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Yeah... I get the feeling Gfted1 was being a wee bit facetious here... Poe's law at work.

You mean systematically, as the word is used in the Cambodian or Armenian cases? No idea, to be honest. Consensus among historians seems to be that natives were treated rather brutally by colonizers, were often worked to death, and conquistadores had a habit of razing towns to make a point. But a standing policy of rounding them up and murdering them en masse? That's harder to establish and contrary to reason as the economy of the New World was strongly dependent on native labor. Killing too many of them was literally bad business. But hey, since when is evidence a requirement for trolling or political statements?

Also Starring: Brent Spiner as Jedi Something. In case you want to to take a look at what's coming before committing your CCs: mined CM items in KOTFE

We tend to remember the name of the first person to do anything conclusively and leave a good record, but we don't necessarily enshrine those who came close, those who attempted it but failed, those who lent the shoulders on which historical figures stood or what have you. We remember Neil Armstrong, but the names of the Apollo 8 crew aren't known nearly as widely (and even Aldrin...). It's unfair, but what can you do. Well, the homeland of the original Vandals evolved to be the economic and cultural center of modern Yurop, for instance. Given sufficient time, it's impossible to know what those peoples would have accomplished left to their own devices. That said, I agree with the sentiment. Alternate history and hypothetical scenarios are fun, but ultimately pointless. Personally I can't take anyone who uses either as a basis for an argument seriously. In other news, the mayors of Barcelona and Cádiz have refused to participate in festivities of the national holiday and have gone to Twitter to denounce the "celebration of the anniversary of a genocide", causing equal amounts of lulz and indignation. Apparently "change" around these parts means that political representatives become massive internet trolls. Le sigh.

EFF's take on the leaked final version I wonder if the rest of the treaty is as bad. Here's hoping the EU crashes and burns before they get to sign the Atlantic equivalent.

"Palumboism", as that condition is commonly known (in reference to Dave Palumbo, a notorious case), is an affliction whose causes aren't fully understood. It's likely that it has something to do with substance abuse, not just anabolic steroids, but also IGF-1, HGH and insulin, as none of the "Golden Age" guys displayed it, but there must be other factors at work, because it's not consistent and it only affects some bodybuilders. Note that not only the midsection is deformed — the lats, pecs and arms are also lacking the size you'd expect a pro bb'er of the mass monster era, and especially compared to earlier pics of the same guy. Moreover his skin isn't looking particularly healthy and accelerated aging seems to be an additional concern. Fun times.

No, I don't see how it is. If purposefully killing outside of immediate self-defense is unacceptable, blood ties cannot make it worse, as "unacceptable" is an absolute. You are making an emotional argument, not a rational one. Killing is killing, as you say. People reacting differently is precisely why we have courts and laws to decide on this sort of thing coldly, instead of letting it be handled by angry mobs with torches and pitchforks. I don't know how it works in the US, but my understanding is that aggravating circumstances work roughly as follows: a) whether there is premeditation of some sort (separating manslaughter from murder, mens rea) b) whether the means are chosen deliberately so the victim cannot possibly defend themselves (i.e. using a gun or a bomb, running them over with a car or poisoning, thanks Mr. White) c) whether abuse of superiority is involved (i.e. a parent killing a child, a cop killing a suspect in custody etc.) Blood ties are a essentially a non-factor with regards to the gravity of the killing itself, unless the victim had a dependence relationship that was exploited by the killer(s). This doesn't seem to be the case here as she was standing on her own two feet. If she really depended on her family, then you are right, but that is already accounted for as an aggravating circumstance, which makes the case being a "honor killing" just an anecdote of shock value only because we are used to "other" sorts of killings around these parts.

What happens when the men are already at home, though? Couldn't find data on Germany (wonder what's up with that), but it's not like women being murdered by men is exactly a new thing here. Ah, wait. I remember now. Honor killings are absolutely more abhorrent than honor-less killings because <reasons>. *nods sagely* Btw, remember when police could "guarantee security"? Yeah... me neither.

It's apparently a tad more complex than simply "it works"/"it doesn't work". It's a phenomenon that has positive and negative aspects. Swiped from a Meshugger post in the previous iteration of the thread: The Downside of Diversity — What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

October 12, Anniversary date of Columbus' arrival in the Americas (October 12, 1492). A US Federal Holiday. I believe it used to be a Federal Holiday for several South American countries as well, but I think these have been changed to things like Discovery Day (Bahamas) or Day of the Americas (Belize?) rather than to be specifically about Columbus. It's also the Spanish national holiday. It's celebrated in some Latin American countries, as you say, under various motifs (resistance against Yuropeans, Race Day, encounter of cultures, etc). It's not called Columbus' Day here, we call it "Hispanidad" ("Hispanicity"), though I'm not sure how much the sentiment is shared elsewhere...

I can't read Russian, which by extension means I can't very well discern your meaning, but at the very least, the green shirt guy photo was proven to be a hoax. IIRC someone mentioned it a few pages back, too.

1. But the first link is what your link is based on. It's literally the latest official available data. The quarterly report doesn't have sex distribution. Merkel's statement was on the first week of september, so no data available yet. Also, she was specifically referring to Syrians, not "mostly everyone". Syrians, as has been established, do not make up a majority of the asylum seekers. So what is your point, again? 2. Erm, yeah. That's kind of the point. Not every immigrant is entitled to political asylum, and nobody has argued that they be granted it no questions asked. They must properly demonstrate that they are facing persecution in their country. 3. Do you have a source for this? 4. Ugh. Fine, let's check for Afghanistan and Iraq. Somalia doesn't have data. A little over 34% of Iraqis consider that non-Muslims should have to abide by sharia law. It increases to a bit over 60% for Afghanistan. The fraction that would favor the harsher stuff is necessarily lower as you'd be multiplying by a factor smaller than 1. Again, nowhere near "morally paramount" for muslims, even from the most reactionary of countries. The video showed a politician making an offhand reference to "research" which she didn't produce and nobody called her on it. Do you have this research? 5. Nope, fortunately I already provided a non-wartime example, which shows a disproportionate rape rate in a developed country during peacetime. Which you conspicuously ignored. 6. Nope, sorry. It actually isn't, and let's see why: population in France as a whole is increasing. Childbirth resulting from mixed (one French and one non-EU parent) couples is about 80% larger than the number of children being born from non-EU couples. There are more than ten times more children being born from one or both French parents than there are children born from foreigners (EU or not). Sure, the trend seems to be a decrease in full-on French births, but it will take *decades* for that trend to "radically change the demographics". Provided the trend holds. Please be so kind to reference your claims in the future. 9. Taking refugees in isn't about what you or me happen to be "interested" in. It's about human rights, themselves based on moral minimums. Wanting to avoid being forcefully conscripted to fight a war has little to do with cowardice. Nobody has a duty to take up arms. Non-violence is a perfectly valid personal choice, look it up. Again, the effects that conscription have on the population abound in history (cf. post-WWII Germany), and that's even without getting into the more muddy questions of whether taking up arms is the same as "fighting for freedom", especially in this context, where different factions are struggling to impose their own blend of tyranny. But whatever, it took being discharged from the military (I wasn't a pencil pusher) and a deep personal crisis for me to realize a lot of this stuff. I don't really expect you to agree just because I say so. Good luck with your heartbreak, btw.

So old vid, and not a soundtrack per se, but I still found it interesting:

Both are vets. One is/was a USAF colonel, intelligence. The other deployed to Iraq as "Squadron Judge Advocate", whatever that is. There's psychos in all branches though, so I'm not making guesses as to whether they are actually "combat" vets or just glorified desk jockeys.

You bought all available schematics? That's a lot of credits. Regardless, as Gromnir said, from 400 to 500 crafting is... inconsistent. In addition, level isn't always the determining factor regarding crafting difficulty: According to this, you should craft augments from 410 to 420 as you are doing, but I don't remember if it's the only available option for leveling.

A T-Rex's top speed is estimated to be around 30 km/h and weighed about 6 tons, just a tenth of a present day MBT. In order to accelerate something like a T-Rex to 60-80 km/h, you'd need to apply tremendous force on the ground. If it's bipedal, the pressure on the ground is twice as great as for a quadrupedal creature and it has exactly half as much stability. An elephant that trips and falls can sustain life-threatening injuries. An elephant can run at ~40 km/h and weighs no more than 10 tons, which is about half as much as the lightest 'mechs and just 10% the mass of the heaviest variants, from what I've read. Comparing an animal to a fictional future tank is not exactly a sound argument, but the physics are the same and in the event of a crash, slip, trip or similar mishap, you can bet it would suffer major damage. So yeah, not necessarily impossible, but hella impractical and unnecessarily complicated, so unlikely to ever be built for any reasons, which was the original sticking point. (loses badly to cyborg ninjas with raspy voices though ) Regarding the KS, seems to have slowed down a bit. I have little doubt they'll get to 1.85M but the MP PVP stretch goal is probably beyond what they can muster.

CM stuff isn't such a big deal to me, never bought any packs, but... src: http://www.swtor.com/info/news/blog/20151001

Aaaaand it's science time! Just scaling up insects doesn't work so well because the size-mass ratio is a power law. Consider this: some insects can walk on water, because even though their weight is distributed more or less evenly between 6-8 small limbs, the pressure they exert isn't enough to break water's surface tension. On the other hand, a present day 60-ton main battle tank whose weight is distributed along large tracks can often put enough pressure on the ground to destroy paved roads. Nature is full of these "tricks" that work provided the organism weighs little, but scaling them to human size or larger is a no-go. Even if miniaturization, materials science and engineering could overcome the huge physical challenges posed by simply scaling stuff up, operating a 100-ton bipedal mech outside of a low-gravity world would probably be too risky.

«It would be well for your government to consider that having your ships and ours, your aircraft and ours, in such proximity... is inherently DANGEROUS. Wars have begun that way, Mr. Ambassador.» (lol @ "moderate rebels" btw. Yeah, the whole three of them need protecting!)

It's bad because the west has consistently made a mess of things, has had a year to degrade ISIS with little progress shown and apart from having made a mess of things looks likely to make a further mess of things with no consistent strategy from the past, present or future. Russian intervention can scarcely be worse than that. Plus, if you happen to loathe retrograde extremists you can pretty much guarantee that Russia will go after the lot, not just selective ones based on not offending certain 'allies'. I very much doubt that Russia can simply bomb Assad's problems away — the US have shown that solely airpower is not enough to defeat threats even when they were bona fide trying to win wars. Assad had his own airforce too, and his army has been utterly incapable of capitalising on it. I doubt it will magically become an effective fighting force with Russian warplanes involved. It's going to take boots on the ground to give Assad the definite upper hand, and Russia's track record isn't exactly great wrt asymmetric conflicts (and whose is?). I wouldn't want to be a Russian conscript right now. And then there's the House of Saud... ah, such fine allies they make.

This may surprise you, but I completely agree. Which is why I'm actually fine with people in Europe dealing with the consequences of the blunders caused by "a few unaccountable ****s in Brussels". Last I checked, all EU members are still nominally democratic. If that is what it takes for people to ****ing wake up and smell the coffee, then so be it. All I can say is that during the Yugoslav Wars I was too young to raise a stink anywhere, though. I'm neither a corporate media fatcat nor a NATO senior commander, so other than raising my voice there's little I can do to affect things. However, past wrongs don't justify current or future mistakes.

Wow. That jacket looks right like the kind of thing I'd love to have and never use. Eh. I have never played a MW game before and don't know anything about the universe, but IN HBS WE TRUST.

To be honest, I probably could have had a reply ready by monday afternoon. Sleeping 10 hours in 3 days plus ADD isn't exactly a path towards productivity, though. It's not like the issue is going anywhere, so no rush anyway. @Bartimaeus: yeah, even if the person you're replying to won't bother with your posts, it's a public forum, so in the interest of keeping the topic going, it may be worth replying anyway. And then there's Bruce...

Okay, I really have to ask. Have you actually read any of the links you posted? I don't need to refute your sources, because your sources don't back your points! Let's see, factual errors first, politics later. Nearly four in every five (79 %) asylum seekers in the EU-28 in 2014 were aged less than 35 (see Table 3); those aged 18–34 accounted for slightly more than half (54 %) of the total number of applicants, while minors aged less than 18 accounted for one quarter (26 %). — Yep, clearly 3/4 of them are men in their best fighting age. (men aged 18-34 actually amount to ~41%) Out of the 185k first-time asylum seekers in Q1 2015, 26% were Kosovars, 16% Syrians, Afghans amounting to 7%. Those of Maghrebi (North African) origin are a negligible fraction at best — Yep, clearly about half of them are North African or Arab. In 2014, close to half (45 %) of EU-28 first instance asylum decisions resulted in positive outcomes, that is grants of refugee or subsidiary protection status, or an authorisation to stay for humanitarian reasons [...] This share was considerably lower (18 %) for final decisions (based on appeal or review) / At the end of March 2015, around 530,000 persons were the subject of an application for asylum protection in the EU still under consideration by the responsible national authority — Yep, clearly everyone (well mostly everyone) is welcomed in Europe. In most regions, fewer favor other specific aspects of sharia, such as cutting off the hands of thieves and executing people who convert from Islam to another faith. [...] While many say there is only one true interpretation, substantial percentages in most countries either say there are multiple interpretations or say they do not know. [...] By contrast, only a minority of Muslims across Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe want sharia to be the official law of the land. [...] Among Muslims who support making sharia the law of the land, most do not believe that it should be applied to non-Muslims. [...] In Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe, relatively few Muslims who back sharia support severe criminal punishments. [...] Muslims in Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe are generally less likely to support stoning adulterers. [...] Elsewhere in the two regions, fewer than four-in-ten favor this type of punishment, including roughly a quarter or fewer across the countries surveyed in Southern and Eastern Europe. [...] In Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe, only in Tajikistan (22%) do more than a fifth of Muslims who want sharia as the official law of the land also condone the execution of apostates. — Yep, clearly executing apostates and non-Muslims and conducting female genital amputation is morally paramount. And you ask me why I'm so hostile? Well, you should well know: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bull**** is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Seriously, if you try to flood me with a bunch of irrelevant or misleading links again, I'm just going to reply by posting a ton of cat memes. I do have a lot of free time — that doesn't mean you get to waste it. Now: Yes. Or we could also look at the rape of Polish and Soviet women by Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS members, the rape of German women by RKKA members, the Rape of Nanking, the rape rate in Detroit in '85 and so on and so forth, to see why "the increase in sex crimes in Germany is being fueled by the preponderance of Muslim males among the mix of refugees/migrants entering the country" is total bull****. It's not about Muslims as much as it is about a bunch of other factors such as a complete breakdown of the rule of law, absence of repercussions, dismal living conditions and hopelessness. A bit of сum hoc ergo propter hoc never hurt anyone, right? Now, for some quick fun, let's try a little thought experiment. Let's take Marseille, which ZeroHedge claims has the highest Muslim ratio of any city in Europe, and go with a worst-case scenario: 35% are already Muslims. Now we dump the whole of France's refugee quota (30k) in there. The Muslim percentage goes up from 35% to a whopping... 38%!!! OMFG!!! Clearly, this scheme is going to "radically change the entire demographics in Europe". If you want me to find links to prove that refugees fleeing from IS and Boko Haram who are granted asylum in Europe will not be raped en masse and murdered by IS and Boko Haram, well, yes, I don't have any. I also don't have any links proving that water is wet and rope is useful for pulling but not for pushing, so please don't ask. I still believe however that we have an immediate moral mandate to at least give people whose countries we're complicit of turning into hellholes a chance to request asylum. I haven't argued for accepting everyone no matter what, because nobody is proposing that. I'm just calling bull**** on your doomsaying. Europe and "the West" at large is much more likely to fall due to to dumbass westerners more worried about their level 100 Pikachu than the fact that their government murders abroad in their name, and who are incapable of thinking for themselves, of even understanding what the freedoms earned by their forebears entail (let alone standing up for them), than to hordes of Muslim refugee-rapists. No, I don't have evidence that absorption of unskilled and uneducated foreigners is positive from a socioeconomic standpoint, and to be honest, I don't believe it is. However, I'm of the opinion that moral imperatives must overrule macroeconomic arguments. And by the way: being an able-bodied male does not mean you are generally obligated to fight in any war. Especially not in those you haven't had a hand in causing. Removing potential manpower reserves from war-torn areas is a good thing, I should think.

It's about 20k asylum applications in Austria in 2015, not "hundreds of thousands". The recent surge (an estimated total 80k for this year by authorities) will be handled by the recently approved quota scheme, relocating most to other EU countries. Strike one. Inflation, unemployment. Inflation is at ~1% currently, down from ~3% in 2012. Unemployment is 8.4%. It seems to be increasing somewhat, but it's still below the Euro area average of 10.9%. Strike two. Regarding "super high crime rates": according to data, Austria is consistently placed among the safest countries in the world[1] [2]. Strike three, and you're out (of touch with reality). So yes, you really have to explain how we get from the current refugee situation to the failed state scenario you are advancing, because facts certainly aren't on your side. That's the slippery slope I keep mentioning: you haven't explained precisely how the end of the world is going to result from this particular issue. I'll deal with DE and MeshuggerVC's posts tomorrow, if work allows.