"no one wants to date a porn star/stripper/escort"

not true.

I'm guessin' these cats know they're screwed knowing that they are as good as caught, and they're hittin' the pipe one last time on a neighborhood drive w/ police escort before returning to their cells.
All that may be determined concerning the additional suspects in this robbery is that they were the smart ones who aren't in this getaway car.

Fuck me and heat exhaustion-I'd get on a no-fly list so fast by demanding an exit in terrorist fashion. Before long, an escort would appear on the tarmac with lights a-blazing and guns drawn

My first thought, purely objectively (really), is that this could very, very easily be just as intentionally mistranslated as this video:
http://videosift.com/video/North-Korean-Traffic-Cop-60-minutes
.. but for obviously different reasons. Universal skepticism is everyone's friend.
My second thought is, yes, obviously anyone who actually believes this should immediately escorted to a retirement center and not allowed any influence on society. (Though that would just be doing to them, albeit allegedly less violently, what they're already doing to their own culture, wouldn't it?)

Universally, religion is the most effective means of communicating a way of order (i.e. morals), while simultaneously blinding everyone to any alternative point of view.

What we, collectively, -humankind- need to do, is marry rational-judgement with the moral code of the golden-rule in a way that has the viral infectiousness of religion without dismissing independent thought.

I can't post the rest of my ideas because the NSA will kill me.

My fee for escort would require costumes of my own design to be worn by participating family members, the Mad Tea-Cup Party ride at least 10 times during the course of the day, and a bottomless stein of Bärenjäger on ice.

Oh, and I'd have a reinforced electric wheelchair that would stand-astride two riders-

"confiscating" is a thing only the government can legally do, when private citizens "confiscate" we call it stealing. In your example you asked the offender for the laser, if you had ripped it from their hands it likely would be technically illegal (even without tripping them like she did). When you take another's property without permission it's stealing, it does not matter if you claim you intend to give it back later or if they are asshats.
I was talking about the end of the video where she tries to either grab or punch the kid running away, and falls doing it. If she had grabbed and held him, as it seemed she was trying to do, they could have freed themselves, whatever that took. That's what I was saying, of course they could not legally beat her because she stole their board. I did say "if she had caught them..." in the original post, but I guess that wasn't clear.
I agree, the kids were wrong and should have left when told to, she should have escorted them off the property and returned the board, not tried to bully them because they didn't listen to her right away. They did "offer" to leave if she returned their property. What she did could have easily put her in danger of being sued (successfully) had her timing been better, or beaten with skateboards if the kids had really been little scumbags, and she had other, better options.

edit: on a side note, my point that she's just bullying is born out by the fact that she tells the kids they can get the board back from the sheriff, but then later indicates she had not intended to really call the sheriff by saying "OK, now I AM calling." (this implies she didn't intend to call until they grabbed for their board).

Good point, and I love your freudian typo, "legal and legal immigrants" (if you have a link to the doc...). The problem of homeless immigrants here is a complicated one: there are shelters for asylum-seekers but they a) are not numerous enough to keep up with the growing influx, b) try to prioritize women/children, c) have trouble with interethnic squabbles (which can grow to full-fledged knife-fights, thank FSM we don't have guns in easy circulation), d) have to deal with the profiteers/criminals giving them a bad rep.
In addition to this, those who have been denied permission to stay are less likely to show up at state-run shelters where they are liable to be found out and escorted out (of the country). Finally, criminal tourism* in Europe (especially the richer countries, like CH) is a real problem, one the US does not experience.

*a huge topic of its own, but some examples in CH are French car-thieves, Romanian mafia-organised begging/breaking-and-entering (often using children so as not to get penalised), North African drug-dealing (the hard stuff), etc. None of these make it easier for the population to be more accepting of the vast majority of non-criminal foreigners from these parts, because it is as usual the criminals who are the most visible.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

Anyone who is "The Shooter" is going to be walking around cow-towing like he owns the place. Rightfully so because he owns a gun and he knows nobody else in that building does.

Anyone who is "trained" will not be standing up and just walking around or even moving around at all. They will be in cover somewhere waiting to see if he walks by the door or a window and shoot him. They will also be trying to escort people out of the building if at all possible to safety which would completely defeat the whole "If innocent gun wielder #1 sees innocent gun wielder #2" situation. If there is a madman in your class room shooting at people you will be running away from that person.

The problem is your "doubling down" on the hero segment where someone is going to hear gunshots and SPRING into action. Fuck that.

I don't like this.
(1) There was no escort.
(2) There was no video.
(3) This is a (low quality) advertisement.
(4) The entire thing feels like glurge ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=glurge ). These guys might have killed many enemy airmen. Why show mercy at this point? Did the German fighter pilot make a habit of partially disabling planes and letting the crew fly home to pilot a new plane? Heck, that B-17 might have just gotten done bombing a German city.

War is such a terrible thing. This video makes me uneasy -- it makes it seem like there is honor, mercy, and order in a war in which tens of millions died horrible, anonymous deaths. This event is an exception that is contrary not just to the larger event, but to the morality of the very men involved.

It's like those photos of the happenstance cross in the WTC ruins.

I'm not trying to diminish the significance of this event, but "escorts American bomber to safety" (as the title states) is obviously not what happened.

Stigler: "I hope you make it."

Brown: "The pilot gave a salute and left."

>> ^Yogi:

Is this for real? I've been hearing that it blows.

Its not the revolution this review seems to make it but its not bad. The strongest aspect of the game is how fucking gorgeous everything looks. The areas are pretty draw dropping, you'll want to level just so you can explore further. The combat is also fairly fun, at least for MMO standards.


The questing differences are really only superficial. While WoW might have you collecting hides from random critters GW2 has you doing much the same thing. The dynamic events are painfully formulaic. They pretty much all call for you to kill a boss that spawns, defend a small settlement, escort supplies etc and frankly it becomes quite monotonous.

The principle criticism of GW2 was that it wasn't really a persistent MMO. They've tried to address this in GW2, but in doing so they have introduced a lot of the flaws of the MMO genre. ANET have been very keen to talk about how different GW2 is from the rest of the genre, but really its less of a departure than GW1 for better and for worse. Its a pretty good effort, but its not all BIG ASS party.

Ok, snow leopard-print steering wheel cover on a mid-90s Ford Escort removes all credibility. LOCK EM UP.