I don't know if this will embed well, but this completely reminds me of this scene from The Duellists where two starved Napoleonic soldiers run into a Cossack local.

San Marino? Iceland? Finland? New Zealand? Switzerland? Holland? Denmark? Canada? Possibly Sweden? Id give them a shot.

Funny to imagine that. Montenegro pulling the strings for once instead of being pushed away from the camera by Trump. Half the world scurrying to maps in vain, trying to find it, the other half not knowing what the fuss is about as usual. You will buy our goat milk or we will impose tariffs on your fancy gangster guns, automobiles and helicopters!

As superpowers go, the US is not too bad. Its a fairly hands-off type superpower if you compare it to say the Roman Empire or Napoleonic France. Taking a long time to even annex Puerto Rico properly.

Wondering really how China will fare. Give it 25 years. And they sure wont ask as nicely as you just did.

Is it just me or does he sound like Napoleon Dynamite?

It's Kip! (napoleon dynamite)

Napoleon Dynamite + Mean Girls

Here is the problem, Mr. Schlosser is a journalist, not a Nuclear Scientist. He does not understand, or has chosen to ignore for propaganda reasons, that an unarmed warhead is EXTREMELY unlikely to perform the exact sequence of events that need to take place to have a nuclear reaction happen.

Yes, he is fully correct in that we have had numerous 'butt-clenching' moments in which we could have started WW3 due to a malfunction or human error. But in the other cases he mentions, such as the bombs that landed on Spain, the lightning bolt on the tower, and the wrench on the rocket, the chance of the warhead going up while being unarmed is infinitesimal. They simply don't go 'boom' because of a collision or explosion. Now you could have a 'dirty bomb' type incident where the radioactive materials could be spread and come into contact with humans, but that is about it.

The cases that have been officially listed as Broken Arrows were because they involved an active bomb, like the one in Florida. Everything else he mentions in this video is his 'belief' and is conjecture.

Now, before I get unloaded on, I wish we didn't have nuclear weapons. I don't agree with Trump that we should renew the arms race, I think he is nuts since we have more than enough weapons to blanket the cities of the world more than a couple of times. If you add all the nukes from the Big 3 (USA/Russia/France...yes, France) there are enough to cover every single inch of the world.

The problem is, who bells the cat? If we give up all of our weapons, we are at risk. I wish we weren't, but we would be. If we bring down our numbers gradually, there are still other countries that may not, like North Korea. How do we trust the other country is actually following through? In a perfect world, we would all lay down our weapons and sing kumbaya, but as Heinlein wrote: "...Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

PS...Yes, I know Starship Troopers is a controversial novel with overtones of Militarism and Fascism. However, there are quotes that ring true no matter what 'ism' people attach to the overall story. If you doubt that, look at the utter disbelief and depression that overcame liberals when Trump won. "He simply was supposed to, it was impossible, not like this, we have no hope, etc" were the feelings of the people who gave him no hope of winning. I, having lived and read enough to get a fair picture of how fucked up we are as a species, had little doubt he could pull it off. We elected a former Wrestler as governor, a former actor as governor, and a former actor as President. We overlook mass genocide in other countries. We ignore climate change. We spend hundreds of billions on defense and less than 10 on space exploration, all the while living on a planet that is already critically overpopulated (and is growing almost exponentially).

Kylo Ren as Napoleon Dynamite? Ligers are bred for their skills in magic, so hypothetically he'd need that sweet lightsaber and force powers in case of liger attacks.

sugar->metric system->which side of the road to drive on->jousting

Fuck yeah, videosift... epic thread!

@RFlagg, I'm almost certain I read somewhere that Napoleon changing the road side is an urban legend.

To jump in on the left hand/right hand drive thing.

Figure most people are right handed. Early weapons, swords would be worn on the left hip to make it easier to draw. So you step up on the horse from it's left as the sword is in the way for getting up otherwise. Now as you ride your horse down the road, you'll ride on the left, as you want to keep approaching people on your right in case you need to respond to an attack, you are attacking them on your free side and not across the horse. So people get used to riding on the left of the road. This gives left hand drive a certain sense from a historical perspective.

Of course if you are driving a team of horses, then you are probably on the left rear horse, and for vision and control reasons, it's probably best to drive that team down the right side of the road. So a certain sense there too.

Then again, how often do you drive a team without a coach behind the horses? So why not drive from the right hand spot down the left of the road? Unless it has to do with the shotgun position, since then the person there has to shoot across the driver, in which case right hand drive once again makes sense.

None of which answers why some countries do right hand drive vs left. Did the US adopt right hand drive just to be different from the UK? Why did France adopt right hand drive? Did Napoleon's war efforts really lead to the rest of Europe adopting right hand drive? Sounds like an issue for CGP Grey to tackle...

And not one mention of AI or Napoleon.

So...Napoleon Dynamite meets hip-hop?

Here is Card's preface before any of the Quotes TYT laid out:
"So as a science fiction writer and a student of history, allow me to spin a plausible scenario about how, like Augustus Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, and Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama could become lifetime dictator without any serious internal opposition."

It is absolutely clear that he does NOT state this is a prediction of the future he expects. Meanwhile Cenk painstakingly sets up that the quotes are Card's rallying cry against what he expects to happen in the next few years. That's lying.

Card's statements prior to that were nothing any more severe than what all manner of people decried Bush and Cheney for and worse. Plenty of people talked at length about 'what if' Bush doesn't step down, or Cheney doesn't step down. I think it horrifically unfair to now leap down Card's throat for the same.

I took a computer graphics class when I was going to college that talked about data visualization. Every time I see something on this topic, I am reminded about something the prof showed us in that class -- a visualization of troop losses during Napoleon's march on Russia in 1812-1813 by a French civil engineer named Minard.

Minard's chart gets a whole lot of dimensions and relevant variables displayed in a very simple, easy to read format. The "big picture" is evident at a glance, but details readily emerge when you look closer. It is a map, it shows number of soldiers and losses from cold/fighting, temperature data which contributed to those losses, etc.

I think that using CG including video and animation to expand on the ways that we visualize data is very interesting and exciting, but on the other hand depth and detail of relevant data is sometimes most impressive when it comes in a very simple package, like Minard's map.

Pretty neat stuff!

The dad feels bad for punishing the child and weakly asks her to reaffirm her love for him, and the child senses his weakness and withholds her love as a bargaining tactic..this kind of parenting is why you see situations where children are yelling at their parents in the supermarket and the parent tries to hush them up with a candy bar.

Without the parents presenting a unified and unwavering front on discipline and authority in the home, the children quickly learn how to manipulate them and play the parents off of one another. They become little napoleons who know all they have to do is throw a fit to get their way. The home environment where the child is exalted and the discipline is weak and the authority compromised is a breeding ground for the dysfunctional, me-centric culture we see today.