But, at the end of the day, the methodology for demonstrating the effectiveness of the therapies is the same.
This reminds of all that BS about multiple sclerosis vein theory, and all the M.S. lobby groups demanding governments pay for it and fast-track the research, despite the fact that dozens of researchers who were experts in M.S. were more than a little dubious and insisted that any potential therapy needs to be adequately tested. And now a bunch of quacks in Latin American countries offer it and lo and behold, you have M.S. sufferers dying of strokes and the like because they jumped the gun, and there's still no evidence that the vein theory is even right.
You either have science-based medicine, or you just have the throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks medicine.
At any rate, I found the Death Star somewhat more believable than "red matter", which, in Star Trek's long history of really bad invented physics, takes the cake as the worst. Why bother rebooting Star Trek if you're simply going to adopt all its worst aspects all over again? That Romulan mining ship had to have been bigger than the fucking Death Star, so it should have been able to phase modulate a neutron beam capable of roasting Vulcan via reworking the nacelles to produce tachyon bursts at a higher frequency, and didn't need something as fucking retarded sounding as "red matter" injected into the core.
Well, more to the point, Kirk was quite happy to toss out the Prime Directive whenever it came into collision with his own personal ethical bias. Kirk was the perfect example of Asimov's axiom "Never let your sense of morality interfere with what you know is right..." He'd only get pissed off about Prime Directive violations when somebody else did it (ie. Patterns of Force).
Um, the Animated Series came out in the 1970s (even if it was more like a weird hybrid between Larry Niven's Known Space universe and Star Trek), not to mention the Phase 2 project which ultimately morphed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That's not even counting the stories by James Blish and the novelization of The Motion Picture by Alan Dean Foster.
Or could I have just shortened the above by saying "You're a fucking ignorant moron"? I'll let the moderators decide.
To be sure, even in Britain, the Guardian's editorial department was working overtime to try to compare this to the 1981 English riots, but at the end of the day, while there was no doubt some link to the riots being sparked by a questionable police act, all in all, these riots were just free for alls. It wasn't an English Spring, it was lawlessness. Freedom fighters, by and large, don't go marching out on to the streets to steel cars for joy rides or smash into shops to steal expensive footwear or home electronics. While the Arab Spring certainly had its incidents of lawless SOBs raping and looting, for the most part, when you looked at what was happening, you saw idealistic people overthrowing unjust governments, not trying to break into shoe stores to steal Nikes.
In the end even the Guardian seems to have backed down from the "English Spring" nonsense, and while still insisting there is injustice in what the Coalition is doing, no longer seems to think that this was some outbreak of mass anger at the budget cuts. The first tip that should have clued people in that this wasn't the English version of the Arab Spring was just how many people at the bottom end of England's socio-economic ladder were as pissed off as the Middle Class at the lawlessness of it all. Only a few wanna-be Marxists so this as the underclass rising to take back their country.
It doesn't, but PETA is so far removed from reality now that I don't really think it registers with them. They've truly left behind any notions of sanity, let alone any notion of sensible marketing, that it's all irrelevant now. This is so blindingly nuts that I think maybe the time has come to commit their board of directors to the insane asylum. I can only imagine that there is some semi-normal fraction of PETA's support base that's looking at this and going "WTF???"
A lot of the Vulcan voodoo stuff comes across as fantasy, although Star Trek's writers were neither the first SciFi writers to invoke telepathy. Asimov is generally considered to be on the hard SF side of things, and what is the Mule but a Jedi sans all the nifty martial arts moves? Heck, Herbert's Paul Atreides has mental powers far beyond even what Lucas inserted for the Jedi, and yet I don't think you'll see too many people calling Dune a fantasy book.
To some extent, even hard SciFi is going to go beyond the realms of what we know to be possible. Even tech like generation ships, if an SF author doesn't want to invoke magic FTL travel, are sufficiently beyond our technology to be considered almost magical.
What we need to do is to make sure we tax all a company's holdings if they are on home turf, even if those holdings are registered elsewhere. Give a company a choice, either pay taxes on all your holdings, or you cease to be a domestic company, period.
Here that bang. That's reality kicking down your door. If you think some poor family in Los Angeles is in the same class as some trust fund loaded family in the Hamptons, then your definition of "class" has no meaning whatsoever. Short of caste-based or feudal societies, class is almost invariably based on money.
Let's take your example here. Basically your saying that a tax rate of 33% leads to fair results. So a guy making 750,000 has to pay out 250,000 in taxes. So let's look at the guy that makes, say, 20,000, now pays out about 6,600 bucks. The guy who has 500,000 in his pocket after taxes by any measure is far better off than the guy left with 13,400 bucks. So what we've determined is that flat tax rates do not create a fairer system, save in a purely abstract and mathematical sense.
Like I said. Providing you employ a private army, you can most certainly live in some place where law and order have collapsed, where civil society is in retraction. In other words, if you have the resources to become a warlord, you can keep your possessions. If you do not, then you lose your possessions, and if you're lucky, don't get killed in the process.
To create a modern civil state requires a lot of resources. To get rich without basically having to be a warlord means that the underlying society has to be willing to live by the rule of law. So yes, even the richest people in the civilized world owe the underlying society a huge amount, simply for the fact that the society, rich and poor alike, have agreed to abide by rules that allow the acquisition of wealth within the necessity of the acquisition of huge amounts of political and military power.
I'm unclear here. Are you saying there wasn't looting during the UK riots? I mean, what are you saying? I'm willing to concede that there was a socio-economic element to the riots, but this was no English Spring riots here. There was a criminal element in the UK riots in a big way. Cars were being stolen, people were killed who were simply defending their property, shops were looted. Beyond that, your average Arab could only dream of having the kind of welfare state the UK has.
And tell me, where exactly would you be without a larger society? You may have not noticed this, but we're not solo predators, we're a social beast, no matter what sociopathic Libertarian philosophy may say.
Labouf was fucking awful, and I think he, more than anyone else, dragged down Crystal Skull. This is a guy who should stick to doing Transformers movies, it matches his (lack of) range perfectly.
Not to mention that he was a trained Shakespearean actor. Roddenberry, though he had his problems with Bill Shatner (and visa versa) was still willing to admit in later years that getting him for Star Trek was quite a coupe. The fact was that Shatner has got some of his bad name from the fact that he acted in a helluva lot of crap, but like any actor who isn't in the stratosphere, he had to work for a bloody living, and it meant he couldn't be too picky about the scripts he auditioned for. He had a family to feed.
That strikes me as a separate debate. At any rate, even the Roman government gave out bread to the masses in Rome, because the alternatives were food riots, which were nasty affairs.
So, let's put it this way, the government maintains a minimum standard of living simply because the alternatives are ultimately much more expensive.
Still, to my mind, Rear Window and Vertigo stand at the very summit of Hitchcock's work. Rear Window because I don't think any film before or since has so successfully embedded the viewer into the story, we are literally invited to share the binoculars with Jimmy Stewart, and become just as impotent as he is. And Vertigo because, well, as far as psychological thrillers go, it's one of the greats. It was certainly one of Stewart's great performances (and this was a man who had no lack of great performances under his belt).
Even some of the earlier material, like Rope and Dial M For Murder are extremely effective thrillers. Dial M For Murder has had its imitators, but none have really come close.
The Hitchcock films I've tired of, to be honest with you, are the quickies like the Birds, and probably Psycho as well, mainly because it's become a cliche (not its fault of course).
As to Wilder, well, he's pretty much my favorite Hollywood director. I hadn't watched Some Like It Hot for the first time in about fifteen years a few months ago, and what a wicked wicked comedy it is. And of course, one of my all-time favorite films is Double Indemnity.
The same percentage does not mean the same thing. To a guy earning a million bucks a year, 50% (just pulling a number out of my hat) represents a helluva smaller hit than for a guy earning twenty grand a year.
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But, at the end of the day, the methodology for demonstrating the effectiveness of the therapies is the same.
This reminds of all that BS about multiple sclerosis vein theory, and all the M.S. lobby groups demanding governments pay for it and fast-track the research, despite the fact that dozens of researchers who were experts in M.S. were more than a little dubious and insisted that any potential therapy needs to be adequately tested. And now a bunch of quacks in Latin American countries offer it and lo and behold, you have M.S. sufferers dying of strokes and the like because they jumped the gun, and there's still no evidence that the vein theory is even right.
You either have science-based medicine, or you just have the throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks medicine.
So when's the last time you saw someone with polio or smallpox?
Well, we know it wasn't a moon....
At any rate, I found the Death Star somewhat more believable than "red matter", which, in Star Trek's long history of really bad invented physics, takes the cake as the worst. Why bother rebooting Star Trek if you're simply going to adopt all its worst aspects all over again? That Romulan mining ship had to have been bigger than the fucking Death Star, so it should have been able to phase modulate a neutron beam capable of roasting Vulcan via reworking the nacelles to produce tachyon bursts at a higher frequency, and didn't need something as fucking retarded sounding as "red matter" injected into the core.
Well, more to the point, Kirk was quite happy to toss out the Prime Directive whenever it came into collision with his own personal ethical bias. Kirk was the perfect example of Asimov's axiom "Never let your sense of morality interfere with what you know is right..." He'd only get pissed off about Prime Directive violations when somebody else did it (ie. Patterns of Force).
Um, the Animated Series came out in the 1970s (even if it was more like a weird hybrid between Larry Niven's Known Space universe and Star Trek), not to mention the Phase 2 project which ultimately morphed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That's not even counting the stories by James Blish and the novelization of The Motion Picture by Alan Dean Foster.
Or could I have just shortened the above by saying "You're a fucking ignorant moron"? I'll let the moderators decide.
Hamill was still miles better than Hayden Christensen. Hamill could at least do a few different moods, whereas Christensen can only do "angry stare".
Maybe not....
"Meesa be thinkin' you be part of the Collective, and everybody be happy all the time! Meesa be assimilating you muay muay now!"
Britain, as it currently stands, is broke. You can apportion blame as you please, but one thing is clear, the British welfare state is not affordable.
No, you just have to pay your fucking taxes.
To be sure, even in Britain, the Guardian's editorial department was working overtime to try to compare this to the 1981 English riots, but at the end of the day, while there was no doubt some link to the riots being sparked by a questionable police act, all in all, these riots were just free for alls. It wasn't an English Spring, it was lawlessness. Freedom fighters, by and large, don't go marching out on to the streets to steel cars for joy rides or smash into shops to steal expensive footwear or home electronics. While the Arab Spring certainly had its incidents of lawless SOBs raping and looting, for the most part, when you looked at what was happening, you saw idealistic people overthrowing unjust governments, not trying to break into shoe stores to steal Nikes.
In the end even the Guardian seems to have backed down from the "English Spring" nonsense, and while still insisting there is injustice in what the Coalition is doing, no longer seems to think that this was some outbreak of mass anger at the budget cuts. The first tip that should have clued people in that this wasn't the English version of the Arab Spring was just how many people at the bottom end of England's socio-economic ladder were as pissed off as the Middle Class at the lawlessness of it all. Only a few wanna-be Marxists so this as the underclass rising to take back their country.
It doesn't, but PETA is so far removed from reality now that I don't really think it registers with them. They've truly left behind any notions of sanity, let alone any notion of sensible marketing, that it's all irrelevant now. This is so blindingly nuts that I think maybe the time has come to commit their board of directors to the insane asylum. I can only imagine that there is some semi-normal fraction of PETA's support base that's looking at this and going "WTF???"
A lot of the Vulcan voodoo stuff comes across as fantasy, although Star Trek's writers were neither the first SciFi writers to invoke telepathy. Asimov is generally considered to be on the hard SF side of things, and what is the Mule but a Jedi sans all the nifty martial arts moves? Heck, Herbert's Paul Atreides has mental powers far beyond even what Lucas inserted for the Jedi, and yet I don't think you'll see too many people calling Dune a fantasy book.
To some extent, even hard SciFi is going to go beyond the realms of what we know to be possible. Even tech like generation ships, if an SF author doesn't want to invoke magic FTL travel, are sufficiently beyond our technology to be considered almost magical.
What we need to do is to make sure we tax all a company's holdings if they are on home turf, even if those holdings are registered elsewhere. Give a company a choice, either pay taxes on all your holdings, or you cease to be a domestic company, period.
Here that bang. That's reality kicking down your door. If you think some poor family in Los Angeles is in the same class as some trust fund loaded family in the Hamptons, then your definition of "class" has no meaning whatsoever. Short of caste-based or feudal societies, class is almost invariably based on money.
Let's take your example here. Basically your saying that a tax rate of 33% leads to fair results. So a guy making 750,000 has to pay out 250,000 in taxes. So let's look at the guy that makes, say, 20,000, now pays out about 6,600 bucks. The guy who has 500,000 in his pocket after taxes by any measure is far better off than the guy left with 13,400 bucks. So what we've determined is that flat tax rates do not create a fairer system, save in a purely abstract and mathematical sense.
Like I said. Providing you employ a private army, you can most certainly live in some place where law and order have collapsed, where civil society is in retraction. In other words, if you have the resources to become a warlord, you can keep your possessions. If you do not, then you lose your possessions, and if you're lucky, don't get killed in the process.
To create a modern civil state requires a lot of resources. To get rich without basically having to be a warlord means that the underlying society has to be willing to live by the rule of law. So yes, even the richest people in the civilized world owe the underlying society a huge amount, simply for the fact that the society, rich and poor alike, have agreed to abide by rules that allow the acquisition of wealth within the necessity of the acquisition of huge amounts of political and military power.
I'm unclear here. Are you saying there wasn't looting during the UK riots? I mean, what are you saying? I'm willing to concede that there was a socio-economic element to the riots, but this was no English Spring riots here. There was a criminal element in the UK riots in a big way. Cars were being stolen, people were killed who were simply defending their property, shops were looted. Beyond that, your average Arab could only dream of having the kind of welfare state the UK has.
And tell me, where exactly would you be without a larger society? You may have not noticed this, but we're not solo predators, we're a social beast, no matter what sociopathic Libertarian philosophy may say.
Labouf was fucking awful, and I think he, more than anyone else, dragged down Crystal Skull. This is a guy who should stick to doing Transformers movies, it matches his (lack of) range perfectly.
Not to mention that he was a trained Shakespearean actor. Roddenberry, though he had his problems with Bill Shatner (and visa versa) was still willing to admit in later years that getting him for Star Trek was quite a coupe. The fact was that Shatner has got some of his bad name from the fact that he acted in a helluva lot of crap, but like any actor who isn't in the stratosphere, he had to work for a bloody living, and it meant he couldn't be too picky about the scripts he auditioned for. He had a family to feed.
With a few exceptions (Magnum PI), most of the detective/cop procedurals from the 1980s suck ass. I can't blame Shatner for that one.
That strikes me as a separate debate. At any rate, even the Roman government gave out bread to the masses in Rome, because the alternatives were food riots, which were nasty affairs.
So, let's put it this way, the government maintains a minimum standard of living simply because the alternatives are ultimately much more expensive.
Still, to my mind, Rear Window and Vertigo stand at the very summit of Hitchcock's work. Rear Window because I don't think any film before or since has so successfully embedded the viewer into the story, we are literally invited to share the binoculars with Jimmy Stewart, and become just as impotent as he is. And Vertigo because, well, as far as psychological thrillers go, it's one of the greats. It was certainly one of Stewart's great performances (and this was a man who had no lack of great performances under his belt).
Even some of the earlier material, like Rope and Dial M For Murder are extremely effective thrillers. Dial M For Murder has had its imitators, but none have really come close.
The Hitchcock films I've tired of, to be honest with you, are the quickies like the Birds, and probably Psycho as well, mainly because it's become a cliche (not its fault of course).
As to Wilder, well, he's pretty much my favorite Hollywood director. I hadn't watched Some Like It Hot for the first time in about fifteen years a few months ago, and what a wicked wicked comedy it is. And of course, one of my all-time favorite films is Double Indemnity.
The same percentage does not mean the same thing. To a guy earning a million bucks a year, 50% (just pulling a number out of my hat) represents a helluva smaller hit than for a guy earning twenty grand a year.
So, vote for someone different.