For every white superhero, there is a black superhero; and for every 20 black and white superheroes, there is a single Asian S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and/or a Latino comic relief.

I'm kidding, I don't really give a shit -- but it's true.

One argument I've heard is that crime takes place in the inner cities, so of course there will be a larger portion of black heroes/villains.

Anyway, I've read 100s of Marvel comic books, including the Alias, Daredevil, Marvel Knights, and Defenders series (which ISN'T the Defenders we're going to be presented with on Netflix) so I'm definitely excited about seeing Jessica and Power Man.

But more importantly, the Purple Man (Zebediah Killgrave) is a key villain to know and fear. He pulls a lot of the conspiratorial strings of the Marvel universe on earth to come.

It would be really cool to come back to this guy on 20 years and see his dream come alive.

I am German myself and I am disgusted how the German media and politicians are only blaming Greece. Some conservative papers (like welt.de) are ticking out completely and are turning to phrases that are very close to our Nazi history and are not allowing overly critical comments.

How Germans could chop down wages so quickly and without much opposition from the people and other parties?
The main reason is Hartz IV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept
Its a reform for the unemployed people, which at first sight doesnt have much to do with wages of the working people. But it does have everything to do with it. Let me explain:
Before Hartz IV unemployed people didnt have much to fear from the state. They got their unemployment (Sozialhilfe) money every month which was enough to live without much fear of anything. It didnt mean much to be unemployed. But people found a job if they wanted to. Of course, like every country, it was exploited by a tiny minority. People were happy with it and many countries were envious of that system because it provided so much social security that people got very peaceful and crime rates were pretty much non-existent.

Hartz IV was planned to cut the massive costs of that social system. The left wing government (which turned out to be massive hypocrites), a coalition of a socialist party and a green party, claimed it would decrease unemployment rates massively and save lots of tax money and they would force those lazy useless unemployed people to get jobs. They emphasized on "the hard earning people whos tax money is stolen by lazy unemployed" and used the tiny minority of exploiters to get Hartz IV under way. Hartz IV was basically a cut for unemployed people where they would barely have enough money to live from or pay the rent from it. It also allowed the government to use many tricks to adjust the unemployment rate. They for example excluded people who were unemployed at a certain age or people who were send on useless trainings (like how you write a job application or how you use a PC), which were forced on them from the government. If they didnt attend, they would get cuts on the already not enough Hartz IV money.

They got it through the parliament (since there was no oppositon of mention thank to their "democratic" coalition) and it went all downhill from there. Unemployed people were suddenly massively discriminated, even by the politicians, because they had created so much hate against unemployed and built many stereotypes in the process, supported by stupid fake shows in the media, just to push Hartz IV through. As I said before, they only used the minority that exploited the system before in their arguments, and didnt care about the majority. That also lead to companies falling for the created stereotype and not employing people who had been using Hartz IV at one time and even going as far as them looking at older employees as inferior. They got rid of them in a massive purge, which also led to the trick of excluding old people near pension-age from the unemployment statistics. Pensions dropped because those old fired people didnt get a job anymore and had to use Hartz IV. That meant that they had to use up their savings before they get Hartz IV money (that rule is part of Hartz IV), which drained old people of their money and also caused them to get caught in an even worse trap:
After a few years of getting Hartz IV money, they dropped to the lowest pension rate, which was barely above Hartz IV. It didnt matter if they worked 40 years of their life in a well paid job. Now they were poor and would never get a pension that was appropriate to their former job. That lead to a massive shift in wealth away from the normal people (middle class and poor), to the rich people. The buying power of Germans was destroyed, and it became even worse after the socialist/conservative government (yes, a stupid coalition like that is possible here) increased the sales tax by 3% to a whopping 19%. As result of this living costs exploded and black labor skyrocketed. Cost of energy of any kind, taxes, food prices, gas, rents, every day stuff you need increased massively. The Euro was to blame too, because prices of many things (especially food) were just exchanged 1-1 to the Euro. So for example if there was cheese before that cost 1 Deutsche Mark, it would now cost 1 Euro, even though 1 Euro was worth 2 Deutsche Mark. Wages collapsed, while everything got much more pricy. Hartz IV made all that worse.
Now for the main reason how Hatz IV pushed wages down:
The fear of dropping into Hartz IV (for the reasons I mentioned) was massive. Nobody ever wanted to drop into Hartz IV because they knew then everything was over. So they accepted extremely low wage jobs, even if that meant they would get less money than they would from Hartz IV, which already was barely enough to live a crappy live from. They took 2, 3, 4 shitty paid jobs instead, and the companies loved it, because they saved a lot of money with that. The problem with that was that even well educated people had fear of Hartz IV and accepted lower wages because of it. Wages didnt rise for 20 years (and they dont rise much now either). Yet living costs, as I said, increased massively. It all came together.
Germanys economy was very low at one point, yet they still tried to tell us that the unemployment rate dropped again (even 2007/08 and every year after that). People started to learn how they manipulated us and now we are here. Companies making revenue records after revenue records, yet nothing is arriving at the people. The media claims everything is well, the statistics still lie to us that the unemployment rate is low, but its not.
And now they are trying to blame the Greeks for our problems. Just like the unemployed Germans before, and the stupid masses fall for it again.
Yet they still wonder why Germans are a dying breed (population has been dropping for years now), and dont get that having children is very expensive in Germany and only few people still have money or time for that (since both women and men have multiple jobs to be able to live) because of these developments.

Swear everyone on the sift has shit logic.

Define "small fanbase".

You think that providing thought provoking political satire to innumerable crowds of strangers over 35 years as a comedian..

Acquiring and maintaining two relatively popular sociopolitical panel discussion shows for over 20 years..

And creating a documentary entitled Religulous with the express purpose of calling on our society at large to question their own religious convictions..

ISN'T effective or engaging..?


Yet Jon Stewart..

The same Jon Stewart who has explicitly stated that he's doesn't wish to be considered some political figurehead.

And whose Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear - while rather large and somewhat inspiring - was PURPOSEFULLY meant to be neutral..

Not leaning to one viewpoint or another and, thereby, basically useless and ineffectual..

is some sort of generational-change messiah by comparison?

OR! @Lawdeedaw & @ Truckchase..

Do you just not like Bill Maher and think Jon Stewart is "cooler"/funnier..?

Because that definitely what it seems like..

My cousin Mike had this kind of head on a passing incident Christmas eve 20 years and lost his life. Left behind wife and 2 kids. Ouch.

I ride and just can't watch things like this. I know it happens and was also taken down by a car ( 90 year old man) and barely missed death. I love to ride and will never give it up. I just cant watch this kind of stuff.

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

I hate the term TBTF. If the corporation is too big to fail then don't let it or cause it to fail but rather put a few key executives in the slammer for 20 years and fine them into poverty. The corp. will replace the executives with new people who might think twice about the legality or morality of the methods they use to increase shareholder value and earn bonuses.

BWAAAHAAHHAAAHAAAHAAA!!!!! That's so awesome!
I grow a plant called dracunculus, which has the same, fly attracting flowers/scent, and look quite similar to yours. I grow them outside! They're both closely related to the corpse flower....


***World's Largest Flower (inflorescence) Amorphophallus titanum, or Titan arum
An enormous flower found in Indonesia, also called the "corpse flower" for its unpleasant odor. It emits the smell of rotting flesh and attracts pollinators. Technically, the Titan arum is not a single flower, but a cluster of many tiny flowers, called an inflorescence. The Titan arum has the largest unbranched inflorescence of all flowering plants. The plant can reach heights of 20 feet) and weigh as much as 170 pounds!


I would suggest putting it outside (not in direct sun) and let the flies go nuts. Congratulations on having a really weird, beautiful, and stinky flower! I hope you grow to like it (if not it's smell, at least it's look). ;-)

We know it's powerful enough to penetrate, fur &/or mail + a thick gambeson/doublet as most of the Nights watch wear (reference, any scene where she shoots a battle dressed crow such as end of season 4). Even allowing for heavy shafts and piercing tips that's still some serious power.

Well beyond your average 20-40lb target & small game hunting type bows. Even if it was primarily a hunting bow, the wildings frequently hunt big game like Elks so it makes sense that it'd be a relatively heavy draw.

Besides even if it was a relatively light warbow (60-80lbs or so lets say), that's still hardcore to the extreme to hold at full draw for more than a few seconds and not loose ones composure (my aim would probably start shaking after 3-4, my body after 10-20 tops).

(and I think 80-120lbs is probably more likely anyway)

Besides this all misses the real point underlying i.e. no one trained with a bow would be silly enough to waste so much energy holding at full draw. Half maybe, or just taking up the slack.

Doubly silly given John has no ranged weapon of his own here and she could probably draw and loose 2 or 3 arrows before he closed the distance if he tried.

Goes on my list of pet gripes with GOT alongside Daenerys "firing" catapults and the occasional sword "schwing" sound. (not that I don't love the show)

I'd agree if he was there and it had just happened. 20/20 hindsight and the fact no one was hurt makes me think a dark sense of humour rather than ill intent.

Very funny. Can't help but comment on that guy from 60 Minutes or 48 Hours or 20/20 or whatever it is, at the 8:14 mark. I haven't watched any of those shows in 20 years and damn, he looks awful. I always despised the over edited smugness that was a big part of those shows, especially that guy.

So very true. The Cosmetic industry is making an absolute killing on butt implants, and it's not just the 20-something crowd. It's the 30 & 40'something people getting tuns of work done so they aren't pushed out of their field.

Hey 20'something guy at Silicon Valley who thinks anyone over 30 is useless. I personally had a hand in developing some of the tech you are using now. You 'really' think you are better at it than I am just because you're in your 20's and I'm in the my 40's? Guess what. The answer to that is 'no'.

Just to break down the math here. This is the equivalent to hearing some asshole say something for about 4 seconds on your 20 minute walk.

Not saying it's right. Not saying women should be harassed. You live in the city? Good luck walking anywhere for 20 minutes and not seeing or hearing some kind of crazy shit.

I think the first 5 minutes was the most important part of the conversation. It's bigger than both men and he's got a point. The burden of proof in "journalism" has been on a downward trend for the last 10-20 years and sites like Salon have decided to just throw it out the window outright.

What they've discovered is that spreading "based on a true story" style journalism is much more profitable than traditional journalism and their (relatively) new and growing religion allows them to do it without sin.

This religion is much more damaging than any popular, established religion in practice today. This religion doesn't need buildings or ordained practitioners. This religion creates its own propaganda as a side effect of its practice. Its worshipers can often hide in plain sight and subvert civilization for years without direct personal repercussions; in fact they are often rewarded for their behavior.

The religion is Objectivism, and its deity is "the invisible hand". When your morality is judged by your profit than you've undone a core pillar of civilization. The damage of all other practiced religions in the modern era pale in comparison.

The first five minutes of this video were the only part of this conversation that were relevant to the real challenges of our times.

How can I show this to my neighbours and make them understand it?Timeline of this weekend - we saw some of them dressed to the nines getting into a stretched limo on Friday.

On Saturday they (as normally) loudly discussed how the person they saw could have performed for 5 more minutes whilst simultaneously stating how this performer had proven Michael Jackson's saintliness because said MJ had stayed with the performer for 4 days.

It's worth noting at this point all we knew was they went out somewhere in a stretched limo and saw someone who had MJ to visit for 4 days.

On the Sunday the normal loud talking over our fence lead to the discovery that not only did my neighbors take a stretched limo to arrive at a Michael Flatley concert. They couldn't recall the name of the long haired blonde peado with a cigar (it was Jimmy Saville - most prolific sexual predator in history) or as they roundly called him "that Australian dude" (Rolf Harris - more cherished, like painted the queens portrait, but still sent down for being a peed).

So the outcome of this is my neighbors who have a very small 4 bed house (would be 3 except they opened the loft), own 9 cars, have a 32, 26 and 18 year old still living at home. They hire a stretched limo so they go an see Michael Flatley perform live then come home and discuss loudly how Michael Jackson was obviously a good person because he stayed with Michael Flatley. Shortly afterwards they then totally struggled to remember the names of the biggest sex offender ever known in the uk and the most treasured letdown of all time.

This is almost par with them discussing a new flavor of chips/crisps for 45 min or that time 4 of them tried to count the same amount of change for >20 mins and none of them could agree the same amount.

Sorry had to rant - I'd love to confront them over the noise/cars/stupidity etc but I'm a mildly tough 40 year old. Their highly violent and the 26 year is a goddamn cagefighter.

I honestly can't vent enough - literally I could write a novel on how much my neighbors suck. Just as a final point to carry things across - I recently needed to cut back some ivy in my backgarden. During the hour this took they played Natasha Beddingfield's "These Words" 5 times. Yes I'm a Maggot, Yes I'm a 40 year old who probably needs to stop jumping into moshpits. But Natasha Beddingfield??? 5 times?? Really????