There were a lot of different tricks in there. A part of me really wonders if the mat on the table is a "printer/scanner" and that "marker" is extremely important. There may be a time-released chemical that helps all of this go down (meanwhile he may actually have a small printer on his body somewhere). When the smoke appears that is when the "card" is doing it's chemical thing (as you could smother one card with this chemical making it fully black, but then the printer could change the chemical pattern again as it is scanned and therefore reset the card with the other signature...).

The truth is, I have no idea how it was done, but I think what he is wearing (and possibly what is underneath--not to mention the pockets that are very hard to determine their location or size), possible chemical reactions used in a few different ways, a slim printer, and a slim scanner. Plus all of the sleight of hand tricks you did or did not catch...

If true, he used some fairly complicated technological prowess, besides his agility to get this done. But, for ages untold the creations made and used by magicians are just as important sometimes as the act.

This would also be THE perfect trick to give Penn & Teller the slip, as they may have never ran across anything like this (I've run into tech that could easily do lots of this--scanner through things, etc; it just depends on what is in that pen exactly...think of it kind of like invisible ink, but it need not stay that way and it more than likely can be made to "dissolve" as some sort of inert gas).

Everything was done here flawlessly, even the music feed into the act making it harder to catch.

Phew, that is long enough and I may only have 50% or so right on this one.

Fuckin A. That's going to be killer.

I loved Evil Dead 2 since I was a lad, but just this year watched it again along with the first and third installments for the first time. It's hilarious that part 2 was effectively just a mulligan, almost an exact re-shoot of the first movie.

Part 1 tried to be just scary. Part 2 was the perfect blend of scary and hilarious. Part 3 just tried to be too funny. This one looks like it's going down that path, but hopefully it'll come off better. It looks great.

I wonder if he also mentions going back in time and all that.

Love Sam Axe. Good stuff.

Let's ignore for the moment what led to this current mess within the Eurozone. You point out, correctly, that Greece is too poor to service its debt. And yes, for the German government to do whatever is required to get back their loans is to be expected. However, Greece was incapable of servicing its debt five years ago. Yet the subsequent programs, all supported or even demanded by the German government, reduced Greece's ability to pay back at least portions of its debt. At the end of the day, goods and services are what it's all about. And by dismantling the Greek economy, nevermind the Greek society, they actively undermined what they publicly claimed to be working for: a self-reliant Greek economy, capable of financing the needs of Greece. And capable of paying back what is owed.

The question inescapably poses itself: was it done intentionally or are they blinded by ideology?

One doesn't have to be as far left as I am to see that it didn't work, doesn't work, and never could have worked. Even the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz are perfectly clear about it.

Varoufakis, as you note, has been just as clear about this at least since late 2010, when he published the first draft of his Modest Proposal with Stuart Holland. There was a very good discussion about it in Austin in 10/2013 under the topic "Can the Eurozone be saved?" Participants included Varoufakis, Tsipras, Flassbeck, Holland and Galbraith, amongst others. I submitted a short clip back then.

His argument that Germany won't see a dime when Greece is shoved off a cliff, as correct as it is, never had any bite to begin with. The German government, and large parts of parliament, are operating in a parallel universe, economically. Over here, mercantilism is the road to success. Monetarism works. Surplus good, deficit bad. Saving good, spending bad. Everyone should have a current account surplus.

It's horseshit by the gallons, and it's the official economic policy of the largest economy in the EU.

And we're not even getting into the political aspects of it. Throwing a member of the EU into debt bondage, suspending its democracy to please the gods of the market... that's a travesty and a half. Yet it's also inevitable if they insist on going down the road of neoliberalism.

Worst of all, Greece is just the canary in the coal mine, as Varoufakis likes to point out. Greece had plenty of issues before they joined the EZ, but when they chose to adapt the same currency as a much larger economy hell bent on competitiveness, which is the favorite euphemism for Germany's beggar-thy-neighbour policies, they were doomed to be crushed. The rest of the PIIGS are next in line, unless this whole mess explodes beforehand. Maybe Rajoy's Franco-esque repression techniques fail, maybe le Pen wins in 2017, who knows. Maybe Schäuble finds the 100k of bribes that he conveniently forgot about back in the '90s and chokes on them.

Last but not least, 208 billion Euros – that's the projected current account surplus of Germany this year. That's 208 billion Euros of debt foreign economies have to accumulate, so that the German public and private sector can run a combined surplus of €208b. That's the elephant in the room. Systematic undercutting of the inflation target through suppression of unit labour costs and a dysfunctional focus on exports.

That's a good point. It's very odd that they circle the roundabout completely then go half way around again before proceeding.

What's more odd is that when he finally leaves the roundabout to go down the road, the black car is waiting stopped at the curb until the camera guy approaches, at which point he finally takes off up the road to commit the hit-and-run.

Maybe some kind of screwy insurance fraud or stupid prank video.

@charliem,

Energy is absolutely a better measure and marker of climate change than temperature. I started there since the video did. In reality though, everything in climate change is solely about the energy balance at the Top Of Atmosphere. More TOA energy in and temps go up in the long term, less and temps go down. It's the very foundation of climate change.

The climate models that your links look to for projections of things like methane thresholds are based on modelled temperature predictions. The IPCC notes the following on the state of the art in climate models:
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The Models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
It's in Box 9.1

So, climate models currently FAIL to predict TOA energy accurately and hand tuning is required for modelling temperatures into the known past in order to avoid unrealistic states because the TOA energy is wrong. Maybe we aught not panic just yet on extrapolations from that base. I'm not calling climate models garbage, rather they are a learning tool for climate processes and one lesson is that we have a long ways to go in understanding the central component of TOA energy balance. If you go to google scholar and lookup the references from the IPCC assertions you'll find that the modellers acknowledge that most models still either leak or create energy from nothing. As in, even conservation of energy is imperfect in them still.

Your cursory glance approach is a problem, the devil is in the details.

Looking at energy further from NASA's numbers also tells us that the net contribution to TOA energy trapping from the CO2 we've added in the last 100 years is about 3W/m-2 globally. The global TOA energy imbalance is about 0.5W/M-2. In other words, if we could magically remove all the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere, we'd suddenly have a global energy imbalance at TOA of -2.5W/M-2. That brings two things to mind.
1.The enormous energy imbalance you want to call a catastrophe is 0.5W/M-2, but merely rolling back to 1900 CO2 concentrations today would yield a negative energy imbalance 5 times as large.
2.Of the 3W/M-2 that our actions have pushed on the planet, natural factors(warming and other unknowns) have already balance out 2.5W/M-2 of the imbalance, today.

You also might wanna check how much energy is in the oceans on the whole. If you take the increase in energy as a percentage of OCH instead of straight joules you'll find the trend is << than 1% annually.

He was arrested for trespass, because he didn't leave when he was told to leave.

A business has control over their property, which includes the parking lot.

As far as judges go, you can flip a coin, one day this, another day that.

Judge probably doesn't go down to the local quickie mart and see beer cans that people throw out, condoms, people complaining that someone is in the parking lot playing their stereo too loud, just hanging out etc.

That's cool. What's even more interesting is the time machine aspect.

Back in 2000 (when Clinton was still president) the US debt was 20k per citizen and actually going down. Fast forward 8 years to the end of the Bush administration and the debt has gone up to 33k, an increase of 65%. After 4 years of Obama, it's gone up to 49k, an increase of 48%.

Maybe your next president could try not starting a war in their first term?

I was in one of the areas that does ACT instead of SAT. I took the test when I was a freshman and got a 29 (out of 36, quite a high score), and never took it again -- I think due to a mixture of apathy and fear that my score would go down, although that wouldn't matter because you always submit your highest score.

I went to a local state university even though a 29 on the ACT is high enough to get some attention from prestigious universities. Personally, I was NOT impressed with the state of post-secondary education in the US. I'm "glad" that I went and got my degree, but only because it is expected and pretty much a requirement for getting most jobs.

I did learn some stuff, about 25% of which I feel was actually relevant to my field of study (Computer Science). If I was interested in paying the university for actual knowledge obtained as opposed to paying them for a piece of paper that opens doors to jobs, I could have packed all the relevant classes into 1-1.5 years and gotten the same amount of knowledge out at a small fraction of the cost (less than 1/4). University education felt extremely inefficient and arbitrary to me.

I don't think I'd have been any more impressed with an ivy league university education. Pay a LOT more, deal with the same inefficiencies, and end up with roughly the same amount of actual knowledge gained -- but an admittedly more (arbitrarily) valuable piece of paper to wave at job recruiters.


The situation is only getting worse for the Gen Y's and Millenials behind me. Higher expectations / requirements for college degrees in jobs that have no business requiring them, much higher tuition even at state universities, etc. I don't have any solution or advice other than suggesting that people take as many credits as possible from cheapo junior / community colleges and then transfer those to the cheapest in-state university they can.

So basically, I guess that I think that the SAT (or ACT) is actually less broken than the entire post-secondary education system at large in the US. A mere symptom of a much more severe underlying problem.

True, but the charges rarely go UP in severity from cop to DA, they go down. The cops usually charge the worst they can, the DA charges what's possible to convict on. In this case as I read it, the cops charged him with the lesser crimes, indicating even they didn't think he was being violent in the previous crimes (excepting arson).

It depends on what they tried, when, and how. If they reasonably try to diffuse a situation rather than escalate it, I will always support them, no matter the outcome. I rarely see or hear of cops trying that anymore, today it's all about using force to gain absolute control at any cost, IMO.

Because they ALL seem to stand with the obvious criminals, I can reasonably paint them all with one color until that situation changes. The few exceptions to that rule are becoming fewer and farther between, with a quieter voice than previously, usually silent. In my mind, that makes them all accessories after the fact to whatever crime the cop they support committed, a charge they must defend themselves from with evidence they did their best to stop/arrest/charge the offending cops (not hyperbole, not baseless statements, not "if" (something untrue) "then they're justified" logic) showing that I'm wrong if they wish to change my mind.

What you have done is excuse each and every instance where a cop blatantly goes overboard and hurts or kills a citizen, and supported the lack of prosecution, and said that how they are treated is proper, not being prosecuted, or being allowed to kill with impunity. You never strung the exact words together, only the sentiment.

No, what you do is say "if" some ridiculous thing that isn't true "then they are justified." That's your MO, and how you excuse the inexcusable every time.

The cop in front had the same amount of time to decide and the best view of anyone, and decided backing off was clearly proper...he can be heard instructing the other cop to do just that...but demolition man decided he knew better from behind....so....

Hmmm...why don't you go down to the local crack house alone and unarmed and tell them how to act? The local crack heads have more patience, sense, restraint, and will listen better.

My point is cops no longer 'put their lives on the line to protect innocent people', they put innocent people's lines on the line to protect themselves these days, and that's the problem. 10 people killed by cops for every cop killed by citizens says it all.
(drops mic)

Cops should be able to kill with impunity? That's a pretty ridiculous statement, which I never said, in fact if I did, please quote me here.

Also, I never said what this cop did was right. But you have this general tendency to weave fanciful flights of hyperbole and ascribe them to me.

I'm only bringing up what I think are some other considerations. Of course, the cop had just a minute to decide, you have...how much time?

Have you ever gone to your local police department and read the daily log? Why don't you go down there and talk to some of these monsters, maybe you can talk some sense into them.

Also, I conceded many moons ago that there are many jobs more dangerous than being a cop. Construction is one job that is. My point was that cops put their lives on the line to protect innocent people, which makes their sacrifice a little more selfless.

i don't expect you to look up to cops, especially since you only observe from the sidelines...where it is nice and safe.

And here we see one of the reasons I stopped listening to metal for a while.

Fuck "true" metal and anyone who says they know what is or isn't "real" metal. You go down that path and you end up listening to nothing but Manowar.

It's either a good heavy song or it isn't.

Sandman's pretty far from my favourite Metallica track, but it's a decent tune and a good "gateway drug" into heavier stuff.

If I remember correctly, the Croatians put everything else on hold when they introduced their system and had their entire staff out in the field for 6 months to enforce it. After that, the system was widely accepted and controls could be tuned down to a normal level.

Greece cannot go down the same route if most of what little bureacracy they have is still in cahoots with the previous nepotic governments. Maybe some third party can provide personnel for a few months...

The €2B come straight from our Tax Avoider in Chief, Juncker. Some say he's more of a federalist, more willing to compromise to keep the EZ together. Doesn't really matter though, Greece is too far down the rabbit hole.

As for Syriza: your guess is as good as mine. If they don't start praying to our Lord Austerity soon, the Troika won't hesitate to let them drown. And if they do get on their knees, Syriza will split and everything's back to square one.

I used to live on the Big Island, near Kilauea..We would go down to the ocean and check out the lava spilling into the sea. It was really beautiful, but you had to keep your distance because the fumes of the lava hitting sea water are toxic.

Sure sounds like it fits the Logan Act to a T to me. Just because others did it and weren't charged in the past doesn't invalidate the clearly broken law.
Can anyone charge them with treason, or does it have to come from the DOJ, because I'm ready! Imagine, 3 years with standing, but absent republicans "in charge" of congress (but no longer having a majority vote)! Hilarious!
I love it that, in their 'open letter', they completely misrepresent the facts, congress doesn't ratify treaties as they claimed, nor does it take 2/3 vote to concede and let the president ratify them, and he doesn't need their concession anyway. D'oh! Another republican mega-fail. I hope they go down hard this time.