Heh I can understand why you think so. No I was talking Truman. Granted he wasn't as completely unaware as Trump was when he was elected. But he'd only served in the senate for two years before he was pushed in as VP. Note that the VP selection process was really different even though it was only ~70 years ago.

Once he got selected he became president that same year. Instead of working along Roosevelt's post-war plan and he refused to be a part of the grand alliance (meetings between the leaders of the big 3 powers that came out of that war).

Instead he started threatening the USSR with nuclear war if they worked toward developing nuclear weapons or expanded their territory... the so called Truman Doctrine.

He also played a fairly big roll in starting the whole middle eastern mess we're still dealing with to this day. Though that obviously goes back to the political failures after the Great War.

Guy was a dumb-ass who by reports of those around him didn't know WTF he was doing half the time.

So many red herrings, cries of "wolf!", that I'm hyper suspicious.

According to this report/video, it's about accident vs intentional, not white vs black, not man vs woman.
Both cases went to grand juries, so the seeming disparity is not so institutionalized either, maybe cultural, maybe fact based.
Also, the father's charges likely to be dropped to culpable negligence or nothing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3606895/Mississippi-man-released-jail-daughters-death.html

Edit:apparently he pled to manslaughter for probation.
I think you are off the rails @C-note.

Sorry, but they should have let Top Gear die. The new hosts are just awful and boring. I'm so glad we have The Grand Tour on Amazon, what a coup for Bezos.

This brings up some interesting points.

What is an "assault rifle"? My grand-dad's 303 bolt action rifle was used to fight Germans in the war. It was an "assault rifle". Yet I don't believe this is what you mean. Do you mean AR-15s or similar? The AR in AR-15 stands for Armalite Rifle. It was a select fire gun (capable of automatic fire). The civilian version is semi-automatic. It isn't an "assault rifle" but you could use it as one. You can use any gun as an assault weapon if you so choose to designate it for that purpose.

You may not need a semi-auto for deer hunting, but hunting doesn't end with one animal. Going duck hunting - it's much easier with a semi-auto and 6 round versus a 2 round break action. Going on a pig hunt (for animal destruction). You'll want a semi-auto with a high capacity magazine.

What about home defense? You most certainly DO need a semi-auto long gun. If you choose a pistol over a long gun then you are putting yourself at a massive disadvantage - and the whole point of using a tool to defend yourself is to give yourself an advantage over the aggressor.

Should a gun be harder to get in the USA? In my opinion yes. It should be harder. Whether that is by making ownership of some firearms dependent on being an active member of a club (where the club has the requirement to be each other's keeper) or stopping unvetted second hand sales or some other solution or combination thereof, I don't know the answer. But the two suggestions I've put here are a really good start. Along with a storage onus (don't properly store your firearm and it gets used in a crime - you get a BIG fine). Basically I believe there are plenty of solutions that won't infringe on an American's 2nd amendment rights to acquire and own a firearm.

The last couple of decades I've really begun to see the military as corporate welfare. We have a force capable of crushing, literally crushing any non nuclear power nation 20 times over. We can never use that force against a significant nuclear power nation like Russia or China lest we risk WWW3, the war that will REALLY end all wars (by humanity at least). Our tech is also pretty much useless against a guerrilla force because they can melt across borders and into the local population.

Our outdated technology still would destroy any of the nations other than Russia or China. We have shit mothballed and decaying that would do so. We have a fucking stockpile of main battle tanks that we will never use, but we keep building them and storing them because, apparently, if you let the people go who know how to make them you can never replace that knowledge.

All the while, we let people get mired in school debt, credit debt, and increase our national debt because we need to crush some unknown force. We spend a fraction of what we should be spending on space exploration and colonization. I could go on, but why bother.

If you have any doubt, just look at the F35. By the time it is all said and done, we will have close to half a trillion sunk into that fucking debacle and it STILL isn't functioning capably. Russia and China haven't got anything close to it and we don't need it against anyone else. You could take that money and give close to 2 grand to every single man, woman, and child in the country. Instead we basically are lining Lockheed Martin's pockets.

"once there was band, they were called the MC5,
they said, if you ain't part of the solution, there ain't no reason to be alive,
well, I believed in it so much, I once wrote it on a shirt,
but they sold their soul to levis, goddamnit boys it hurt.
Hell, I still believe in the music, man, if not the band,
and maybe that's the point if it ain't a master plan.
So, keep on singing kids, learn yourself something grand,
just don't forget your heart or the ground on which you stand."
-The Eastern - The Needles Eye

Your video, Skyglow - The Grand Canyon, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Depends how you define failure? If it makes a bunch of money but is shit, it's successful to the suits but a failure to the fans.

CoD games are a great example of this.

If it's critically hailed by fans but doesn't squirt out the bucks (Firefly/Serenity, Babylon 5 etc), it doesn't matter how well it's received by the fans because it may not ever continue as a franchise.

More to the point, if you subjectively enjoy a piece of shit, are you wrong? Because TLJ, imo, is a turd. You seemed to enjoy it. Who is right? Both? Neither? Does it matter?

In the end, what we see on screen is a factor of studios looking for stuff that will make a fortune, not what is going to make a great film in terms of artistic merit. If they cared about artistic merit, there are dozens of fantastic stories in the SW extended universe novels that could have been picked as starting points for 7/8/9. The stories of Grand Admiral Thrawn or Rogue Squadron for example.

A shit aggregated score will not prevent Ep 9 from coming out so why does it matter? Hopefully it might spur the writers on to actually putting together a story that isn't the equivalent of the OJ chase in space, but I'm not holding my breath.

I second that, indeed they are.

I'm a Chinese immigrant (to Canada) and I got a different kind of racist treatment from, er, the "majority".

But the theory is that, the best way to beat a racist is to be better than him/her - both in character & wealth. No matter what kind of unfair (in my POV) treatment the majority/society-at-large throw at me, the best way forward is make myself useful, bear the hardship to make my 2nd generation better off then I, have them pass on the same ideal to the next generation. Down the road, parity can be achieved, and my kids & grand-kids will be even better off then those racists.

My dad always said he hadn't much schooling (been at school for a total of 3 years), but through sheer determination he was very successful.
Rather than spoiling us he made sure he got us into good schools and we return the favor with good grades and focus.

What I'm saying is, those racists don't bother me, I'd rather do some good with my time than arguing with those ne'er-do-wells. This I think is rather typical thinking for most Asians immigrants.

tow the leftest party line.

Yep we be throwing grandma off the cliff and cutting school lunch for little johnny.

Lets not forget this tax plan is Armageddon --

No wonder you party has lost its ass in elections over the last 8 years.

The elitist raping party of snow flake stupidity.

My grand kids will only be able to read history books of this defunct klan party

Police commissioner: Slain Baltimore detective was to testify in case of indicted officers

The following day. He was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury against corrupt cops the day after he was killed with his own weapon.

How unfortunate.

Politico has a long piece on Boehner. It includes this little gem:

On Sunday, July 17, it appeared they had a deal. Boehner and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor—whom the speaker had reluctantly brought into the negotiations, knowing the majority leader’s distrust of Obama could poison the talks—worked out some final details that morning at the White House. When the president returned from church, Boehner says, he invited them both into the Oval Office and shook their hands. Some fine-tuning remained, but in Boehner’s mind the so-called grand bargain was done. The framework included reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending; and $800 billion in new revenue. “I was one happy son of a bitch,” Boehner tells me.

The next 48 hours changed everything. On Tuesday morning, the so-called Gang of Six—three senators from each party who had been discussing their own sweeping fiscal agreement—announced a briefing for their colleagues at the Capitol. They unveiled a separate framework, totally unaware of what Obama and Boehner had agreed to. This deal included significantly more revenue. Chambliss, by then a senator, was one of the GOP Gang members and had no idea—because Boehner had been negotiating with the president in private—that their announcement would kill the speaker’s deal with the White House. Obama saw that Republican senators were endorsing a deal that included far more revenue, and knew there was no way he could sell the grand bargain to his liberal base. When he came back with a counteroffer, seeking a higher revenue number, it validated Cantor’s warnings about not trusting the president. And by that point Boehner’s members had heard enough about the grand bargain to know they didn’t like it—with the $800 billion revenue figure, much less something higher.

So the deal fell apart, and the two sides peddled their competing versions of events: Boehner’s team said the White House moved the goal posts, while Obama’s allies said the speaker couldn’t sell his own members on the deal.

I would love to be able to get medical marijuana easily in Texas. But the bill they passed in 2015 had so many restrictions it is laughable.

You can only get it if you get low-thc oil. You can only be prescribed it for epilepsy and only then if you haven't responded to federally approved treatments. Assuming you meet those guidelines, you need two different doctors that must be registered with the DPS to both agree that no other medication will help you.

Not bad enough? The state has dragged its feet on actually licensing companies to grow cannabis to make the oil, so that 2 years after the bill was signed a couple of companies are just now able to ramp up production. Then they will need time to convert the product to oil and THEN the state will take some more time to make sure the product 'meets specifications'.

This stupid thing is you can already get low-thc oil on the internet legally that is roughly the same strength. Plus it restricts the most active compound, THC, so it limits drastically who will actually gain any benefit from it.

Since I suffer from two different ailments, both which have been shown to be helped by actual cannabis instead of the oil, I am SOL. I have to take a huge dose of Cymbalta and become zombie-like for a good part of the day, or I can suffer crippling anxiety/depression/fibromyalgia pain. The other fun thing is that the Cymbalta exacerbates my IBS, the other ailment I have that cannabis has been shown to help.

I could cut out a drug with horrible side effects and take a natural drug that could help every single symptom I have, with the only side effects being paranoia and the munchies. But then the pharma company would miss out on the roughly one grand a month that my pills cost my insurance. Can't have that!

PS: That price is for generic Cymbalta now that it is available. Originally it was closer to 2k a month for name brand. Another fun side effect? Cymbalta also fucks up your sex drive, sometimes making you impotent but more frequently making it nigh impossible to orgasm. So you can get erect as a male, but good luck finishing.

The data of the study came out of Germany, where the effects of a change in temperature are much more moderate than in many other areas. Basically, this decline is attributed mostly due to farming, the saturation of everything with pesticides, and, generally speaking, the destruction of the ecosphere. Even worse, this is in a country with comparably extensive regulation on all these matters, unlike, say, India.

As you say, this really is no bueno.

Driving past fields of rapeseed in the late '90s meant a windshield full of bugs. We used to head into the fields wearing yellow shirts just to see who can get the densest armor of bugs. Now, I can walk past the very same fields outside the town I grew up in with less than 5 bugs on a yellow shirt.

Or how about another anecdote: when I grew up, barbecue in my (grand-)parents yard meant paying attention to all the wasps, so that you don't swallow one by accident. I haven't seen a single one over several barbecues this year. Bees and bumblebees are still around, though less plentiful, but wasps are a complete no-show. Haven't seen a hornet in two years.