several competing flux capacitor prototypes

I'm sorry? The time traveling device from back to the future?

Yeah, that was very strange.

*Death Metal/Progressive Metal, not Black Metal. (Sorry for being pedantic.)

He's talking about the person who tweeted and complains about Jon Stewart.

"losses based on data from rural towns"

What does this mean and how would someone be able to verify these numbers?

Do you remember where you read that?

The current elite in Indonesia came to power by desposing the left-wing nationalist Sukarno and by murdering 2 million people suspected of being members of the Communist Party. It had 1 million members at that time. To this day, the perpetrators of that genocide walk around freely, and are celebrated as heroes for "saving the nation" from the "communist traitors". There's a museum which celebrates the genocide of the communists and the purpetrators are often on TV talking about how they murdered the inhabitants of village X or Y because it was a hotbed of communism.

For those who want to learn more about this forgotten history, read The Jakarta Method, a book about the Indonesian Genocide and how it functioned as a model for anti-communists all over the Globe (Guatemala, Chile...) and watch the film The Act of Killing, in this film a couple of participants are asked to reenact their killing of communists for a documentary (which they happely do, and in painstaking detail, because the only feedback they're accustomed to is praise for their acts) which provides a horryfying insight into the way the killing of our comrades is looked at. It's basically impossible to watch the film in Indonesia, to quote wikipedia.

it is highly risky to submit The Act of Killing, titled Jagal in Indonesian, to the Film Censorship Board, since the probability of it being banned would mean Indonesians can face charges for watching the film, and allowing paramilitary groups to heckle screenings

Russia, a country that (...) has an economy the size of Italy

Not engaging in the rest of this debate, but this is misleading. If you just look at GDP, that's true, but if you look at GDP PPP (purchasing power parity), it's the §th economy of the world, right after Germany. PPP means that you don't just translate roebels into dollars, but that you check what you can actually buy with it.

Since the link goes to the homepage, I didn't believe it at first. Here's the archived version of the article, for my fellow skeptics: https://archive.is/1IdVZ

I translated the reaction of the general-secretary of the Belgian Workers Party to the Dutch election results. I think it makes a lot of sense.

"The election results in the Netherlands are tough but not unexpected.

The cocktail of decades of blind austerity, bureaucracy and frantic marketization had already exploded on March 15 this year (when the BBB [= right-wing farmers party] won the election).

No lessons were learned from that. On the contrary. The centre-right parties copied the rethoric of the extreme right that keeps on kicking downward, to the people who have the least. Perhaps it is better to look at those at the top?

Public utilities were privatized; public services stripped; education and health care came into the hands of professional managers; child care became a haven for private equity funds; the social rental sector became a shadow of what it had once been; and the Dutch labor market became the most flexible in the entire European Union: one in three workers has a flexible employment contract.

Wages remained static and profits went through the roof. Harrowing poverty increasingly came alongside obscene wealth. Over a million Dutch people sank below the poverty line. According to the latest counts, there are 32 thousand registered homeless people. Food banks that still had a meager six thousand clients in 2008 have seen that number increase to 120 thousand fourteen years later. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires reaches a record high: as many as 317 thousand citizens own assets of more than a million euros.

That is the policy of the last two decades. And those policies were pursued by the centrist parties, all of them. If we want to stop the extreme right, it can only be in breaking with those neoliberal policies, rather than now preaching headlong more of the same centrist policies.

And yes, it can be done. If we dare to look upwards instead of downwards."

To add one thing to this analysis: the collective profit of all non-financial companies in the Netherlands was higher than all the wages combined. Total wages were 330 bilion euros, total profits of non-financial corporations were 344 billion, and profits of financial corporations were 190 billion. That means 534 billion euros in profits for 330 billion in wages.

including at least 20 children.

According to the guardian, it's 91 children.

these maggots

Agree with everything you say, but let's not do that.