Raithe

A police officer called the station on his radio. "I have an interesting case here. An old lady shot her husband for stepping on the floor she just mopped." "Have you arrested the woman?" "Not yet. The floor's still wet."

Some good habits to consider... The Child is the Father to the Man

Well that analogy kind of breaks down when the core philosophy of the group in question is "actually, society absolutely does not treat these disadvantaged groups as if they're of equal worth to the rest of them, maybe we should do something about that". The trouble is, half the time it seems that what they then proceed to do is rather than ensure that the disadvantaged groups are treated better per se, what they seem to set out to do is actually cripple or at least handicap the groups they don't consider to be disadvantaged. At times it can come across in the vein of "Oh, look, you have a very smart child, so rather than teach him to his fullest extent, we'll teach him the basics, and then spend all our time on the kids who we consider to be not smart." There comes a point where being anti-elitist crosses into anti-elite (slightly different things) and you then cripple everybody to the "slowest" person because that's "fair", rather than focus on trying to get everybody to their maximum potential.

Well, to 1up with pain to my ego... the university Christmas party I got ridiculous drunk and happened to be wearing cheesy musical socks. So all my friends remember me puking up, and every time I upchucked my ankles would bang together and tinny, electronic "jingle bells" would play... oh my ego was in agony the next day.

I went to a friends birthday celebration. Which in this case, meant going to a roller disco where an obscene amount of 80's music was played. Thus, I had to try to remember what to do when wearing roller skates. Something I haven't had to do in a decade. Or two. Still, after about 3 hours of skating while under the disco lights, I did only fall down the once.

They did do it by dropping a moon on him. So it was spectacularly silly.

Yeah, it's pretty much done in that.. things happening in the background. It was a jarring note. Just wait for more.

For the update on a classic...

For the snarky political cartoon...

What Bruce, you can guess about how EU problems can be dealt with but we can't do the same with African issues?

For one perspective on this... The Federalist - Expel People Who Demand Trigger Warnings In other words, how can you be so cruel as to expect these students to engage with knowledge as it actually exists? They’re just trying to get the degrees they paid for in peace. Leave them alone. What I am about to write may come off to many people as cruel. As such, I feel it necessary to begin by stating that I write this piece as a victim of childhood abuse who still suffers some degree of PTSD from the experience. I won’t claim it’s nearly as bad as that experienced by, say, combat veterans, although unlike Myers and her “abusive relationship,” I do have a window into PTSD that severe—namely, the very man who abused me: my father. My Experience With PTSDYou see, my father had severe PTSD from his time as a Green Beret during the Vietnam War. It is probably at least partially because he refused to seek treatment for it that I ended up suffering the same thing to a lesser degree. My father’s PTSD transformed him into an erratic, explosive, psychologically abusive man who instilled paranoid fantasies in me about everyone, including my own mother, starting when I was at the tender age of five. To make sure I never questioned these ideas, he punished any signs of critical thinking with almost Maoist tactics of repression. He also sweetened his psychological poison pill by alternating his rages and interrogations with grandiose flattery designed to make me even more dependent on his fantasies. Thankfully, my mother kicked him out when I was seven, but to this day I find it difficult to fully trust many people because of the pure paranoia I was forced to experience and embrace at an early age. I don’t bring this up for pity. I bring it up because I know what it is to be triggered, and to have to fight your way past a psychological gag reflex that you never wanted, but that the dual cruelties of fate and another person’s mental illness imposed on you. It is because I know this that I must write this article. In the past few years, I have seen the markers of a disorder I have learned to live with cynically twisted into a political cudgel by the radical Left, as well as a number of people I can only believe are still too deluded by their own continued suffering to realize what a mockery and an insult their cause is to their fellow sufferers. I don’t know which of these categories Myers fits into, but, frankly, it doesn’t matter. A snake-oil salesman is a snake-oil salesman, even if she believes the snake oil works. Leave College If You Can’t Take ItLet’s get back to Myers’ “just let the poor traumatized kids get the degrees they paid for” argument. No, don’t let them get those degrees. The whole point of those degrees is to signify their bearers possess qualities beyond merely the credit rating to take out vast amounts of student loans. The entire reason college degrees are supposed to be valuable is that they signify a capacity to absorb and process specialized knowledge beyond what non-degree-holders have. This is, in fact, the whole purpose of education generally. This means if some troubled or weak students have allowed their mental illness to preclude them from absorbing such knowledge, the fault lies not with the college, but with them. Such people are as ineducable as an illiterate English major. The solution is not to expel knowledge from the classroom that is disagreeable to these feeble and fragile minds. It is to expel them. Their place is in a psych ward, not a school, and their money (or, more likely, their parents’) is better spent seeking treatment there than spoiling education for everyone else. I am not exaggerating when I say that the stigma attached to mental illness exists at least partially because “sufferers” exhibit these sorts of cognitive glass jaws. Why should you be willing to spend time around someone prone to breaking down and blaming you at any moment, let alone take responsibility for them as an employer, supervisor, or especially the sort of educator-****-substitute-parent that many college administrations try to be? In our lawsuit-happy culture, there is no reason for any rational being to want anyone who is mentally ill nearby if their most visible “advocates” are so fragile they want to see a Shakespeare play labeled like a pack of cigarettes. You’re Harming People Who Have Real ProblemsThis stigma is more than just an insult to people who do their best not to permit their mental illnesses to affect their lives. It also permits some senseless and unenlightened policies at universities. Witness Yale University’s policy on mental health, which seems to treat everyone with mental illness—even those who want to do nothing but learn in order to escape the circumstances that led to it—as a potential lawsuit. The result? Anyone who shows signs of mental fragility—even when he doesn’t permit it to affect his coursework—gets quietly suspended as a precautionary measure to avoid liability. This policy has already led to one suicide by a suspended student and a pervasive culture among Yale students of not reporting their mental-health issues, which should surprise no one. But can we truly say it is irrational if the trigger-warning proponents are right that any mentally ill student who reads “Titus Andronicus” is liable to suffer a panic attack or become suicidal? If that’s true, the only rational response for educators is simply to either avoid contact with the mentally ill, or to shy away from teaching anything that might possibly implicate the darker side of human existence. This is why colleges like Yale drive their students to suicide rather than risk a lawsuit, and why college professors fear that teaching “triggering” material might prematurely end their careers. In the guise of sensitivity, mental-health “activists” have convinced them that sufferers are ticking time bombs. I hope that I speak for many, many other people who’ve dealt with mental illness when I say we are not so easily exploded, and many of us, especially those who have been acutely afflicted, resent the hell out of being portrayed that way. I refuse to give people who spread this meme of the easily breakable sufferer even the benefit of praising their noble or empathetic intentions. What they offer is not compassion, but idle, sniveling condescension disguised as such. Can’t Handle the Heat, Get Out of CollegeTo give one example of just how insulting these coddlers can get, consider the following argument that many proponents of trigger warnings have voiced to me: “Surely,” they say, “you wouldn’t throw spiders at an arachnophobe and claim it’s defensible behavior? How is bombarding people with triggers in a classroom any different?” Setting aside how infantilizing the logic is, the problem with this logic is its generalization onto the classroom, which comes equipped with a few implicit expectations about your ability to absorb information. Sure, one might not throw spiders at an arachnophobe in a social setting, but when an arachnophobe decides to major in entomology, he forfeits his right to complain about seeing spiders. Yet this style of argument clearly rings a chord with some people who suffer from mental illness. This is depressing, but also helpful, for it gives us a much clearer sign of who the ineducable and broken among us are. When they lend their support to the professional coddlers masquerading as “activists,” they advertise their presence. Like it or not, the activists have done us a service in flushing them out, as surely as the exterminator does a service by drawing out termites. The “victims” they hold up as poster children should be the first people that colleges suspend, expel, or forcibly commit to whatever mental-health facilities they retain. This will take the stigma away from most mental-health sufferers and put it firmly where it belongs: with the ones whose inability to hack it in an educational setting is so all-consuming that they can’t stop talking about it. Sick People Need Treatment, Not Trigger WarningsIs this cruel? No. What is cruel is leaving people that troubled without treatment, and then expecting them to survive in institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to seeking truth. It is true that some people are so damaged that, in the immortal words of Col. Nathan R. Jessup, they “can’t handle the truth.” It’s not fair to the colleges or to them to expect them to hack it any more than it’s fair to expect someone with easily broken bones to become a body builder. Either the college will have to dumb its educational mission down to the point of meaninglessness, or the extremely damaged will have to put themselves at risk of interminable mental agony. The first option destroys learning; the second destroys people. Better to keep the people incapable of learning away from it. I know what it is to be triggered. I also have never resented a professor for not warning me in advance. If anything, I was grateful. For me, something being triggered was a bright flashing arrow indicating precisely what I most needed to work on to be able to live a normal life and cease permitting my painful past to control me. Seeing that truth and your own disorders don’t line up can be frightening or liberating; often both at the same time. Like Plato’s philosopher, whose eyes burn in the light of the sun when he first emerges from the cave, stripping away your own mental illness’ illusions can be very painful. As in Plato, it is also worth it. But if you can’t brave that light, you don’t deserve it. If you need trigger warnings in order to learn, then the only warning we should hear is a warning against letting you in the classroom. There will always be those who prefer to be lost, but we don’t need to burn maps to accommodate them. To get back to educating students, colleges need to understand that some would prefer to remain lost in a dark wood of error. For those students, there can be only one option, and it is to inscribe above the campus gates the only warning the ineducable deserve to read: Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

A fair point, but also too dramatic with the spilling over of course, especially seeing as birth rates are dropping across the world. http://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2014/2014-world-population-data-sheet/data-sheet.aspx And as you can see, basically we just need to help Africa now with literacy and development now. No need for hyperbole, no need for exaggerations, lets take this discussion at face value - there is no "crisis", but we certainly benefit a lot more by helping nations help themselves. Especially because he's right in the fact that its basically the better offs that leave, which is a huge problem for the country they flee from. The trouble with helping Africa with literacy and development.. is how much of the money and aid sent gets skimmed off by the local warlords or actual members of the assorted official governments in those countries.

Exactly, just like the English have tolerated the French, and the Germans... I wouldn't say that the cultures are incompatible, just that they are quite different in their perspectives and attitudes on certain things. As such, they need to develop ways to mesh together and find a balance. Unfortunately, the EU doesn't try that. It's a duct-taped monstrosity that evolved over time as a series of bureaucratic organisations between governments and now tries to apply a top-down "do what we say" approach full of red-tape. -- Then again, you do know why God made England so small? Otherwise we would have conquered the whole planet, not just run 3/4's of it for awhile.

I just wish you could use the harpoon on all vehicles. The tougher ones, I could understand first having to use the harpoon to remove a layer or two of armor, but then it should expose a weak point for your next shot. Some of the cars I've come across, though, my harpoon doesn't seem to lock on to anything. Once you have all the upgrades for the harpoon, I don't think I encountered any vehicles that didn't have a couple of lock on points. The trouble is that some seem to only show when you're on the side of a car rather than behind it. Also, some other lock-on points only show up after a certain amount of armour has been reduced.

So.... Rupert Murdoch just bought National Geographic

I pretty much went through the entire game with only the 1st level of armour on the car. Went with the.. 2nd level of ram, and just kept pushing the engine/suspension/exhaust to max. That and kept the tires that improve both asphalt and sand handling. The right mix of swerving and boost should give you plenty of time for thunderpoon reloads.