I think it’s sometimes a hard thing for Americans (and people immersed early on in their political culture) to grasp, since they very much have a back-and-forth dynamic that many other countries don’t have. Here in Canada, for example, the Liberal party (Justin Trudeau’s party) has been in power for something like 79…

Well that’s not exactly a natural cycle - after all it’s been American policy since Monroe in the 1820's and particulary in the last 100 years to actively interfere in Latin American politics, usually through cultivating friendly regimes and actively working to destabilize unfriendly ones.

‘Lone wolf’ in the sense that they were probably operating out of any sort of direction or even advance knowledge on the part of Daesh. It’s part of their MO. Less organizing cells and carrying out directed attacks and moreso acting as an ideologcal beacon/banner for self-organized attacks carried out by individuals…

I’m pretty sure Daesh knows that there are probably Western intelligence assets embedded in their territory. They’re fighting a war against the West and its partners in the Middle East - kinda comes with the territory. A newspaper saying that much is really just stating the obvious.

Even if it is terrible I’d argue we as fans of video games have a duty to go and see it. Good or bad, if Warcraft makes money it encourages other studios to try and adapt other video games into movies, some of which will invariably be better than Warcraft.

If we were talking about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its related Oriental Orthodox cousins you would have a point, but we’re talking about countries where very recently imported Western brands of Christianity have largely been at the fore of discriminating against LGBT people.

Yeah. That’s the whole point of the show, isn’t it? They’re riffing off of tropes and archetypes and themes taken from the old 1930’s hardboiled crime fiction and movies. They did the same thing in season 1 (albeit with a dash of Lovecraftian flair) to wild applause but now that they’re sticking much more closely to…

McDonough definitely sounds like one o’ them Irish Papist sorts who are overrunning our fair United States. The Know Nothings were right after all!

Controversial in the sense that Obama’s gotten the GOP reinvigorated like only a black man in the White House can, while the Democrats are kind of burnt out and some are a bit disillusioned after the trench war and series of pyrrhic victories that have dominated Obama’s presidencies.

That’s one of my favourites too! I can’t believe no-one’s uploaded that separately.

I have a special place in my heart for this one - the sound design and everything is just so good.

Considering the entire field of CRISPR/Cas9 genetic engineering is less than 2 years old, they’re doing pretty well. Doubly so considering that we only figured out how to apply it therapeutically in the last 12 months. Genetics is a really fast-moving field.

CRISPR/Cas9 is an amazing technology that’s only been applied to vertebrates for less than a year now - and it’s already revolutionized the field of genetic engineering. This Scientific American article on the subject that was published mid last year is a pretty good primer if you’d like to learn more.

The footage was not really spectacular, mostly coming off as a Battlefield-like standard shooter with a Star Wars skin and a decent-looking gimmick with the AT-AT. In other words, it didn’t appear to do much that seemed particularly outlandish or surprising.

Fun fact: bowfins are part of a group of fish that can breathe air to a limited degree. Their swim bladders are highly vascularized and connected to their throat by a small duct, which allows them to act as not-terribly-efficient lungs. Helps them live in stagnant, highly eutrophied water bodies like swamps - they can…

Well, there’s a bit of a complication there in that Western intelligence agencies used vaccination programs as cover in places like Pakistan in the past. When you have a kernel of truth like that, it’s easy for all sorts of radical conspiracies to form around it - like that Western governments are using vaccinations…

It’s the perfect double bluff, though! I mean, what better cover is there for a vampire than to wander around in public in a cape and pancake makeup while calling yourself Blood-Dzraku? No-one will actually believe you, and when the time comes to investigate all those mysterious exsanguinations, they’ll quickly…

I find it interesting that you’ve cited ‘plenty’ of the ‘world’s greatest comedians’ who apparently use this technique, but have conspicuously avoided ever actually mentioning any actual names or routines.

Not really. ‘Punching down’ just isn’t all that funny, since it is almost always mean-spirited and that tends to bleed through in just about every context it’s employed in.

There’s also the phenomena that Jon Stewart saw as ‘punching up’ versus ‘punching down’ in comedy. Turning a group you are not part of and that has been historically victimized by society into the butt of a joke is ‘punching down’ - no better than the schoolyard bully calling their targets ‘funny’ but hurtful…