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October 28, 2015: Republican Debate #3
Didn't watch this time. Ben Carson sure is popular isn't he?
Wikipedia
Fireworks Fly In Unruly Third GOP Presidential Debate
Four Republicans Battle For Attention At Undercard Debate
PolitiFact
Bizarre, campy song "explains" China's 13th 5-year plan
Bizarre, campy song explains China's 13th 5-year plan
Song (low information content)
The Life of a Busker
I've been singing on the street for tips. I don't make a whole lot, I'm doing pretty good if I can pay for a Starbucks at the end of the day. Sometimes I can buy a bag of rice and a couple cans of beans to cook on my campstove.
Today wasn't looking so good. I wasn't into it mentally and was not making any tips but even so I persisted as I knew that, at the low rate I generally get tipped that random fluctuations are significant.
Then just now, behind Powells City of Books at 11th and Couch in Portland's Pearl District, some joker heckled me the ENTIRE time I was singing - all the way through all eight of my songs.
What he didn't realize is that I am from Kuro5hin.
Right then I earned nine bucks in tips; all day before that I only made $1.35. As we parted I waved my cash in his face then said "Learn to sing Sir, and we could be a duet".
U.S. Military Actions Abroad, 1798-2015
Uses of Force Abroad 1798-2015, and More from CRS
A newly updated tabulation of U.S. military actions has been prepared by the Congressional Research Service, up to and including the October 14, 2015 deployment of 90 U.S. troops to Cameroon. The CRS listing does not include covert actions, disaster relief operations or training exercises. See Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2015, October 15, 2015.
[other CRS reports listed at source]
The PDF is 38 pages.
October 13, 2015: U.S. Democratic Primary Debate #1
Previously:
- August 6, 2015: U.S. Republican Primary Debate #1
- September 16, 2015: U.S. Republican Primary Debate #2
The candidates participating in the debate are Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Webb. Larry Lessig did not make the cut. CNN coverage begins at 8:30 PM EDT, the debate begins at 9 PM EDT and ends at 11 PM EDT.
Links:
The first debate is scheduled for October 13, 2015, at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern time. It will air on CNN, and will also be broadcast on radio by Westwood One [AUDIO-only should be available online via CBS Radio]. Anderson Cooper will be the moderator of the debate, with Dana Bash and Juan Carlos Lopez asking additional questions and Don Lemon presenting questions submitted by voters via Facebook.
To be invited to the debate, a candidate must have achieved an average of at least 1% in three recognized national polls released between August 1 and October 10. In addition, a candidate must either have filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission or declare that one will be filed by October 14, the day after the debate. The latter criterion would accommodate Vice President Joe Biden if he decided to enter the presidential race as late as the day of the debate.
- 2016 Democratic Presidential Nomination Polls
- The Endorsement Primary
- CNN Will Live Stream Democratic Debate in Virtual Reality and SoylentNews
- Single page candidate comparison
- OnTheIssues: Sanders, Clinton, O'Malley, Chafee, Webb
- Template at Wikipedia linking to candidate position pages
- CNN releases Democratic debate podium order
Should Vice President Biden decide to enter the race and take part in the debate, there would be a podium placed on the stage for him as well.
Google's .bro file format changed to .br
Journals: Soylent controversial topic containment zone?
Google's .bro file format changed to .br after gender politics worries
In late September, Google released a compression algorithm called Brotli and gave files it makes the extension “.bro”.
But last week the extension was changed to “.br”.
The reason for the change is threads like this one, in which posters suggest that “'bro' has a gender problem” and “comes of[f] misogynistic and unprofessional due to the world it lives in.”
[...]
Plutus' Revenge
It was the only life-bearing planet in the entire universe; the very first planet to have life. It was the only planet in existence to have the conditions necessary for biogenesis, including being a double planet, each orbiting each other. The double planet was one of the keys of biogenesis, because of the tides. The timing of orbits and gravities had to be perfect, as well as chemical and photonic conditions.
Life has a hard time getting started. This was the first planet on which it was possible. It would be billions of years before any other planet had these conditions.
In time, its rotation slowed as its sister planet Theia went farther away and took up an eccentric orbit around the star.
It was a very rich planet. Rich in metals, rich in diversity of vegetation once life had evolved that far, vast riches of water, and very rich in hydrocarbons. It was rich in chemicals and conditions conducive to abiogenesis. One of the planet's fauna evolved to the point of sentience, then the arts, than the sciences, until their technologies were very advanced. By the time this had come about, though, the slightly smaller sister had wandered away. The Vulcans never knew of it.
The Vulcans were a very religious people who worshiped Plutus, a god everyone could see and love. When the heretic prophet Ragnarok was twenty three, he warned them that Plutus had told him to inform everyone that he was commanding them to explore outer space, that there were vast riches there, and their very existence depended on it.
But space exploration isn't cheap, and the Vulcans couldn't see any monetary payback, only expense. Space travel wasn't started.
Fifty years later Ragnarok spoke of an evil that only Plutus could save them from, and said it was on its way, and called it Theia. He spoke before a crowd one day, saying Plutus had spoken to him in a dream. As they listened intently, he informed them that their god was angry because they had never left Vulcan and was going to destroy the Vulcans, and Ragnarok and his family were the only ones who would survive the cataclysm unless he told anyone of his dream, in which case he would die instantly and his family would perish as well. His blasphemy was met with a storm of stones, and he died there broken and bloody. The mob then murdered his family and set his house on fire.
But Ragnarok was right. The rich are never satisfied with their riches, so poured more and more of their seemingly limitless hydrocarbon riches into industry and commerce, all worshiping Plutus with all their hearts. Technology brought wealth, and was developed to a very high degree.
A century after the would-be savior Ragnarok was stoned to death, the Vulcan culture was already in decline. They developed space travel, but they never saw the signs of the decline. The denizens of a declining civilization never do. But space travel was developed despite its seemingly nonexistent to meager payoff, and a colony was planted on the next planet out from theirs, the third, and another on the fourth. The third planet was uninhabitable because of its almost completely nitrogen atmosphere, and space men and women had to wear oxygen masks and very heavy clothing outside. It was very cold there, having very low concentrations of greenhouse gasses. The planet was called “Schnee”.
Schnee was the reason space travel was actually developed on Vulcan. Vulcan had been much like Raj a few centuries earlier, but had gradually warmed, becoming hotter and drier. The area near the equator become a desert with fewer and fewer forms of life, and its oceans started shrinking, the water entering the atmosphere as vapor and staying there. Collecting this water was very expensive, so they started looking at Schnee for water. It was a hard life for the scientists and ice miners there, many of whom froze to death.
The fourth planet, Raj, was much nicer. It had a nitrogen atmosphere with plenty of oxygen for animals to breathe, and carbon dioxide for plants to breathe and warm the planet, so had very comfortable temperatures near its equator. Scientists were there before too long, followed by rich tourists, followed by rich immigrants who went for its beautiful weather and the wonderful Marineris Ocean's seashores. As Vulcan became hotter, Raj became the star's ruling planet. All still worshiped Plutus.
Vulcan was dying, but wasn't yet dead when Theia returned. It had been in its eccentric orbit for billions of years, its orbits often changed drastically by a gas giant and a ringed planet.
Theia seemed to be headed directly to Raj! It came very close, its gravity from its larger mass than Raj's and its nearly all iron composition tearing away almost all of Raj's atmosphere. Animals, including the sentient Rajians whose ancestors had immigrated from Vulcan died in hours. Flora came to its end shortly later.
Raj's gravity altered Theia's course, and it was now headed directly to Schnee. Vulcan had fallen so far that its meager population of Vulcans had no idea of the destruction that had hit Raj, now dead, and what awaited Schnee. It mattered not to them, for they knew that they were doomed. Ragnarok's prophesy was well on its way to being true -- but no one would be left alive to tell tales of the blasphemous prophet.
The Vulcans on Schnee saw Theia coming, but were helpless to do anything about it. There were few of them left, as well.
At first it was a white dot in the night sky that got brighter and brighter every evening, then bigger and bigger. Before long it was a huge circle. It hit Schnee with tremendous force, releasing tremendous energies. It made a giant splash of molten rock and metal, and steam from the suddenly boiled ice. Vulcans who still had binoculars could see rings around Schnee, but there were few Vulcans, let alone binoculars. They, the few animals, meager vegetation, and microbes in Schnee's atmosphere that had ridden to Schnee with the Vulcans were the only life in the entire universe.
Plutus had his revenge, making Vulcan so hot anything combustible burned, and soon there were rivers of flowing lead. Schnee was covered in an ocean of magma, and Raj was hit by so many meteors that all traces of Vulcan activity were erased completely. Plutus had not only destroyed the Vulcans, but all evidence of their very existence.
It was finally only the microbes in Schnee's atmosphere that lived, who had no way of appreciating the beauty of Schnee's rings. Which was a pity, as they were very beautiful rings indeed.
BBC Trending: Drawing of a 6-year-old Syrian girl, racist?
BBC Trending: Is this manga cartoon of a six-year-old Syrian girl racist?
"I want to live a safe and clean life, eat gourmet food, go out, wear pretty things, and live a luxurious life… all at the expense of someone else," reads the text on the illustration above. "I have an idea. I'll become a refugee."
The image and caption were posted by a right-wing Japanese artist last month. Now, more than 10,000 people have signed a Change.org petition in Japanese urging Facebook to take it down. The petition, posted by an account calling itself the "Don't Allow Racism Group", claims that several people have reported the illustration and demands that "Facebook must recognize an illustration insulting Syrian refugees as racism."
Although the Japan Times reported that Facebook did not take the picture down, saying it did not go against community guidelines, the artist herself removed the picture. But she remains defiant about her motivations for posting it in the first place. Toshiko Hasumi told BBC Trending that she believed the people signing the petition were left-wing activists. "I draw many political mangas [Japanese comics] which are not favourable to them," she said. "This is why they targeted me."
Barrett Brown: Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels
The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison: Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels
Another fun piece written by Barrett Brown from federal prison, this time about Purity.
Here are some older articles along similar lines.
Last season's anime (incomplete list)
This is a reposted submission with editing.
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Incomplete list.
Overlord. (13 episodes) Too short. Ending yelled "our production budget is too small". Really, felt like an advertisement to learn WRITTEN japanese, and buy the raw manga from amazon.co.jp; to find out what happens next.
Chaos Dragon. (12 episodes) Beautifully dark; at least for the first few episodes. The "happily ever after" ending felt tasteless and disgusting. Doesn't anybody know how to write a good tragedy anymore ?
Normally, I wouldn't submit trash like this; but the queue's empty, so . . .
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