I mean, there are a lot of questions about this, to be sure, but at the moment I guess the one that that is most preoccuping my thoughts is "Why Gangsta's Paradise?"

They are just links to articles/videos on the great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.

Intro to Ashurbanipal: https://goo.gl/W58wPJ links to https://blog.britishmuseum.org/who-was-ashurbanipal/ which is an article on the British Museum's blog.
The second link goes to a youtube video featuring Irving Finkel explaining how to write cuneiform
The third link goes to https://blog.britishmuseum.org/lion-hunting-the-sport-of-kings-2/ which is another article on the Museum's blog, on lion hunting in ancient Asyrria.
The final link is also on their blog, and is an article on King Ashurbanipal’s botanical gardens https://blog.britishmuseum.org/paradise-on-earth-the-gardens-of-ashurbanipal/

Newt,

Thanks, man! It sounds like paradise!

Any information on this? Is this the result of illegal ocean dumping, a trash barge sinking, or just normal garbage filled runoff at this spot?
It's hardly the only island paradise overrun with plastic. This is what people do, nearly everywhere we go. We need a plague, yesterday.

Your video, Paradise - Love Official UK Trailer, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 11 Badge!

In a way Scahill is like a less educated\refined version of Noam Chomsky. He does good investigative work, and dedicates enormous energy into exposing and spotlighting the bad things that America does. That has a place, but without a similarly harsh and critical light being cast on America's targets/enemies it becomes propaganda.

Jeremy says he wouldn't work with Charles Manson to oppose trump, fair enough. What about kind of working with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Say, at least agreeing not to attack Stalin while you both deal with Hitler?

The world is incredibly complicated and the singular and lone focus on American mistakes paints a deceptive picture. Pointing out the problems with America's war in Iraq, like torture and Quantanamo and declaring these as so immoral we needn't even look at Saddam's past is propaganda. Saddam waged two campaigns of genocide against his own people. When America saw the abuses at Abu Ghraib, they shut it down and attempted to punish those responsible. When Saddam's brother used chemical weapons to exterminate Kurdish civilians Saddam commended him for it. Guantanamo is bad, but it doesn't mean we should fail to acknowledge the concentration camps that Saddam operated during his genocide of the Kurds. It doesn't mean it's unfair to observe that conditions in Saddam's prisons across the country were far more cruel during his entire reign.

There's a nuanced place here that Scahill and Chomsky and pundits like them just fail to acknowledge and encourages inaction at times were the lesser evil may well be for America to do something, even if aborting Gadafi's genocide doesn't make Libya a paradise after.

I have never even heard the term before a week ago, my aunt said I should check out "scientific pantheism", The page I read was that nature itself can provide spiritual nourishment, without any magic, superstition or deities. When we look at the milky way and our jaw drops in awe, that is a similar experience in the mind to "feeling a god". , that is what I took from it so far. "But we are not talking about supernatural powers or beings. We are saying this: We are part of nature. Nature made us and at our death we will be reabsorbed into nature. We are at home in nature and in our bodies. This is where we belong. This is the only place where we can find and make our paradise, not in some imaginary world on the other side of the grave." https://www.pantheism.net/beliefs/

Your video, Bird of Paradise up all night to get lucky, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Am I imagining it or is the theme some variation on 'Pastime Paradise?'

I guess they been spending most their lives living in a future paradise.

Your video, Living Off the Grid in Paradise, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This is kind of annoying to me. The only grid this guy is living off of is the electrical grid. He's got guns and ammunition, vehicles, boats, internal combustion engines, gasoline, oil etc etc. Take away civilization and he will, of necessity, start to revert to pre industrial living fairly quickly. He's not some eco warrior or rugged individualist protecting nature, he's living off of everybody else's little corner of paradise.

No. Compromise implies give and take, not a one sided one way capitulation. I think 'both side's (as if there are only two factions) need to work together for common goals, not try to force their agenda down the other's throat. Trump voters need to change, especially the far right ones, same for Clinton voters on the far left. Neither extreme is good for the nation, but centrists are a dying breed. Sanders did reach out and had Republican support.....the DNC fucked us all by fucking him.
I understand the idea that Trump is the lesser evil, if you don't believe anything bad about him and believe he's successful, like most of his supporters. I contend the only evidence they have for that is his worthless word, because he wrote a book about how to get ahead by lying and screwing people over....but they didn't read it.

The pc crowd has damaged the left as much as the Nazis have the right. They both suck, but moderate dems at least fight the pc thugs, not so much on the right.

They aren't islamaphobes for discussing that question, they are islamaphobes for saying only Islam makes violent extremists.
Transphobes for pronoun use...just dumb to me.
Homophobes for obeying a priest that said to hate them, or attack them, or deny their humanity....absolutely....especially since they must cherry pick what's ok and what's not to justify their hatred but excuse similar sins they commit (shellfish, blended fabrics, both just like homosexuality, all three from the old testament, so not for Christians anyway).

The war on Xmas is bullshit. I've never once seen a real person upset in the least over merry Xmas....unless it's displayed on public property, that's unacceptable for any religion.

I really think the outrage over pc thugs is a red herring. If you don't live on a liberal campus, you'll probably never meet one. I live in liberal hippy paradise and I haven't. What they want is nuts, but who cares, Nazis want a Nazi state, which is nuts and anti American, who cares, it won't happen.
Maybe I'm wrong and pc has taken over, but I don't see it outside of South Park.

Two things Hawkings has said come to mind: We need to get off this rock in the next 1,000 years and if there are aliens we probably wouldn't want to meet them because they'd tear us apart.

Lol, but I have so many thoughts on this - I wouldn't even know where to begin and end. Every single day I come up with a couple of different ideas of what the fuck is going on in this reality... So for today, Ugh (lol), we may actually be a part of an exceedingly strange alien "program" that exists beyond our senses. Wherever we look to find the nature of it, it turns into something else, does something else (good luck Large Hadron Collider lol) to create an illusion of infinity, yet along with an illusion of structure. So, in essence we could be the aliens and THE alien(s) is/are all around, inside & outside of us, yet we can't see it or know it. Sounds like a nightmare scenario, but I for one welcome our all encompassing magic-tech alien(s), lol.

I think it is extremely probable that there are lifeforms and probably advanced beings out there. Yet, I am open-minded enough to see that we may actually be *special* and there's nothing else out there besides this one strange paradise that we're destroying. And I mean, we may actually destroy ourselves before we're able to get far enough out there, so there's that and if that happens... guess we weren't so special afterall, or... but then we die and become part of the alien Nirvana so it doesn't matter anyway? lol

My concern is this : Imagine a global extinction event , lets say a repeat of the event that killed off the dinosaurs : a massive asteroid direct hit , instantly killing everything on roughly the same continent or general planetside , such an impact would punch a hole in the very tectonic plate it lands on and cause massive waves not just in water , but in the ground itself , waves of rock and earth surface taveling around the globe meeting on the far side of the impact and ricocheting back again . We are talking GLOBAL earthquakes off the scales, for YEARS after the impact as the tectonic plates are slowliy settling in, all this is followed by a thick cloud of ash from the impact, refueled by frequent vulcanic eruptions , this will block out most sunlight , so after the initial toasting , the few lucky survives of this pandemonium can look forward to hundreds of years of atomic winter. Sounds pretty fuckin bad.

But guess what : thats still better conditions for life than Mars. And Mars is goddamn paradise compared to the other planets around us. Anything outside our immediate neighbourhood ? Forget it , they are ATLEAST thousands of years travel away, making moving anything of note there unfeasable. We ARE a one planet species. Get used to it , take good care of this one , its all we got.

Looks like paradise . Just wow. *promote