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| Title: The Super Hero Thread | |
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alaskaone
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Date Posted：04/01/2012 2:00 AMCopy HTML It took Batman approximately 20 minutes to reach the elevators. He stopped to hand out Batman toys to every child he saw, picking them up for pictures, asking them how they were feeling. LaTon Dicks snapped a photo of Batman standing behind her son DeLeon in his wheelchair. She’d recognized the Batmobile on her way in to the hospital. Like everyone else, she’d seen a TV report on him being stopped by the police and protested, “You can’t pull over Batman.” When Batman finally reached the elevator for the slow ride up to the cancer ward, I could see his face already sweating behind the mask. He told me he loses 5 to 6 pounds in water weight when he wears the superhero uniform. He paid $5,000 for it. He spends $25,000 a year of his own money on Batman toys and memorabilia. He signs every book, hat, T-shirt and backpack he hands out — Batman. Batman is 48. He is a self-made success and has the bank account to prove it. He recently sold, for a pile of cash, a commercial cleaning business that he started as a teenager. He became interested in Batman through his son Brandon, who was obsessed with the caped crusader when he was little. “I used to call him Batman,” he told me. “His obsession became my obsession.” Batman began visiting Baltimore area hospitals in 2001, sometimes with his now teenage son Brandon playing Robin. Once other hospitals and charities heard about his car and his cape, Batman was put on superhero speed dial for children’s causes around the region. He visits sick kids at least couple times a month, sometimes more often. He visits schools, too, to talk about bullying. He does not do birthday parties. His superhero work is limited to doing good deeds, part of a maturation process in his own life. In his earlier years, he acknowledges that he sometimes displayed an unsuperhero-like temper and got into occasional trouble with the law for fights and other confrontations. Putting on the Batman uniform changes and steadies him. Come to the Dark Side.
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The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian
There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
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alaskaone
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#1
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：04/01/2012 2:03 AMCopy HTML Shavarsh Vladimirovich Karapetyan (born May 19, 1953 in Kirovakai) is a retired Soviet Armenian finswimmer, 11-times World Record holder, 17-times World Champion, 13-times European Champion and 7-times USSR Champion, who saved 20 lives when a trolleybus fell into the Yerevan reservoir. Karapetyan, Honored Master of Sports of the USSR, ten-time finswimming World Record-breaker, is better known in the former USSR for one particular day of his life, September 16, 1976. On that day, training with his brother Kamo, also a finswimmer, by running alongside the Yerevan Lake, Karapetyan had just completed his usual distance of 20 km (12 mi) when he heard the sound of the crash and saw the sinking trolleybus which had gone out of control and fallen from the dam wall. The trolleybus lay at the bottom of the reservoir some 25 meters (80 ft) off the shore at a depth of 10 meters (33 ft). Karapetyan swam to it and, under conditions of almost zero visibility due to the silt rising from the bottom, broke the back window with his legs. The trolleybus was crowded, it carried 92 passengers and Karapetyan knew he had little time, spending some 30 to 35 seconds for each person he saved. Karapetyan managed to rescue 20 people, but this was the end of his sports career: the combined effect of cold water and the multiple wounds he received*, left him lying unconscious for 45 days, with subsequent sepsis (due to the presence of raw sewer in the lake water) and lung complications preventing him from continuing his sports career. Not only that. On February 19th 1985 he happened to be near a burning building, he once again ran into the building and started pulling people out one by one saving more lives. Now, he is leading a simple lifestyle, he owns his own shoe-repair shop in Moscow . He also stated that once instead of pulling a person from the water he took a seat by accident, this seat still haunts him in his dreams. I hope to be at least half of the man that he was. Come to the Dark Side.
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The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian
There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
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alaskaone
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#2
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：10/07/2016 10:56 AMCopy HTML One would think that saving a billion lives in developing countries, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and being regarded in many parts of the world as among the leading Americans of this age would be enough to make someone a household name within America. And yet, very few Americans would be able to say who Norman Borlaug is, leave alone list any of his groundbreaking accomplishments in solving the problems of world hunger. ... Borlaug's childhood home in Cresco, Iowa As Borlaug was growing up on a small farm in Cresco, Iowa, first the Depression Era, and then the Dust Bowl of the Midwest, were formative experiences. However, counter to the popular mythology about the Dust Bowl as the creation of "excessive technological resources" applied to agriculture, Borlaug surmised that it was actually the result of insufficient application of technology. He noticed that in places where techniques of high yield agriculture were being systematically applied, Dust Bowl conditions never developed with the same severity. (This was to be proven again in the Dakotas in the summer of 1988, where no Dust Bowl materialized despite severe drought conditions identical to those that triggered it earlier.) Borlaug was inspired into defining a mission for his life: to spread the benefits of high-yield farming to the many nations where crop failures on the scale of the Dust Bowl were a basic fact of life. In 1964, India was reeling from the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India. The world watched anxiously to see how the fledgling democracy would handle this crisis of political succession. However, there was an ever greater crisis looming on the horizon--Nehru had tried to fashion India's centralized economy by focusing almost exclusively on heavy industry, while seemingly intractable problems of food shortages and famines had arisen to plague the agriculture sector. Two consecutive droughts in 1966 and 1967 threatened to bring on famine on a massive scale. The new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, inherited a country on the brink of a human catastrophe. These developments seemed to confirm the worst fears of biologist Paul Ehrlich, who famously wrote in The Population Bomb, his 1968 bestseller: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," and "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." Little did Ehrlich know that Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of 'crash program' he had declared would never work. Working in Mexico, they had developed a special breed of dwarf wheat that resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. C. Subramaniam, then minister of Food and Agriculture in India, came to know of Borlaug's work. It was transparently obvious to him that this was the answer to India's crisis. Acting with great urgency, the Indian government took the plunge, and several chartered Boeing 707s loaded with 16,000 metric tonnes of seeds of the new 'miracle wheat' headed for the eastern skies. Borlaug's team began teaching local farmers in the region how to cultivate this new strain of wheat properly, in both India and Pakistan. Borlaug's work is credited with sparking what has come to be known as the "Green Revolution" in these countries, defying all predictions and achieving an astounding increase in the production of wheat within the span of a few years. Since Ehrlich's dire predictions in 1968, India's population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. By 1974 India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals. Pakistan progressed from harvesting 3.4 million tons of wheat annually when Borlaug arrived to around 18 million today, India from 11 million tons to 60 million. cont... http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/topics/borlaug/special.html Come to the Dark Side.
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The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian
There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
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alaskaone
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#3
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：02/22/2017 2:50 PMCopy HTML In the war, she was credited with saving the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers and downed airmen between 1940 and 1943 by escorting them through occupied France to safety in Spain. She helped establish communication lines between the British military and the French Resistance in 1944 that were deemed crucial to weakening German strength in France in advance of the Allied invasion. By her own account she once killed a German sentry with her bare hands, and ordered the execution of a woman she believed to be a German spy. Come to the Dark Side.
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The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian
There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
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WRS10
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#4
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：02/22/2017 9:34 PMCopy HTML I read this book a few years back
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nancy-Wake-SOEs-Greatest-Heroine/dp/0750940999 from the library. The Kindle version is cheap enough for most people if it is not available locally. |
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WRS10
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#5
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：03/11/2017 11:40 AMCopy HTML Six of the best female spies in Nazi-occupied France Clare Mulley 11 March 2017 |
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alaskaone
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#6
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：04/01/2017 4:05 PMCopy HTML
‘No other choice’: Dad caught kids as they jumped from fire, but pregnant wife landed hard Both parents here were heroic. Dad caught all three while on a broken leg. Mom dropped two children to him while pregnant and on fire. Friends have organized a gofundme effort... so far, over $11,000. Come to the Dark Side.
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The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian
There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
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alaskaone
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#7
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：08/12/2017 4:29 PMCopy HTML Nicholas Winton, a Briton who said nothing for a half-century about his role in organizing the escape of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, a righteous deed like those of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, died on Wednesday in Maidenhead, England. He was 106. The Rotary Club of Maidenhead, of which Mr. Winton was a former president, announced his death on its website. He lived in Maidenhead, west of London. It was only after Mr. Winton’s wife found a scrapbook in the attic of their home in 1988 — a dusty record of names, pictures and documents detailing a story of redemption from the Holocaust — that he spoke of his all-but-forgotten work in the deliverance of children who, like the parents who gave them up to save their lives, were destined for Nazi concentration camps and extermination. Cont... Nicholas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children From Holocaust, Dies at ...Come to the Dark Side.
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The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian
There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
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alaskaone
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#8
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：06/21/2018 11:05 AMCopy HTML So, this happened today... Soltis' cousin, Wendi Yohman, said the searchers had broken into groups of three for safety. She and two men were checking a trail in the woods off Hiland when she heard a noise. The next thing she knew, a large brown bear was charging. "It was so fast," Yohman said. The man put himself between Yohman and the bear, and he was mauled. "I've never been so scared in my life," said Yohman, who credited the man with saving her life. The three searchers were able to scare the bear off, at which point they took the injured man to the road to seek help. A passing driver rushed them back to near Soltis' home, where other volunteers applied a tourniquet to his injured leg. He was driven away in the same vehicle that picked him up, with a police cruiser escorting them from the scene. "It's protecting something," a visibly shaken Yohman told reporters shortly after the attack. "The bear is not acting normal." Police did not identify the man, but said he's expected to survive his injuries. Man killed, member of search party injured in Eagle River bear attacks ...Well done, dude, whoever you are. Come to the Dark Side.
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The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian
There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
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tommytalldog
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#9
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Re：The Super Hero Thread Date Posted：06/21/2018 1:01 PMCopy HTML
Just another example of the male of the species with endless contributions to society. The protection of the weaker sex, the construction of beautiful edifices all over the world, the founding of universities, the written language, the exploration of the world & space, the colonization of the lesser races of the world & improvement of their lives, the building of businesses which better all mankind financially, the providing for their families & others & the list goes on & on. So why is it "women & children first on the life boats?" The male is the trophy species & should be preserved at all costs. Saying "thank you" by the ungrateful is not enough.
Live respected, die regretted
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