Monday Reads

Good article about the dangers in national parks, especially for idiot people who go to the very edge of cliff in order to get a good picture.

Despite one of the commenters insinuating this most recent case was actually a murder-suicide, it appears instead to be a tragic accident by a pair who took unnecessary risks.

In any event, selfies have been blamed for numerous deaths in Yosemite. In September, an 18-year-old Israeli man, Tomer Frankfurter, fell from a 800-foot cliff and died while taking one. In 2011, three young people died while trying to get pictures of Yosemite’s Vernal Falls.

A recent study documented 259 deaths worldwide caused by people taking selfies — dubbed “selficides” by the researchers — between October 2011 and November 2017. The vast majority of victims were young people aged between 10 and 29. The most common causes of death were drowning, transport accidents and falls from high places.

The deaths of Viswanath and Moorthy pierce the benign image of U.S. national parks, which remain wild and sometimes unforgiving places despite their record popularity. According to a 2017 analysis by Outside magazine, just over 1,000 people died in U.S. national parks between 2006 and 2016, excluding suicides.

That is a hell of a lot of deaths.
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Obituary:  Famous Marvel Comics cartoonist Stan Lee has died at the age of 95:


Born Dec. 28, 1922 in New York City, Stanley Martin Lieber discovered a love of writing when he was a boy, and planned on an illustrious career in which he would write the Great American Novel. His path to literary fame took a quirky turn in 1939, when the teenage Lee took a job as an assistant at Timely Comics, the precursor to Marvel Comics. His early duties were lowly: Not much more than a gofer, he kept the artists' instruments prepped and brought in lunches. But by 1941, he was contributing creatively; his first writing job was to produce filler text for an issue of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's "Captain America."

Lee's talents didn't go unnoticed, and he soon was given further writing assignments. The 1940s were a golden age of comics, and superheroes were in great demand. Before long, Lee was creating and co-creating characters including the Destroyer, Jack Frost, and Father Time. As the '40s gave way to the '50s, though, superheroes lost their cachet, and Lee's output diversified. He wrote romance comics, Westerns, humor — almost anything but superheroes. His interest in comics began to wane, and he considered pursuing a new career.
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Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has been elected to the United States Senate seat being vacated by Jeff Flake.  Sinema is the first Democrat elected to an Arizona Senate seat in 30 years.

The Florida and Mississippi Senate races have yet to be decided.
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Tell me again a woman is merely an "identity" when there are stories like this.

The sex imbalance in so many countries is nothing short of horrific, especially given male violence.

This outrage:

THERE are millions of women ‘missing’ around the world, and there is one thing to blame — the “extreme” preference for sons.

It’s a preference being seen almost universally, and in an increasing number of countries it’s producing demographic distortion.

There are about 117 to 126 million women believed to be ‘missing’ in Asia and eastern Europe, as a result of gender-based selection.

Even in the United States, men still have this bullshit preference for sons.

Men aren't better than women.

Something has to be done about it.

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