A CRUNK BIRD posted:

Yesssss finally photographers have found something even loving sillier than HDR to ruin their pictures with. Truly a golden age is upon us

Trench_Rat posted:

does it say MEGA ARMYMEN or NEGRO ARMYMEN




Chechen warlord and president for life (well at least until he goes against putin) Ramazan Kaydrov

BBC posted:

First was Belgian martial arts movie actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, who ended his speech by yelling: "I love you Mr Kadyrov!"

Hollywood actress Hillary Swank was next on stage.

"Happy birthday Mr President," she said.

And then violinist Vanessa Mae performed. She is reported to have been paid $500,000 (£324,000) to attend.

When asked where all the money was coming from, Mr Kadyrov laughed.

"Allah gives it to us," he told reporters.

HCO Plumer GCB GCM posted:

And indeed, more recently, such as in the Great War, when Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Victor August Ernst von Hohenzollern wore the totenkopf on his hussar shako during the Verdun campaign (and indeed elsewhere). Good looking lad that he was.

Mr. Self Destruct posted:

Cocaine and heroin are still used as medicine

quote:

The bizarre and unorthodox medications given to Hitler, often for undisclosed reasons, include topical cocaine, injected amphetamines, glucose, testosterone, estradiol, and corticosteroids. In addition, he was given a preparation made from a gun cleans, a compound of strychnine and atropine, an extract of seminal vesicles, and numerous vitamins and 'tonics'. It seems possible that some of Hitler's behaviour, illnesses and suffering can be attributed to his medical care. Whether he blindly accepted such unorthodox medications or demanded them is unclear.

Fried Chicken posted:

Aaron Swartz committed suicide last night. He was 26. If you have used the internet for any period of time, you probably made use of something that had his fingerprints all over it. RSS, Reddit, web.py, Jottit, and MarkDown all helped net him a sizable amount of cash, which he then used to fund Demand Progress (a progressive political advocacy group that used IT extensively to coordinate its actions), RECAP, a free alternative to PACER (PACER chages access to read ruling on Aerican law. They charge for access and a fee for each time you pull something. He purchased access from PACER to download ~20% of their database of rulings and uploaded them to RECAP so citizens could access case law for free), and did the same with JSTOR, downloading 4 million academic articles and releasing them for free on P2P networks. Both saw government investigation, the JSTOR case led to a wildly over the top prosecution. Here are his own words on his outlook, actions, and how he got where he was https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget

Lots of people like to complain about how the world is. Swartz made plans at took action. At the age of 26 he accomplished more for change than most will in their entire lives. Unfortunately in the end his internal demons caught up with him.

http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html

RIP Aaron Swartz

quote:

Back when we had solidarity, they had to hang people. Now - disunited - people commit suicide.

Wolfsbane posted:

Oh, for gently caress's sake Deep Silver. How could you not have learned your lesson when people found this poo poo in the source code:



So sick of the juvenile manchildren who fill this industry.

hairysammoth posted:

Oh, don't get me wrong - he describes a compelling narrative, and his overall argument is coherent and entirely possible. It's just that, in Machines particularly, when you listen to a lot of the the actual details of his complex causal chains, you're left with not much more than Curtis' own assertions. Having been a full-tilt Curtis fan since The Century of the Self, and loving the idea behind Machines, I ended up coming out of it rather underwhelmed and unconvinced, and I couldn't exactly put my finger on why. This review probably puts it better than I can - but essentially, when you're making long-chain cause-and-effect claims like Curtis, you eventually need some pretty convincing primary sources to drive your case home. As The Loving Trap puts it:

"He had discovered that it did not matter what footage he used, so long as he changed the shots so bewilderingly fast that the audience didn't notice the chasm between the argument and conclusion. This was especially effective when he simply cut the music, mid-bar.

And as a result, Thabo Mbeki was swept to power at the next general election."

Curtis tells a disturbing, compelling story, and he tells it beautifully, but after Machines (unlike, say, Nightmares) I came out of it feeling that's all I'd heard - a story, not a documentary.

quote:

Conclusions: Policies to Make Cycling Irresistible

The most important approach to making cycling safe and convenient in Dutch,
Danish and German cities is the provision of separate cycling facilities along
heavily travelled roads and at intersections, combined with extensive traffic calm-ing of residential neighbourhoods. Safe and relatively stress-free cycling routes are especially important for children, the elderly, women and for anyone with special needs due to any sort of disability. Providing such separate facilities to connect practical, utilitarian origins and destinations also promotes cycling for work, school and shopping trips, as opposed to the mainly recreational cycling in the USA, where most separate cycling facilities are along urban parks, rivers and lakes or in rural areas.

quote:

UPPER MARLBORO, Md. — A Green Party candidate running for U.S. Senate in Maryland has died after being hit by an SUV while riding her bike.

Maryland State Police say 30-year-old Natasha Pettigrew died early Tuesday. She was hit by an SUV in Prince George's County early Sunday.

Police say the woman driving the Cadillac Escalade that hit Pettigrew kept driving nearly four miles to her home, even though the bicycle was still lodged underneath the vehicle.

Police say the woman thought she hit a deer or a dog and didn't want to stop in the early morning hours. When she and her husband found the bicycle under the SUV, they called police.

bowser posted:

http://i45.tinypic.com/27yzbm0.jpg
http://i48.tinypic.com/34z0tc0.jpg


45 More here.

quote:

I don't know about people in general but I can give you two perspectives, my father's and my uncle's.

My Father worked for the ministry and was educated in Germany. So basically his take was: "This happens all the time, we'll just go to my mother's house in Ghor and sit it out... "

In a way, he was right but he didn't take into account that the Soviets/USA would eventually get involved. There was a coup every generation since my great grandfather's time, all people ever did was go to the countryside.

My father represents the vast majority of people. There wasn't any further intellectual analysis of what was going on, they just wanted to be safe and only thought of ways they could guarantee their family's well being.

My uncle was educated in communist Czechoslovakia, he was part of the growing middle class. Our family had worked for the monarchy in some capacity or another for generations. We'd been both exploited by the Monarchy and in turn benefited from other people's exploitation, namely the re-allocation of land from people the monarchy disfavored.

He was the primary person who would go between our family in Kabul and our lands in the south and would speak to the 'dakon' the farmers who worked our lands. He knew better than the rest of our family how truly poor people outside of Kabul were.

His take was basically the same of anyone who wanted and felt justified in wanting immediate change. He was hell bent on going out and fighting during the Saur revolution... finally he could help bring equality to the people so used by the "Khan's" for generations.

His view and his educational background represents almost all the people that participated in the Revolution. In a way, the revolutionists were our very best, the young, the idealists, the ones that were educated, the ones who saw the inequality of Afghanistan and tried to do something about it, but in such a very wrong way.

Both were wrong about the Revolution though, whatever hope there was at the time dissolved when the Soviets and then the US got involved. It became so much bigger and more horrible than anyone had anticipated. The people who left to go to the countryside were not safe from Soviet aircraft, the revolutionists did not anticipate taking on the very people they thought to liberate.

Apotheosis posted:

How do you get to be a Marxist geographer?

quote:

In 2002, participants in the Long March Project began a “Walking Visual Display” along the route of China’s historic, six-thousand-mile Long March (1934-6). As the team undertook the arduous journey, Beijing-based artist Qin kept in close contact with them and tracked the group’s route, with needle and ink, on a tattooed map on his back. Three years later, Qin continued the trek where the original marchers had left off. He was accompanied by three cameramen, who recorded their movements over unremittingly demanding terrain—from snow-covered Himalayan peaks to swamp grasslands—and a tattoo artist, who continually updated the groups progress on Qin’s back.

good electric posted:

System Metternich posted:

Lightning hits St. Peter's the day Pope Benedict resigns.

Iridium posted:

Also, audio from the police scanner.

"We're going to go ahead with the plan, go ahead with the burn"

"7 Burners deployed and we have a fire"

Guardian posted:

3.50pm GMT update: The word "burner" may come from "BurnSafe" containers for CS gas canisters, made by the Covina-Thomas Company in Covina, California. On its website the company lists among its recent customers the LAPD, although not the San Bernardo County sheriff's office. More details soon.

TheMammoth posted:

This was saved as "1000th of critical mass." Any guesses as to which bomb?


Apologies for lack of certainty, this thread prompted me to go looking through a folder of pictures I saved from here between 4-8 years ago.

quote:

Nuclear explosion photographed less than one millisecond after detonation. From the Tumbler-Snapper test series in Nevada, 1952, showing fireball and "rope trick" effects. The fireball is about 20 meters in diameter in this shot.

ekuNNN posted:

boom boom boom posted:

The final boss of Metal Gear Rising is John Galt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rep9nVnYPSE#t=3m23s

Forgall posted:

Sure is.

quote:

The lyrics of "The Penguin" were released Friday and immediately interpreted as an attack on the man who succeeded her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy, as France's leader.

The former supermodel sings: "He takes on the airs of a king/but I know, the penguin/doesn't have the manners of a lord.

"Hey penguin!/If one day you cross my path again/I will teach you, penguin/I will teach you to kiss my hand."

R. Mute posted:

Strange that Al Jazeera didn't make the link themselves



e: and if you were talking about leaving bloody corpses in general, yeah, all the cartels have a knack for it.

TheMammoth posted:

I used to commute to work on the train, now I drive and have been listening to NPR a lot more (if only because the Chicago area absolutely loving sucks in terms of radio station selection compared to northern CA or similar), and I have learned to loath the typical purple prose which almost necessarily introduces any NPR member station story.

"More than half of the letters in the adjacent gas station's neon sign are dark now. Beneath them, through the glass of the shop's front window, an elderly man in a blue baseball cap purchases his daily lottery tickets from the young Hispanic girl behind the counter. She smiles and laughs easily. Though it is almost evening here, many of the cars which pass us make their way down this narrow downtown street without the use of their headlights, as though they hesitate to see where they are really going. A small woman of middle-age, her head and body tightly wrapped against the late summer chill, approaches me to ask for the time. Yet, I realize, she isn't asking me for the time so much as she just wants to speak."

This could conceivably serve as the introduction to almost any NPR piece on any subject. To me, it all sounds like a lot of self-impressed former English majors who think everything they write is some incredible portraiture of true America.

Deceitful Penguin posted:

"In his ceramic works Ai engages with issues such as the loss of historic material culture due to rapid modernization as well as broader themes including perceptions of value, mass production, globalization and the concepts of 'real' and 'fake'."

Maarak posted:

You should see Spring Breakers ASAP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw7Se-sCwYM

Beats Mushrooms posted:

Harmony Korine's a dude.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

There is a famous Truffaut statement about there being no such thing as an anti-war film.

Rude. posted:

http://i.imgur.com/Ht3n07M.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/lYU128K.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/TNVjsQv.jpg

Bohemian Nights posted:

DMZ is alright, but real journalistic comic books that should be mandatory reading are Joe Sacco's Palestine, Safe Area Gora˛de and The Fixer, the two latter ones covering the Bosnian war.

Highspeeddub posted:

Maybe http://i.imgur.com/1Uno93y.jpg