INFINITE IMPROBABILITY: Superior Spider-Man, worse storyline - The Weekender

INFINITE IMPROBABILITY: Superior Spider-Man, worse storyline - The Weekender

No. 700 brings about yet another death in the Marvel Universe.

When you’re writing a film, there’re only a few endings you can give your character. One of those possible conclusions is killing them off.

When you’re writing a continuing comic book series, however, that’s usually not an option, particularly when it’s your title character. Marvel Comics, yet again, is scoffing at that notion, for better or worse. Actually, it’s just for the worse.

After 50 years, and just before co-creator Stan Lee’s 90th birthday, “The Amazing Spider-Man” comic series is ending with issue No. 700.

This is a big deal, but almost all major comic characters have had their comics restarted at No. 1 over the years, mainly to sell more books (first issues are usually very collectible) and to give new readers a good jumping on point if they hadn’t been following along and didn’t know where to start. This is probably not a good time for any jumping, other than up and down angrily.

You see, the long-running story of Peter Parker is ending with his death in this issue, and it doesn’t happen in that “heroic sacrifice” kind of way that you would assume it would. You know, giving the character some sort of justice after all this time. Instead, his mind is stuck in the body of his dying his arch nemesis, Dr. Octopus, and Otto randomly decides once he inherits Peter’s memories that he’s going to stop being a bad guy after a lifetime of crime and devotes himself to being a better Spider-Man, re-launching the series as “The Superior Spider-Man” in January.

Yeah, I actually read comics and it doesn’t really make any sense to me either.

I realize that Marvel was bought out by Disney a few years back, but is this take-off of “Freaky Friday” really the best way to end this beloved series?

It’s interesting as a “What If…?” story, but for writer Dan Slott to actually end the life of one of the greatest superheroes ever just to experiment with this idea seems a bit excessive, particularly since Marvel contends that this is a “permanent change.”

 History says differently.

1939

1938 wanted to kid itself that it was going to cruise all the way to 1950 just because full scale global war didn't erupt in 1937.

And here we are. In 1939.

'Doctor Who' will take over television in 2013, says Steven Moffat - Doctor Who News - Cult - Digital Spy

'Doctor Who' will take over television in 2013, says Steven Moffat - Doctor Who News - Cult - Digital Spy

Published Wednesday, Dec 19 2012, 11:30pm EST | By Morgan Jeffery |33 comments

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Steven Moffat has promised that Doctor Who will "take over television" in 2013.

However, the showrunner - speaking at a screening of this year's Christmas special 'The Snowmen' - remained tight-lipped about any specific plans for the 50th anniversary year.

© BBC

"They are immense, they are considerable," he promised. "[The episodes] will be full of tremendous surprises. But they wouldn't be surprises if I accidentally said them now, would they?

"But I promise you, we're going to take over television. Trust me."

> Doctor Who Christmas special 'The Snowmen' - Spoiler free preview

Jenna-Louise Coleman will make her debut as Clara in 'The Snowmen', with Moffat also addressing the mysterious link between the new companion and Oswin Oswald - the character that Coleman played in the episode 'Asylum of the Daleks'.

The Doctor Who Christmas special: The Snowmen

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"You will know [what the link is between the two] eventually," he promised. "You are going to get the answer but as ever on Doctor Who, we make you wait a little bit longer."

'The Snowmen' will air on BBC One on December 25 at 5.15pm, with eight more Doctor Who episodes confirmed to follow in 2013.

Read more: http://www.digitalspy.com.au/british-tv/s7/doctor-who/news/a446258/doctor-who-will-take-over-television-in-2013-says-steven-moffat.html#ixzz2FrnaUDl6
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DOPPELGANGERS! Twin portraits: Quebec photographer Francois Brunelle takes pictures of look-alikes | Mail Online

The same...but different: Nathaniel (who did not give his last name) and Edward Toledo, pictured in Montreal in 2003, are remarkably similar but not twins

Here's looking at you: Yves Megert (left) and Remi Bacon, pictured in Geneva, Switzerland in 2001

Face-off: Edith Prefontaine (left) and Stefanie Tremblay pictured in Montreal in 2001 by photographer Francois Brunelle

Mirror image: Stéphane Morin (left) and Claude-Simon Langlois are unrelated look-alikes. Mr Morin, is Canadian-born and Mr Langlois, is American-born

Twin portraits: Quebec photographer Francois Brunelle takes pictures of look-alikes | Mail Online

At first glance, it's an elegant set of portraits of twins - but look more closely and the secret is revealed.
None of the individuals captured by photographer Francois Brunelle are related by blood, their faces just have strikingly similar characteristics.
Mr Brunelle, who lives in Québec, has studied the human face since he started out as a photographer at the age of 18 in 1968.

The collection, entitled I'm not a look-alike!, features a range of individuals from North American and European backgrounds who are not related, side by side.
According to the photographer, the portraits allow him to explore the intimate relationship between subjects and how they approach their remarkably similar appearances.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2247797/Twin-portraits-Quebec-photographer-Francois-Brunelle-takes-pictures-look-alikes.html#ixzz2FB9HvWCl
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Here's a thought for Eschaton fans.

In the Apocalypse of John (Apocalypse means Revelation or uncovering; Eschaton means THE END OF THE WORLD), "The Beast" is identified as male. The Antichrist (the, as it were, Antichrist of all Antichrists) presumptive, identified as the dragon, is NOT identified as male.

So why does everyone insist on thinking that Nostradamus' third and final antichrist will be a guy?

Why couldn't the Antichrist of all Antichrists be a chick?

A scarlet woman perhaps.

Perhaps the last President of the USA? The one elected in 2016?

Food for thought.

OR IS IT?

Stalin committed no crimes. In other news, Barack Obama is his real name, gillard isn't a lowlife crook and we have always been at war with Eastasia

Reminder: The REAL Reagan. A fighter.

Articles: Who Is Barack Hussein Obama? And What Is He Really Up To?

Articles: Who Is Barack Hussein Obama? And What Is He Really Up To?

Fully half of Americans had doubts about Obama from the beginning, and a great many of us saw through him the first time he took the national stage to read from his teleprompter.  Even my young daughter saw through Obama early on.  "He reminds me of a mean teenage girl," she once said of him. 



 "He makes faces at people.  He's vain, self-centered, and rude.  He never tells the truth about anything."

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/who_is_barack_hussein_obama_and_what_is_he_really_up_to.html#ixzz2BQtsAKJW

"Zombie Invasion" training planned for troops on Halloween - conservative news

"Zombie Invasion" training planned for troops on Halloween - conservative news

‘Zombie Invasion’ training planned for troops on Halloween

By: Hope Hodge
10/29/2012 01:28 PM

First it was the Center for Disease Control’s campaign for zombie preparedness. Then the Department of Homeland Security got in on the action, warning of a coming zombie apocalypse as a way to get the public planning for emergencies.

Now, the AP reports, a defense contractor in California has a counter-terrorism exercise in the works that will pit Navy special operators, Marines, soldiers, and civilian emergency responders against the un-dead enemies–conveniently timed to take place on Halloween.

Executed by the security firm Halo Corp., the zombie event is billed as a serious training exercise that uses fictional monsters as a way to practice speedy response to the kind of “asymmetrical warfare” that has been the standard in the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan.

Charting The Non-Linearity Of Hyperinflation, And Predicting America's Future Courtesy Of Ancient History | ZeroHedge

Charting The Non-Linearity Of Hyperinflation, And Predicting America's Future Courtesy Of Ancient History | ZeroHedge

baktun the future: First Day, Last Day

baktun the future: First Day, Last Day

Reviewing the "death of comicbooks"

I was recently reading savage critiques of Christianity, and as amusing as the vitriol was, and indeed as impressive as some of the scholarship was, it sent my mind on other tangents- chief amongst them the failure of the American superhero in comicbooks.

Stupidly high prices, a desire to maintain monopolistic controls over publishing, the plagiarism factories, smug false feelings of superiority and all the rest seem to me to have followed, rather than caused, the decline and fall of Marvel and DC.

In truth both Marvel and DC, just like Roman Empire in its time, exist in name only, with barbarian rulers in place of their original temporal and spiritual leaders. No one in their right mind could suggest that the current enemies within the gates are originating and exploring as Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and the rest did in the early 1960s- establishment mentality is now dominant, with a "priesthood" and an "orthodoxy" preventing anything more than endless repetition.

With this state of affairs in place, what will happen then to what were once highly popular comicbooks?

By a process of slow death one can see several probable and highly probably steps towards total extinction.

Firstly, the feudal system of hirelings and fake independents will in fact establish itself even more firmly, with the fusion of the false facades of Marvel and DC with their true owners, and true cores, being Disney and Warner respectively. These latter organisations are classical media companies- faceless, resolute, unapologetically mercenary, soulless, adhering to mainstream agendas, disinterested in innovation, never releasing copyrights that have fallen to them.

Secondly, due to this fascistic control, and the alliance of corporations such as Disney and Warner with the current dominant controllers of the media, when that centralised empire falls, so too will Disney and Warner fall. This may not be as far off as some imagine. In the mean time, the battlefield between those outside the cosy walls of this incestuous industry and the slave soldiers of the corporate media will be the coopting of public domain properties and the attempt to revitalise the uneven battle by true independents by the discovery, more or less at random, of something that will decisively turn the struggle in their favour.

Thirdly, the corporate properties, already grim parodies of themselves, will continue to be debased to the point that they disappear from view. For evidence of how this happens consider the life cycle of Flash Gordon- from dominant cultural entertainment to plagiarised bastardised Star Wars version at the hands of Lucas to today where not only Flash Gordon is fading from knowledge but Star Wars in its turn has lost all cultural potency. Per Dale Arden, Sic Princess Leia.

2012 aka 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Calendar.

The Maya calendar is a cultural artifact from the general category of the World Ages. Computing the long-term cycles of cosmic order was a concern in all ancient cultures from China to Peru. The introduction of calendars to regulate civic life and agricultural planning was a long and complex process. In devising these systems, the calendar-makers did not limit themselves to time in the human scale, but extended their computations to countless thousands of years. Doing so, they sometimes came up with remarkable figures. 

In Hindu chronology, the number 4,320,000,000 is associated with the cosmological motif of the "Days and Nights of Brahma." This number caught the attention of Joseph Campbell, who observed that 4,320,000,000 years, or 4.32 billion years, is intriguingly close to the current estimate for the geological age of the earth, 4.5 billion years. 4320 is the base number that generates the four Yugas of Hindu cosmology. It also shows up in the chronology of prediluvian kings compiled by the Babylonian priest, Berossus, and elsewhere. It is an artificial norm (a sacred canonical unit, if you prefer) that also factors into various geological, sidereal, solar, lunar, and planetary time cycles.

Like the Hindu timescale, Maya calendrics runs into the range of remote, unimaginable numbers. The mathematician-priests who devised the Maya calendar recorded exact dates of events, down to the day, but they also liked to extrapolate far backward and forward in time. The precision of their planetary, solar, and lunar tables is impressive. They calculated the cycles of Venus and the Earth as accurately as we do today, down to four decimal points. This mastery of verifiable time-cycles commands respect, and obliges us to look closely at their long-term extrapolations. For the Maya and all other ancient peoples, verifiable and non-verifiable calculations were integral to a single system of sacred calendrics. I see nothing woolly-minded in granting some respect to their long-term timeframe, especially if something can be learned from doing so.

According to most experts, the Long Count dates from early in the Classical Maya era, 200 - 900 CE, although it may be much older in conception, possibly originating among the Olmecs in the 7th C. BCE. The engravings that record the earliest dates are Chiapas de Corzo, Stela 2, 32 BCE, and Tikal Stela 2, 292 CE. The last date recorded was January 909 CE. The calendar uses a string of five units factored on a 20-base: k´ín (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (360 days of 18 winals), katun (7200 days or 20 tuns) and baktun (144,000 days or 20 katuns).

The stele or engraved stones with calendric glyphs record dates by hieroglyphs and dot and bar notations, showing the units by position. Scholars notate the dates in five placements, from baktun to k'in, like this: 9.16.0.2.0, equivalent to June 18, 751 AD. December 21, 2012 is written 13.0.0.0.0. There are three standards of correlation and, you bet, a lot of quibbles and fine tuning in Maya chronology.

Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of a Manchurian Candidate, by Webster Griffin Tarpley, at The Ralph Nader Library

Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of a Manchurian Candidate, by Webster Griffin Tarpley, at The Ralph Nader Library

"Where did you get a public opinion that we should fully disarm and then, according to some theoreticians, such as Brzezinski, divide our territory into three or four states? If there is such a public opinion, I would disagree with it." -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, June 4, 2007.

This book exposes Obama, but it does so from a standpoint that is fundamentally different from almost all other critical studies seen so far. This book exposes and refutes Obama from the left. In this book, the vague and vapid messianic and utopian platitudes, the lemming legions, the personality cult, the narcissism, the megalomania, the fake polling, the media and intelligence agency manipulation which are the essence of Obama and his campaign of mass manipulation are criticized thoroughly, but always from a standpoint which reaches back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal, in many ways the best government that America has ever known. The basic thesis shared by the authors of this book is that Obama is a right-winger, an elitist, a creature of Wall Street, and a deeply troubled personality, running far to the right of his main opponent, Sen. Clinton, on all major issues, including the two critical areas of economics and foreign policy. Obama's ultra-left components, concentrated in social and energy policy, are an ideological camouflage which only accentuates, and does not alter, his overall pro-Wall Street profile. Obama is a right-winger, and this book criticizes him from the left. This, it turns out, is by far his most vulnerable flank in today's crisis of simultaneous wars and economic depression.

Other studies of Obama can be divided into three main groups. First are those which approach their subject with transparent adulation and hero worship. This is the majority of the treatments of Obama coming out of the liberal and left liberal community, and these studies are so biased as to be basically worthless. The authors are often the limousine liberals and wealthy elitists and their publicists, and these persons tend to make up Obama's most devoted base. 

The rightists speculate that Obama will surrender to the supposed global jihad, whereas his true goal is to launch his own apocalyptic global hyper-jihad against Pakistan, China, and Russia, in conformity with the prescriptions of his guru and svengali, the marplot Zbigniew Brzezinski. Obama is the darling of the failed and bankrupt elites: Brzezinski, Jay Rockefeller, George Soros, Paul Adolph Volcker, General Merrill "Bomb Now, Die Later" McPeak, Joseph Nye of the Trilateral-Bilderberger complex, and the notorious ruling class cover-up artist Lee Hamilton are all in Obama's amen corner. The right-wingers then try to portray Obama as a Moslem, whereas he obviously worships at the Ford Foundation Church of the Counterinsurgency, where the racist provocateur Jeremiah Wright purveys a Gnostic synthetic religion totally distinct from both Christianity and Islam. They try to portray Obama as a left liberal, whereas he exhibits in fact many of the features of what is being increasingly recognized as postmodern fascism. All of these right wing and neocon attempts to understand the Obama phenomenon are thus crippled by an attempt to make this candidate and his supporters fit into ideological schemes left over from the Cold War, or else from the post-9/11 era. But the Cold War is long gone, and the post-9/11 era is rapidly fading into yesterday's headlines, even as the Brzezinski faction gears up for the global showdown with Moscow, Beijing, and the other capitals of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The net result of all the right-wing and neocon studies of Obama is to vastly underestimate the danger that he poses, both in terms of world-wide thermonuclear confrontation (the likely outcome of Brzezinski's endgame), as well as in terms of the transformation of the U.S. society and economy towards postmodern fascism. The postmodern fascist danger is not confined to Obama: the radical environmental charlatan Al Gore has just announced his intention to spend $300 million to create a private army of 10 million: Malthusian fanatics who will coerce politicians and society in general into implementing global warming countermeasures. These will obviously include reductions in the standard of living, and speculative bonanzas for Gore and his clique of elitists. Gore's Green Army will be available for strikebreaking. It might also undertake a March on Washington in the spirit of Benito Mussolini's October 1922 March on Rome. Will Gore's environmental storm troopers wear green shirts? If they do, they will join the tradition of the green-shirted Romanian Iron Guards of Codreanu, an imitator of Il Duce. Not surprisingly, Obama has announced that Gore will be prominent and influential in the future regime of the Illinois messiah.

Alan Keyes: Witness For The Prosecution