I look forward to seeing Ant-Man pop up in sequels or cameos, if for no other reason than to show-case what an experienced Ant-Man could do with the suit. Some of the fight scenes gave brief flashes of how effective the suit could be, but the movie didn't explore it as well as I think it could have.

The movie sacrificed something in pursuit of a punchline or a gag every five-to-ten minutes. It's like the movie was trying so hard to be tongue-in-cheek that it almost approached self-importance from the other end.

Overall I agree that it was fun and entertaining, but it's definitely one of the weaker films in the Marvel franchise.

Marvel was putting out decent movies before Disney bought them. Are we now supposed to shun Marvel in service to some higher ideology because we don't like Disney's approach to copyright?

I'm not following your train of thought here. Are you saying the labelling standards in place for "GMO" (from state to state) are fuzzy and inconsistent? Or are you saying it's such a nebulous term (like "organic") that it doesn't tell you anything at all?

Do you have evidence of this or are you just spouting paranoid theory? And don't tell me "just Google it" or any other similar smart-ass comments. You're making the claim, you provide the evidence.

First, what numbers are you using to get $4 trillion for state budgets? Some of that is overlap from the Federal budget which sends some of the tax money back to states for administration of federal programs. When that money is cut, state budgets drop as a result. That happened this year in Arizona when federal subsidies to certain AZ state programs were cut and AZ had to raise the amount it collected from cities and counties to meet the shortfall. Source: currently living in Arizona.

Where would you start cutting waste from? Personnel? Maintenance and equipment? Welfare programs? Military budgets?* Wild-land fire-fighting efforts in rural America? FDA monitoring? The Education Department? The lovely sequestration game that BOTH major political parties brought down on us is already limiting what agencies can accomplish. Yeah, yeah, "do more with less", blah blah blah. There are only so many hours you can make people work in a day before they burn out. There's only so long you can run equipment on a shoe-string budget before something breaks.

For the record, I am NOT a Democrat and I do understand numbers when I put a dollar sign in front of them.

*Killing the F35 would have saved us a lot of money. Killing it now would still save us future expenses associated with making that bucket-o-bolts work worth a damn and the infrastructure upgrades to go along with it. Write your Congresscritters.

You're welcome. Go forth and do with it as you will.

Dial it back a notch there Tex. I'm not calling you out and I'm not insulting you. I just left you a link.

I recommend browsing this thread. There's whackjobs aplenty on both ends of the spectrum.

Unfortunately no one does this. Or at least not the two airlines I've flown recently. They board the first-class passengers first, then all their special clubs (Gold Members, Sapphire Members, etc), then they board by groups. I can't really identify what makes you a Group 1 vs a Group 4 member, but I don't think it's based on seat assignment. On the last four flights I was on, I spent five minutes standing in the aisle, trying to get to my seat at the back of the plane but blocked by a dozen people in various rows trying to put their luggage in the overhead bins. From the time the airline started boarding to the time they shut the cabin door was anywhere between 30-40 minutes each flight. Getting off the plane, by contrast, took about 15 minutes.

First-class passengers have their own segregated overhead storage bins, at least on US Airways and United.

On a side note, I flew first class once about three years ago when Southwest delayed me for five hours due to overbooking. I considered flying it again next time I had to travel but the prices were enough to talk me out of that.

Misuse of SWAT assets is a separate issue from militarization. The former is a procedural problem that city and state governments around the United States should be addressing. SWAT team members should be pushing back against being used for every stupid thing that comes to the mind of the police chief.

If you're going to "militarize" any part of the police force, the SWAT is the place to do it. Those teams exist specifically to deal with threats outside the normal tactical capabilities of law enforcement, which may include confrontations with well-armed gangs or home-grown crazies. In those instances, it make sense for the SWAT members (who are supposed to be trained to a level beyond your normal patrolman) to have a wider variety of options and hardware at there disposal.

Now, the militarization of the regular police force is something else entirely. Patrolman Krupke doesn't need an automatic rifle with gee-whiz optics and an up-armored assault vehicle just to patrol the neighborhood beat.

Harrison Bergeron was supposed to be a cautionary tale, dammit!

He used it to rapidly chill fruit and make a smoothy. I was once at one of his live shows and he used the same principle to make ice-cream in something like 30 seconds.

Getting on to most military bases in the US is fairly easy. Getting into the secured buildings where the interesting stuff goes on is much much harder.