The foreign policy of both Russia and the US is far more motivated by domestic policy than "imperialism" or "cold war tactics".

Putin just needs to appear to be winning. Winning wars, media arguments, just winning anything. Crossword competitions, ice hockey games, fishing, push-ups, literally anything. With not much to be gained in Ukraine quickly, he can switch to helping Assad to quash rebels and appear to fight the IS. Russian air support and logistics will have small losses and big PR gains. Putin is clever so he will avoid direct confrontation with the IS leading to a long stalemate and much destruction, in Iraq mainly.

Obama needs to do stupid unworkable things like "spread democracy", "help Israel no matter what", "broker peace in the middle east" and "support 'friends' of the US, some of them as bad as Assad" - its nearly impossible for him to have a sane middle east policy. There is nothing Obama can do in the short term in Syria. He probably cant reconsider his position on Assad and there is no reasonable path to topple Assad gracefully. Also no direct path to fight IS - Turkey will fight Kurds before fighting IS, Israel has to be careful.

Is Iran the key then? Iran is definitely not to be trusted http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/11903290/Eight-of-Irans-womens-football-team-are-men.html

As someone who researches the effects of video games on education (primarily on learners of English as another language) I can tell you the empirical research into the topic is not nearly so cut and dried.

There was a lot of hype about the "brain age"-type games when they first came out, some of which this video references, but what we know now is that those types of games only make you "smarter" in the sense that they make you better at solving similar puzzle-types. In other words, the gains you see are really just the effects of practice. The supposed "smartness" does not transfer over to other skill areas. See this link for more info: http://pamkato.com/2013/04/17/do-brain-training-games-work-yes-no-and-maybe/

So basically everything referenced in this video can be explained by "practice" rather than by some special characteristic of the video games themselves (certainly video games make the practice part fun, though). Furthermore, there is pronounced lack of research into whether the benefits such as those reported in this video actually mean anything significant (i.e. whether being able to more concretely differentiate different levels of gray when you are younger actually leads to better vision when you are older compared with non-gamers, whether you retain the ability to read small text as you age better than non-gamers, etc.).

I do believe there are cognitive benefits to ALL kinds of gaming (board games, pen-and-paper RPGs, card games like poker, crossword puzzles, tic-tac-toe, etc.) but based on the empirical evidence so far I'm not convinced there is anything particularly special about video games that leads players to become "smarter" in the sort of general sense that is being suggested here.

>> ^Crosswords:

Troglodytes who touch computer screens to point at stuff.

It's even worse when it's the current user doing it. You've got a mouse under your hand that controls an object already on the screen, not coincidentally called a pointer!

Along the lines of what @Shayde said, I had a user once who not only got ink on the screen, but actually intentionally wrote on it. I kept throwing out her little post-it notes with her password on them, so she wrote it directly on the monitor screen.

Or, if they use a pen to point at stuff. Pen ink on the screen is the worst. A problem when everyone shares desks at work. :-/

I had another pet peeve at work just today; a co-worker who kept sniffing loudly through his nose like he's clearing it. Every few seconds. For several hours. Gaaaaaahhhhhh...!
>> ^Crosswords:

Troglodytes who touch computer screens to point at stuff. Yes thank you I do see the thing on the screen that's right in front of my face, and now I see your big nasty smudgy finger print too. I need to find a way to lift prints from screens and apply them to crime scenes.

>> ^Crosswords:

So basically its, 'look what you an do when you have 100k+ worth of sound equipment'? Its cool, but as far as a feat of human vocal prowess not so much. Reggie Watts is far better in that respect, plus he's got awesome fluffy hair.
Yes, Reggie Watts or Beardyman are more impressive.

>> ^Crosswords:

>> ^kceaton1:
It goes beyond evolution though, if I'm getting this right. FOR HELL'S SAKE we can use the speed of light to see things FAR, FAR, FAR, FAR, FAR^100 older than 10,000 years!!! It's a fucking joke. If you believe this you are an idiot. Period! = .
It's not just light and carbon dating, we have LOTS of ways to show this place is WAY older...

You're forgetting the Law of God Physics which clearly states God can do anything including making the universe appear much older than it actually is for the purposes of fooling his human creations so he has a way of testing their loyalty when he's not asking them to kill their first born son and saying, JUST KIDDING, at the last minute.


The funny part about this stuff is that they typically say that God "moved the photons" (atleast the semi smarter ones will) and the STILL dumb ones will say that, well light was, you see going a different speed back then so it still all adds up...YOU SEE!!!

BUT THEN!...If you understand relativity correctly like me you understand that you can change the speed of light all the time you want. In fact make it go 1 ft/second! It doesn't MAKE A DAMNED difference in how we will STILL measure the time gone/go/will go by! People never get this at all and it really is the sort of thing were someone mumbles under their breath when they finally understand what I'm saying/going to say: "Is that not amazing!!!". You see mass and energy are the same thing and light is special, it goes the same speed EVERYWHERE, EVERY-TIME, ALL THE TIME--and this thing called "light" are these little tiny particles/waves called photons that as I said before, but not quite as directly, they literally ARE mass and energy, so the relationship between us and light is so fundamental it SHOULD blow your mind. But, so many people went through school and listen to their preachers and have no idea how vitally important that "little" discovery that Einstein made was!!! So, even we at 1 ft/s light speed STILL notice everything moving and everyone we know moving at that same "time" measurement of one second (funny isn't it; but, light is traveling at one second as well, how can this make any sense..!?!?! Well here it comes, it is called relativity and the fact that light is a constant and the other very important fact that our measurement of one second really measures...what?) as we are literally stuck in a cage (this "cage" is called The Universe) that cannot be tampered with. This is all due to that little fact that our perception of time IS relative and our view of one second can be EXTREMELY messed with, but to us it will always seem to be one second--even if 1 Billion years went by. The age of the Universe comes from the SHIFT of energy in the photons present that we can see coming from other places in any direction around us; so God would need to put THAT hologram there nothing else, BUT there is a giant problem in doing this (because due to our friends that want God to actively fuck us over for some reason--the hologram only extends technically 10,000 years out and "hides" the rest--if God put everything the way we see it and it isn't even an illusion--what can I say at that point if God was real I would join the Devil in less than a heart beat to overthrow his LYING, SADIST, and moreover EVIL ass!) If the hologram WAS there then: the hologram, it would need to be different in EVERY single direction you look; every time you move one Planck length (I might be wrong, maybe just the length of a photon) further out into space God would need to fix the energy distribution to make his illusion look correct... YOU HAVE no idea how absurd to the absurd degree this sounds, even GOD would spend his entire existence doing this because the job would require this long to do it: forever (until the UNIVERSE STOPS!). I'm not kidding it would be utterly ridiculous (from Earth his "image" would look right, on Mt. Everest, it would look wrong,; in space it would look wrong--in fact if you have sensitive enough equipment every square foot you took would somehow end up looking incorrect--we're talking about the cosmic background radiation, the little thing that lets us know how old our Universe is and that everything around us is moving away from us...

So that comes to the "putting the photons into place syndrome". For the most part I'm starting to think that these people like to abuse their brain in secret rooms with paint, huffing it until they collapse in a heap. in the morning they slowly scrub the white vinyl paint off their nose and mouth and go start with the blue. The problem with this is God had to of atleast put photons 13.5 Billion years out for this to even work--so in the end it falls so flat on it's face it makes no sense. If he was using a hologram, where is the border? Why do we detect gravitational anomalies when those have been proven to be real locally? It just goes on, and on, and on, and on.

I'd love to hear them explain why space may be full of Dark Matter or better yet why is "nothing" full of something called "The Quantum Foam"--you may have heard of "Vacuum Energy", same thing more or less--look it up it's fascinating and may even be the source OF "The Big Bang". Why can we pull photons (from "nothing") out of the Quantum Foam? According to lots of religious folks you can't create something from nothing, but WHAM, there it is! Sometimes, it just might be a bad idea to hold onto your old per-conceived precepts if they do not allow for change. BTW, the photon coming out of thin air was in a very well-known (now) experiment and is HIGHLY worth looking up; you can find details about it in my Videosift Blog (which is entirely about it).

You could disprove their crap all day. The truth is is that they did bad in their science classes, they just didn't get it and for some archaic left over juvenile resentment, they must have their righteous rite of "The Comeback Minister (or Preacher/Prophet/Father/etc...). So in revenge they are taking the easy way out and saying, "Hah, see I didn't need to learn that stuff from Mr. Scrampton in 12th grade! I'm a Minister now and I can just TELL you what is right, because I know it's right in my gut; especially after five cases of Budweiser!". Now they never tell you the truth. They lie, they tell you it "came" to them, like their a prophet now or something. ...Well if they can be prophets, why can't we? Oh wait, scientists do in fact fill this role and they do a good job at it. they constantly warn us of dangers and things the government should do. But, there are far too many damage control freaks with their own agenda running around and they seem to cling to religion as it satisfies very easily their questions, making it so they don't have to work to find the actual hard ones that exist and that we DO need.

It's not in the Bible that any of these idiots would tell us anything meaningful, nor the Koran, or any other holy book. So I find it strange that so many line up and then sit down and listen to these idiots blather on about the world and how to cure it and what it's ills are. They also as I said do a great deal of "re-education" in THEIR vision satisfying that old juvenile, washed up nothing who couldn't get over the fact that he wasn't good at science off the bat or maybe even when he tried too. This is the bane on America (and I would assume many other places, but America has a lot of this). They are teaching and re-teaching our people ridiculous notions and since they require very little work to understand, just community, people believe it--especially because it's being believed in numbers and that is the important part.

Now this was a longer post than what I wanted it to be and it also went past the scope of my original intentions. BUT, the reason why those statistics exist is due to the nature, the epidemic of how people are being re-taught forcibly (you think like us or you are no longer with us--it can have shocking community affects, especially when it becomes a inter-family problem...I know this EXTREMELY well due to my Mormon upbringing; when I became an atheist I was shunned and cut-off from the community, at first. they slowly let me back in when they realized I was an extremely good person, usually a better person than many of the people in the Church and so my neighbors finally no longer cared--cared what the churches stance was either--who or what I was, they took me for what I was--IT TOOK 20 years to happen!). So many people are started and taught young this is a HUGE problem, I know it's a major one with the Mormon church. You are baptized into the church at eight. You should hear the things they ask you to accept and agree to--they are things that only and adult with experience could properly answer (more like someone that is 25) yet an eight year old surrounded by their family and peers of course can give only ONE answer.

After that, you being to be taught all the incorrect things you could possibly think of. If you are even semi-devout like me (and this goes for many other religions as well) going to public school in Utah, the church has LITERALLY built seminary schools next to every High School and Junior High (and this is true outside of Utah too, as I'm SURE Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nevada--maybe more too, I'm sure they have them locally to attend--I'm sure many of these states have these institutions built right next door or somewhere for kids to attend) you will attend seminary due to the wishes of your parents (my parental situation was beginning to change--and for the better).

Still I attended seminary through grades 7-12 and could have continued in College, but I was agnostic by then...if not basically atheist, just not strong enough to say it. Seminary had it's wonderful parts, but the mis-information was a joke. luckily I was smart, very smart. So I was able to separate the information apart from each other and it allowed me to ask STRONG questions about my one time faith. These questions and their mis-information EASILY killed that religion for eternity, for me--for A LOT of reasons. Many of which, many of you know...easily. It came to ME slow. SO when i talk about helping other people you need to realize what we are up against. facts that do come to us easily usually don't to them and it typically has to do with their past. but, it is HARD to get them to talk about their past openly. For one thing there is no possibility of them being wrong or in danger of it. Somehow we MUST change this.

/Like I said longer, but I hope it was worth it.
/edited for more clarity and a few additions

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by original submitter Crosswords.

Moving this video to Crosswords's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Thanks @xxovercastxx and @Crosswords.

I've heard it said that Americans treat their flag like we (British) treat our monarchy, in that they're both the symbol of our nations. However, I don't know of anyone who particularly cares about our monarchy; I know there are people love them and a few hate them but most just shrug our shoulders and get on with real life. It seems that the American flag isn't treated with this apathy, but perhaps I only hear about nut-bugs (to varying degrees) because the 99% of normal Americans aren't newsworthy.

Obama's flag-pin is case in point: I heard about that, probably here on the Sift, and it seemed like half of America was up in arms at this "disrespectful" gesture, as if it mattered a damn. I realised that this was probably a small handful of far-right morons who generate a disproportionate amount of noise (e.g. Fox News). I've no idea actually how large a portion of the American public cared about his lapel.

Not that Britain doesn't have our own seemingly pointless moral/patriotic mobs, for example, the arbitrary whinge about not having war memorial symbols on England's football kit, which because a huge issue last November despite not having been an issue once before. It was a big deal in the shittier newspapers but if you'd polled the general population, I doubt many would have had a strong opinion.

FWIW, there's no actual patriotism in having a flag outside your house or in your press conference. Patriotism is personal sacrifice for national benefit, and flying a flag is neither. But this is a whole other kettle of plankton.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Here is the chart so far. It's hard to read because of all the names unfortunately, but you can manually take people off the chart if you like. I added a few inactive sifters from the last time this was posted - if you are one of these people and want to retake, let me know and I'll change it. I also added all of the American presidential candidates and Obama. I'll wait for a few more days for others to join, then I'll post.




http://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdgraphpng.php?showform=&Newname=0.0%2C0.0&Newname=on&Newec=-3.4%2C0.0&Newec=on&Newsoc=-5.6%2C0.0&Newsoc=on&
Dystopianfuturetoday=-7.9%2C-6.9&Alien+Concept=-4.4%2C-4.6&Ctrlaltbleach=-6.3%2C-5.5&Duckman33=-5.8%2C-4.6&Lucky760=-1.4%2C-2.4&Zifnab=-6.6%2C-5.9&Dag
=-4.0%2C-8.4&Fantomas=-7.1%2C-5.3&Gwiz665=0.5%2C-5.7&Lann=-3.1%2C-5.7&Speechless=-7.6%2C-6.0&Radx=-7.0%2C-7.7&Eric3579=-6.9%2C-7.5&Sarzy=0.5%2C-5.4&Bo
ise+Lib=-7.5%2C-7.3&Thegrimsleeper=-4.1%2C-6.2&Kulpims=-7.5%2C-8.4&Critical+D=-4.9%2C-6.9&Longde+=-3.5%2C-3.2&Norsuelefantti=-7.6%2C-7.4&Crosswords+=-
3.7%2C-4.9&Ron+Paul=9.5%2C-1.0&Obama=6.0%2C6.0&Romney=7.0%2C6.5&Santorum=7.0%2C8.5&Gingrich=8.0%2C7.5&Qualm=-10.0%2C-10.0&Blankfist=3.9%2C-6.2&Farhad2
000=-3.4%2C-5.6&Newname=0.0%2C0.0&Newname=on&Newec=-9.3%2C0.0&Newec=on&Newsoc=-9.8%2C0.0&Newsoc=on&Peggedbea=-9.3%2C-9.8&newname=&newec=&newsoc=

Here is the chart so far. It's hard to read because of all the names unfortunately, but you can manually take people off the chart if you like. I added a few inactive sifters from the last time this was posted - if you are one of these people and want to retake, let me know and I'll change it. I also added all of the American presidential candidates and Obama. I'll wait for a few more days for others to join, then I'll post.




http://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdgraphpng.php?showform=&Newname=0.0%2C0.0&Newname=on&Newec=-3.4%2C0.0&Newec=on&Newsoc=-5.6%2C0.0&Newsoc=on&
Dystopianfuturetoday=-7.9%2C-6.9&Alien+Concept=-4.4%2C-4.6&Ctrlaltbleach=-6.3%2C-5.5&Duckman33=-5.8%2C-4.6&Lucky760=-1.4%2C-2.4&Zifnab=-6.6%2C-5.9&Dag
=-4.0%2C-8.4&Fantomas=-7.1%2C-5.3&Gwiz665=0.5%2C-5.7&Lann=-3.1%2C-5.7&Speechless=-7.6%2C-6.0&Radx=-7.0%2C-7.7&Eric3579=-6.9%2C-7.5&Sarzy=0.5%2C-5.4&Bo
ise+Lib=-7.5%2C-7.3&Thegrimsleeper=-4.1%2C-6.2&Kulpims=-7.5%2C-8.4&Critical+D=-4.9%2C-6.9&Longde+=-3.5%2C-3.2&Norsuelefantti=-7.6%2C-7.4&Crosswords+=-
3.7%2C-4.9&Ron+Paul=9.5%2C-1.0&Obama=6.0%2C6.0&Romney=7.0%2C6.5&Santorum=7.0%2C8.5&Gingrich=8.0%2C7.5&Qualm=-10.0%2C-10.0&Blankfist=3.9%2C-6.2&Farhad2
000=-3.4%2C-5.6&Newname=0.0%2C0.0&Newname=on&Newec=-9.3%2C0.0&Newec=on&Newsoc=-9.8%2C0.0&Newsoc=on&Peggedbea=-9.3%2C-9.8&newname=&newec=&newsoc=

>> ^Crosswords:


I'm sure there are a few in the larger cities, I wouldn't say common. I've been in a few hipster pretentious coffee shops, where most of the pretentiousness was coming from the people I went with. The coffee was always odd tasting, the establishment dirty, and the seating overly casual, aka big disgusting couches.


Lol, would be an "experience" going to a place like that, but only once. Don't think I could stand that sort of place.

>> ^longde:

What motivated you to caucus and would you do it again? I assume from your comments you would not.>> ^Crosswords:
I caucused once, it was a complete cluster fuck and completely open to corruption. I also find it hilarious that Republicans are always bitching that democrats cheat, and yet here in their own party is some pretty blatant cheating. Those with a guilty conscience are more likely to think others are guilty too.



Lets see, there was the general lack of nobody knowing what was going on, the drunk guy getting in a shouting match with the only person who seemed to have any idea of what was going on, waiting a long time for an election official that never showed up. A lot of potential, mostly young, voters left before voting occurred because of all the above. The lack of anonymity on voting, seemed to have an obvious effect on many people's vote, as some obviously felt pressured when they weren't in the majority, or they saw someone they knew voting opposite of them. I don't remember exactly how votes were done, I do remember we all went into our separate camps, then there was a show of hands for candidates, then a piece of paper was passed around for people to sign for which candidate they voted for. Then we voted on some other measures, and then potential delegates were selected. There was no security to the voting, just a guy with the pad of paper our names got written on, that and the general sense of people not having a clue wtf was going on.

I would probably be unlikely to go to one again, but you never know.

What motivated you to caucus and would you do it again? I assume from your comments you would not.>> ^Crosswords:

I caucused once, it was a complete cluster fuck and completely open to corruption. I also find it hilarious that Republicans are always bitching that democrats cheat, and yet here in their own party is some pretty blatant cheating. Those with a guilty conscience are more likely to think others are guilty too.

>> ^Crosswords:

I don't disagree with the assessments of the video, but I'm pretty certain this is just another one of our famous polished turds. There's a good chance this program is only limited to Dallas county, and may not be in effect, or at the very least hasn't grown.
Canada probably does/did a whole lot more to rehabilitate criminals than Texas ever will. Maybe its easier to show the efficacy of a program when you go to a place where its essentially incarceration without rehabilitation.
http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/crimereports/10/citCh2.pdf


a polished turd would even be a good start, especially when states are faced with enormous budgetary shortfalls. the Buddhists would say "suffering brings wisdom", altho it might be more apt to say in this case, with financial ruin comes rationality. (hopefully)
all in all, it's a positive at a time when we could use some positives, in a place that one would least expect it.