Cool! However I'd like to see a video demo on a surface you can't ride down with ease using a board that can also ollie on pavement. I used to ride down a grassy hill identical to that one every day on my way to school, and that was during the ridiculously tiny-wheel era (early 90s)
One frustrating thing for me to observe is superiors ignorantly telling young soldiers and marines to remove and toss aside as needless 'fluff' the waist belts central to the load-distribution technology of modern military packs.
Notice that when you see footage or photos of soldiers with large backpacks, they are more often than not very hunched over. This is because they are naturally attempting to center their gravity while carrying great weight in packs that put all of the weight on their shoulders, the last place it should be.
Alpine science has taught us that a rigid frame can distribute the load of a heavy pack to a tight waist belt that can enable the pelvis to bear 90% of the weight. Then, ideally with most of the density of the load packed toward the top of the pack, one's center of gravity is high. This not only drastically increases maneuverability (think of balancing a tennis racket on your palm), it removes the compression stress on the spine, which nature designed as more of a suspension bridge than a load-bearing post. The military was right to follow the lead of the alpine industry in replacing its awful ALICE packs with internal-frame packs, but it is wrong to tolerate the widespread excuse that their crucial waist-belts slow the removal of the packs under duress or are incompatible with body armor and LBVs. The reality is that these waist belts are fully released in less than one second with a squeeze on the fastex clip that buckles them, and the packs are adjustable to fully accommodate BA and web gear. The real problem to overcome is the initial feeling and awkward sensation that such an arrangement doesn't look cool, and it must be tackled from the top.
The nature of modern grade-school backpacks is also a spinal doctor's nightmare, especially now that school-shooting hysteria has removed lockers from schools. Notice the hunched-over posture of the next 12yo kid you see walking to or from school with all 30lbs of his or her books. It's terrible.
I created a half dozen ingenious lego transformers when I was 9, and kept them under a dresser to avoid their being stepped on. Unfortunately, my mother took it upon herself to clean my room, while I was at school, and even more unfortunately, my older sister joined in to help. She no doubt took great joy in destroying my utterly out-of-anybody's-way creations in order to get the bricks back into their box.
She enjoyed that sort of thing. I had crescent-shaped fingernail-sized scars on my forearms well into jr. high, campaign badges my sinister attempts to recover my own construction paper from her room.
Ten years ago, her shrink had her confront our delicate mother after pinpointing the heinous childhood trauma at the root of all her troubles: that when helping her study her 6th grade spelling list, my mother thought it was cute and laughed when my sister initially pronounced 'Des Moines' as 'dez-moyneez,' an event I remember. She's a doctor now. I shouldn't be as nice to her as I am, dangit.
Yeah, but by the same token, any chunk of feces is "connected" and "relevant," a "participant" in the cosmos, whether that piece of feces is figuratively so like serial rapist like Eldridge Cleaver or literally so like the brown semi-solid matter to issue from a butt.
Nice visuals, pleasant music, but the speech is tiresome: Neil Tyson doing what he does best, using flagrant speech or annoyingly dramatic mannerisms to deliver secrets unlocked by infinitely more brilliant minds in a three minute package of ultimately meaningless pop consumption.
Transparently phony wartime propaganda that once served to promote civil war and entertain, now serves to reinforce the historic fantasy at the foundation of politically expedient-as-ever white guilt.
Depends on how knuckles are cracked. Separating knuckles them by pulling two bones away from one another is not the only method of producing the 'crack' noise. Laterally shifting two bones of a finger against one other in opposite directions put inordinate wear on connective tissues than is 'expected' by our DNA. The result is tissue inflammation, AKA...
Definitely neat. It's been done, but I doubt in the tired, tasteless, noisy style of modern, rootless and meaningless "street art."
Zeon Santos writes: "I wonder if law enforcement agencies will vilify this form of clean graffiti as they have with other forms of street art?"
Not unless the message is popularly objectionable, and even then they'd almost certainly decline to prosecute. But I believe the same issues to remain. In the case of this purportedly "clean" graffiti as much as in the case of conventional territorial pissings of brainless teenagers of all ages, the neglected topic is the /right/ to /artistic vision/ of others. An architect who designs a bridge, building or even a retaining wall might labor over color selections with reflections on myriad considerations, such as expected moss growth. Taking license to paint a brightly-colored mural -or etch a complex design into the moss covering- 3% of the fruits of her labor is an obnoxious expression of self-centered presumptuousness -kinda like people who assume that everybody at a given hot spring or campground would rather hear music they can't stand than none at all (birds chirping, wind in willows, etc).
Not sure where it entered my mind, but somewhere along the way, possibly when I hiked through two hours of Polish forest to the ruins of an ancient castle bearing the phrase "crips is cool" in neon pink, I concluded that graffiti artists are best handled with really long bull-whips. Ideally, the tip of the whip should lash supersonic coin slots into the necks of these souless twits caught /in the act/, but Singapore-style arranged bullwhip sentences would suffice for my purposes. I can dream, can't I? So far I've been constrained to merely giving chase on foot. Somehow, I'm not surprised to behold that /extreme physical cowardice/ seems to universally accompany an affinity for writing one's f_ing name on a, f_ing wall at age 28 or whatever.
I'm tired of the word misnomer "native." It really is quite problematic.
Is a child born to "native american" parents while they are stationed in Germany more "native" to the continent he's never been to than a child born to 7th-generation European-Americans in Florida?
If yes, then why? His genes? In other words, his RACE? If so, then it's agreed that some American citizens are legally guaranteed complex and financially drastic special rights on the basis of race alone, not anything that was "done to" them as individuals, but rather to their /race/ by some members of the other races who suffer by exclusion from these advantages.
What does a second-generation Finnish American owe to a "Native" American, considering that their ancestors never interacted?
And what was "done to" "Native" Americans? They were conquered by other humans, just as they conquered one another for millennia, except nowhere near as brutally, and their conquerers even went to lengths to help them out afterwards, a kindness they never afforded to their enemies.
And that brings us to the meat of my objection.
If our definition of "nativity" is designed to exclude the native-born (ie, us evil white people), then why do "Native" Americans own it racially? They are ASIANS who walked across a grassy land bridge to get here (duh). If my blonde daughter born in Seattle is not Native because at some point her ancestors were not born in America, at what point did the ancestors of "Native" Americans become "native?" Simply by virtue of being FIRST? If so, then guess what! The jury is way out on that topic. According to Dennis Standford of the Smithsonian Institution, Archaeological finds in the last fifteen years indicate that it was ice-age, seafaring, Solutrean EUROPEANS who buried clovis points in New England, thousands and thousands and thousands of years before any Mongoloids walked here over the exposed bering strait. For all we know, some returned, to possibly include the distant grandmother of my daughter.
NOBODY is "NATIVE." You can whine all you want, but history, including slavery/brutality/warfare did not begin 500 years ago.
With so much hatred and evil concentrated into such a small space, it's a wonder the universe didn't catastrophically implode into their average center of mass.
It's only "bizarre" when seen through the magnificent lens of Jewish academic, entertainment and news media domination set in motion well before the 1920s. The tactics the pertinent Jewish owners, editors, content directors, authors, script writers, etc., used then as now are mostly quite crude accommodations of the simplicity of the masses.
Much like their 1990s and 2000s simplistic demonization of Saddam Hussein and Iraq as they beat the war drums to remove the Iraqi threat to Israeli regional military hegemony while their 5th column in the leadership of the ostensibly antiwar "left" broadcasted a distracting and self-evidently false canard about a war for "oil," they spent the time between the 1920s and now etching images of KKK lynchings into the public mind with the glaring omission of the gruesome rape/murder facts preceding each and every case, and meanwhile producing film after book after television program, ad infinitum, from which the average global citizen could only surmise that no black man has ever been convicted of a rape or murder without being framed to cover for the true (white, of course) perpetrator.
Other omissions include the more subtle but presumably "bizarre" factoids surrounding a fraternal organization (hence the costumes, as with Shriners, Flintstones' Water Buffalos, etc.) of 3,000,000 non-sinister lower and middle class Americans that drastically contradict the Jewish image painted of it, most significantly that the Ku Klux Klan did not hate Blacks, that its earliest inception was not established to terrorize simple blacks but rather for the desperate guerilla-enforcement of fairness in an enemy-occupied south where some blacks allied themselves with northern "carpetbagger" criminal elements as puppet politicians in corrupt schemes of finance, vice, prostitution, massive theft, tax fraud, etc.
Jewish media depictions especially omit any mention of the huge public service efforts of the Klan on the 1920s, aimed at helping not only white Americans but also American Indians (nobody is "native") and, yes, blacks. This KKK was a fanatical constitutionalist fraternity that made relentless outreach efforts to black communities, even dressing up as Santa Claus to distribute toys in black neighborhoods, and even selecting a BLACK KLAN LEADER for one of its largest chapters in the state of Oregon.
Dually relevant to the omni-relevant fact of utter Jewish media domination is the enormously innovative and inventive film The Birth of a Nation, the first true cinematographic epic. This film is the phenomenon that inspired the massive 1920s rebirth of the Klan to such effect that the American "goyim" were nearly unified into a collective force sufficient to head off the disastrous Jewish rule we've seen since, and which has cost countless millions of lives. "The Tribe" took immediate notice, and set about gobbling up every remaining motion picture outlet (apart from Disney's, that would have to wait) which it retains a stranglehold on to this day. Telling though, in a way that reflects on the "bizarre" facts mentioned in the above article and by me, is that The Birth of a Nation depicts the Klan as the defenders of blacks also victimized by the rampant corruption of the post-civil war south. Should it be such a surprise that 1920s Klansmen weren't the satanic devourers of African baby flesh they've been relentlessly depicted as?
One worthwhile caveat:
The post-WWII "KKK" is whatever each of its myriad founders wanted it to be. The public domain term is not owned by anyone, and so nothing is to stop the crudest white ex-con, who stopped worshiping black athletes or entertainers while suffering at the hands of racist blacks in prison, from forming his own "KKK" and drunkenly mimicking the atrocities Hollywood films and television shows would have us believe evil whites are out committing every day. Thus the straw-man has a self-perpetuating effect. Things tend to work out pretty conveniently for God's Chosen People. Almost makes ya wonder.
You posture in the initial ostensibly impartial post as though you're not politicizing neatorama, but later engage in debate that would appear a lot less dubious if you'd at least clear your principal detractors' purportedly 'robot'-censored comments for posting. I was directly and aggressively (not that I mind) addressed by name by your ideological ally "Vivisection," only to have my my speedy and quite substantial response CENSORED, the first instance of which I've experienced on this otherwise laudable website.
Why "single out" and ban the entire demographic of high-frequency epileptics from highway automobile operation when anyone can have a seizure?
Why "single out" and ban felons from bank security positions when illegal behavior can be practiced by anyone?
Why "single out" and ban children from voting when more than 90% of the population actually falls for the entire, symbiotic, left/right, democrat/republican, conservative/liberal FARCE?
etc.
etc.
etc.
You might go over to wikipedia or just google and plug in the word 'statistics.' It's fascinating stuff.
Notice that when you see footage or photos of soldiers with large backpacks, they are more often than not very hunched over. This is because they are naturally attempting to center their gravity while carrying great weight in packs that put all of the weight on their shoulders, the last place it should be.
Alpine science has taught us that a rigid frame can distribute the load of a heavy pack to a tight waist belt that can enable the pelvis to bear 90% of the weight. Then, ideally with most of the density of the load packed toward the top of the pack, one's center of gravity is high. This not only drastically increases maneuverability (think of balancing a tennis racket on your palm), it removes the compression stress on the spine, which nature designed as more of a suspension bridge than a load-bearing post. The military was right to follow the lead of the alpine industry in replacing its awful ALICE packs with internal-frame packs, but it is wrong to tolerate the widespread excuse that their crucial waist-belts slow the removal of the packs under duress or are incompatible with body armor and LBVs. The reality is that these waist belts are fully released in less than one second with a squeeze on the fastex clip that buckles them, and the packs are adjustable to fully accommodate BA and web gear. The real problem to overcome is the initial feeling and awkward sensation that such an arrangement doesn't look cool, and it must be tackled from the top.
The nature of modern grade-school backpacks is also a spinal doctor's nightmare, especially now that school-shooting hysteria has removed lockers from schools. Notice the hunched-over posture of the next 12yo kid you see walking to or from school with all 30lbs of his or her books. It's terrible.
She enjoyed that sort of thing. I had crescent-shaped fingernail-sized scars on my forearms well into jr. high, campaign badges my sinister attempts to recover my own construction paper from her room.
Ten years ago, her shrink had her confront our delicate mother after pinpointing the heinous childhood trauma at the root of all her troubles: that when helping her study her 6th grade spelling list, my mother thought it was cute and laughed when my sister initially pronounced 'Des Moines' as 'dez-moyneez,' an event I remember. She's a doctor now. I shouldn't be as nice to her as I am, dangit.
Nice visuals, pleasant music, but the speech is tiresome: Neil Tyson doing what he does best, using flagrant speech or annoyingly dramatic mannerisms to deliver secrets unlocked by infinitely more brilliant minds in a three minute package of ultimately meaningless pop consumption.
Zeon Santos writes: "I wonder if law enforcement agencies will vilify this form of clean graffiti as they have with other forms of street art?"
Not unless the message is popularly objectionable, and even then they'd almost certainly decline to prosecute. But I believe the same issues to remain. In the case of this purportedly "clean" graffiti as much as in the case of conventional territorial pissings of brainless teenagers of all ages, the neglected topic is the /right/ to /artistic vision/ of others. An architect who designs a bridge, building or even a retaining wall might labor over color selections with reflections on myriad considerations, such as expected moss growth. Taking license to paint a brightly-colored mural -or etch a complex design into the moss covering- 3% of the fruits of her labor is an obnoxious expression of self-centered presumptuousness -kinda like people who assume that everybody at a given hot spring or campground would rather hear music they can't stand than none at all (birds chirping, wind in willows, etc).
Not sure where it entered my mind, but somewhere along the way, possibly when I hiked through two hours of Polish forest to the ruins of an ancient castle bearing the phrase "crips is cool" in neon pink, I concluded that graffiti artists are best handled with really long bull-whips. Ideally, the tip of the whip should lash supersonic coin slots into the necks of these souless twits caught /in the act/, but Singapore-style arranged bullwhip sentences would suffice for my purposes. I can dream, can't I? So far I've been constrained to merely giving chase on foot. Somehow, I'm not surprised to behold that /extreme physical cowardice/ seems to universally accompany an affinity for writing one's f_ing name on a, f_ing wall at age 28 or whatever.
Ugh.
Is a child born to "native american" parents while they are stationed in Germany more "native" to the continent he's never been to than a child born to 7th-generation European-Americans in Florida?
If yes, then why? His genes? In other words, his RACE? If so, then it's agreed that some American citizens are legally guaranteed complex and financially drastic special rights on the basis of race alone, not anything that was "done to" them as individuals, but rather to their /race/ by some members of the other races who suffer by exclusion from these advantages.
What does a second-generation Finnish American owe to a "Native" American, considering that their ancestors never interacted?
And what was "done to" "Native" Americans? They were conquered by other humans, just as they conquered one another for millennia, except nowhere near as brutally, and their conquerers even went to lengths to help them out afterwards, a kindness they never afforded to their enemies.
And that brings us to the meat of my objection.
If our definition of "nativity" is designed to exclude the native-born (ie, us evil white people), then why do "Native" Americans own it racially? They are ASIANS who walked across a grassy land bridge to get here (duh). If my blonde daughter born in Seattle is not Native because at some point her ancestors were not born in America, at what point did the ancestors of "Native" Americans become "native?" Simply by virtue of being FIRST? If so, then guess what! The jury is way out on that topic. According to Dennis Standford of the Smithsonian Institution, Archaeological finds in the last fifteen years indicate that it was ice-age, seafaring, Solutrean EUROPEANS who buried clovis points in New England, thousands and thousands and thousands of years before any Mongoloids walked here over the exposed bering strait. For all we know, some returned, to possibly include the distant grandmother of my daughter.
NOBODY is "NATIVE." You can whine all you want, but history, including slavery/brutality/warfare did not begin 500 years ago.
Much like their 1990s and 2000s simplistic demonization of Saddam Hussein and Iraq as they beat the war drums to remove the Iraqi threat to Israeli regional military hegemony while their 5th column in the leadership of the ostensibly antiwar "left" broadcasted a distracting and self-evidently false canard about a war for "oil," they spent the time between the 1920s and now etching images of KKK lynchings into the public mind with the glaring omission of the gruesome rape/murder facts preceding each and every case, and meanwhile producing film after book after television program, ad infinitum, from which the average global citizen could only surmise that no black man has ever been convicted of a rape or murder without being framed to cover for the true (white, of course) perpetrator.
Other omissions include the more subtle but presumably "bizarre" factoids surrounding a fraternal organization (hence the costumes, as with Shriners, Flintstones' Water Buffalos, etc.) of 3,000,000 non-sinister lower and middle class Americans that drastically contradict the Jewish image painted of it, most significantly that the Ku Klux Klan did not hate Blacks, that its earliest inception was not established to terrorize simple blacks but rather for the desperate guerilla-enforcement of fairness in an enemy-occupied south where some blacks allied themselves with northern "carpetbagger" criminal elements as puppet politicians in corrupt schemes of finance, vice, prostitution, massive theft, tax fraud, etc.
Jewish media depictions especially omit any mention of the huge public service efforts of the Klan on the 1920s, aimed at helping not only white Americans but also American Indians (nobody is "native") and, yes, blacks. This KKK was a fanatical constitutionalist fraternity that made relentless outreach efforts to black communities, even dressing up as Santa Claus to distribute toys in black neighborhoods, and even selecting a BLACK KLAN LEADER for one of its largest chapters in the state of Oregon.
Dually relevant to the omni-relevant fact of utter Jewish media domination is the enormously innovative and inventive film The Birth of a Nation, the first true cinematographic epic. This film is the phenomenon that inspired the massive 1920s rebirth of the Klan to such effect that the American "goyim" were nearly unified into a collective force sufficient to head off the disastrous Jewish rule we've seen since, and which has cost countless millions of lives. "The Tribe" took immediate notice, and set about gobbling up every remaining motion picture outlet (apart from Disney's, that would have to wait) which it retains a stranglehold on to this day. Telling though, in a way that reflects on the "bizarre" facts mentioned in the above article and by me, is that The Birth of a Nation depicts the Klan as the defenders of blacks also victimized by the rampant corruption of the post-civil war south. Should it be such a surprise that 1920s Klansmen weren't the satanic devourers of African baby flesh they've been relentlessly depicted as?
One worthwhile caveat:
The post-WWII "KKK" is whatever each of its myriad founders wanted it to be. The public domain term is not owned by anyone, and so nothing is to stop the crudest white ex-con, who stopped worshiping black athletes or entertainers while suffering at the hands of racist blacks in prison, from forming his own "KKK" and drunkenly mimicking the atrocities Hollywood films and television shows would have us believe evil whites are out committing every day. Thus the straw-man has a self-perpetuating effect. Things tend to work out pretty conveniently for God's Chosen People. Almost makes ya wonder.
You posture in the initial ostensibly impartial post as though you're not politicizing neatorama, but later engage in debate that would appear a lot less dubious if you'd at least clear your principal detractors' purportedly 'robot'-censored comments for posting. I was directly and aggressively (not that I mind) addressed by name by your ideological ally "Vivisection," only to have my my speedy and quite substantial response CENSORED, the first instance of which I've experienced on this otherwise laudable website.
Thanks.
Wow.
Why "single out" and ban the entire demographic of high-frequency epileptics from highway automobile operation when anyone can have a seizure?
Why "single out" and ban felons from bank security positions when illegal behavior can be practiced by anyone?
Why "single out" and ban children from voting when more than 90% of the population actually falls for the entire, symbiotic, left/right, democrat/republican, conservative/liberal FARCE?
etc.
etc.
etc.
You might go over to wikipedia or just google and plug in the word 'statistics.' It's fascinating stuff.