Sorry if I offended your delicate sensibilities. Given that you responded with an obvious satire (gardens are illegal in NZ), I assumed you weren't being 100% serious either.

Apologies for bringing facts into this discussion.

Damn, there's that sarcasm again.

To address your points

"Did you even read the article I linked?"
Sorry, I didn't. I opened it, but I really don't have time to read a 40-page law review article.

"In other words, you're flat out wrong when you say the 2nd amendment wasn't about self-defense".
Ok, we can agree to disagree there, but the point still stands that the statement "The WHOLE point of the second amendment... is so we can defend ourselves" (emphasis mine) is incorrect. I'll grant you it might be PART of it.

"I'm not sure why your tone is so dismissive in this thread."
Because I'm tired of trying to convince Americans to stop murdering each other.

"you're quite lucky to live in a country where your government protects you from growing your own food by throwing all those dangerous gardeners in prison. "
Please tell me you realise that's satire because your tone kinda makes me think you're taking that seriously. No, gardens are not illegal in NZ. Almost everyone I know grows some of their own food (at least, those of us lucky enough to afford a house with a garden).

"New Zealand has a shit-ton of guns (about one for every four people)"
Agreed. I even previously brought this up myself.

"people own them for a variety of reasons, from sport"
I know, I have friends who target shoot and hunt

"to self-defense"
cue wrong buzzer sound effect.

To get a gun in NZ you need a Firearms licence. To get this , you will be interviewed, and

You will have difficulty being deemed 'fit and proper' to possess or use firearms if you have:
...
indicated an intent to use a firearm for self-defence.

Have some people (shock, horror) lied to the cops to get a licence? Probably, but in general, no-one here actually wants a gun for self-defense.

Look, I have no problem with people using guns. I just think that maybe you could all stop fetishising them so much and realise that you live in the 21st century and not the old west.

Personally, I'm with Jim Jeffries on this one.
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Jim-Jefferies-on-gun-control

@ChaosEngine

Did you even read the article I linked? It makes a pretty strong case that at the time the wording was intended to imply every citizen's responsibility as well as right for "collective self-defense," as in everyone should own a gun so they can help out in the event of an invasion.

In other words, you're flat out wrong when you say the 2nd amendment wasn't about self-defense--that's precisely what it was about. It wasn't about personal (i.e. individual) self-defense at the time of its inception but it has since been found to include that meaning because the idea that people should keep guns at home but only use them to defend against foreign attackers and not domestic ones, such as a home invader, was found to be patently absurd. And yes, eventually militias faded away, but the idea that citizens have a right to own firearms for sport or protection--whether it be from wildlife or other humans--had already been legally established for a long time.

I'm not sure why your tone is so dismissive in this thread. You live in New Zealand, am I correct? Yes, you're right, you're quite lucky to live in a country where your government protects you from growing your own food by throwing all those dangerous gardeners in prison.

Look, New Zealand has a shit-ton of guns (about one for every four people) as well and people own them for a variety of reasons, from sport to self-defense. You have a lower crime rate, which can be attributed to a variety of factors but not conclusively to the strict gun laws, as people in New Zealand do in fact still commit crimes with guns.

So... what's the point you're trying to make?

Twice what my family eats...but yes, a small subsistence farm could also be called a garden, just as my orchard of 30+ apple trees could be called a back yard. That doesn't make it produce any less.

Not true. Some, (very few) still grow grain using old school methods, some even using old school grains (thank goodness, we will have them to thank for still having grains when/if the Monsanto grains fail). It's not even 99%, but it is 'most'.

Industrial farming describes a methodology, not a size, not an incorporation. The fact that a single person or two might farm thousands of acres means they are using the same industrial methods, because non industrial farming takes more people.

Clearly, natural farming takes more effort, and costs the consumer more, but does not require major ecological mitigation, so if you count ALL costs involved, it's not that much more expensive. You act like it's impossible, but it's how ALL farms operated prior to the mid century. If it wouldn't scale, please explain how it worked for thousands of years before industrial agriculture started, or how it continues to work in other countries.

It may not work for WEAK shallow root grain crops that can't compete for water and nutrients, like the one's Monsanto sells. It worked fine for thousands of years with more natural, long root crops that also held the soil together.

I didn't hear that in the video, but fine. Don't just repeat known BS and lies then. Roundup is only a pesticide in that it allows GMO crops that have modified genes to be pesticides themselves to grow without competition....and that doesn't count, and I think you know it.

No, I'm not trying to say the video is perfectly honest, it's clearly highly biased...I didn't say that. They do HINT that Monsanto's actions are "evil", but extrapolating and exaggerating from their already somewhat overboard, clearly biased but careful statements to make them insanely more overboard and biased is not helpful to anyone.

You mean this characterization..."You know, on account of them being evil and wanting to see millions of people dead because it gives their corporate heads joy. Just like it wanted to invent pesticides as a means of convincing the public to poison each other for giggles, and getting the state department to experiment on people."
Um...yeah....that's completely insane. I already explained why it's wrong in so many ways, and defy you to show where they said anything resembling that. You have to listen with quite a biased ear to hear that in between the lines of what they actually said, and one must be incredibly, clinically paranoid to believe any public company does things just to be evil rather than purely for profit. The evil they do is an accepted result of their business methods, not the intent of their business, and I think the video was fairly clear about that.

You may stand by that, as I stand by my summation of your comment...that it's insane and exaggerated hyperbole that ridicules an extreme paranoid stance no one actually took.

@newtboy

If you are only growing twice what you can eat yourself, you are describing a large garden, not a farm.

More over, what you class as 'industrial' farming is in fact the entirety of all grain farming. If there is a place in farming for wheat, corn, soy, canola and so on, 99% of it is done on what you class 'industrial' farming.

Your typical family farm is over a thousand acres today. If I go out and start naming the family farms of just friends and family I know, I can come up with 30-40+. They all farm over a thousand acres, they use tractors and combines and they make a fair bit more food than twice what they can eat. They aren't the ultra rich land barons that your 'industrial' moniker would imply either, at most they have a singular hired hand to help out with the work. The ones with children interested in taking over often don't need to hire anyone at all.

If you want to abandon that agricultural production and the methods used you mean raising the cost of production more than 100 times over. I can't even fathom the cost of weeding a thousand acres of wheat by hand, let alone removing grasshoppers from a corn crop that way. I'm sorry, but what works for your garden doesn't scale to grain crops.

Oh, and the conflation of herbicide and pesticide was done by the fear monger crowd. Listing round-up as a chemical that only kills plants and not insects and animals didn't fit their agenda so now everything is supposed to be called a pesticide across the board. Maybe that's just a Canadian thing, but the bottom line is that if you had a crop completely over run with insects you could spray it once a day with stupidly high concentrations of round-up and the water in the sprayer would do about the same damage to the insects as would the round up.


As for the video's other claims, I stand by my characterisation. You can't honestly tell me the video is trying to put forward on open and honest picture of Monsanto's actions and history. For example, the Manhattan Project, here's a transcription for clarity:
"Monsanto head Charles Allen Thomas was called to the pentagon not only asked to join the Manhattan project, but to lead it as it's co-director. Thomas put Monsanto's central research department hard to work building the atomic bomb.Fully aware of the implications of the task the budding empire sealed it's relationship with the inner cicrcles of washington with two fateful days in Japan.
"
- queue clip of nuclear blasts-

I think I stand by my summation.

Mala Mala Private Game Reserve - aka Tiny Penis Gardens.

Your video, Primitive Technology Has Serious Gardening Skills, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Lyrics:

Angels on the sideline
Puzzled and amused.
Why did Father give these humans free will?
Now they're all confused.

Don't these talking monkeys know that Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly old monkeys,
Where there's one you're bound to divide it
Right in two

Angels on the sideline
Baffled and confused
Father blessed them all with reason.
And this is what they choose.
Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground

Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They forge a blade, and where there's one they're bound to divide it
Right in two.
Right in two.

Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys give them thumbs, they make a club
And beat their brother down.
How they survive so misguided is a mystery.
Repugnant is a Creature who would squander the ability
To lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here

Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two

Fight over the clouds, over wind, over sky and
Fight over life, over blood, over air and light,
Over love, over sun, over another.
Fight for the time, for the one, for the rise and

Angels on the sideline again
Been so long with patience and reason
Angels on the sideline again
Wondering when this tug of war will end

Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Cut and divide it all right in two
Right in two
Right in two

So, I don't want to take anything away from these dogs. They are smart, extremely trainable and handle adverse environments with ease. Kudos to them for this "feat" of outer worldly doggie duties.

But lets not kid ourselves here, the dogs are NOT flying the plane. The yoke is locked and they are simply pushing down left or down right to "steer" the plain. Impressive for the likes of dog... but not flying.

Flying involves so much more than tilting the yoke. Way finding, fuel/weight calculations, the ability to take off and land, stall evasion, emergency outs, the ability to understand weather forecasts and weather patterns, etc, etc, etc.

If the pilot unlocked the yoke those dogs would have nose dived into some English ninnies garden in less time than it would have taken them to eat a treat.

Up voting for the dogs... down voting for the schmaltzy human commentary.

I found this in my English garden after watching this, oddly looking forward to the next time I cut myself.

Show a dozen different people the same event and you can get a dozen different feelings or reactions. But on the internet you had better make sure you show the right kind of reaction or risk being attacked for it. If they brought these guys in without letting them know what they were really in for then it's ambush TV at it's finest.

The shame responses in these guys were pretty clear and I thought that making them take on the shame and guilt that rightfully belongs to another seems cruel and manipulative to me.

Guys often feel the need to take responsibility, it doesn't matter what it is or even if they really were responsible. And so they drag these guys out in front of millions and proceed to make them feel as responsible as they can. And really , all men are responsible for these things anyhow, right?

This video is meant to instruct? You mean like how you are supposed to react? And if you deviate from this response in any way whatsoever you are not human anymore or something?

Being human means that you are a creature of both thought and feeling, emotional reactions can either be compassionate as in this case or deadly when someone commits a crime of passion. Both our hearts and our heads will be needed if we want to continue as a species.

@eric3579
I don't know any of these men, but I know that were I in this situation I would feel like a bug under someone's microscope. (of course you'd never get me in front of a camera, knowingly at least) For what it's worth, I feel bad for everyone involved in this mess. The women were subjected to things that nobody should have to put up with, told things that were cruel, stupid and pointless. (but humans are so good at all three of those things) The men were tricked into someone's drama fueled media spectacle and suffered for something they had nothing to do with.
Not that any of that matters, in your professional opinion I'm probably just a garden variety psychopath.

I want one!

It would look great in my zen garden.

Trump lives matter.
Samantha Bee should go to a Trump event and get trumped by the fans.






Let’s dip into the rhetoric of a garden-variety Black Lives Matter march that I observed last November on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It featured “F**k the Police,” “Murderer Cops,” and “Racism Is the Disease, Revolution Is the Cure” T-shirts, “Stop Police Terror” signs, and “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Racist Cops Have Got to Go” chants.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432800/donald-trump-rhetoric-black-lives-matter-just-bad

Over here we've been campaigning to save the bees now for a good few years. Plant bee friendly flowers in your garden!

We are literally *fucked* without bees. Not just a little fucked - proper fucked.

bah sony exclusive...

only console ive ever owned was an atari 2600, then I got a trs-80, moved to Tandy 1000 EX, and every couple years a new pc even the ORIGINAL PS2 made by IBM in the 80's. I'm getting old. Been a PC gamer since age 11, I turned 39 last month.

But Quantic Dream stuff is pretty awesome.

I've never been a fan of Walled Gardens