El Mamerro

IF YOU LIKE MAYWEATHER SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU MARRY HIM

I moved 3,378 miles last summer, and it was the best thing I've ever done in my life. Having a lot of money saved enhanced the experience threefold, for I was able to really take it easy and get to know the new place and the new people for a few months before I settled back into a working/steady income routine.

That is certainly a possibility, but to be honest, I was always kinda fond about that idea. I was secretly bummed when the creators denied that theory, in the same way I was bummed that the smoke monster was not a nanobot cloud (cause that would've been awesome). Whatever the case, they played it out tastefully, and even if you want to interpret it the big copout way, with this being everything in Jack's head as he died from the plane crash (why not?)... it still feels elegant and well accomplished. There's no doubt that the mystery of the island and DHARMA and whatnot was supremely fascinating, and what I loved best about the show, but the fact is, if the characters weren't interesting (note: interesting ≠ likeable) it would have been a piece of shit show regardless of cool mystery. That Flash Forward show that fizzled was based on a very cool premise, and offered riveting mystery, but the characters sucked dick and you couldn't muster enough giveashitness to follow through. Lost had that because it was always interesting to see the characters react to a mysterious situation, and was always very gratifying to learn how the baggage they carried as people had a hand in them making the decisions they took. That constant parallel story throughout every season, spent 100% on examining character, made an interesting mystery story into a fascinating one. I think people who think the island mystery is interesting regardless of character is fooling themselves a bit, but that's just me. Lost's best episodes swung for both the heart and the brain, like those episodes when Desmond began to experience the time displacements in season 3. This finale skewed for the heart in a big way, and while I missed brain diddling a little bit, I felt the brunt of it right to the chest, no homo.

I appear to be in the minority here, but I found the finale to be enormously satisfying. All the little mysteries and details about the island and plot devices seemed to be completely marginal and secondary than watching that stunning resolution for all the characters. I no longer really care about the unsolved mysteries of the island, and I'm perfectly happy to move on without ever knowing them.

Maybe not immediately, but gradually, yeah.

I think it's premature to say the American empire is failing for sure; god knows this same sentiment has been claimed for decades if not centuries. We are in a difficult period that may or may not be comparatively worse than other periods we've lived through, and I don't share this wave of pessimism that is so prevalent around these parts. America will live on, its influence will still be felt, and technology will certainly be a tool for survival. If anything, I think the American empire is probably going to evolve into a global governance model that strongly leans towards American/western values, and which America holds high influence over.

This is odd to me, because the past empires I was talking about didn't really have anything approaching the concept of "companies" or "corporations". Those are very modern institutions. Conquest in the past had different purposes, some of them rational (resources), some of them not (worship). I do still maintain that lack of communication technology was a major factor in empire failure because homogenization and sharing of knowledge was too slow and clumsy for people to consolidate their visions of progress. Opinions and stances remained clustered regionally, and eventually boiled over into conflict due to lack of understanding of outside perspectives. Back then, there wouldn't be a single American against the war in Iraq, but now we have access to so much information and perspective from their side, it has allowed a significant opposition to the war to evolve. We are more sympathetic towards our enemies nowadays because of our ability to see their perspective, and that fosters a march towards unity. About the Brezinski video, it is definitely relevant to the discussion, but I feel people are inserting their own meaning into his words. I didn't see anything there that suggests ZB is afraid of global political awareness, or that it is a bad thing in general. All he states, in a very logical fashion, is that when people are politically aware, they'll form stronger opinions and make their voices heard louder, which in turn presents a bigger challenge in moving forward in a unified way. This is not a bad thing, it is only a difficult thing. Life is full of things that are great and beneficial but involve much harder work to achieve them. If he had said something about global political awareness being an obstacle we needed to get rid off, then I'd agree, but he just presents it as something that has to be naturally dealt with.

Hooray for video titles that plant seeds of misperception. Real message: Global leadership lacking unity + global political awareness = difficult and complicated to deal with for achieving common goals All of a sudden becomes: ZB IS AFRAID OF THE PEOPLE!

Sounds like Zig in panel 3.

Again, this has been true throughout history, but every pattern I see relating to the way human society has developed seems to lead more and more towards homogenization. As cultures mingle and interact, they learn from each other what works and what doesn't, and humans worldwide tend to adopt new global behavioral structures that helps them solve problems. We're approaching a point where a big number of regional problems have been solved, the solutions have been shared, and individual cultures can apply the principles learned in their own unique ways. The next row of big problems we have to solve work on a global scale, and require a coming together of some sort. Like it has been mentioned, global governance is only required for a specific set of human problems, and will probably be set up to deal strictly with that. You'd be right to conclude that in the same way federal government has been slowly expanded beyond it's original set of functions, we could expect global governance to follow the same path in the future. However that is a slow process, that will happen over years of tremendous change in the human condition, and it is arguable that the federal governments expansion has happened in order to better deal with the huge paradigm shifts America has experienced since the creation of the federal government. We can expect more radical changes in the next 50 years than in the past 200, and the role of global governance will follow suit to deal with it as best as we can.

There's more where that one came from. http://kotaku.com/5540330/these-golden-books-are-not-for-children/gallery/

I basically feel global governance is pretty much inevitable from an evolutionary standpoint. The question is not if, but "when" and "how". We've gone from extremely fractured and separate groupings (tribes) to large conglomerates (nations) that have proven to be much more efficient in taking care of solving humanity's most pressing issues. In the past, massive, world-spanning empires have tried to take hold and failed, mainly because we simply weren't technologically and culturally ready back then to come together like that. In today's world, the communication and collaboration tools we've developed, and the ability to instantly share knowledge between anyone in the world completely change the playing field when it comes to large scale governance. It's a little shortsighted to say things wouldn't work now because they haven't worked in the past; we're working on an entirely different technological paradigm here. American-style freedom has so far proven to be one of, if not THE, most efficient way of progressing as humans, with most modern nations adopting similar (or at least related) frameworks to get themselves ahead. I wouldn't doubt for a second that any kind of global governance established in the world would be at least very strongly based on American ideals of society. I don't see why global governance should be mutually exclusive of individual rights or allowing nations to have more than a fair degree of national sovereignty in dealing with their people and their territory. That said, while American-style freedom has proven to be extremely awesome for technological progression, it has also allowed us to be tremendously wasteful and irresponsible with our natural resources. This is something that needs to be addressed, and most Americans won't want to hear the truth of what it entails. However, I do share the concern that handing governance to yet another global bureaucracy would probably yield shitty results, so I can't advocate it yet. I do think we are more technologically capable to take care of our future and participate more than ever in issues of governance right now, and this will only increase in the future. I think we are rich in possibilities in the near future for a new type of government that leverages the internet's ability to give people a voice to become the fairest system we've known yet.

Always a matter of time before the Coolguys McOver-It's show up to hate.

Manny isn't hiding shit, dude is fucking susceptible to mind games, and Mayweather is pulling a fast one on him. He'll eventually accept, be saddled with the weight of bowing down to an opponent's ridiculous request, and lose the fight... and it will have not much to do with the mindgame (although it'll certainly help), he'll lose because Mayweather is just too fucking good.

Shit My Dad Says: The TV Show. Starring William Shatner, no joke.

Sorry FF, we are complete assholes for explaining how the information in the film is bullshit, instead of actually spending time and effort discussing bullshit.

That's too bad you couldn't handle it. Don't let the door hit your vagina on the way out.

MACHETE.

Fun fact: She was the shaman lady in Avatar.

This is true, though that same demand drove supermarkets and their suppliers to adopt cheaper, faster, higher-yielding farming practices that in the end sacrifice nutritional value and heavily affect the environment. The goal should be a middle ground: a reasonably healthy, reasonably sustainable, reasonably priced product. We went too far in sacrificing quality for convenience, and demand from the opposite spectrum, however trendy or exploitable it may be, is a healthy behaviour that should be encouraged.

Not saying everyone who eats local is aware of this, but a good reason to buy local, if you were environmentally conscious, is because there's much less pollution and resources used on transporting goods long distances.

Nope, that was Jose Miguel Cotto, Miguel Cotto's brother. Never been as good as his more famous little brother. No easy feat, but still not a major challenge. Didn't see this fight but I'll say it again, Mayweather will beat Pacquiao and it will be massively disappointing to everyone.

^Rad up there, that's the Georgia Guidestones. I went there this summer about 3 days after the summer solstice and got to see the sunrise alignment: The story behind them is super awesome.

Curious ≠ Suspicious There's absolutely nothing wrong asking questions. Being prone to overly nefarious assumptions is.