I've never liked Bat'leths. They're bad. They make zero sense as a weapon.
Wielded in both hands, it have all the reach of a large knife, but none of the maneuverability.
You can kind of use a Bat'leth one-handed, but it's clumsy and not at all balanced. It makes for wild swings that are more likely to hurt you or your friends than the enemy.
You can sort of block with them, if the opponent is going to make an overhead chop. That looks cool on screen, but if the warrior with a Bat'leth was facing a warrior with a simple sword and shield, the warrior with the Bat'leth would fucking die.
It's just a bad weapon, and looks like it was made to impress mall ninjas.
Cigarette smoking causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year.1,6 Cigarette smoking is estimated to cause the following:1
More than 480,000 deaths annually (including deaths from secondhand smoke)
278,544 deaths annually among men (including deaths from secondhand smoke)
201,773 deaths annually among women (including deaths from secondhand smoke)
Cigarette smoking causes premature death:
Life expectancy for smokers is at least 10 years shorter than for nonsmokers.1,2
Quitting smoking before the age of 40 reduces the risk of dying from smoking-related disease by about 90%.2
I personally say ban tobacco completely, because it's still the single largest cause of medical issues in the US.
Cancer, COPD, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Stokes, etc. All diseases that smokers get at extremely elevated rates. Hell, currently, one out of every five deaths in the US are linked to cigarette use.
But sure, gun control. It's a good idea, but it wouldn't do anything about 20% of all deaths each year.
Anyway, teens are most likely to start smoking via menthols or flavored tobacco. Which is why we should ban them. Because if you can drive that 20% number down, you should.
It's not that they didn't block UV, it's that they installed UV lights in the DJ booth because it would "look cool".
It was a purposeful choice, and no one stopped to think about why it was a bad idea. Which is totally on brand for people running a convention based around NFTs.
Israel doesn't want an occupation? What the fuck are they doing in the West Bank then? That's a full military occupation.
But no. You're right. Israel seems to want to kill everyone in Gaza, or maybe just force the survivors to live in an even more cramped concentration camp.
You were a child who was working. That's child labor. Full stop.
You also were exposed to harmful chemicals. Even if you "wanted" to be there, you should not have been.
So you worked, got a video game, and a lifelong addiction. And you think that was a good thing?
But it still doesn't matter. Yours is an edge case. This proposed ban on flavorings for tobacco is meant to help prevent thousands from getting addicted in the first place.
Here's how it works. A given teen will, at some point, try a cigarette. If it's flavored, they are statistically more likely to try a second. If you ban flavorings, then that second cigarette will be less likely.
We know that nicotine is more addictive than pretty much any other chemical out there, but it's not instantly addictive. The goal is to make smoking as unpleasant as possible. Which will also save the lives of some people who are currently addicted.
See, that's the problem, you want to fight. Israel wants the fight, because the n they can justify more ethnic cleansing.
To deal with Hamas, you have to deal with the root causes of Hamas.
You have to defuse the justified anger of the Palestinian people, stop the settlers, put many of them in jail for the crimes they've committed, put many Israeli leaders in jail for the crimes they too have committed, and then put the leaders of Hamas in jail.
That's the starting point.
Give all the Palestinians citizenship, and the protections that come with it.
Side note, did you know that the vast majority of Palestinians don't have citizenship of any country, despite being born in the area? The area their grandparents were born in? Their great-great-to-the-uncounted generation grandparents?
Yeah, give all Palestinians full citizenship. That right there would diffuse a lot of the anger. And then you can work on dismantling Hamas as a police matter, and not as a military target.
Do you listen to yourself? Hamas uses human shields, so you want to murder all the hostages? Just pre-emptively murder them all. That way Hamas can't use them, right?
No thought beyond mass murder, which is what Hamas wants, because the more wanton murder that the Israelis engage in, the more recruits Hamas gets.
And then there's the fact that Hamas has been propped up by Israel, funded by Israel.
Yes, Hamas is evil. Israel responded to that evil by killing thousands, and are gearing up to kill tens of thousands more. Included in that count are thousands of children.
And because suffering is not a competition, we know that both of these things are fucking evil. Israel's mass slaughter is just as evil as Hamas' initial attack. The only difference is, Israel has far more munitions and is planning far more murder than Hamas could ever dream of.
Do a lot of teens work on tobacco farms for their first exposure to nicotine? No, that was just you?
I mean, you also bring up the specter of unsafe child labor. That's something else that we need to tackle, but we can also ban flavorings that make the tobacco more addictive to those who didn't spend their childhood harvesting tobacco.
The payoff of that story is far better as well. In Generations, Data uses the emotion chip, then at the end, digging through the wreckage of the Enterprise, they find Spot. Data cries tears of joy.
Wow, denying that tobacco causes cancer is a level of delusion that I had thought died out with the 5th or 6th Marlboro Man (who all died of cancer).
Do you want to know one of the causes of cancer from Tobacco? It might surprise you.
But you'll ignore this because you're hopelessly addicted to nicotine, one of the single most addictive chemicals known.
You try to deflect with whataboutisms, but guess what? People are trying to solve those health problems as well. You're just pissed that they're trying to solve one that affects your personal addiction.
I can tell that you're addicted just by the vitriol in your response here.
Did you start of menthols and other flavored tobacco? Because that's how a lot of people start. Which is why people are pushing for a ban, so others won't be as hopelessly addicted as you are.
Bush Sr was spending most of his time in the 90s cultivating a close business relationship with the Saudis, particularly his fellow members of the Carlyle Group.
Bush Sr was at the Annual Investor's Conference on 9/11 where Shafiq bin Laden was the Guest of Honor.
First is, Biden has a stutter. Everyone has known about it for his entire political career, and he's mostly overcome it, but every now and then he'll trip over a word. Right wing nutjobs will then scream that Biden can't form a coherent sentence, even though he can indeed do that.
The second source of the "Biden dementia" nonsense is projection/deflection. In the middle of Trump's presidency, there were some medical experts who started raising questions about Trump possibly having something along the lines of Frontotemporal dementia. Now, these were people without access to Trump's medical records or any records beyond videos of Trump, so there's a large grain of salt to be taken.
The basic argument was the Trump has a distinct stance, legs ramrod straight, but his torso leaning slightly forward. This is very common among people who suffer that type of dementia. His word choice has also tended to delve into the nonsensical more and more over the years, even if he's still able to string together a grammatically correct sounding sentence. Which is another sign of that particular strain of dementia.
The main argument against FTD is the seeming lack of apathy. FTD is a disease that robs you of your emotions.
The sub category of Semantic dementia might fit Trump better, but honestly, I think he's just a lazy conman who was never very smart in the first place.
I've never liked Bat'leths. They're bad. They make zero sense as a weapon.
Wielded in both hands, it have all the reach of a large knife, but none of the maneuverability.
You can kind of use a Bat'leth one-handed, but it's clumsy and not at all balanced. It makes for wild swings that are more likely to hurt you or your friends than the enemy.
You can sort of block with them, if the opponent is going to make an overhead chop. That looks cool on screen, but if the warrior with a Bat'leth was facing a warrior with a simple sword and shield, the warrior with the Bat'leth would fucking die.
It's just a bad weapon, and looks like it was made to impress mall ninjas.