Amentep

If you've seen the "V" mini-series, you know the basics of IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, as it originally started life as an adaption of the book. The original version (entitled "Storm Warning" and adapted by Kenneth Johnson) was aledgedly rejected as "too cerebral" for US audiences by NBC, so the American Facists were changed to space aliens who liked to eat people. Also lasers were added.

We sing it in funny voices to try and crack each other up.

Per the original thread on this topic -

Looks like MLBPA accepted the deal. Going to be weird seeing the National League use designated hitters.

I read Wallace's reaction as being against people trying to claim it was a hoax and that he was trying to play the victim. Even the FBI says it was a noose knot, just that it was used as a garage pull and had been for some time.

Its a fun opening, but you lose a bit of Quincy Jones Soul Bossa Nova to the film sounds...

Old thread:

I wonder if a shorter season will be more exciting? I've often thought that the expanding of sports seasons (NBA and MLB in particular) have made things less interesting (along with the increasing length of games to showcase commercials).

June 19 is the date General Gordon announced Federal orders (General Orders, Number 3) in Galvaston announcing the freeing of slaves: Since the westernmost states' slave owners had been fleeing the Union army to Texas with their slaves, this date is considered the last date where slaves were made aware of their freedom, which became a focal point in Texas that spread nationally. You can read a bit more about the history here where I think Dr. Gates does a good job summarizing the history and importance - https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth/

hmmm...from memory, Ted Healey worked out the Stooges act with M. Howard, Fine and S. Howard around 1922 (Moe started as a single Stooge in 1921), but modern wrestling was developed by the Gold Dust Trio (Toots Mondt, Ed 'Strangler' Lewis and Billy Sandow) to replace declining-in-popularity exhibition style wrestling with a flashier, more exciting "Slam Bang Western Style Wrestling" style in 1919-1920. Its the legacy of this style that Vincent J. McMahon bought into when he started Capitol Wrestling Corporation (later, WWWF, WWF, WWE) in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) in the early 1950s. He even had Toots Mondt working for him for awhile. That said modern WWE wrestling has as much similarity to Slam Bang as it does with the Stooges, so maybe you are right, afterall...

For further information, it seems like attachments are tied to posts, and can only be removed by editing the post...which can't be done past the edit window on the post the attachment is attached to.

The difference is that the US business class believes that if your profit isn't growing, you are doing things wrong. Despite the fact that unlimited growth is an impossibility, the need to show stockholders a profit means that they'll charge what they think they can get away with. This is the background to all those things I mentioned. Other countries regulated health care, placed limits on costs, or introduced other measures to keep costs down.

What exactly did I write that made you think that I was suggesting the violence seen in the video was justified? Was it the part where I said violence should, in general, be condemned? Was it the part that I said to be wary of people pushing agendas? Or the part asking for the context that would at least let us understand why there was violence?

Insurance companies have to show their stockholders a profit; private healthcare the same. Public healthcare has to show politicians they're not a mismanaged drain on the tax money they're given to operate. Doctors have to pay back all the loans they took to get to and through medical school. Since the insurance companies can negotiate rates with hospitals, hospitals often increase costs on the uninsured to make up what they lose to keep the insurance companies happy. Businesses of a certain size are required to offer insurance, which means they are shouldering most of the cost, so a lot of the cost gets passed to them, which get passed on to the employee. Research costs are usually factored into costs - that new medicine was #572 in the trials, so you're not just paying for your drug and its manufacturing, but the failed trials that came before its success. With patents on medicine having a short term (because generics are in the public interest), there is only a short window that a company can maximize its profits before the medicine can be offered in a generic form. Etc.

I find it odd that people don't ask for more evidence or context when presented video footage* - even with things that don't challenge their views. Hitch**** had a theory regarding images; take a picture of an old man smiling and intercut it with him looking at a cooing baby. The context is that of a doting grandfather and baby. Take the same man smiling footage and intercut it with a sexy woman undressing, and the man become a lecher. In this case, the poster of the video has an obvious agenda, which itself makes the video suspicious. The account is starting from the position that 'blacks' are invading and de-white-ifying Europe, and he advocates all Europeans set their location status to "Occupied <nation>" to indicate this He refers to a group of people as a "pack" to associated them with violent and animalistic imagery, so he's already appealing to emotion rather than logic and trying to otherfy the group Since we must assume an agenda based on the evidence, it'd be nice if the details of the video could be verified independently. Mind you, I think its wise for context in a lot of situations; I've seen enough pictures paraded as "Thing a" when they were really "Thing b" on the internet and in real life to know that you can't trust random people to deal in honesty and truth. This happened online with the recent riots, where posts were made of fires from a year or more ago claiming they were from those nights (as if the fires and destruction that existed weren't bad enough on their own). So looking at the footage: The video footage appears old - it is very low res for a modern phone. There's nothing to indicate it is in Australia that we can tell from the low res images, so we can't even begin to verify the narrative we are presented with. We only see part of the video and don't know what happened before or after the film shown. These are important because the claim is that this happened and nothing was done about it - but this can't be independently verified by details about where the original source is (assuming even that nothing was done about it). Perhaps the group was bad people, perhaps there was an incident prior to this we don't see, perhaps all of them are drunk or mentally ill - the point is we don't know the context, but the poster of the video is trying to create a narrative that fits their agenda. Unless you want to accept that agenda - and any agenda presented to you by anyone who presents information to you - some critical thinking skills should be exercised, in my opinion. *I actually include news media on this as well as often times "The News" is synonymous with "What We Have Footage Of", and even that can be selectively edited.

Anyone familiar with the incredibly high price of healthcare in the US.

The Cleveland Spiders Sorry, couldn't resist. I'll show myself out.

While violence, in general, should be condemned, I'd be wary of buying into the narrative surrounding the presentation of that video. The only context for the video is provided by the poster, who by their twitter profile has an agenda they are pushing (if it wasn't obvious from their word choice).

In this case for the Supreme Court, my understanding is that the official reason he was terminated was listed as "conduct unbecoming", and that when he pushed about the reasoning was able to make some connection between his firing and his joining a gay sports team. When there isn't a documented pattern of employee issues to justify cause it opens employers up to accusations of manufacturing cause in a firing.

With the exception of certain employment situations in the US, for most professional jobs you'd need to show cause or violations of the employment contract to terminate someone. Temporary work, day-to-day employees, etc. will be exceptions.

I tried four times to read Dune - never could finish it.

New thread:

New thread! Old thread here: