After reading the graphic novel, I was convinced that Ultra Comics is supposed to represent the character Marvelman/Miracleman made famous by Alan Moore though others including Neil Gaiman have penned him, so I Googled the topic, but I can not find any discussion. Am I the only one who sees obvious similarities between the character designs of Ultra Comics and Miracleman? Ultra Comics even has the lightening bolt of Captain Marvel/Shazam of the DC universe, and as all fans of Miracleman know, the original Marvelman had to change its name due to a suit filed by DC, then change again to get Marvel off its back and then went into limbo due to Todd McFarlane---make the Gentry (the villain if you believe in such things as villains) of the DC title, "The Multiversity" the Gentry the world's comic book super giants, including DC, Marvel and Todd McFarland.

What Happens to the Republican Party now that they have mobilized/alienated the Youth Vote?

We all know the answer. In the 1960's, it took the draft and the Vietnam War to do it. Callous lawmakers sent our young men off to die in a senseless war and when the kids asked "Why?" they were told to "Shut up( and die)"

This year, a wave of senseless gun violence has swept our land, killing(among others) our young people. When our young people have tried to speak up for themselves to ask "Why?" Republican lawmakers in the pocket of Russia and the NRA have told them to "Shut up (and die)!"

Young people never take kindly to that message. At least not in the United States. Maybe they listen quietly in Russia. Though I kind of doubt it.

Welcome to the revolution, Russian/NRA-Owned GOP mother fuckers. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

The fact that several armed officers were outside and could not enter safely proves that arming teachers will do no good. In order to take down a determined gunman, you must have 1) full body armor 2) a team meaning more than one, because he will run if he sees just one guy in full body armor 3) sophisticated weapons and 4) perfect aim so you do not hit civilians. In other words, you need a S.W.A.T. team in every school.

Arming teachers won't work. Arming school guards will not work. Putting the school guard in Kevlar won't work unless he is an Olympic quality marksman--he'll just end up shooting kids, too.

Here is a link to what Hillary Clinton was doing in 1999:

Hillary Rodham Clinton called the refugees' stories "extremely disturbing," saying they brought up images that hadn't been seen in Europe since World War II.

snip

NATO accuses the Yugoslav army and Serb special police of conducting a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against Kosovo's Albanian population.

Mrs. Clinton said the stories echoed images of the Nazi era, as depicted by films like "Schindler's List" or "Sophie's Choice."

"Think about what that means -- to be driving people from their homes, separating them from their families, loading them on trains," she said.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9905/14/kosovo.refugees/

According to one source, Vladimir Putin was not amused by her attempts to stop fellow Slavs from conducting an ethnic cleansing:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.html

On March 24, 1999, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was on his way to Washington when he got word that NATO had begun bombing Kosovo. He ordered his plane turned around. A few hours later, he landed in a Moscow that was reeling from the insult of not being consulted. Russians had only a vague idea of what Kosovo was but a very strong concept of Serbia being a land of fellow Eastern Orthodox Slavs and of Yugoslavia being a rightful part of Moscow's sphere of influence. Not being consulted—or even, apparently, warned—sent the very clear message that the U.S. had decided it now presided over a unipolar world. There was no longer even the pretense of recognizing Russia's fading-superpower status: President Bill Clinton had chosen not to wait the few hours it would have taken for Primakov to land in Washington, allowing him to save face by at least pretending to have been in on the conversation.

From this point on, Russian President Boris Yeltsin's administration, already weak and embattled, would be unable to justify its friendly, perennially de-escalating posture toward the West. Anti-American feelings ran so high you would have thought the U.S. were bombing Russia. By turning his plane around, Primakov had endeared himself to the nationalist opposition and turned his back on Yeltsin. The liberals in Moscow were in a panic. The nationalists were mobilizing not only politically but also militarily: Men lined up outside the Yugoslav Embassy in Moscow to sign up to volunteer to defend Serbia.

The mood I found in Belgrade matched Moscow's perfectly. The country was mobilizing in support of its nationalist leader, Slobodan Milosevic. The few groups and people who continued to oppose him grew more marginalized and embattled by the day. They also grew increasingly paranoid, which paralyzed them. A daily concert in the center of town was literally drumming up support for the war effort, which had acquired the proud status of a defense effort—against the Americans, no less. A popular Russian rock group previously known as pro-Western came to play. When a young Serb opposition activist of my acquaintance got his draft notice, he readily donned the uniform: He did not want anyone to think anti-Milosevic activists were unpatriotic.

When I returned to Moscow in mid-May, the liberals' panic and the nationalists' fervor had subsided, but I found signs of the nationalists' newfound strength—and wrote my final dispatch about that. And then history followed its changed course. In August, Yeltsin anointed as his successor, a virtual unknown named Vladimir Putin. Within a few weeks, Putin became spectacularly popular by launching a new war in Chechnya. Politicians formerly known as liberals praised the Russian army for its performance there; one said it was “regaining its dignity.” He did not mention Kosovo, but he was referring to the general sense of humiliation that had stayed with Russians since the spring.

It can't have helped that under Bill Clinton, the CIA blamed the Serbian for 90% of the atrocities and all of the attempts to commit genocide in the Bosnian war:

In what is believed to be the most comprehensive United States assessment of atrocities in Bosnia, the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that 90 percent of the acts of "ethnic cleansing" were carried out by Serbs and that leading Serbian politicians almost certainly played a role in the crimes.

The C.I.A. report, based on aerial photography and what one senior official called "an enormous amount of precise technical analysis," also concludes that while war crimes were by no means committed exclusively by Serbs, they were the only party involved in a systematic attempt to eliminate all traces of other ethnic groups from their territory.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/18/world/us-clashes-with-russia-over-bosnia.html

Certainly, Putin fears Clinton. Check out his reaction to some rare election losses in Russia in 2011:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/world/europe/putin-accuses-clinton-of-instigating-russian-protests.html

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin accused Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday of inciting unrest in Russia, as he grappled with the prospect of large-scale political protest for the first time in his more than decade-long rule.

In a rare personal accusation, Mr. Putin said Mrs. Clinton had sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country” after Sunday’s parliamentary elections, which were condemned as fraudulent by both international and Russian observers. Anger over the elections prompted a demonstration in which thousands chanted “Putin is a thief” and “Russia without Putin,” a development that has deeply unnerved the Kremlin.

Speaking to political allies as he announced the formation of his presidential campaign, Mr. Putin said that hundreds of millions of dollars in “foreign money” was being used to influence Russian politics, and that Mrs. Clinton had personally spurred protesters to action. The comments indicate a breakdown in the Obama administration’s sputtering effort to “reset” the relationship between the United States and Russia.

To the would be Hitler of Russia, Herr Putin, who has resolved to make Russia as great as Germany was under the Nazis, Hillary Clinton was an obstacle in his path. She had proven that she was not afraid to call a genocide a genocide and to shine a spotlight on war crimes for all the world to see. Putin could not have Hillary Clinton in the White House, not if he intended to take back all the countries that once made up the USSR. No, he needed a weak willed puppet, someone without Clinton's intelligence, compassion, spine and balls. So, he found Trump. Who will call a mass shooting of school kids "democracy in action" and a genocide "foreign aid" if you pay him enough money.

Remember, Bill's big regret was not listening to Hillary when she told him that he should intervene in Rwanda. Had she been president the US would have acted in Rwanda. Under Trump, the defenseless are up for sale. Take everything that Trump has done and cost us in this country and magnify it five fold and you will come up with what could happen to those in third world countries if we do not toss him out on his lily white over fed ass.

To anyone wondering why the GOP and Trump are not doing anything to stop the senseless violence, remember who is in charge. To Putin, school shootings and all the other senseless gun violence are good things, because they weaken the United Stated. Russia did not seize control of our government because Putin loves us. Russia did not court voters in West Virginia because Putin felt their pain. Russia is being run by ex-KGB who are still following their old play-book, except now they see us as economic, not ideological rivals, and they want to supplant us as the dominant world power.


Yes, the NRA is responsible. But the NRA, like Trump and the Republican Party is another tool of Putin. If we want to end the violence and make American sane again, we need to get out the vote, and seize control of our government back from the foreign power that has staged a silent invasion.

West Nile Virus is a pain in the you know what to most of the species it can infect (like humans) but there is only one species that it kills 100% of the time. That is the crow. Why? What does WNV or the mosquito that carries WNV have against the crow? Crows do not eat mosquitoes. They eat dead things. And dying things. Like small mammals and birds that are lying around listlessly dying from West Nile Virus encephalitis, too weak to fight off the swarms of mosquitoes that fly over them, drinking their blood, sucking up all that West Nile Virus rich plasma----

Is that it? Did West Nile Virus evolve to kill crows because they kill the source of the blood and the infection? Or, to put it another way, was the variation of West Nile Virus that was 100% fatal to crows the one that was most successful because with the crows out of the way there were more warm but not quite dead infected bodies lying around to spread the infection?

The good news is the crows and ravens won and the West Nile Virus is gone. Gone riddance. Worst headache of my whole god damned life. I think I might be part crow.

In big letters on a major freeway:

"Hate what is evil. Cling to what is good."

If the pastor had started the quote with the usual first line---"Love must be sincere..."---then it would have been a message about love. But instead there is a great big message stretched out across the horizon telling us to "HATE"--at a time when too many of us are already toting guns and looking around for someone to hate on---permanently.

The last thing we need is Churches reinforcing the hate message. And the dualism of those two lines taken out of context are scary. How much are we supposed to hate what is evil? How far do we go to prop up what we are told is good?

This billboard has me so angry that if I happened to be a church goer, I would probably give up church for Lent.



Mystical experience is an important part of human life. So is faith. But thank the Founders we have laws to protect us against state sponsored religion.

This is the kind of stuff you think about when you have your second bout of influenza in a month, even though you got your flu vaccine and took Tamiflu on your first day of symptoms both times. Influenza sucks. Missed six days of work total and felt like dog poo for 14 days altogether. And there are 2 more strains out there. Oh boy. I think I'll hold my breath until spring.

Ok, so here is why I think that we might owe cicadas a great big round of applause for influenza.

First, influenza typically originates in Asia in birds. You know, all those big flocks of ducks and chickens that they insist upon keeping alive until they decide to butcher them and cook them fresh to cut down the chance of getting salmonella and campylobacter. They call some strains "bird flu" but all strains affect birds. Humans are just incidental targets IMHO.

So, if we assume that influenza evolved to control bird populations, the next step is consider where influenza strikes. Winter in the far north and far south. The rainy season around the equator. What is a natural enemy of birds that would exist in one state during cold months and monsoons and a different state during warm months/non monsoons? Flying insects that have a pupal state. I.e. Lepidoptera, moths. They stay underground when it is cold/rainy. They fly when it is nice. Once they get their wings, they have only one thing in mind--procreation. But when they are worms, maybe they can serve another purpose--like getting rid of predators that threaten the breeders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidoptera

What is the Lepidoptera whose "boom" (population surge every 13 or 17 years) is heralded by a sudden decrease in the local bird population about 6 months before the moth boom? The cicada.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/06/18/the-cicada-paradox/#.Wn-iY0MtGyM

Pretty fishy that. Almost as if the cicada which has been around for like a million years or longer has figured out a way to get rid of its biggest predator before it decides to take to the air and lay lots of eggs. But how would a larva buried underground do that?

What if the cicada larva was able to create a virus capable of infecting another larva, say another super/producer with a long (though not quite 13 or 17 years long) periodicity, the Gypsy moth. What if the cicada brewed up a dose of parasitic virus that made gypsy moth larva climb to the tops of trees and wait to be eaten by birds? And what if that parasitic virus had influenza virus attached to it, ready to infect the birds? See the link below for how such a parasite works.

https://answersingenesis.org/biology/disease/parasites-affect-behavior-moths/

It would not have to be the Gypsy Moth. I mention that as just one possibility. Any worm or larva that lives in the ground side by side with the cicada would do. But Gypsy Moths are so exuberant when they decide to go "boom."

Note that scientists are currently growing influenza vaccine in the tissues of--you guessed it---armyworms.

http://www.thevaccinereaction.org/2017/10/armyworms-used-to-make-flublok-influenza-vaccine/

Coincidence? Maybe not. Here is a bit of trivia from 1939:

https://books.google.com/books?id=TjVrAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA410&lpg=PA410&dq=worms+carry+influenza&source=bl&ots=OF08BVFayo&sig=NLt3bA-oOwG0SA1G0kEhXT-VdrM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitwYea8-vYAhVBSq0KHc7KCnwQ6AEIRjAJ#v=onepage&q=worms%20carry%20influenza&f=false

A scientist studying swine flu discovered that when a pig was infected with influenza, the pig's lung worms (nematodes in this case) picked up the virus, carried it and were able to transmit it to the same or another pig if given the opportunity. Meaning that scientists have known for a long time that insects can be carriers of influenza. If a pig's lung worm can carry flu, what other worms/insects can do the same?