Zoraptor

Well, unless they get to be too much trouble like Mr Epstein was, I guess. Who knows, maybe he genuinely did kill himself but it could hardly look more suspicious if it were done deliberately. Nothing to do with any party affiliation though, he got a patsy deal from one of Trump's appointees and while there does genuinely seem to have been a break between Trump and Epstein a fair while ago Trump certainly ain't the only R associated with him. (The conspiracy theories are a bit Americocentric anyway; obviously Phil the Greek's crack assassination squad is cleaning house for Prince Andrew like he did earlier for Charles with Diana. Tywin Lannister has nothing on Prince Philip)

So yeah, the master storytellers Friedman and Weiss, 'creators' of Game of Thrones have landed at Netflix, rather than Amazon as rumoured. So LOTR is 100% safe from their input. OTOH Netflix is probably a good fit given the (lack of) quality of most Netflix Originals recently. (Lol at 'GoT creators' in the headline though. They adapted it and pretty well initially, but ironically given that headline it was when they had to actually 'create' that they totally screwed the pooch. OTOH, they'd probably have done a decent job with The Witcher since that would have been an adaptation)

That fake Democrat would do anything for attention, fancy using military service to boost your profile. Shameless. Then again she's only running because she wants a cabinet or VP position and has no actual chance so why bother voting for her. Did you know she also didn't like gays 20 years ago, or is a big fan of gAssad and wants him to run Israel? Plus she only gets attention due to Russian bots or because she's pretty and she hasn't guaranteed she won't do a 3rd party run and support Hillary Joe when he inevitably wins the nomination because she's so awesome. No no no, I haven't joined Shareblue and am not running through an obvious sponsored list of talking points with no regard to context or the person I'm replying to- only Russians run influence campaigns and the only shills and bots on the internet are people who disagree with me. (Think I hit every note for the typical reply every time Gabbard is mentioned on reddit/ FB/ Twitter- including the self contradictory ones like running as a 3rd party candidate and only running to get a cabinet position- except for the enormous 'spontaneous' and totally not potted list of links illustrating her badthink)

I doubt even the talking heads blaming video games on TV really believe it's to blame for gun violence. It's just that the more obvious factors aren't palatable for them to blame.

Hmm, US bar size is the same in each graph so since there is a clear 1:1 correlation between game revenue and gun deaths reducing one bar will reduce the other- that's just basic logic. (Next step: GDP to gaming revenue vs violent gun deaths in the Americas to get Colombia/ Honduras/ Venezuela/ El Salvador in there and all the pesky Euros and Asians out...)

It's referred to as a shining example because politics. If you believe in gun control it was a great success because... it has to be; otherwise other countries won't do it, and it got guns off the street even if the people handing them in were never actually going to go Martin Bryant anyway. OTOH if you're pro gun it was an abject failure because it only punished law abiding people and criminals got to keep their guns. In truth like most such things it was a partial success though not really at what its stated aim was, but people championing it as wonderful results in others making the same mistakes because they dismiss the problems it had as propaganda. The 20% figure for Australia was total banned firearms, they got about half of that. Whether that's an objective success or failure is a bit of an open question to say the least. Exact same thing with the buyback here, which is unsurprising since it's based on the Australian model. If you watch/ read/ listen to most media it too is a shining success. But, if you're expecting the 150-200k banned guns to be handed in within 6 months 200ish at a 2 day event is not actually a great start whatever the media say; it actually suggests you're going to get maybe half of what you expect to*. They also released figures including accessories like magazines (if you read the small print) as if they are guns to inflate the figures. So the actual numbers are well below- well, well below- what they should be. Still, not as bad as the pro gun media make it out to be either, with their 'only 700 guns handed in' headlines based on a figure for before the buyback even started and using 1.5 million (ie total firearms in the country) as the number expected to be handed in. *or 'expect to', officially they expect the 150-200k figure, but the budget is set for a lot less than that. If there's one thing that is annoying otherwise perfectly reasonable people it's that the government is 100% bullmanuring on the issue. Something Has To Be Done though, and a buyback is Something.

The Australian buyback scheme involved ~650000 guns. I don't know it for a fact but I'd be extremely surprised if that was 20% of Australia's firearms, 10% would be far more realistic. The expectation here is that about 10% of guns will be handed in as well in our buy back scheme, though that's based on the Australian experience no doubt. Couldn't see any buy back working well in the US, it didn't work all that well in Australia and isn't working that well here and guns as part of our 'culture' is a lot weaker in both places than in the US. Doesn't help that buy backs always set up to appeal to those who would not be a threat anyway- people concerned with following the law in the first place aren't going to be rampage killing except in very unusual circumstances- rather than people who would be a more significant threat.

I don't need to read any more at all. The Polish Government- paleoconservative as it is- is running interference for a bunch of kiddie fiddlers because it's less damaging to them to covertly support paedophiles than to criticise and punish the source of their ideological power. Mostly though, you as a Pole have no ground to stand on criticising other countries for their treatment of children when your institutions have failed spectacularly for decades to protect them. The Polish Government is terrified of a Ireland like situation where after their scandal all the pillars of paleoconservative catholic values have crumbled in a decade. Hence the interference campaign insinuating criticism of the RCC is the work of commies, degenerates (oh irony) and Sorosian outside agencies. The Polish people, on the other hand, include many who aren't exactly happy with cosying up to molesters, and includes those who have worked hard to expose and stop the abuse- and some who'd happily sweep it under the rug and hope it goes away. (FTR, there's plenty to criticise about New Zealand's record in protection of children as well. Everyone has bad child protection practices. Fundamentally if child protection is involved the situation has no good resolution most of the time and it's just minimising the bad)

Wow, a Pole lecturing Norway on children's rights. Not like Poland's current government is running interference for the biggest child molestation conspiracy in the world over literal centuries- the Catholic Church. Any child protection agency is going to make mistakes as the situation is fundamentally one where, frequently, there is no good answer. The Catholic Church on the other hand has made a whole lot of deliberates and apparently the only defence available is that it's all a commie/ Soros plot to discredit the pillars of Polish society. And in other news, the US has formally announced their withdrawal from the INF Treaty. Unsurprising, and not really much effect after the US abrogated it years ago with Aegis Ashore- not that you'd know that from media coverage as I haven't seen a single source mention it- and the Russians have (probably, at least theirs isn't proven unlike Aegis Ashore) done the same. Joins the growing list of international agreements the US has withdrawn from, though at least this time there's an argument it isn't a unilateral withdrawal. And, of course, a reminder that "China isn't bound by it" is a load of bollocks as an excuse too, since the only US territory the Chinese could hit would be Guam, and maybe the Aleuts.

It's there, it's just obscure. I wouldn't take anything coming from the politics subreddit as being true even if I wanted it to be. It's completely captured by Shareblue bots and has been for literally years. Trump does rather take the "under fire at Sarajevo airport" type self insertions and embellishments to a whole new level though.

Baltimore was certainly an 'interesting' experience when I went there. Had a day there, the waterfront was nice enough if pretty typical for a medium sized city, so we went for a walk and seemingly about two blocks back from it you could have been in real life The Wire. Or more accurately, since it was while ago, real life Homicide: Life on the Streets. Quite an eye opener for a teenaged NZer.

Smells like a contract negotiation leak to get someone to up their offer. LOTR series already has all its major creative/ admin side roles filled, iirc, and is starting to release cast information. It's too far along for Friedman and Weiss to be parachuted in.

"in brightest day or darkest night lens flare shall offend our sight logic's fans should fear a lot Abrams power: haphazard plot" Though to be fair to JJ, he could scarcely do worse than the last Green Lantern movie.

I'd suspect that's the contamination they'd be worried about too. It's been pretty difficult to prove any practical effects of leachate- even the effects of something prominent like BPA/ bisphenol A is controversial- but it's a stupid risk to take without very good reason. UV, heat and plastic is potentially a nasty combination.

The ultimate problem with US debt is human nature and its tendency, when offered a good scenario and a bad one, to pick the good scenario no matter how unlikely it is or what the evidence is for the bad one. I'm 100% sure that most US politicians know that their debt is a problem, and a big one; but solving it will be unpopular, other politicians will insist that the problem isn't that bad and they'll be the ones getting elected because "everything's fine, no need to make sacrifices, in fact we can spend more on stuff you like" is a lot more marketable than "we're in trouble, we need to minimise the trouble as quickly as possible and that means cut backs". And no doubt there's a lot of too big to fail hubris as well. The US definitely has a fair way to go until it's literally overdebted though. I'd probably say in practical terms the US could fairly readily service twice the debt it has now so long as the overall economic situation is more or less comparable to today. End of the day a constant debt load will inflate away slowly and becomes more manageable so long as the economy is growing and so long as it is a constant overall debt. The big but though is the Confidence issue, and the probability of a rival trying to spike the US if she looks vulnerable. (I'd be pretty surprised if a lot of US politicians didn't have plans to 'take advantage of' any economic chaos though, at least in the abstract sense. The 2008 bail outs went largely to vested interests deeply connected to multiple politicians, and in many cases rather than punishing them for stupidity or irresponsibility effectively rewarded them as smaller and less connected rivals went or were allowed to go bankrupt, or were bought up by their larger rivals on the cheap)

There was some talk of it being let go if they guaranteed it wasn't going to go to Syria but it didn't amount to anything. Probably the most salient fact about the whole incident is that there isn't actually an EU oil embargo on Syria- yes, seriously. Closest is jet fuel exports, and imports of Syrian oil to the EU. There's zero mention of exports of oil to Syria being banned though (eg, UK.gov).

Not only have the Brits not released it they planned on holding on to it for the maximum time allowed before they legally have to make a decision; hardly a sign of good faith. The whole thing was calculated to inflame tensions- there's no way the UK was so naive as to believe anything else could result from it- probably at the insistence of the US so as to try and lever the other Euros away from the JCPOA. The UK rather laughably enforcing EU law (literally laughable given Spain which isn't leaving the EU DGAF about the tanker being in their waters beforehand) and seizing ships in the Straits of Gibraltar while trumpeting the Straits of Hormuz as being an essential international waterway where ships are inviolate was never going to go down well, nor is it credible that they thought there would not be reciprocation. HoonDing better post that Goering quote again, since it's apt.

Nevermind, we'll always have The Hexer to go back to if Netflix's Witcher is rubbish.

The suggestion the US shot one of its own drones down was the Iranian being snarky- and given it's Iran, a bit of a back handed reference to IranAir 655. And yeah, if it wasn't Iranian there are a lot of others it could be. Iran wouldn't really care if they lost a drone (they'd likely wave their arms about dramatically, of course, and shout stridently about imperialism etc) as their drones are for the most part very cheap and very disposable, unlike a Global Wotsit. They seem to lose a couple a month in Syria, and not really worry about it. Looks like the IRGC have nabbed a couple of British tankers in the Straits of Hormuz in the last few hours. Not exactly an unexpected development, given events at Gibraltar.

Way easier to film/ obtain for filming F18s than newer planes. The current F14 equivalents would be the F18 and F22 too, not the F35; but the F22 would be equally if not more difficult to get permission to use as the F35 I would think. And on the PR side, you presumably will have a fair bit of dogfighting in a Top Gun 2 movie and the idea is that the F35 won't have to do any of that and the F22 can just take out anything without being detected. You need the US military onside to film, and they won't want it implied that stealth isn't an automatic win; with a non stealth plane that isn't so much of an issue and you can have whatever enemy it is seem to be a far more compelling threat.

I'd actually agree, though I'd put a fair bit of the blame on the US media and the packed field. I'd be perfectly willing to accept that she doesn't think Joe is racist but attacked him as a calculated move because she knew it would get exposure (and whatever he did in response could not turn out well); and that is what was necessary given the way the Democratic nomination field is. That approach is another thing that is great for a candidate looking for a nomination, but a lot less so when an actual nominee. Ah, a true classic copypasta. Even a fat degenerate mass murderer can get things right once in a while.

Pretty narrow vote for her as well- not exactly a strong mandate. Trump wants the EU broken up or in a weak union as it is currently, with each bit contributing. A EU army is another step to a genuine rivalry with the US so far as he (and to be fair in all likelihood reality too) is concerned.

Emmy nominations are out, for anyone interested. [Edit: For the quality of S8 GoT got a ludicrous number of nominations including some bizarre options, but much like the Lord of the Rings movies the worst part seems likely to win most awards as a proxy for better times. If they wanted to give a Stark brother a nomination it should really have been Robb this year, and Lena Headey was barely even a supporting actress given Cersei had so very little screen time. Obligatory meme observation: Chernobyl got 19 noms; compared to expectations that's not great, not terrible. interesting forum bug with long spoilers: my comments at the bottom were outside the tags but got included, and they're uneditable too. Had to copy them out of the page before editing]

I don't know if it's the actual reason, but it may be to encourage new users to contribute. Typically the longer the thread the less likely a new user is to post on it due to feeling intimidated or not being able to 'catch up'. (Pretty sure actual academic research has been done on it too, but all my search turned up was, randomly, a bunch of stuff on pot)

Involved in the Argo script? I'm obligated to label him an utter hack by Act of Parliament. I'd go so far as saying that JJ has done some decent writing as well, at least if you separate the plotting elements from the script. Plot wise his movies tend to be derivative as anything and his TV shows convoluted for the sake of obfuscating the lack of genuine progress and mystery resolution, but they're not badly scripted. Having said that, a decent script and plot for (what were they thinking?) 'Rise of Skywalker' would be a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.