Global warming is not man made. End of story.

Only politicians who want to TAX more believe in it. Take the $ out of it and then see how quickly this issue goes away.


And lets say you are right. From the current "facts" we are doomed. So who the F cares. Eat cows and cut down trees and get on with life.

Are you sure that 50 billion farm animals releasing methane would have no affect on the planet?

Are you sure that cutting down 80% of forests (trees absorb co2) would not have an effect?

You don't need know anything about maths or science to see that these huge numbers are significant regardless of what the sun is doing.

Just to make sure you can appreciate how much 50 billion is - it would take you 31 years to count 50 billion.

Human activity in the last 100 years (especially in the last 50) has drastically changed the earth.

Here's the thing. It's absolutely the case that their plan is to provoke an escalating conflict with us, their cultural superiors, but it turns out this is a bad plan because Allah isn't going to intervene like they think and deliver them a victory in a fight they can't otherwise win.

If the enemy are superstitious retards then we should celebrate, because it makes them easier to kill. Smallpox has been eradicated, polio soon to follow, why shouldn't islam be next? Let the moderate muslims join the fight; let them be cut down for it.

True, the constitution has some screwed up parts. However, there is a process in place to make or change amendments. If the bulk of the United States decides to repeal the 2nd Amendment, using the methods in place to do so, so be it. I'd give my guns up in that case. If the legislature decides to pass an unconstitutional law as a knee jerk reaction to a terrorist act, then they aren't getting them. The problem with unconstitutional laws, by the way, is that SCOTUS can always wink at the bill of rights and say that it is constitutional. I don't care for that, but again, it is a legal interpretation of the document if they do it. I'd give up my guns if that happened.

I don't even really have an issue if we go back to the assault weapon ban of the 90's. I get that we can make some changes and cut down on these incidents. I'm just extremely leery of package deals like lets ban everyone who ends up on a list from having weapons based on a government decision. You give someone due process to avoid being on the list, like we do to people accused of felonies before they are convicted, no problem. But as it stands, our President is just tossing an idea out there that absolutely violates multiple rights and people are eating it up like it was candy.

Actually I like the fact they're using beer brewing byproducts. Helps cut down on waste.

Ketamine has shown a lot of promise in small doses for combating depression before it ever begins. As far as I know, the best alternative for opiates is Kratom.

I've used it plenty for other reasons, cutting down on alcohol and what some call "Kratom dreams". But, it is one of the best tools for opiate withdrawal while still receiving the "benefits" of an opiate. Supposedly, people are able to combat heroin withdrawal, which is huge. That said, it's completely legal and you can buy it off the internet, but always research the color strain before - there are green, white & red strains which have somewhat different effects.

Most likely explanation, I think, is that they chopped the tree down and left it for a bit before beginning to saw it into smaller pieces for removal. In between initially being cut down and sawn into pieces the snake crawled into what looks like a rotted out hole in the core.

I've cut down a lot of trees. I've never even heard of this. I can't even imagine how:
1) the core of a tree could be hollowed out like that without some very specific rot/infection/insect.
2) a snake would find/penetrate that in the first place.

Are trees really snakes?!

I find your second point more convincing.

Animals are serial rapists. I'm not sure why our diets should be informed by them. Clearly our teeth, and a great many other things, are pretty good clues to what we have historically eaten.

However. I love bacon, but I'm pretty sure I'd eat a lot less bacon if I had to occasionally slaughter a pig to get it. I don't have a moral objection to eating meat, I have an objection (and I am a hypocrite here to boot) with the almost hedonistic way we pay others to do the dirty work so that we might satiate our appetite. Where once our appetite for meat served as the necessary motivation in the face of the considerable effort we had to expend to get it, now I walk for 10 minutes, pay the equivalent of perhaps 10 minutes of my wage, and voilà, chicken ready to eat.

All of this would be "so what" if it were not for the environmental and health impacts this imbalance might cause, as well as the suffering we cause animals in our pursuit to ever drive down the price of flesh.

But yeah, if you have a small list of things you can eat affordably, and meat is one of them then, yeah, it's a bit different. I am fortunate enough to be fairly unrestricted in what I can eat...and yet I still choose to buy animal corpses wrapped in plastic. I'm trying to cut down though!

Not at all. I hate seeing nice trees cut down as well.

I would guess they took it down because of the HUGE crack in a large branch that you can see at the start of the video.....oh...I just read the description where they explain EXACTLY why they took it down, it was dropping branches after a lightning strike, almost hitting someone. That likely means the trunk was also weakened, and it was certainly close enough to take out that house.

I can relate. I (sadly) took down a 30-40 meter Douglas Fir tree in my yard a few years back. It's still painful to think about. My tree had grown too tall, and had a weakened root system because it was growing sideways out of a small hill, and had massive gopher activity all around it. All the surrounding trees on other properties were cut well before we moved here, so it was also exposed to full wind. I was terrified that it was going to come down through my bedroom and kill the wife and myself, or through a neighbors house, so we had it cut. I've spent the nearly 3 years since then digging out the root ball (which WAS as weakened as I had thought) and turning the hole into a large pond. I still hate that we had to kill the tree, but it was a safety issue. At least I have firewood for years to come, and a pond.

Am I the only only one who thinks this sad? Why did they cut down such a magnificent tree?

"Automatically ok"? Not necessarily. But in cases where it makes sense, at a stretch even "plot sense" for the character to be there; yeah, I think that is OK.

The Last Samurai isn't a documentary. But, the general historical justification for Tom Cruise's character being in Japan is pretty much valid. Meiji was interested in the West -- clothes, technology, weapons, and military. He actually did hire Westerners to train his army, although from what I read it sounds like they were German, French, and Italian rather than American. Still, the movie portrays the general situation/setting with at least *decent* broad-strokes historical accuracy. LOADS of movies deviate from even this degree of historical accuracy *way* more without drawing complaints; particularly if their main purpose is entertainment and not education / documentary.


Your hypothetical reverse movie makes some valid criticisms. Even though it would have been historically possible for a Westerner to be in Japan at the time -- even to be involved with training a Western-style military -- it would be unlikely for such a person to get captured, run into a Shogun that speaks English, become a badass (or at least passable) samurai warrior, and end up playing a major role in politics and significantly influencing Emperor Meiji.

My defense against those criticisms is that, for me at least, the movie is entertaining; which is kinda the point. Your "Union Samurai" movie might be equally entertaining and therefore given an equal pass on historical inaccuracies by me.

The whole characters as a "lens through which the audience can appreciate a culture/history outside their own" issue is (slightly) more weighty to me. I don't think those are often necessary, but I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted if the movie maker feels that they are in order to sell tickets.

I love the Chinese historical novel "Three Kingdoms". A few years ago, John Wu made the movie "Red Cliff", mostly about one particular battle in the historical period portrayed in that book. For the Chinese audience, Wu made the movie in two parts, summed up about four and a half hours long. For the US / West, he made a version trimmed to just over two hours. Why? Because he (and a team of market researchers, I'm sure) knew that very few Westerners would go to see a 4+ hour long movie, entirely in Mandarin Chinese (with subtitles), about a piece of Chinese history from ~1800 years ago that very few in the West have ever heard of or know anything about.

I think the full 4+ hour long movie is great. In my personal top 10 favorite movies of all time, ahead of most Hollywood stuff. But I also understand that there's no way that movie would appeal to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Western viewers in that full-on 4+ hour format. But, even though I personally think the cut-down 2 hour "US" version is drastically inferior to the full cut, I am glad that he made it because it gives a suitably accurate introduction to the subject matter to more people in the West (just like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dynasty Warriors" videogames do), and makes that tiny, tiny fraction of Western people that know anything about it a little less tiny. While being entertaining along the way.

For other movies, sometimes the best way that a filmmaker can sell a movie to an audience that otherwise might not accept it (at least in large enough numbers to justify the production costs) may be to insert one of these "lens" characters for the audience to identify with. I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with that. It might not work for movies that are taking a more hardline approach to historical / contextual accuracy (ie., if Tom Cruise showed up in "Red Cliff" in circa 200AD China), but outside of those situations, if that is what the studio thinks it will take to sell tickets... Cool.

The Last Samurai is, like @ChaosEngine said, a movie primarily about an outsider learning a new culture (and accepting his own past). He serves as that lens character, but actually the hows and whys of his character arc are the main points of interest in the movie, at least to me.

I'm sure that an awesome, historically accurate movie could be made dealing with young Emperor Meiji, Takamori (who Katsumoto seems to be based on in The Last Samurai), and the influence of modernization on Japanese culture at the time. It could be made with no Western "lens" character, no overt influence by any particular individual Westerner, and be entirely in Japanese. But that movie wouldn't be The Last Samurai, wouldn't be attempting to serve the same purpose as The Last Samurai, and very likely wouldn't sell as many tickets (in the US) as The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise!) did. That wouldn't make it a worse movie, just an apple instead of an orange.

As always, my views are just a layman's perspective with no claims to expertise.

@RedSky

You correctly point out the intent of the reform, to stop fractional banking which they diagnosed as a primary driver of volatility within the financial sector. They want to revert back to a system where the banks were intermediaries the way you described it: deposit leads to loan, in this case at a maximum ratio of 1:1, no leveraging.

Unlike the current system where bank deposits are mostly created by banks themselves -- the act of lending creates deposits. In fact, deposits are liabilities of the banks, not assets. Reserves are assets, but they are only traded between entities with accounts at the central bank. And, in normal times, are provided quite freely by the central bank in exchange for other assets.

Anyway, "Vollgeld" places the ability to create money exclusively in the hands of the central bank. Controlling the amount of money in circulation was a concept most central banks were eager to drop during the '90s, since it never worked. Demand for credit is volatile, central control is inflexible, even if they could somehow quanfity the need for it ex ante -- which they can't. Hell, they can't even do it ex post. You can't quantify the need for additional money beyond what's already in circulation if the central bank's action set the conditions for a dynamic development in the first place. You can't know in advance what increases in production need to be financed, you can't know how demand for liquidity evolves over time. The quantity theory of money was buried for a reason, it ignores reality.

Anyway, I applaud the proponents of Vollgeld for pointing out the dysfunctionalities of our fractional reserve system as well as how questionable it is, ethically, to hand over so much power to a small cabal of financial elites. In fact, I'm quite ecstatic to hear them point out that a nation with a sovereign, free-floating currency does not need to finance deficits through banks -- how very MMT of them. Go OMF!

But their proposed solutions are a fallback to "the market will stabilise itself if left alone, a completely independant central bank will keep the quantity of money in circulation at just the right amount". This hands-off approach resulted in absolute devastation whenever it was applied. They want to turn the state into a regular economic subject that has to adapt to the amount of money currently in circulation. It's (the illusion of) control by technocrats, where you get to disguise policies against the masses as "economic neccessities". Basically the German Eurozone on steroids.

As for the absolute independence of the central bank: you are right, that is not strictly part of the Swiss Vollgeld initiative. But it's what almost every proponent of Vollgeld within the German-speaking circles argues for, including major drivers behind the initiative. Can't let politicians have control over our central bank or else they'll abuse it for populist policies.

They are true believers in technocrat solutions, completely seperate from democratic control.

PS: I cut down my ranting to a minimum of MMT arguments, given that many people see it as just a different sort of voodoo economics.

Edit: Elizabeth Warren's 21st Century Glass Steagal Act strikes me as a rather promising way to solve a great number of problems with the financial industry without going back into the realm of monetarism.

The mixture of valid points, exaggerations, ignorance of context and completely false information makes it a bit... difficult to digest.

Generally speaking, a lot of errors were made regarding Cologne.

The police fucked up entirely and basically was unable to maintain control of the square in front of the central train station where shitloads of theft, sexual harassment and even a few rapes were committed.

The public media did not report on it properly. They did, in fact, refuse to report it at all at first. But that doesn't stem from an obession with PC nor is it special treatment for refugees/immigrants -- it's good old-fashioned pro-government bias. A few days later, they were all playing the same tune again: bad immigrants, bad muslims, need more law-and-order, close the borders, need new laws, etc. Same shit as always.

And yes, you cannot expect all these refugees to be model citizens from the get-go. Different culture, different language, segregation, no work permit, no familiy, maybe first-hand experience with war -- they are bound to commit crimes, assuming otherwise would be naive.

And accepting a million refugees might have been a bad idea after cutting down public personnel and services for two decades straight. But what's done is done. The question now is what can be done to improve the situation for everyone involved. What doesn't help is further segregation (refugee camps), private security (aka mobs hunting brown people, happened in Cologne already) or downplaying the massive problems.

As for that wierd tirade from 1:07 onwards about true Germans: except for all the people from Bohemia, Prussia and Silesia, aka Poland; or the millions of immigrants from Italy and Turkey; or the folks from former Yugoslavia; etc. Two thirds of the bloody country has family names that mark them as n-th generation immigrant. Half of my extended family is from what is now Russia (Kaliningrad) while my family name is distinctively Dutch. "Paid German taxes" gives a hint to his motivations. Folks in East Germany didn't pay German taxes: do they count? Refugees from former German enclaves ("Russlanddeutsche") didn't pay German taxes, nor did they speak proper German: do they count?

All in all a very misguided rant, too eager to abuse real fuck-ups for his own ideology. Rape culture, SJW, PC -- doesn't apply in this case. It's small government, media with establishment bias, a general inability for open discussion of problems, and a shitload of incompetent arseholes in positions of power (e.g.: chief of police in Cologne, gone now).

By the way, he forgot to mention the hundreds(!) of refugee shelters that were set on fire during the last few months. Bands of immigrants committing crimes are a problem, bands of Germans committing crimes are a problem.

We had a six digit number of prime suspects for trouble already: young, male, unemployed, un(der)educated, no fucking hope. It's the main cause for the persisting problems with Nazis in East Germany: no hope. Adding a million additional people, lots of them with equally bad prospects, without any serious effort to integrate them is bound to blow up in our faces eventually.

The best thing that can happen for the entire Eurozone would be a massive integration program in Germany. And by massive I don't mean a meagre billion Euros. We're talking 15-20 billion a year, for at least five years. The more the better. Even in the current economic regime, it would be much cheaper than the repercussions from staying the current course: doing fuck all.

It's scenic, but the constant Orc attacks are a pain in the arse.

On the plus side, commuting by eagle really cuts down on the carbon footprint...