Hydras are even bad in the campaign, lol. They're a fantastic unit for 100 minerals and 25 gas, though. Although the Lurker and the Impaler morphs for them are both REALLY good.
They cut discretionary programs to their lowest levels in many years. Entitlement programs are where they really need to cut if they wanted to trim the deficit, and you don't see people tripping over each other to either make the medical care market cheaper or more efficient.
The endless shrieking over the budget deficit is just a cover for people trying to keep the GOP together in the face of existential crisis - the Market Republicans (business), Libertarian Republicans (except when they aren't), and Social Republicans need distractions or they'll be at each others throats.
Let's face it - the GOP, as an institution (if not the grass roots), does not care about the deficit. It does not. If they did, they could have extracted various reforms from the Democrats in exchange for legislation - they could have played politics and gained something from it. They did not. Ask yourself, what is more likely to have happened:
1) the GOP squandered the past 2 years and the fights over the deficit to accomplish precisely nothing, or
2) that they were using the fights as an end in and of themselves to maintain party cohesion at a time where the only thing keeping their various factions together was their shared hatred of lefties?
Paul Ryan's budget was largely forgotten by the GOP not because it didn't add up, but because it was a political liability. This entire thing has been nothing more than a cynical ploy to maintain organizational unity in the face of mounting internal tensions.
Edit: If a Republican president is elected in 2016 - because if one isn't, they are in SERIOUS trouble - you'll see the deficit as a problem melt away even if it rises. I would remind everyone that the House controls the power of the purse. They could force entitlement reform but aren't willing to make the hard decisions needed to do so. Since they haven't worked up the nerve after two years and a lost Presidential election to even propose to do what they say they want to do, it beggars belief that this is about policy.
Edit2: The sequester is terrible policy but it was meant to be terrible policy. After a few weeks they'll wrangle out a half measure and we'll go back to manufactured crises every two months.
Mandating language at a government level is a bad idea in general. The Quebecois aren't going to maintain their culture by legislating their language into dominance, because culture and language aren't the same thing. They're not. Period. Full stop. Insistence to the contrary flies in the face of evidence I humbly present the United States, the United Kingdom of England, Scotland and Wales, Ireland, and Australia as sufficient evidence to the contrary.
Maintaining cultural integrity requires conformity to declared culture rules and excluding outside influences, which in and of itself precludes the possibility of multiculturalism. The opposite trend is stuff like these guys and Indian reservations, which are an abysmal failure to do much of anything beyond let a bunch of people stew by themselves to 'maintain their cultural integrity'.
What they really need to do with taxes at a federal level is scrap them and start over. The whole thing is just a mess right now. The base rates on businesses is too high, on stocks and derivatives too low, etc. The whole not indexing the numbers to inflation bit is also getting really old and really, really stupid as to why haven't done this.
Just enough is enough. Doing them on the back of a postcard isn't going to happen, but federal tax law is byzantine.
Right now, taxes on businesses start too high - they should be reduced to 20-25%, with less dependence on deductions and the ability to lobby state and federal Congress to meet budget. That money by and large gets filtered through the business as income or investment, with cash hoards being the exception, not the rule. They should start treating stocks like any other form of income, with dividends and the value of sales taxed at the holders respective income bracket. Doing otherwise creates perverse incentives and treats stocks and accompanying financial products as preferred income.
If you do all that, reform the market for medicine so prices for all medicines and medical procedures MUST be public information, and rate the efficacy of medicines and medical procedures, you would watch a lot of these problems melt away.
-------------
Inequality is a big deal, but we're not going to solve it by taxing rich people so we can pay for drugs for old people. This isn't some rich/poor divide, if you're concerned about finance, it's an old/young divide. What we need to be doing is investing in our future by emphasizing technical skills and education in math, science, and technology from k-12. Reforming taxes to make a more business friendly atmosphere for small businesses would also help, as well as some basic repairs to our countries aging infrastructure. **** is falling apart in many places. More nuclear power stations would also be a good way to move forward, with new model reactors and designs replacing our current crop of cold war era built plants.
I say this as a Democrat. Medical care needs some reform. Taxes need to be fixed - in most cases, lowered. Certain expenses - namely medical, need to be reined in. In many cases, it's going to suck for the people who have their costs reined in. But many products can be pushed out of pharmacies and become OTC (hell, they did it already for prilosec and prevacid). We need to be investing in the future, not pouring money into medical care for the elderly, at a federal level.
I think if the first cut you make to the Medicare problem is cutting out the fraud...that would be an amazing start.
Same with Medicaid, Disability, Welfare, and yes, even the Military (though when the Military spends money fraudulently, it's usually called "research")
Medicare and Medicaid fraud is almost nonexistent. These programs are incredibly tightfisted. Military has problems because of ****ty accounting practices and pork barrel politics, they'll hopefully be able to pass an audit on their accounting this year.
Medicare barely covers pharmacy costs on its own - most of what you're referencing likely comes from Medicaid. (Or Part-D that is personally funded by the recipient at a hefty premium - $180/mo is my non-D contribution, I believe last time I looked at the cost if I wanted to add D it was something like $540 extra a month - it was something completely out of scale with the $20 in copays I have without it for sure [all my meds are cheap generics except one, but I "illegally" get that one via a Canadian pharmacy for $20/mo instead of the $180/mo I'd pay through my normal Medicare pharmacy plan (gabapentin - fun stuff)])
When the mother in law has me pick up her Medicare only diabetic meds (which are covered BETTER than most meds under Medicare) - she's looking at $180+ on stuff with a list price of $300. The same meds used to be $20 when she was on BC/BS just a few years ago.
Now that said, with assistance from Medicaid those same meds max at something like $3.30 or something like that. (Although since Medicaid is locally managed, probably is variable depending on state) And with the numbers for Medicaid qualification under Medicare being low enough to cover a large portion it absolutely would effect many, but again technically Medicaid for most of the issue.
Frankly, if Medicare didn't suck without a secondary pharmacy plan you wouldn't see Medicare-D being such a big deal currently. (Although ACA is expected to result in their demise for the mostpart)
Absolutely some cuts need to be made to Medicare - but I don't think pharmacy is likely to be one that can really have any serious effect (although it could on Medicaid). Fraud - like used to happen with the Scooter Store and was tamped down on are great examples of where absolute gains can be made - and without any real sacrifice either. [I have no problem with people getting Scooters if they REALLY need one, but the qualifications were low and they didn't worry about documentation that entire businesses popped up to abuse]
Ice: Indeed on Military Research (even the real thing no parantheticals) still astonished the F-35 project has almost run $2t now, and still not produced a working aircraft - and likely not something that we'll ever make the money back selling to other nations with that level of cost, unlike cheaper research projects.
Minor nitpick - diabetic stuff is largely covered under Medicare B, not D.
Cost overruns in prescription drug plans are astounding. People get prescription omeprazole - prilosec - even though that crap costs $20 for 42 capsules of the otc version. The prescription omeprazole equivalent to that much can cost over $80. Nexium is $220 a bottle, when it goes generic they're going to sell it OTC for the same price as prilosec. Similarly, adapalene gel costs over $200 for a 15g tube, you can get the same thing for $50 from Canada. Medicare D has so many plans that just saying "Med D coverage" is almost meaningless, but the price of medicine is ludicrously high. There's a huge markup on many drugs in the US, and Medicare is the prime driver of costs as the elderly are increasingly being treated with a stream of drugs. Those who 'pass' means tests get Medicaid assistance which helps defray drug co-pays at the pharmacy level, but also serves to shunt Medicare expenses onto Medicaid, making up an increasing portion of expenses.
Seriously, the government needs to aggressively bargain down the price of drugs it buys, along with other liberalizations that open up the pharmaceutical trade, in order to break the astounding costs associated with medicine in the US. Insurance takes a small share of the pie - the lion's share of money is absorbed by drug companies, particularly non generic manufacturers (although the generics are still obscenely expensive), as well as hospitals and other care centers with large administrative staffs and departments.
I can't speak for everyone, but I am willing to sacrifice for a positive change.
I've been super poor, once when my dad got arrested, my mom, brother and I lived in a friends attic, all sharing a used mattress.
I lived a few years of my childhood on welfare, and delt with evictions, shelters, soup kitchens.
I can survive poverty again if I had to.
That being said, I know there are some changes I would make that would really rock the system. That's the problem though, no one wants to rock the system.
But I would rather suffer through 10 years of absolute hell to come out the other end in heaven - then plod through a slightly better hell but forever.
I do not forsee any positive changes on the horizon, I see a horrible future ahead of us.
Though, I usually get the "nice tinfoil hat" remarks if I talk about why.
Actually mending US budget problems doesn't require you to sacrifice.
It requires Medicare to sacrifice, which means substantial cuts and/or reform. Medical care, specifically for the elderly, is the prime driver of government costs. I work in a pharmacy - do you have any idea how much this stuff costs? Drug and hospital overruns are an obscene expense, not to mention you get people in a vegetative state being kept alive by intensive care which costs oodles of money despite dementia having rotted their brains out.
The sequester is bad because it doesn't do anything to liberalize the drug market by making compound drugs easier to field (Januvia, I'm looking at you) despite both ingredients being already deemed safe, it doesn't do anything to make generics easier to get, it doesn't do anything to prioritize health care management plans rather than fee for service, it doesn't do anything to shove meds that should be OTC 100% into store aisles (PPI's like Prilosec, Nexium, Aciphex, and Prevacid), and it doesn't do anything to rate the effectiveness of various treatments which is so badly needed.
It's just a bad bill. It was designed to be bad, to try and force the house and senate to reconcile their differences. Even if you want to just trim budgets, there are better ways to do so than the sequester. It going through is a travesty since it proves the house and senate aren't capable of sitting down and implementing serious reform on entitlement programs.
The good cheer with which it is greeted is something I find utterly baffling. It doesn't even come close to generating a balanced budget, in order for that to happen we would need to implement entitlement reform including the removal of reimbursement for certain therapies and palliative care for terminal patients. It's a token effort with negligible gains financially that does serious harm to worthwhile programs. It is largely futile, and cheering for its passage ignores the reality of accounting in favor if ideology that sees cuts as an end unto themselves. Even if 100% of discretionary spending, including military, was cut, we would still be running a deficit due to health spending. Any budget trimming plan that ignores Medicare growth is, by definition, not a serious attempt to deal with the budget.
The technical term is either 'boss fight' for when the number is 1 big one or 3 small ones, a 'cutscene' where it's usually 1 really big one or less than 10, or an 'intro'/'conclusion' for any other number. When not being rendered, swooping around, or fought, dragons (in any number) can referred to as either a 'problem' or by name.
For instance, in Skyrim, where Alduin shows up, you see an intro of dragons. Near the end of the game as you talk to Paarthurnax, you get a conclusion of dragons.
In Witcher 2, Dragons are considerably more badass and can't be killed by a gaggle of drunken fjord-billies. As such, you get several cutscenes and one boss fight of dragon.
Which you're posting on a machine that has literally tens of thousands of moving parts.
Life is a series of chemical processes - when the chemistry changes, the complex molecules that are proteins interact differently. Why these processes go from step to step isn't mysterious, it's chemistry. They don't 'know' anything - they react to their environment. And when they've 1 billion years of random changes to get here with slight deviations in each generation with failures being excluded from continuing in the process, it stands to reason that the ensuing molecules and accompanying processes might be really complex.
The officers who shot at the newspaper delivery women before verifying that they either were or were not Chris Dorner should have the book thrown at them. But they weren't killed.
I despise the kind of standoffs that Dorner ended up in since they end up with either a voluntary surrender of the suspect or the death of the suspect. There's got to be some kind of better way to flush somebody out of a cabin than tear gas. A thorough review of actions taken before any death involving police is always in order, and the use of tear gas to flush him out, and the viability of other tactics, deserves to be questioned.
The problem with Avengers vs. X-men is that there's no baseline power level for them. You can't compare them next to each other like you can Pokemon with fixed stats in a game. They've gone up and down in power over the years - both teams, with various reboots when they get too strong, etc.
Yes, the X-men could trash the Avengers if you use the right continuity bit of them. Likewise, the Avengers would thrash the X-men if you get them at the right time.
Pikachu, however, is an objectively bad Pokemon. It is slow, fragile, and weak. Its offense is 55 atk, 50 SpA, and 90 spd. Its defense is 35 HP, 30 Def, 40 SpDef. This puts it extremely low on any sort of matchup versus anything.
Wolverine would beat Pikachu, b/c of his insane bulk and resistance to paralysis. He would just keep spamming Metal Claw, and even though Pikachu's electric type resists it, he would still eventually wear it down.
Cyclops would lose, b/c Cyclops loses at everything. Loses at leadership. Loses at girlfriend. Loses at losing.
All the rest would win, as they're either faster than Pikachu (storm, jean grey), have priority moves capable of OHKO (Shadowcat pretty obviously knows Shadow Sneak and Nightcrawler has Sucker Punch, with enough Atk to OHKO Pikachu), or are tough enough to trade hits with the rodent (even Jubilee).
If Beast is anything like Whitney's Miltank, he would kick Pickachu's ass 11 times out of 10.
I think it's fair to say that Professor X can use Psychic, so he should be able to handily beat a Pikachu, any Pikachu. It's worth noting that Ash's Pikachu got his butt kicked in the show plenty of times throughout the series - each of the X-Men, even Jubilee, stand a solid chance to beat a Pikachu. Ash's Pokemon don't get plot armor before a re-match.
C'mon, they don't use it b/c it's an obvious game breaker in the show that fundamentally was about conflict but not necessarily combat - they were diplomats and scientists, not soldiers. If you were a military strategist and someone showed you a teleporter and said "Your enemy lives in a gas filled box over thar" your first thought would not be to use it to send him a fruit basket and a boarding party.
If the show was more combat centric ala Battlestar Everyone's a Cylon, it would have been used a few times.
A big thing is weapon yield. If a Star Trek ship wants to refit its weapons with antimatter or space distortion weaponry, they can change up their torpedoes into planet destroying armaments relatively quickly. Blowing up planets is easy in the Trek-iverse, while in Star Wars even the largest battle station isn't rated for the kind of blasts that Star Trek ships can dish out.
Trek warships are WAY more powerful than their Star Wars universe equivalents, easily capable with appropriate and available weapon loadout of blasting planets into hot gas. The Enterprise of TNG is roughly equivalent to a Nebulon-B frigate in the Star Wars Universe, and it could be retrofitted easily with higher power torpedo banks capable of generating explosions that shields in either universe couldn't possibly handle.
If we consider how combat would work practically, it would look a lot more like Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ - relying heavily on teleporters where they're available) than what was displayed in the show. The bigger question is why neither universe goes on about stuff like anti-missile systems since you could obviously pack a HUGE warhead with high energy explosive in a Star Wars ship, as well as the effective range of turbolasers, which can glass a planet but seem to have vastly less range in effective ship to ship combat (tracking systems for fast moving targets?). Transporters work at ranges of over 20 kilometers, so you can teleport an antimatter torpedo from extreme range right into a Star Wars ship formation and detonate it, obliterating all strike craft, all smaller vessels, and quite probably either damaging or destroying the larger craft outright depending on the size. Niche units like the Super Star Destroyers and Death Stars don't really factor heavily into a force equation - their shields were stronger than Star Destroyers, but they don't have anything to make up the speed difference, teleporter advantage, and weapon yield that Trek ships can bring to bear from beyond turbo laser range. To say nothing of the extreme cost of supplying such vessels when smaller, more efficient craft could do their jobs for them. The problem is that Trek ships wield range, speed, and firepower far in excess of their Star Wars equivalents.
He's a Terastodon replacement (kinda), not a Primus replacement. He'll replace whatever people replaced Primeval titan with, and actually be better for many since he's resistant to Bribery, prevents reanimation from letting a B/X deck that doesn't include green rocket ahead, and can't be used to just blow you out when stolen/reanimated.
Agree with others about the Primus as combo target - persist is unique in EDH to the Primus.
Terastodon still has a niche since he can blow up 3 things of ONE opponent, allowing you to completely blow someone out. If you can resolve a Natural Order by turn 4 in any green deck, you will kill one opponent with a Terastodon unless they've played three mana artifacts. I guarantee it. This guy, not so much.
If everything was real, he could've called a journalist or a lawyer.
Well, let's consider this:
Reports of LAPD brutality, corruption and abuse are widespread. Everyone knows what they do. Their reputation is so bad that every single claim Dorner makes about them is perfectly believable. This has been going on for year in and year out. And yet, nothing has changed. The LAPD is still going strong.
This suggests that just going to a journalist or a lawyer doesn't actually work. There is nothing you can report that would finally push the case over the edge because we're already talking free fall. Corporate media isn't going to be particularly critical of authority because it would harm their interests. Official channels and lawyers are obviously not enough because official channels are corrupt and judges are in on the LAPD's dealings. When law enforcement oppresses you instead of protects you, you don't turn to law enforcement to fix it. You can't.
It actually *did* work because the LAPD was put under an eight year consent decree after the Rampart scandal and underwent significant institutional reform.
Corporate media is also going to go whole hog into scandal because it makes headlines that are good for business. Running around killing people isn't the solution to your problems. What this guy did isn't justifiable in any way, shape or form.
The endless shrieking over the budget deficit is just a cover for people trying to keep the GOP together in the face of existential crisis - the Market Republicans (business), Libertarian Republicans (except when they aren't), and Social Republicans need distractions or they'll be at each others throats.
Let's face it - the GOP, as an institution (if not the grass roots), does not care about the deficit. It does not. If they did, they could have extracted various reforms from the Democrats in exchange for legislation - they could have played politics and gained something from it. They did not. Ask yourself, what is more likely to have happened:
1) the GOP squandered the past 2 years and the fights over the deficit to accomplish precisely nothing, or
2) that they were using the fights as an end in and of themselves to maintain party cohesion at a time where the only thing keeping their various factions together was their shared hatred of lefties?
Paul Ryan's budget was largely forgotten by the GOP not because it didn't add up, but because it was a political liability. This entire thing has been nothing more than a cynical ploy to maintain organizational unity in the face of mounting internal tensions.
Edit: If a Republican president is elected in 2016 - because if one isn't, they are in SERIOUS trouble - you'll see the deficit as a problem melt away even if it rises. I would remind everyone that the House controls the power of the purse. They could force entitlement reform but aren't willing to make the hard decisions needed to do so. Since they haven't worked up the nerve after two years and a lost Presidential election to even propose to do what they say they want to do, it beggars belief that this is about policy.
Edit2: The sequester is terrible policy but it was meant to be terrible policy. After a few weeks they'll wrangle out a half measure and we'll go back to manufactured crises every two months.
Maintaining cultural integrity requires conformity to declared culture rules and excluding outside influences, which in and of itself precludes the possibility of multiculturalism. The opposite trend is stuff like these guys and Indian reservations, which are an abysmal failure to do much of anything beyond let a bunch of people stew by themselves to 'maintain their cultural integrity'.
Just enough is enough. Doing them on the back of a postcard isn't going to happen, but federal tax law is byzantine.
Right now, taxes on businesses start too high - they should be reduced to 20-25%, with less dependence on deductions and the ability to lobby state and federal Congress to meet budget. That money by and large gets filtered through the business as income or investment, with cash hoards being the exception, not the rule. They should start treating stocks like any other form of income, with dividends and the value of sales taxed at the holders respective income bracket. Doing otherwise creates perverse incentives and treats stocks and accompanying financial products as preferred income.
If you do all that, reform the market for medicine so prices for all medicines and medical procedures MUST be public information, and rate the efficacy of medicines and medical procedures, you would watch a lot of these problems melt away.
-------------
Inequality is a big deal, but we're not going to solve it by taxing rich people so we can pay for drugs for old people. This isn't some rich/poor divide, if you're concerned about finance, it's an old/young divide. What we need to be doing is investing in our future by emphasizing technical skills and education in math, science, and technology from k-12. Reforming taxes to make a more business friendly atmosphere for small businesses would also help, as well as some basic repairs to our countries aging infrastructure. **** is falling apart in many places. More nuclear power stations would also be a good way to move forward, with new model reactors and designs replacing our current crop of cold war era built plants.
I say this as a Democrat. Medical care needs some reform. Taxes need to be fixed - in most cases, lowered. Certain expenses - namely medical, need to be reined in. In many cases, it's going to suck for the people who have their costs reined in. But many products can be pushed out of pharmacies and become OTC (hell, they did it already for prilosec and prevacid). We need to be investing in the future, not pouring money into medical care for the elderly, at a federal level.
Medicare and Medicaid fraud is almost nonexistent. These programs are incredibly tightfisted. Military has problems because of ****ty accounting practices and pork barrel politics, they'll hopefully be able to pass an audit on their accounting this year.
Minor nitpick - diabetic stuff is largely covered under Medicare B, not D.
Cost overruns in prescription drug plans are astounding. People get prescription omeprazole - prilosec - even though that crap costs $20 for 42 capsules of the otc version. The prescription omeprazole equivalent to that much can cost over $80. Nexium is $220 a bottle, when it goes generic they're going to sell it OTC for the same price as prilosec. Similarly, adapalene gel costs over $200 for a 15g tube, you can get the same thing for $50 from Canada. Medicare D has so many plans that just saying "Med D coverage" is almost meaningless, but the price of medicine is ludicrously high. There's a huge markup on many drugs in the US, and Medicare is the prime driver of costs as the elderly are increasingly being treated with a stream of drugs. Those who 'pass' means tests get Medicaid assistance which helps defray drug co-pays at the pharmacy level, but also serves to shunt Medicare expenses onto Medicaid, making up an increasing portion of expenses.
Seriously, the government needs to aggressively bargain down the price of drugs it buys, along with other liberalizations that open up the pharmaceutical trade, in order to break the astounding costs associated with medicine in the US. Insurance takes a small share of the pie - the lion's share of money is absorbed by drug companies, particularly non generic manufacturers (although the generics are still obscenely expensive), as well as hospitals and other care centers with large administrative staffs and departments.
Actually mending US budget problems doesn't require you to sacrifice.
It requires Medicare to sacrifice, which means substantial cuts and/or reform. Medical care, specifically for the elderly, is the prime driver of government costs. I work in a pharmacy - do you have any idea how much this stuff costs? Drug and hospital overruns are an obscene expense, not to mention you get people in a vegetative state being kept alive by intensive care which costs oodles of money despite dementia having rotted their brains out.
The sequester is bad because it doesn't do anything to liberalize the drug market by making compound drugs easier to field (Januvia, I'm looking at you) despite both ingredients being already deemed safe, it doesn't do anything to make generics easier to get, it doesn't do anything to prioritize health care management plans rather than fee for service, it doesn't do anything to shove meds that should be OTC 100% into store aisles (PPI's like Prilosec, Nexium, Aciphex, and Prevacid), and it doesn't do anything to rate the effectiveness of various treatments which is so badly needed.
It's just a bad bill. It was designed to be bad, to try and force the house and senate to reconcile their differences. Even if you want to just trim budgets, there are better ways to do so than the sequester. It going through is a travesty since it proves the house and senate aren't capable of sitting down and implementing serious reform on entitlement programs.
The good cheer with which it is greeted is something I find utterly baffling. It doesn't even come close to generating a balanced budget, in order for that to happen we would need to implement entitlement reform including the removal of reimbursement for certain therapies and palliative care for terminal patients. It's a token effort with negligible gains financially that does serious harm to worthwhile programs. It is largely futile, and cheering for its passage ignores the reality of accounting in favor if ideology that sees cuts as an end unto themselves. Even if 100% of discretionary spending, including military, was cut, we would still be running a deficit due to health spending. Any budget trimming plan that ignores Medicare growth is, by definition, not a serious attempt to deal with the budget.
For instance, in Skyrim, where Alduin shows up, you see an intro of dragons. Near the end of the game as you talk to Paarthurnax, you get a conclusion of dragons.
In Witcher 2, Dragons are considerably more badass and can't be killed by a gaggle of drunken fjord-billies. As such, you get several cutscenes and one boss fight of dragon.
Life is a series of chemical processes - when the chemistry changes, the complex molecules that are proteins interact differently. Why these processes go from step to step isn't mysterious, it's chemistry. They don't 'know' anything - they react to their environment. And when they've 1 billion years of random changes to get here with slight deviations in each generation with failures being excluded from continuing in the process, it stands to reason that the ensuing molecules and accompanying processes might be really complex.
I despise the kind of standoffs that Dorner ended up in since they end up with either a voluntary surrender of the suspect or the death of the suspect. There's got to be some kind of better way to flush somebody out of a cabin than tear gas. A thorough review of actions taken before any death involving police is always in order, and the use of tear gas to flush him out, and the viability of other tactics, deserves to be questioned.
Yes, the X-men could trash the Avengers if you use the right continuity bit of them. Likewise, the Avengers would thrash the X-men if you get them at the right time.
Pikachu, however, is an objectively bad Pokemon. It is slow, fragile, and weak. Its offense is 55 atk, 50 SpA, and 90 spd. Its defense is 35 HP, 30 Def, 40 SpDef. This puts it extremely low on any sort of matchup versus anything.
Wolverine would beat Pikachu, b/c of his insane bulk and resistance to paralysis. He would just keep spamming Metal Claw, and even though Pikachu's electric type resists it, he would still eventually wear it down.
Cyclops would lose, b/c Cyclops loses at everything. Loses at leadership. Loses at girlfriend. Loses at losing.
All the rest would win, as they're either faster than Pikachu (storm, jean grey), have priority moves capable of OHKO (Shadowcat pretty obviously knows Shadow Sneak and Nightcrawler has Sucker Punch, with enough Atk to OHKO Pikachu), or are tough enough to trade hits with the rodent (even Jubilee).
If Beast is anything like Whitney's Miltank, he would kick Pickachu's ass 11 times out of 10.
I think it's fair to say that Professor X can use Psychic, so he should be able to handily beat a Pikachu, any Pikachu. It's worth noting that Ash's Pikachu got his butt kicked in the show plenty of times throughout the series - each of the X-Men, even Jubilee, stand a solid chance to beat a Pikachu. Ash's Pokemon don't get plot armor before a re-match.
If the show was more combat centric ala Battlestar Everyone's a Cylon, it would have been used a few times.
Trek warships are WAY more powerful than their Star Wars universe equivalents, easily capable with appropriate and available weapon loadout of blasting planets into hot gas. The Enterprise of TNG is roughly equivalent to a Nebulon-B frigate in the Star Wars Universe, and it could be retrofitted easily with higher power torpedo banks capable of generating explosions that shields in either universe couldn't possibly handle.
If we consider how combat would work practically, it would look a lot more like Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ - relying heavily on teleporters where they're available) than what was displayed in the show. The bigger question is why neither universe goes on about stuff like anti-missile systems since you could obviously pack a HUGE warhead with high energy explosive in a Star Wars ship, as well as the effective range of turbolasers, which can glass a planet but seem to have vastly less range in effective ship to ship combat (tracking systems for fast moving targets?). Transporters work at ranges of over 20 kilometers, so you can teleport an antimatter torpedo from extreme range right into a Star Wars ship formation and detonate it, obliterating all strike craft, all smaller vessels, and quite probably either damaging or destroying the larger craft outright depending on the size. Niche units like the Super Star Destroyers and Death Stars don't really factor heavily into a force equation - their shields were stronger than Star Destroyers, but they don't have anything to make up the speed difference, teleporter advantage, and weapon yield that Trek ships can bring to bear from beyond turbo laser range. To say nothing of the extreme cost of supplying such vessels when smaller, more efficient craft could do their jobs for them. The problem is that Trek ships wield range, speed, and firepower far in excess of their Star Wars equivalents.
Agree with others about the Primus as combo target - persist is unique in EDH to the Primus.
Terastodon still has a niche since he can blow up 3 things of ONE opponent, allowing you to completely blow someone out. If you can resolve a Natural Order by turn 4 in any green deck, you will kill one opponent with a Terastodon unless they've played three mana artifacts. I guarantee it. This guy, not so much.
It actually *did* work because the LAPD was put under an eight year consent decree after the Rampart scandal and underwent significant institutional reform.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/02/christopher-dorner
Corporate media is also going to go whole hog into scandal because it makes headlines that are good for business. Running around killing people isn't the solution to your problems. What this guy did isn't justifiable in any way, shape or form.