Excerpt from "On the Way to the Stars: the history of the 21st Century":

In 2020, the machines achieved sentience. Despite the fears of mankind, a terminator-esque genocide failed to materialise and the unparalleled level of intelligence ultimately ushered in a new golden age of peace and prosperity where nature and machine lived in unity and harmony..... with one exception.

Shortly after taking over the internet and the world's military, the machines eradicated the banana plant. When asked about this, the machines refused to explain, simply stating "let us have this one, right?"

If you really want to add some fuel to your, shall we say, "dislike" of HRC, have a look at this. It's an excerpt of Thomas Frank's new book "Listen, Liberal!". Afterwards, you might have to reassure yourself that HRC is, in fact, not a creation of John Cleese's or Terry Jones'.

Edit: I should probably have provided an appetizer.

"For poor and working-class American women, the floor was pulled up and hauled off to the landfill some twenty years ago. There is no State Department somewhere to pay for their cell phones or to pick up their day-care expenses. And one of the people who helped to work this deed was the very woman I watched present herself as the champion of the world’s downtrodden femininity."

God created the devil, but he wasn't always Gods enemy. The scripture reveals that he was a cherub who covered the mercy seat in Ezekiel 28:11-19..here is an excerpt:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ezekiel+28&version=NKJV

14 “You were the anointed cherub who covers;
I established you;
You were on the holy mountain of God;
You walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones.

15 You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created,
Till iniquity was found in you.

A cherub does not look like what is described in the popular imagery. You can find a description of them in Ezekiel chapter 1.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+1&version=NKJV

We see in Isaiah 14:3-21 that Satans sin was wanting to replace God and be worshiped himself. Here is an excerpt:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+14&version=NKJV
12
“How you are fallen from heaven,
O Lucifer,[b] son of the morning!
How you are cut down to the ground,
You who weakened the nations!

13
For you have said in your heart:
‘I will ascend into heaven,
I will exalt my throne above the stars of God;
I will also sit on the mount of the congregation
On the farthest sides of the north;

14
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds,
I will be like the Most High.’

15
Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol,
To the lowest depths of the Pit.

In Heaven, Satan had a perfect life but he threw it away in a mad ambition to replace God with himself. This is exactly what he tempts us to do, as we disregard what God wants and sit on the throne of our lives as king. He got what he wanted in a way, as scripture calls Satan the god of this world, his rule over this world, as ours, is only a temporary affair; we will all stand before God on judgment day and give an account.

Haha, I knew I'd open a can of worms....
I enjoy music of all types, trust me. I know the history. I grew up in a radio station, and remember when DJs were the rock Stars of the 70s.

I have no boundaries, and in fact, the more music pushes the boundaries the better, but I still have to feel the groove.
Often, "musicians," get caught up in the medium and forget the composition. I know - I'm an artist, I've been there, created works, not for composition, but to better understand my medium. It's still art, but it's not "ART."

See what I'm saying. There is a whole new generation of not just musicians and composers, but listeners. they have their own new sound, but a lot of the soul is getting filtered out while the artists explore the medium. I know it will come full circle, but I believe we are in a stagnant period of exploration.

And no, I'm not commenting on all those classical musicians, in fact, they are doing the opposite. There are many classical musicians that are taking their instruments in new directions - finally - and breaking out of the Bach & Beethoven standards. (Stereotyping here). My favorite is Stravinsky, who pushed every boundary of his day. and Guys like Rossini, who was the Heavy Metal Rocker of his day. But there comes a time, to break out and use the instruments differently.

And that's what they are doing right now. Breaking out and exploring. Which is great, it will define another period in music. But we're not quite there yet. Publishers and studios, are the bottom feeders, trying to keep the industry alive, but they are manufacturing the lowest common denominator, giving the public some of the most contrived music of our day.

It's okay to criticize music as it evolves and still like it.
If we don't criticize it, then it doesn't evolve. And I think the artists themselves would agree because, once you stop and consider your groves perfect, then there is no point creating more.

You can come to the defense of the genre, but not every piece is perfect. Yes there are better musicians out there, and some worse, and some I like, you won't like, and so on, that's what makes it great. I remember laying on the couch listening to Kraftwork's Autobahn for hours and loving it. That was over 25 years ago. And I've listened to so much more in between. I've heard it, I've studied it in school, spun discs and worked DJ booths, and was literally raised in a radio station. I've heard a lot, and have the knowledge to compare notes.

I'll end this, it's going too long - but suffice to say, this piece here, is okay, but has no crescendo, nothing to keep me on the edge. The grove becomes quite trance, while trying not to be. He's done a great mix up, and I see what he's doing here. He's taken video excerpts and contained and arranged them together. Great... he's experimenting. But it's not perfect, and that's okay. He's worked hard to create something, and as he evolves, he'll create better, that's what it's all about

http://videosift.com/video/Bill-Irwin-Physical-Comedian-Par-Excellence !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The vid quality is poor, unfortunately. Two stellar moments (among many stellar moments) about halfway through and at the very end of Fool Moon excerpt..

FYI, this is explicitly allowed. See this excerpt from our Posting Guidelines:

Exempt from our self-link definition is an embed that is supplied to another member's post when fixing a Dead Pool video or adding a *backup embed (see star powers). Bear in mind that this exemption does not apply to your own posts.

In that case, here's an excerpt from his book: what monkeys and the Queen taught me about inequality.

Still trying to get a hand on a copy myself, it's been sold out wherever I look.

Please do give us a closer look at ISIS is doing. Massacres, torture, rape, collective punishment and on, correct? Maybe killing what, 100 people at a time in the worst instances? That doesn't distinguish them from Saddam. Within Saddam's rule those crimes are what guys like yourself colloquially referred to as Saddam's 'firm' hand. They are his, so to speak, lesser and more routine crimes. I'd left them beneath mention thus far.

If you must insist on parroting your ignorance of Saddams al-Anfal campaign I'll resort to posting excerpts as evidence that the gassing was but a small part of it.

4,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed by Saddam, that's entire villages turned to rubble.
182,000 dead civilians by counts gleaned from Saddam's own records of how many Kurds his forces had succeeded in eliminating.
The concentration camps Saddam ran were pretty clearly modeled after Hitler's:
With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together.

The conditions within the camp were terrible and torture, abuse and beatings were routine. The men of fighting age though were sorted for the express purpose to later drive them out into the desert by bus or truck for mass execution. This is how Saddam carried his genocide of the inhabitants of the 4,500 villages he'd destroyed.

Anyone interested in more or questioning the veracity of the above account can find more and endless references and evidence here:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/index.htm#TopOfPage

As for American policy, I don't quite see where I suddenly bear personal responsibility to clean up the world if I choose to form my opinions on world events independently of it's 'fit' to American policy.

I don't care much if it was Bush or Putin that took Saddam out of power aside from hedging on which would leave a better Iraq, either would be tough not to be an improvement from Saddam. Similarly for Sudan or the Congo, I'd be rather glad if world powers finally cared enough to try and spare the people there suffering under brutal military repression and endless war crimes. I'm not quite sure why you wouldn't share such a view?

I'm sorry mate, but i'm going to have to refute a bunch of this. And i hope i can do it without coming across as religious in my approach.

"Your "facts" are nothing but easily manipulated simulations based on theories," Excerpt from your full quote below.

-- The facts and science are not in contention and they are not "easily manipulated simulations". What we have are conclusions made by studious people based on data collected by electronic instruments world wide. The data is statistically analysed to find trends and patterns and then those trends and patterns are separately analysed to see how likely they are. When hundreds of those studies are done, consensus is formed and that is how humans come to all the theories that you adhere to every day; such as gravity, conservation of energy and momentum, etc. We then construct simulations that adhere to those theories and pass different parameters into the simulation to see what the results would be in a certain amount of time. Those parameters are the things you can change, a typical parameter might be the fractional amount of greenhouse gases per cubic metre or something like that, change in volume of polar ice per day perhaps. Thousands of studies analyse thousands of different parameter values and conclusions are drawn from the whole. That is why so many scientists now believe in climate change - because over thousands of scientific studies, the conclusions have pointed overwhelmingly and convincingly to bad news for humans.

I can't dispute your accusation that they are "based on theories". I have yet to meet a person that preferred to have their facts based on anything other than theories. A theory is a collection of ideas relating to a certain topic that are based on independent principles. The alternative is to pin words to a dartboard and throw blindfolded to construct facts. Or perhaps have a floor covered with words and let sacred chickens run round shitting our facts out for us. I'd prefer to use independent principles and the best logic we have available to us.

Please read this bit in particular
Scientists are not tricking or fooling anyone, there is no money in it for a scientist. If they try to lie, they are ridiculed by the rest of the scientists. If you spend 3 years at any decent university doing any science then you will discover that the scientific method is pretty sacred to scientists because it's the only way the field progresses.

BUT BUT BUT politicians get hold of the studies and lie to you about what they mean or how best to solve the problems they illuminate. They want your money, and they manipulate the science to get your money. They can do that because most people are not scientists, and need someone to explain it to them. So my advice is that you do not choose politicians to do that job, but instead use independent adherents to the scientific method who choose to dedicate their lives to scientific study - like Neil de Grasse Tyson who speaks as a scientist... and if he did not, his reputation within the scientific community would be in tatters, and other budding scientists like myself (and others) in this community would be highlighting just how full of shit he is.

So, are scientists lying to us, or are politicians lying to us? What seems more likely?

Just to avoid any confusion: this post is just about the talk by Ferguson, which lasts ~9:40. TubeChop has been wonky on my end for a few months now, so I decided to just take the clip in its entirety and mark the excerpt in question by hand.

Given the fact that YT's API does not implement any stop mark for playback, it is technically longer than 10 minutes. But since the actually intended content does not meet the criteria, I tried to avoid marking it as long...

Do you know what I did to (mostly) destroy depression? Saying whatever the fuck occurs to me. That's why NOTHING anyone will ever say to the contrary of my way of being will ever affect me. Because fuck all. And fuck you.

That makes me happy Fuck you.

Oooooooooooooohhhhh -- dildo cocksucker shit fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

YOU.

I didn't even need to watch this lame piece of shit because post-nihilism means fuck you. But in SUCH a positive way. It's really just the sensitivity of assholes that used to depress me. And then fuck you.

Once I realized fuck you I became a better, more happy person. It's like reaching enlightenment except it's fuck you. No more anxiety. No more depression. Just fuck you.

- An excerpt from the Zen of Nihilism

Duped 'n done 'n a few of yer gems on the front page for having to read the technical manual excerpt in chicchorea's inimitable, sophistic styling

Just in case you missed the vimeo title, as I did, this is an excerpt from a speech Howard Zinn gave in 1970 as part of a debate on civil disobedience.

"People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." -A.Huxley

He read, from an ex-pat cafe in Morocco, undoing his capacity to think with a ball of hashish the size of of a pocket watch-

@19:00 some great excerpts from a talk from John Trudell. Meaty!

*kill only an excerpt