rising marginally, from natural forces, it will be far better for mankind than falling temperatures. It will result in higher crop yields and less death around the world. More than twice as many people die of extreme cold than extreme heat.

Contrary to morons such as Al Gore (who will never agree to debate the topic, so fearful is he of getting his clock cleaned), scientific evidence clearly shows that we have had no increase in extreme weather events. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, summed up the latest science on weather extremes when he wrote that “There is no evidence that disasters are getting worse because of climate change....There's really no evidence that we're in the midst of an extreme weather era - whether man has influenced climate or not,”
Pielke also explained that the data does not support linking Hurricane Sandy to man-made global warming. “Sandy was terrible, but we're currently in a relative hurricane 'drought'.” But that doesn’t stop politicians from trying to make political hay from them.

Much of the gum bumping about "global warming" may be attributed to the political aspirations of Al Gore who hoped to ride an environmental white horse into the White House. It all comes down to a politically-motivated overreaction to a 0.35 degree C increase in globally-averaged temperatures in the period from 1978-1997. Since 1998, temperatures have flat-lined. They are now at 14.5 degrees Celsius which is exactly where they were in 1997. What this amounted to was a hyperbolic response to a temporary and cyclical climate phenomenon, which has been replicated a myriad of times in human history.

The climate history of the 20th century, by itself, contradicts the CO2 equals warming hypothesis. From 1913-1945, CO2 was not a factor and temperatures rose slightly. And from 1945-1977, temperatures fell in the face of rising CO2. It was only in the period from 1978-1997 that temperatures and CO2 rose simultaneously. But since CO2 is likely to continue to rise for the foreseeable future, we will have periods of both rising and falling temperatures in the face of rising CO2.

The scientific travesty is that many politicians are trying to transform CO2 into a “pollutant” requiring draconian federal regulations whose only effect will be to stifle economic growth. CO2 is a harmless trace element constituting just 0.039 per cent of the earth's atmosphere (390 parts per million by volume). It's what humans and animals exhale and its presence helps plant production. 500 million years ago, CO was 20 times more prevalent in our atmosphere. The aim is to convince the uninformed that carbon dioxide is the equivalent of carbon monoxide, a highly toxic gas.

With time and historical perspective, the global warming crisis will turn out to be the greatest scientific fraud in history. But that won’t politicians from exploiting it in the short term.

On a daily basis, politicians, like Obama, and pundits mindlessly bump their gums about global warming, uh... "climate change" (the term employed when the earth stopped warming), without having the slightest idea what they are talking about. Malloy is just the latest in a long line of demagogic politicians trying to capitalize on the scare. Most simply parrot the line about a "so-called "consensus of scientists," without the slightest knowledge of the science or data, or point to extreme weather events as “proof.”

Science does not operate on the basis of consensus, but provable fact and hard DATA that is replicable. No one can prove that C02 causes warming, apart from the other forces that are chiefly determinative of climate--solar output, cosmic rays (and their effect on cloud cover), the earth's elliptical orbit, its axial tilt, etc. The earth's climate cycle has been in place for eons and is not being altered by any significant degree by anthropogenic CO2. In fact, 99% of the people who believe in the "global warming crisis" cannot even tell you what the current globally-averaged temperature is, nor how much it may have risen over the past century (or any other time frame for that matter). Nor do they know that the current globally averaged temperature is 1-2 degrees C below what it was during the Medieval Warm Period, when human activity could not have been a factor.

Neither temperatures nor sea level rise are accelerating. Temperatures haven't risen since 1997. And even the U.N. predicts just an 8.5" to 18.5" sea level rise by 2100 (2007 IPCC Report), far below the 20 feet predicted by Al Gore, or the 35 feet predicted by Joe Lieberman in 2002. In fact, sea levels have been rising at a rate of about 7" per century since the end of the last age 12,500 years ago, so the U.N.'s predicted range is likely to fall at the low end.

Weather stations around the world are notoriously unreliable, many placed in locations now near asphalt parking lots, etc., replicating the urban island heat effect. Calculating the globally averaged temperature in an enormously complex task. compounded when scientific frauds like Phil Jones and Michael Mann (of the infamous "hockey stick" graph) hide, and would not supply, their data because it does not support their predetermined conclusions of anthropogenic global warming. (Climategate). This is not surprising, however, since thousands of scientists stand to collectively lose billions in federal research grants if the hoax is exposed (more than $80 billion has already been spent on such research, nearly 500 times what oil companies have spent to fund so-called “skeptics”).

The fact is: even if the earth's temperature is rising marginally, from natural forces, it will be far better for mankind than falling temperatures. It will result in higher crop yields and less death around the world. More than twice as many people die of extreme cold than extreme heat. The scientific evidence clearly shows that we have had no increase in extreme weather events. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, summed up the latest science on weather extremes when he wrote that “There is no evidence that disasters are getting worse because of climate change....There's really no evidence that we're in the midst of an extreme weather era - whether man has influenced climate or not,”
Pielke also explained that the data does not support linking Hurricane Sandy to man-made global warming. “Sandy was terrible, but we're currently in a relative hurricane 'drought'.” But that doesn’t stop politicians from trying to make political hay from them.

Much of the gum bumping about "global warming" may be attributed to the political aspirations of Al Gore who hoped to ride an environmental white horse into the White House. It all comes down to a politically-motivated overreaction to a 0.35 degree C increase in globally-averaged temperatures in the period from 1978-1997. Since 1998, as Mr. Hart correctly points out, temperatures have flat-lined or declined. What this amounted to was a hyperbolic response to a temporary and cyclical climate phenomenon, which has been replicated a myriad of times in human history.

The climate history of the 20th century, by itself, contradicts the CO2 equals warming hypothesis. From 1913-1945, CO2 was not a factor and temperatures rose slightly. And from 1945-1977, temperatures fell in the face of rising CO2. It was only in the period from 1978-1997 that temperatures and CO2 rose simultaneously. But since CO2 is likely to continue to rise for the foreseeable future, we will have periods of both rising and falling temperatures in the face of rising CO2.

The scientific travesty is that many politicians are trying to transform CO2 into a “pollutant” requiring draconian federal regulations whose only effect will be to stifle economic growth. CO2 is a harmless trace element constituting just 0.039 per cent of the earth's atmosphere (390 parts per million by volume). It's what humans and animals exhale and its presence helps plant production. 500 million years ago, CO was 20 times more prevalent in our atmosphere. The aim is to convince the uninformed that carbon dioxide is the equivalent of carbon monoxide, a highly toxic gas.

With time and historical perspective, the global warming crisis will turn out to be the greatest scientific fraud in history. But that won’t politicians from exploiting it in the short term. Obama has already wasted billions trying to fix a non-problem.
And now he’s even orchestrating the mindless followers of a new secular religion to march on the Mall to advance this silly agenda.

You have to name it maatc-Urban dictionary time again, escalopter-man!

When I said "just about any" kind of firearm should be legally obtainable, I should clarify that I mean guns. Explosive ordinance, anti-vehicle weapons, fully-auto vehicle mounted machine guns, etc. is where I see the line between reasonable and unreasonable.

My problem with getting into regulating "assault weapons" is that I see it as a very real slippery-slope hazard -- unlike restrictions like waiting periods, registration, legal obligations to keep guns locked in cabinets when not in use, etc. etc.

Here's an example: my gun-nut friends had in their extensive arsenal 2 rifles, an AR-15 and a Ruger Mini-14. The AR-15 is basically equivalent to a military M-16, except the one they had didn't have selectors for 3-shot burst or full-auto (semi-auto only). The Mini-14 was designed around the M-14, which was the military standard-issue rifle until being replaced by the M-16.

Trying to get the government to regulate those firearms seems like a nightmare to me. Is just the AR-15 (M-16) an "assault weapon"? Are they both? I've fired both and I don't think that there is any reasonable way to say that the AR-15 is "over the line" of what a civilian owner should have with the Mini-14 being "ok". The Mini-14 is a fantastic farm/hunter rifle; safe, reliable, and easy to handle -- but in the event of somebody going off the deep end and shooting people up, it is going to be just as deadly/tragic as if they had an M-16.

Basically I think that the right-wing types have a pretty legitimate beef when they say that gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained weapons, and that therefore most heavy restrictions just affect legitimate, responsible gun owners while doing very little to keep guns out of the hands that you really want them out of. I should look for data about gun crime rates comparing legally purchased guns versus black market sources, and gun-related injury and death rates between gun-nut havens like Texas and my neck of the woods in Kansas compared to more liberal urban areas.

Finally, I guess that I should make it clear that I'm OK with restrictions that require you to prove that you are a responsible owner to have any firearm. Waiting periods, background checks, loss of privileges to anyone with a criminal record, having to register and periodically present your firearms to prove that you aren't re-selling them, etc. I consider all that kind of stuff reasonable limitations on our right/privilege to own firearms. But getting into trying to figure out what does or does not classify as an "assault weapon" goes the wrong direction in my opinion.

Ha, is anybody in this thread self-aware enough to observe that liberals are unable to debate intellectually, rather than using constant insults?

Let's list them:
1. Somebody who dares to express different opinions must have a small penis.
2. He/she is also a troll.
3. He/she is also an asshole.

That's a lot of ire just for diversity of opinion.


This is what you're not realizing:

1. If you completely remove rural gun-owners from the society, the average crime rates don't go down.

2. So if you want to reduce crime rates, instead of making false accusations of rural gun-owners (untruths are bad), focus on the communities that cause the crime rates (urban youth and gang culture).

Yeah, it's the liberal values that teaches them to engage in illegal gang related activity. Just like how since most southern slave owners were conservatives, your values caused slavery, you asshole. (just joking).

Also, I call bullshit on your assertion that urban youth gangs have liberal values. I'd say that poorly educated low socio-economic status youths from religiously inclined minorities like hispanics are demographically more conservative, if they bothered to have any political preference at all in the first place. Lets see some proof.

Sorry, too busy signing up for my local urban liberal street gang. They are insisting I save a spotted owl as part of my initiation ritual.

@Deano and @Stormsinger:
"Liberal street gangs and urban youth" refers to the portion of gangs and urban youth who have liberal values (nearly all gangs and urban youth). Those gangs and urban youth are the source of most violent crime, so your thesis that violent crime is due to rural gun-owners is inconsistent with the data.

@EMPIRE and @Fletch:
Your response is that because I have different opinions than you and I'm willing speak against the mainstream, I'm a "troll." That definitely proves me wrong that liberals tend to be closed-minded conformists who punish intellectual diversity

It's good to see Jim Carrey speaking out in ways other than his normal advocating against vaccines and getting kids killed.

Unfortunately, the rural people he's making fun of have little to do with the US's high rate of violent crime, which is mostly due to liberal street gangs and liberal urban youth.

Well yeah, you're practically begging for a pedestrian hurricane by putting a plaza at the end of a high density avenue. Every urban planner knows that.

Your video, Urban wingsuit flying into Rio de Janeiro, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

One from New Orleans, about an urban art project in a building that was about to be demolished.

http://videosift.com/video/Rosenwalds-Dying-Days

Take up perhaps then, your woefully didactic point with the editors at the urban dictionary??

You got the gist, innit??

God, this country!! "I wake up today and errant misspelling corrections are at the top of the gnu's list!"