just to add what @Asmo rightly pointed out,is that addictions are a symptom of internal and external forces.

when we consider the state of our society and it its inherent social structures,and we compare addiction rates and suicide rates,i feel there is sufficient evidence for concern.

just look at americas suicide rates.
http://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

we can see a steady increase.
when we factor in military suicides,which have been averaging one,to up to 22 a day since 2009.the larger picture becomes incredibly disturbing.

my point,which is right with asmo,is that while one group kills themselves due to hopelessness,emotional stress or an inability to cope or adapt in these trying times.

the addict is doing the same thing,for the exact same reasons.just on a slower and more precipitous path of self-destruction.

when asked as a child what they wanted to be when they grow up.no child ever answered that their desire was to become an addict.

the "war" on drugs,
is a war on people.

and treating this as a legal/criminal problem is missing the point entirely.
this is a social issue,that can be treated by providing social solutions.

dr bruce alexander discovered some amazing results in rats you may find interesting @MilkmanDan:

http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park

*quality

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot
In the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
The ten-dollar Founding Father without a father
Got a lot farther
By workin' a lot harder
By bein' a lot smarter
By bein' a self-starter
By fourteen they had placed him in charge of the trade and charter
And every day while slaves were being slaughtered
And carted away across the waves
Our Hamilton kept his guard up
Inside he was longing for something to be a part of
The brother was ready to beg steal borrow or barter
Then a hurricane came and
Devastation reigned and
Our man saw his future drip drippin' down the drain
Put a pencil to his temple
Connected it to his brain
And he wrote his first refrain
A testament to his pain
When the word got around, they said, "This kid is insane, man!"
Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland
Getcha education, don't forget from whence you came
And the world is gonna know your name!
What's your name, man?

Alexander Hamilton, his name is Alexander Hamilton
And there's a million things he hasn't done
But just you wait, just you wait

When he was 10, his father split
Full of it, debt-ridden
Two years later, see Alex and his mother, bed-ridden
Half-dead, sittin' in their own sick, the scent thick
And Alex got better but his mother went quick
Moved in with a cousin, the cousin committed suicide
Left him with nothin' but ruined pride
Somethin' new inside
A voice saying Alex, you gotta fend for yourself
He started retreatin' and readin' every treatise on the shelf
There would've been nothin' left to do
For someone less astute
He would've been dead or destitute
Without a cent of restitution
Started workin', clerkin' for his late mother's landlord
Tradin' sugar cane and rum and other things he can't afford
Scannin' for every book he can get his hands on
Plannin' for the future, see him now as he stands on
The bow of a ship headed for a new land
In New York you can be a new man
The ship is in the harbor now
See if you can spot him
Another immigrant comin' up from the bottom
His enemies destroyed his rep, America forgot him
And me? I'm the damn fool that shot him

Alexander Hamilton
We were waiting in the weeds for you
You could never back down
You always had to speak your mind
But Alexander Hamilton, we could never take your deeds from you
In our cowardice and our shame
We will try to destroy your name
The world will never be the same, Alexander!

Yeah, I'm the damn genius that shot him

*ban2.0

Felix Alexander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHv8YE293RE


*related= http://videosift.com/video/The-Romantic
*ban 1.0
Felix Alexander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHv8YE293RE

*ban 1.0

Felix Alexander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHv8YE293RE


*related= http://videosift.com/video/Blind-Pass-Resort
*ban2.0
Felix Alexander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHv8YE293RE

From yt description - Visual director: Alexander Vincent

Clearly reading comprehension isn't a strong point of visual directors.

*ban

Jason Alexander ReRecords Costanza's Message for Kat Denning has been added as a related post - related requested by Grimm.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Jason-Alexander-ReRecords-Costanzas-Message-for-Kat-Denning

One: Faux. For the love of god, faux. FAUX. Please. I'm begging you. Please. If nothing else, this.

Secondly: Why are you pretending that Sarkeesian is the 'face of female empowerment' in anything, and why does that put special demands on her and, I guess, on her twitter account? To some, Sarkeesian is the face of feminism in gaming, to others it would be, I dunno, Leigh Alexander, or Zoe Quinn, or [fill in feminist gamer names here because I don't care about feminist gamers or gaming in general]. I am entirely convinced that Sarkeesian deplores the fact that Cytherea - that anyone - was raped, regardless of profession. There is absolutely no reason for you, or anyone else, to demand that she respond in any way, in this specific case. I would guess that there are plenty of other people who are equally opposed to rape - you, for example - who still haven't done shit to support this specific victim, or the one before her or the one after her. That fact doesn't undermine your general anti-rape stance.

Your ridiculous outrage doesn't answer the question: Anita Sarkeesian is, and is known for being, a feminist critic of video games, gaming culture, and the depiction of women in games. Since when is it part of her job description to respond to every call for support she gets over twitter? She can choose to do so, as a human being, but neither you nor I have any reason to demand that she does so. Last I checked, this horrendous crime was an actual rape and not a 'trope' in gaming media. It's kind of outside of her area of professional expertise.

Also: Faux.

I completely agree with her about Lars on many points. He often (very often actually) makes his technique seem "the best in the world" when compared to ANY other technique (as there are A LOT of shooting techniques; some that need different bows, materials, and setups).

Kind of like being able to shoot through plate-mail... Lars would NEVER be able to pull that off (of course no one, with a shortbow and the wrong arrow--or tip--will be doing it either; the crossbow is as close as you can get to being small and puncturing plate) as it requires a huge amount of pull force to puncture plate (even heavy English oaken wood shields). The type of bow is a big issue, because that is where you get your draw strength. But, what type of tip you have on your arrow will determine whether or not it even goes into or just bounces off the armor...

However, for the most part, archers didn't try to puncture plate armor--because to be honest about it: it was HARD, it required a VERY heavy bow and expensive tips (of course the bows were also expensive, because they would not be made out of normal material--it might be a specially imported type of wood that could hold up to extreme forces; the string may also be made of something a bit different than normal). So, you didn't have very many people walking around with the innate ability to puncture plate. BUT, what most archers trained a VERY long time to accomplish was extreme accuracy, for one reason alone: armor.

Instead of trying to puncture plate or even chain, archers instead aimed for gaps or areas were there was no coverage (basically anywhere you bend or connect the armor to another piece or tie/connect itself together; so places like under the armpit or along the side of the body were the armor is pulled together and tied shut). Then they may not have to go through anything at all, or they will only have light leather or heavy cloth armor in the way--either way they will penetrate, and they will slowly kill their target by slowing them down and immobilizing them, then moving in for the finishing blow OR if they hit the right place they can just let blood loss finish them off...

But, this requires extreme accuracy, especially in battle AND especially so if you are firing from a horse (if you were lucky you were able to ride behind someone and concentrate solely on firing your shots, then you could add a bit of speed as well). This is the one place that Lars has horribly mislead people--OR he has made a really great breakthrough. But, if Lars never bothers to really demonstrate this stuff, we have no idea how great an archer he really is.

His entire video is one gigantic edit. Every shot and "trick" has been setup with the camera in the right place. The biggest problem is we don't know if it took Lars 1000 attempts to accomplish some of these feats (he makes it sound in some areas that it happens VERY fast, however...but due to the editing, or how he edited it, we actually have no idea if his claims are true) or if he did it in ten...or right off the bat...

That is why I said we needed to wait for Lars to actually talk to us about this whole thing, and to clear various areas up (records and competition). Because he has set a very high bar for himself, and from his own video he seems to be amazing--but, I like many know that if you edit enough and try something over and over again, you can make yourself look like an expert *whatever* whenever you wish to do it...

I agree heavily with her about his historic claims (and also mocking him on his "super clumsy" shots and setups to make fun of "modern" archers); she also points out, correctly, how wrong he is on some of those claims. Like everyone shooting from the left side; which somehow Lars, in ALL his studying completely and utterly missed. Which tells me one thing: she knows more about archery history than Lars actually does.

But, is Lars actually a great archer? Would Lars be a good archer in a battle, or more specifically his "technique"? Lastly, is he really an unique archer more than worth praising? We won't know until Lars does what I mentioned above; he must meet these criticisms head on.

If we allow Lars time to learn how to ride a horse; or it might be a bit more fair to just allow him to ride behind someone controlling the horse, which was a common practice even in battle (then make sure Lars knows how to also fire properly from a horse, since it requires controlling a horse--if you're alone--and staying on the horse using your thigh muscles...which is actually a pretty hard thing to do...and requires expert horsemanship; asking Lars to accomplish this is laughable, as this type of thing would have been a lifetime achievement in the past AND any archer that could fire fast, accurate, and ride a horse by himself...would have been a horrific force on the battlefield; then give him a sword/melee skill--make sure they have a lot of upper body strength--and a very well made, thick steel buckler and he'd be godlike; and then enough armor to protect from arrows...BUT this means you have to be very strong...otherwise you will never be able to accomplish ANY of the feats with the bow mentioned above; BTW, I'm mentioning a superhero right here, there "may" have been a few people like this in history, but they would've been very few and far apart...and more than likely used sparingly).

Mounted archers are extremely powerful against all units that are mounted yet slower than them and of course those on foot and without a long range means of attacking them (at least shorter than the mounted archer's range), this I will always agree with. We already know that mounted archery units could create absolute havoc in the past, see: Alexander The Great. However, eventually people figured out how to deal with this type of threat as well... But, horse mounted archers do have their "nemeses", namely foot archers--since they can take some time (if an arrow comes their way, they block it--it is much harder for a horse archer to carry around a big shield or at least just have on sitting nearby--or you can aim for their horse, which is why above I said that "superhero" like warrior would need a melee skill, because eventually they WILL be on the ground).

So, again, we have to wait and see if Lars bothers to respond to this video and to ALL of the others that have also been made (he did make a lot of people angry; as he did make some stuff up and possibly "overshoot" the mark on other claims and possibly even his own abilities...). I won't hold my breath though.

I think we can all come to a fairly logical conclusion on this. If Lars NEVER responds to anything, then we will have to assume that a lot of his "super-speed" with "accuracy" was due to one thing alone: editing.

Phew, I think that covers everything...it certainly was long enough!!!!

The solar flares are very cool. I suggest watching in HD and full screen for maximum awesomeness.

Also from YT description:

The surface of the sun from October 14th to 30th, 2014, showing sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles (22 years). During this time sunspot AR 2191 produced six X-class and four M-class solar flares. The animation shows the sun in the ultraviolet 304 ångström wavelength, and plays at a rate of 52.5 minutes per second. It is composed of more than 17,000 images, 72 GB of data produced by the solar dynamics observatory (http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/) + (http://www.helioviewer.org/). This animation has be rendered in 4K, and resized to the Youtube maximum resolution of 3840×2160. The animation has been rotated 180 degrees so that south is 'up'. The audio is the "heartbeat" of the sun, processed from SOHO HMI data by Alexander G. Kosovichev. Image processing and animation by James Tyrwhitt-Drake.

German Channel ProSieben - Galileo featured Miroslaw Magola who promotes Telekinesis. Real Magneto, X- Men, Miroslaw Magola's telekinesis is achieved by projecting a portion of his consciousness in the object that he want to move.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku : THE FUTURE OF THE MIND: The scientific quest to understand, enhance, and empower the mind.” And his quest to promote: “Telepathy. Telekinesis. Mind reading. Photographing a dream. Uploading memories. Mentally controlled robots.”

Kaku claims all of “these feats” have already been achieved. “These feats, once considered science fiction, have now been achieved in the laboratory, as documented in THE FUTURE OF THE MIND,” Kaku’s website declares.

Kaku notes that his “book goes even further, analyzing when one day we might have a complete map of the brain, or a back up Brain 2.0, which may allow scientists to send consciousness throughout the universe.” Miroslaw Magola alias "Magnetic Man," ( Magnet Mann ) known form Stan Lee's Superhumans - MInd Force who allegedly exhibits telekinetic powers aired on History and Discovery Channel born in Poland and now living in Germany. He claims he can lift objects off the floor, transport them through the air and force them to stick to his body - all using the power of his mind .

He was investigated by Prof. Dr. Dr. Ruhenstroth-­Bauer and Dr. Friedbert Karger of the Max Planck Institute and Dr. David Lewis (psychologist), a neurophysiologist at MindLab, one of the United Kingdom's leading neuro-research centers and Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, professor of Physics at St. Petersburg State Technical University in Russia and Alexander Imich from USA. More [url redacted]

WooHoo Alexander! A quarter century is nothing to sneeze at. Have a wonderful birthday

Mr Mitt really needs some Alexander Technique training. That stilted head hold is still there. Makes him look smug.

It was a similar story on July 24th 1993 at Fairford, when two MiG-29s of the Russian Air Force Russian Swifts aerobatic team collided in mid-air and crashed, but safely away from the public. Incredibly no one was injured on the ground and both MiG-29 pilots (Alexander Beschastonov and Sergey Tresvyatsk) ejected from their aircraft. Aircraft investigators highlighted that pilot error was to blame where it was shown on video that one pilot had carried out a reverse loop and flew into clouds, whereas the other pilot lost visual contact with his wingman and aborted the display performance.

You & Keith Alexander.