New headline: "Teacher defenestrates in front of his 7th grade class!"

The media's role isn't really to report on things performing according to expectations. We don't need headlines about non-corrupt politicians, planes landing safely, or cops doing their jobs, because that's where the bar is already set. The media should be a safety valve that alerts us when the systems we all agree to keep in place (our government, the police, the free market, etc.) are going haywire.

If a cop does his/her job in accordance with their training with the expected outcome, I don't need the media to tell me about it - that's what I was expecting when I agreed with society to have and fund and submit to a police force. If the outcomes are horrific, that's when I need media to step in, to give me a heads up that this thing I agreed to is going off the rails. I either need to change the kind of police I have, my funding of the police, or in a worst case scenario, my submission to the police.

That would be an EXCELLENT alt-headline.

Watch the eyes....

I love this man.

We are so afraid of FAT.

This guy says -- I can twirl, I can dance, I have attitude.

Headline has it ALL wrong.

He is baton twirling as if EVERYONE is watching.

My guy.

The only thing I know for certain is that the entire science of metabolism is much more complicated than a 5 minute video that's pushing a political agenda.

The truth is that all the research has proven nothing yet about the push/pull of calories, exercise and metabolism. Dumbing down the science and presenting half the facts with a biased, attention grabbing headline does nothing to illuminate the subject.

When people do stuff like this and it goes horribly wrong the headlines are along the line of "Person tragically killed in <insert sport name here> accident". When it should be along the lines of "idiot tempting fate pays the price for their stupidity".

one of our tabliod paper's headline today was literally "now lets make Britain great again".

So yeah. Trumpism.

Not specifically a video thing, but any title or headline or w/e that ends in a question mark puts me on edge.

Not a single North American citizen, apparently.

You know who isn't on that list either? Vladimir Putin.

You know whose name and face made it into most of the headlines about the Panama Papers? Vladimir Putin.

Makes my blood boil.

Three pieces for your entertainment:

The Grauniad ran an opinion piece by former NYT executive editor Jill Abramson abtly titled "This may shock you: Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest". The headline is enough to make my head spin, nevermind the content. Not worth spending time on, really. You can guess what the comment section thought of it. Not surprisingly, it was closed after an hour.

Worth a read, however, is a recent polemic by Sean Kerrigan: Will We Elect Hillary After Her Many, Many War Crimes?

What made me laugh was this: the supposed presidential frontrunner would have been hanged if judged by the standards set at the Nuremberg Trials, yet Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer, holds a fundraiser for Clinton at $350k per pair for seats at her majesty's table. Who the hell needs satire anyway, not even Doug Stanhope could come up with most of the twisted shit reality confronts us with day in, day out.

Last but not least, Robert Fisk wonders why neither Cameron nor Obama seem to be celebrating the retaking of Palmyra from the IS.

"Here are the Syrian army, backed, of course, by Vladimir Putin's Russkies, chucking the clowns of Isis out of town, and we daren't utter a single word to say well done."

My 2 cents....

1) Don't EVER get your science just from the internet. ALWAYS verify anything you think you've learned with published peer reviewed science publications/articles.
Veganism does NOT cure or inoculate against cancer (which I'm assuming is what you mean by the #1 killer in the western world). If it did, that would be headline news and easy to prove, since vegans would all be cancer free, they're not. That's some serious BS right there. It may be HELPFUL against heart disease, I'll grant you that much. If that's what you meant, ignore the above.
If the point is eating healthier, excluding processed foods is exponentially better than excluding meats, and should be the first step people take when changing their diet, long before excluding meats all together.

2)So now Vegans are just like anti-choice people who think their choice should be the only choice for everyone!? I hate to tell you, but that position will make your movement lose, no question. Your position leads to only one logical conclusion, attempting to force people to stop eating meat. You don't change minds by force. I suggest you try a seriously different tact, or I fear you're methods may destroy your movement.

3)There is NO "better" alternative to meat. There may be alternatives, but they are not "better" nutritionally. The energy humans gain from eating meat is why we have the brain that allows you to take those positions, plants simply don't offer than dense nutritional value. True enough, evolution is barely still in effect for humans, but that's no reason to stop feeding your body/brain.

Personally, I can see no rational reason to stop eating meat except for moral or health reasons, and if you eat meat raised properly and morally, those moral reasons no longer exist. As we've discussed before, meat from small, local farms rather than large factory farms is often raised with love and care, so there's no abuse, only a scheduled end to life. I have no moral objection to that (and have a hard time seeing how others might have a reasonable objection to it) so I'll continue to eat meat, but I do make an effort to eat only morally raised meats. When the odd occasion happens when I can't choose the meats I prefer, I do feel somewhat guilty, but not enough to go pure vegetarian, certainly not vegan. (which reminds me, all dairy is not produced immorally either. Some smaller farms still exist that treat their cattle with care, but they are sadly disappearing as people usually only buy factory farmed dairy as well, it's far cheaper).
For those who eat so much meat that it's a health issue (yes, I do agree that it causes many health issues if you eat too much), I'm right there with you saying they should eat way less, or none, until they get their health under control.

Wow...I'd seen all the headlines about this, purposefully avoided most Star Wars commentary as it seems pretty weakly considered and nearly always click-bait.

Seems like the "white slavers" comment wasn't anything as serious as the hype-mill spun it. It's almost a throwaway joke that you can tell doesn't really land. I think Lucas seems humble and wise in this clip.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/15/a_new_snowden_whistleblower_leaks_trove

At 14:25.
It's nothing important, just "and those are some of the headlines."

Attacking the religious text is a strawman in my opinion.

There's all sorts of outrageous (by modern standards) stuff in the Bible, Koran, Talmud, and other major religious texts. How could there not be? They were written hundreds to thousands of years ago at a time when reading and writing was limited to the wealthy or elite (i.e. priest classes). Much of that stuff is outright ignored or at the very least acknowledged by deemed less important by practitioners of those religions in modern societies.

All literature is open to interpretation and this includes religious texts. The fact that there are tens of thousands of denominations of Christianity with differing opinions about what it means to be Christian and how to behave as one gives testament to this. While there aren't as many named denominations in Islam, if you actually look at how it is practiced locally in say urban Malaysia (i.e. no Bhurka for women) compared with rural Afghanistan (i.e. full body covering required) you can see there's huge diversity there as well.

So if you want to judge the religion, then you actually have to take the time to make an informed opinion by looking at who does what and why they do it. And when you do that, you tend to find that there's this complex inter-relationship between religious teachings, economics, politics, ethnicity, history and so on which make it difficult to assign full blame to any one "thing" such as religion. The female genital mutilation example I used above makes this pretty clear.

Sticking solely with criticising the religious text puts a critic on very unsure footing, as at the end of the day all the critic is really doing is criticizing a specific interpretation of the text (i.e. their own understanding). That's why, as I said, it's something of a strawman argument since you're really arguing against an interpretation you yourself have created.

It is much better, in my opinion, to look at how specific groups are interpreting and enacting the text, and then criticizing their actions (or the effects of their actions) in the event that there is a negative effect. But in doing so I think it quickly becomes apparent that those actions are almost always enacted locally as opposed to globally. In other words, they are the actions of a specific group of people in a specific place at a specific time who have been influenced by all the factors (history, economics, etc.) I mentioned above.

And when you reach that conclusion you realize you're not criticizing Islam anymore, you're criticizing one groups' interpretation and enactment of Islam in specific context.

On the other hand, if you ask which type of criticism gets you more views on TV or more headlines in newspapers...