This map serves as a great reminder of just how trustworthy NATO has become over the last 15 years. When Germany was given the green light for reunification, part of the deal with the Russians was that NATO would not expand eastwards beyond Germany, especially not into the Warsaw Block.

The Warsaw Block is gone, its counterpart NATO is knocking right at the Russian doors and the media are baffled by the Russian behaviour vis-a-vis Ukraine/Crimea.

Good times, my friend. Good times. Better keep the strategic popcorn reserve at the ready.

Ok, for any and everyone who says "we're just too weak": welcome to the hyper-macho culture. For starters, you're right, I know your husband beats you, but seriously, deal with it. Grow the fuck up and get over yourself. Right? No?

The problem with certain forms of abuse is that many recognize they may in fact be participating in it, and to defend themselves from feeling bad, they justify it. For instance, in extreme examples, SLAVERY!

I posted a link to another video which makes the point: when you start dehumanizing the subject of your intentions, it becomes okay because they're just objects. That's the real issue here: these catcalls become, if you want to call it, a gateway drug for dehumanization.

And I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks we've just become pansies and these women need to suck it up, well, I'm sorry but __|__

How is being denied a job because of your sex a "suck it up" situation? Oh, you wanted to get the manager position? Well, we gave it to your less qualified male counterpart for more money than we intended to pay you anyway.

Why is there still a pay disparity? Equal work = equal pay? Unless you're female. Not to mention all the women passed over for promotions because they're simply not pretty enough. Or hell, just go to a Hooters . . . or Tilted Kilt, Winghouse or any other establishment that's frequented by males who are simply there because of the "hot chicks". I doubt many of those places could exist on their food quality alone.

While stopping to asshole YouTube comments isn't going to solve women's equalities issues, it will help. Intolerance for intolerance will be the only solution. Letting these YouTuber's harass females (yes, it is harassment, not a compliment) and putting women into uncomfortable situations because you feel like you're giving them compliment will only make matters worse.

For instance, go to a gay club and see how you feel when guys are constantly catcalling you, telling you they'd love to fuck you etc. Trust me, when it happens to you, it's not a compliment. It's damned creepy.

Now, if your female friend did her hair, got a new dress etc and you tell her she looks pretty, that's one thing. Telling a random stranger "Hey beautiful" etc doesn't win you any favors.

The pictures of children dying are rather overboard but I digress. Also, the argument about God not being able to stop suffering or death is a false argument. And here is why.

You know children that cannot feel any pain sensation at all? They scratch their own eyeballs out or rip holes into their flesh. They also don't feel pleasure. Why shouldn't God take away pain? Because survival says that's fucking stupid.

Also, sadness or happiness or anything MUST have a counterpart to even exist. Tragedy brings happiness. We miss our children only because we loved them and we loved them only because we know we might not always have that chance. However, mankind brings more tragedy than naturally balancing and we bring far more than God will ever bring. (I don't believe in God so I believe we are all the root for excessive suffering.)

You'll see every pimple on the ass of the male counterparts.

I listened the hell out Power Windows, Presto, and Hold Your Fire also.
Not into counterparts... roll the bones had 1 or 2 that were short lasted. Grace Under Pressure was underwhelming. Now Presto is irritating as F#^&.

There are also sects of Buddhism that advocate torture, execution and public humiliation (The former Tibetan ruling class springing firmly to mind). Sadly it seems even the most peaceful of philosophies can still be trumped by psychotic self righteousness & mindless tradition .

I'm not aware of any specific Sufi sects having executed or tortured people for blasphemy, adultery etc. but I fear such groups likely exist somewhere if one were to go looking for them.

In general I have a healthy degree of respect for "Sufism" because it follows the same kind of esoteric approach to religion/spirituality/knowledge as it's western (Gnostic) and far eastern (Tao, Hindu*, Buddhist etc.) counterparts.

Very roughly "Esoteric religion" is based around looking inwards for knowledge and lends itself naturally to scientific enquiry, considered ethics, critical thinking etc.
When they speak of a higher power it is almost always in terms of something fundamentally connected to and embodied by yourself.
They almost never suggest one need feel threatened by divine judgement, or that some should be privileged over others (*hence the Hindu caste system being not being truly esoteric)

"Exoteric religion" (most of Islam, Judaism, Christianity etc.) is by contrast based around looking outside oneself for knowledge. Truth is revealed by outside agents, divinity and true power always lie outside of oneself. etc. etc. (I'm sure I don't need to further elucidate the negative qualities of such belief systems )


In truth all of the major denominations appear to have at least some some esoteric and exoteric variations even if most fall mostly into one or the other. There are bad Buddhists & Gnostics and there are good Muslims and Christians the only difference really is whether or not they are genuinely applying their own minds and judgement, or hopelessly enslaved to another's.
Or in "someone" else's terms Logos and Mythos.

Back on topic: Bill Maher is Mythos masquerading as Logos.

Do some homework ;-).

Your religion (Christianity) is a bastardization of "Messianic Judaism" (the crazy old testament stuff) and Mithraism (a "Gnostic" religion which was highly (& most) prevalent among the roman legions around the time of the reformation).

Virtually everything positive you allude to in the Christian teachings originally come from Hermeticism and other such ancient "Gnostic" traditions.

Jesus (that is to say "Yeshua ben Yosef") as portrayed as a mortal man is a fabrication at best (and outright fraud at worst).

The "Christ" however has been around for a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooongass time before the name "Jesus" ever hit the scene . This stuff goes back to the Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, Cannanites etc.

And that not even mentioning The Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao Tzu etc. etc. all of whom predate your Jesus by quite some centuries and preach many of the same fundamentals.

Ditch the Dogma and try out the approach of some other religions, you'll quickly find that underneath all the silly myths there's certain things they all have in common (to a greater and lesser extent). You'll also I hope quickly start to realise that the three major "Exoteric religions" (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) are by this stage corrupted to the point of being barely serviceable and a mere shadow of their "Esoteric" counterparts.

Then again you could always just pull the faith card on me

Love is the law...

Take a lesson from the dog. He'll go through all of the doggy stages of grief much faster and more efficiently than his human counterparts, and spring-back from his loss ready to imbue the world with hope and joy again soonish.....then he'll probably go make friends with a squirrel or otter, maybe pick up an addiction or two.

Have to disagree there, if you had said that fundamentalist Islam is a threat I would agree completely but by just saying Islam is a threat you end up insinuating that all followers of Islam are extremists. And yeah I do believe that at the heart of it most religions are pretty much the same in that they all promoted good and bad behavior. But ultimately it comes down to people I believe, people will either listen to their better angels or use the power of religion to serve their own selfish desires.
Evidence based? Factual truth? You're condemning an entire belief system and billions of Muslims based on a statistically small group of whackjobs, doesn't sound very scientific to me.
If a fundamentalist is only as dangerous as the fundamentals of their beliefs then fundamentalist Christians are every bit as dangerous as their Islamic counterparts. I didn't even know what a Jain was until I looked it up, and being based on non-violence "Spiritual independence", "equality between all forms of life"(*) and a highly literate people I would say that sounds pretty cool.
But these things aren't so cool if you're looking to build nations and empires and ultimately become a dominant world religion like Christianity or Islam, BOTH got to where they are today by not being very nice.

(*) taken from the Wikipedia page on Jainism.

Around 5:45 Julian says that free-form strategy games cannot guarantee that the player will always have something interesting to do, and that, in his view at least, you couldn't get away with that sort of game anymore today.

Paradox Interactive with their Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis and Victoria franchises are still up and running. Hearts of Iron 3, in particular, seems more popular than ever, after the release of the third add-on, "Their Finest Hour". And if anything, HOI3 is even more of a sandbox than the original XCOM.

Similarly, Bohemia Interactive's Arma series as a comparable counterpart in the field of first person shooters is gaining massive popularity as well, even though it incorporates extensive "downtimes" for players.

You can't churn out annual iterations and expect AAA-rate numbers of sold copies, but the community is still large enough to warrent a couple of these franchises.

Well, at least she taught us that a government led by a female Prime Minister is neither more social nor more peaceful than their counterparts.

Agree completely on that whole not having to explain itself. Apparently it was written by a teenage Luc Besson and thinking about it does sort of reflect the kind of story you make up as a kid. A lot of imagination, not much direction and completely carefree.

My intepretation was always that Leeloo was the fifth element. She represents life in its purest most innocent form as a counterpart to that wierd ball of death/evil that calls Zorg up on the phone (wat.). Leeloo learns of all the atrocities humanity commits, she loses sight of the point of life until Gorban gives her a reason. Love is the key but not the element imo. I just threw up a little. But here we are analysing a film which defies it. It just wants to show us something fantastical and doesn't care if we understand or not.

ps. That Gorban - Leeloo relationship is still wierd. I was getting a father daughter vibe until they touch lips at the end. Meanwhile in Leon...

Yeah, but the Russian designs cost 10% of the American counterpart, and in the case of the F22, they actually work well enough to use on a battlefield (Air Force refused to use F22s in Iraq and Afghanistan because they were deemed unsafe for combat conditions).

If I were an American I certainly would not brag about the state of the US fighter jet program.

Boner: It is still confusing...

Astrophysicists have created the most realistic computer simulation of the universe's evolution to date, tracking activity from the Big Bang to now -- a time span of around 14 billion years -- in high resolution.

Created by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) in collaboration with researchers at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), the Arepo software provides detailed imagery of different galaxies in the local universe using a technique known as "moving mesh".

Unlike previous model simulators, such as the Gadget code, Arepo's hydrodynamic model replicates the gaseous formations following the Big Bang by using a virtual, flexible grid that has the capacity to move to match the motions of the gas, stars, dark matter and dark energy that make up space -- it's like a virtual model of the cosmic web, able to bend and flex to support the matter and celestial bodies that make up the universe. Old simulators instead used a more regimented, fixed, cubic grid.

"We took all the advantages of previous codes and removed the disadvantages," explained Volker Springel, the HITS astrophysicist who built the software. Springel, an expert in galaxy formation who helped build the Millennium Simulation to trace the evolution of 10 billion particles, used Harvard's Odyssey supercomputer to run the simulation. Its 1,024 processor cores allowed the team to compress 14 billion years worth of cosmic history in the space of a few months.

The results are spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda that actually look like spiral galaxies -- not the blurred blobs depicted by previous simulators -- generated from data input that stretches as far back as the afterglow of the Big Bang, thus portraying a dramatic cosmic evolution (see the above video for a sneak peek of that evolution from four billion years after the Big Bang).

"We find that Arepo leads to significantly higher star formation rates for galaxies in massive haloes and to more extended gaseous disks in galaxies, which also feature a thinner and smoother morphology than their Gadget counterparts," the team states in a paper describing the technology.

Though the feat is impressive -- CfA astrophysicist Debora Sijacki compares the high-resolution simulation's improvement over previous models to that of the 24.5-metre aperture Giant Magellan Telescope's improvement over all telescopes -- the team aim to generate simulations of larger areas of the universe. If this is achieved, the team will have created not only the most realistic, but the biggest universe simulation ever.



>> ^BoneRemake:

this video is a waste without addition information.
what am I looking at. spiraling gas' or something.
what is the significance, why did nine people upvote something they probably do not understand.
what part of the universe is this ? why didnt it start at the beginning ?
WHY WHY FUCKING WHY.

>> ^Trancecoach:

I think it's hilarious that they try to pass this off as "science." It's not science -- it's video games for boys.


I had this thought as well. When the take away is "guys like curvy women" this entire video seems like it could be a study of the water that concludes that it's wet. I don't like the method at all - it might be more informative to gather the entire "attractive" range of these features rather than to just have them figure out what they think is "perfect." At least then you aren't left to wonder how close you'd have to get to perfect to be attractive, and you wouldn't have the conclusion being "men who create the perfect figure create a curvy figure."

If this study is done without a counterpart on the male body, it's loses its credibility. Most of us probably don't care but some probably do.