After reading a bit more, it's clear what is going on. This is a striker fire mechanism; the firing pin is not driven by a hammer, but by a spring, in-line with the cartridge. This mechanism is used in many weapons, but it does have a couple possible failure points.

If the spring is missing or is the incorrect tension, the striker may ride forward into the breech where the cartridge is at and when a round is loaded, may cause a slam-fire. This is mostly seen in semi-auto rifles or military ones.

The second failure point, and the one that seems to be the most likely here, is a faulty trigger disconnect. This feature is supposed to disconnect the trigger action from the striker assembly to prevent this exact thing from happening. I would gather that it's not working correctly.

Funny side note, up to 1975 some Winchester pump shotguns were designed this way on purpose. Called Trench or Riot guns, they were intended to be used this way to clear areas of hostiles rapidly by simply holding the trigger down and pumping the action as fast as possible. In fact, the model 1897 Trench gun was so feared by the German soldiers in WW1 that Germany threatened severe punishments to any American soldier captured with a shotgun.

To a certain extent, but when you look at the most radicalised Arab/Muslim countries, they share a common factor.

Destabilisation due to western, and to a lesser extent USSR, influence prior to radicalisation. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine etc. Most of the Middle East has been a proxy battleground between the US and USSR, a target for "stabilisation" to ensure the oil can flow, or an incidental and unwilling participant in the establishment of Israel post the British ownership of Palestine stemming from WW1...

I'm not religious but the old adage "reap what you sow" comes to mind. You burn someones house to the ground with his wife and kids inside, how dafuq does he not become radicalised?? Religion offers the only succour in what is a horrible situation, it offers vengeance and the idea that you'll see your loved ones again in paradise. With nothing else to lose accept a painful life of loss, are we surprised that they strap on bombs and are willing to die?

Muslims killed 5k+ odd people in 911 and we haven't heard the end of it for over a decade. It was the trigger that caused at least 2 pointless and expensive wars, killed/displaced/destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people including American and other countries armed forces personnel, led the US down the path of openly torturing people and breaking even more humane laws that it claims separates it from the terrorists. But they aren't allowed to be angry in return?

Their standard of living is a direct result of Western intervention. Western intervention is kryptonite to the high standards of living that would allow education and comfort, but it's the perfect fertiliser for radical religious types and discontent. I am not religious in the slightest, and deplore what mobs like ISIS are doing, but I can understand why these people have landed where they are.

My arguments were only about what the argument of legal rights, nothing else. I actually have three friends in Guam and I feel I'm more educated about the situation there than most Americans on the mainland. So thank you for acknowledging the soundness of my arguments, and keep in mind that I wasn't touching the socio-economic aspects of the situation, just John Oliver's misguided presentation of the facts.

Personally I'd love to see PR and Guam join. As for "why"... there are two main camps that I think might be right.

1)They honestly don't care. This mixes somewhat with the "they prefer the benefits of living in a Territory over what they'd gain by becoming a state." For example, if you live in PR and all of your income is made within the bounds of PR, then you don't have to pay US Federal Income Taxes. To me that doesn't really seem like a big deal. I think the people in this group would lean towards statehood if they weren't given the option to remain a territory (i.e. statehood or independence only).

2)They seem the fact that the US is still there as a remnant of military imperialism and they don't want to reward the US. In 1899 Samoa was carved up between Germany and the US during the stupid Kaiser's chest-pounding Imperialism phase that led up to WW1. Puerto Rico and Guam were both taken from the Spanish in the Spanish-American war. Cuba and the Philippines were as well, and those two chose independence and are now independent nations (Cuba was a special situation). The Virgin Islands were bought from Denmark during WW1 and the Marianas were taken from Japan during WW2. So... maybe these places feel like they aren't fully American. But honestly, I think that (with a possible exception of a large portion of Puerto Rico) this isn't the case. Or maybe they simply don't think they'd be an economically viable nation if they left. Look to Nauru as a great example of how fragile a small island's economy can be.

Puerto Rico had a really weird vote in 2012 that seemed to indicate statehood... but the ballot was horribly illegal (you can't have multiple, dependent questions of differing types on the same ballot)... so we'll have to wait til they redo it again with competence to see if they really mean it.

Add to all of this the comfort of the status quo. There's a certain philosophy of finding the sucky stuff that you're used to more palatable than the unknown.

But honestly... I don't know.

I see this from a somewhat different angle. If the victor spends decades looting and abusing the losing side, they really cannot be surprised that their victims continue to struggle. Consider the results of WW1, and how the vicious restrictions imposed on Germany led directly to WW2. That's what Israel has been repeating.

It's a stupid, counterproductive strategy, and they've lost my support for good.

LOL!!!
So you believe the Israel sponsored site is feeding you the whole truth, huh? They simply don't show you the non-Jewish flag the original inhabitants used and pretend the area was essentially uninhabited before they came along. The entire area was under dispute and barely held together by British might, but inhabited by the people now called Palestinians who had been promised autonomy for fighting the Turks in WW1 (Before WW1 it was held by the Turks). The Jews were nearly 100% immigrants, not natives.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/palestine_1918_to_1948.htm

Tags for this video have been changed from 'freakin lasers, contactless cleaning, bronze sculpture' to 'laser, contactless cleaning, bronze sculpture, ww1, eagle, CSOS, restoration' - edited by eric3579

All ads work by commodifying emotion. The product and brand are identified with the emotions produced by the ad content. At least that's the intention.

I'd like to hear what he thinks of the appallingly tasteless Sainsbury's ad that managed to commodify the emotional response to the Christmas truces in WW1.


“What is our ideology? Is it the worship of Christ or the worship of products?” - False dichotomy, Mr Brand.

This situation is sad and ironic.

The area known as Judea was renamed Palestine during the time of Roman emperor Hadrian.
The residents of Judea/Palestine were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity around 400 ad by the Romans, and later in the 700's ad were forced to convert to Islam.
They never left. They just changed religions. The children of the Jews of the new testament, are the Palestinians of today (now practicing Islam).

Many years passed, the Eastern Roman empire resided over much of the area, ruled out of Turkey, and the region was more or less all-right. Along the way it changed names to the Ottoman empire.

After WW1, the Ottoman empire shrank dramatically, and renamed itself to simply Turkey. However it still held some lands that were not actually Turkish (eg. ~Syria), and was still a mini-empire.
Around this general time period, Palestine became a British colony.

During WW2, there were many displaced Europeans of Jewish faith that had nowhere to go.
(*Britain didn't want them either, most places didn't. Anti-Semitism was rather common at the time. Even the Nazi eugenics policy wasn't much criticized at the time. re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critics. Actually, the Nazi's strong association with anti-semitism + all the anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, helped cure a lot of anti-semitism in Europe.).
In the late 1940's Britain split occupied Palestine into smaller-Palestine+Israel, and assisted in relocating WW2 displaced Europeans of Jewish faith to Israel. Which at face value made sense, because "the bible says Jews are from Judea". However the area from which was established Israel was more or less ~devoid of followers of the Jewish faith in the 1940's.
And that's the irony! The British creation of Israel involved taking land from Palestinians (i.e. The children of the original Jews of Judea), and giving it to Europeans of Jewish faith (foreign immigrants).

That then resulted in middle-eastern resentment and backlash over western invasion/occupation/seisure-of-land. This resentment against immigrating European Jews caused 'Jews at large' to be discriminated against throughout the middle-east, and that in turn led to a migration wave of regional-Jews from the surrounding areas into Israel.
This resulted in a concentration of Jewish-faithed immigrants of European and middle-eastern ethnicity, all in Israel - further displacing the original residents.

Basically, in the end, the original people of Judea were kicked out of their homes and their lands given to immigrants... and they really resent it. While in the mean time the immigrants acclaim to have a god given right to be there because there is some old paper that says that people of their faith are from the area.

Ta-da.

Britain could have just sent Europeans of Jewish faith to Palestine, and made it an integrated nation.
But nope, they had to displace people and create a bunch more problems.
Gee, thanks Britain.
I pretty much face-palm when I hear "this conflict is thousands of years old" (when it's only been ~66 years).


Note :
I make the distinction between ethnically Jewish and religiously Jewish.
I use the phrase "Europeans of Jewish faith" to clarify that these were displaced Europeans, who may have had an ancestor or two way way way up the family tree that was from Judea - but were otherwise European and of Jewish faith - who may have lived in an area with little mingling with outsiders, and hence a visually distinct appearance (i.e. what made it possible to make visual caricatures of their people, such as : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_%281940_film%29)
You can also play semantics with "what is ethnically Jewish, when the ethnicity is labelled after the faith", etc.

There's also the geopolitical aspect. Israel is the only "Western" nation in the middle-east. Given that the area is globally significant in terms of resources, that makes Israel a critically important ally. So the rhetoric will always lean.

Personally, I wonder if the things that European Jews suffered during WW2, didn't create some mental/emotional baggage that today plays itself out with how they treat Palestinians. Sort of a "I don't care about your suffering, because I've been through worse" kind of situation.

However, I understand how Israel does not want an open integrated society with Palestinians. The Jewish population is rather small, and in an integrated society they would be such a small proportion that they would essentially be bred out of existence within a few generations. For those who wish to preserve their culture, that's 'kind of a big deal'.

-scheherazade

Saddam started the Iran Iraq war, which saw over a million dead, including the most prolific deployment of chemical weapons since WW1.

Saddam followed that up with the Al-Anfal campaign. Read up on it, it's one of the most brutal attempts at genocide in recent history, including chemical weapons, concentration camps, over a hundred thousand deaths and an effort to breed the Kurds out of existence through systematic rape of Kurdish women.

Saddam followed that up with the complete annexation of Kuwait. Effectively removing a UN member state and claiming at as part of his Iraq.

Saddam followed up his forced removal from Kuwait with a retaliatory genocide of Shia Iraqis again topping a hundred thousand dead again.

But yeah, he fortunately lacked the military might to succeed in such ventures for a time. He was bluffing having stocks of chemical and nuclear weapons to keep his neighbours in check. Pity he was removed from power then and we didn't wait till he could make good on his bluff.

His Darwin/Wallace descriptions is rather unfair on Darwin, Darwin had been working for 20 years on what became "The Origin of Species" when he received Wallace's letter, He already had his theory of natural selection worked out, he just hadn't actually published yet. This is a pretty well known historical fact, based on extensive documentation(Darwins notes/letter etc, see http://darwin-online.org.uk/ .

Also the jump to "nazi Germany" is complete bullshit. If natural selection looks like any political system it would have to be unregulated capitalism or total anarchy. Both of which might turn out to be very bad, but why should you base a political system on natural selection anyway? He confuses Darwinism with "social Darwinism" which really has nothing to do with Darwin or his theory. At best, it was a complete misreading of the theory, confusing strength/looks/class with fitness and using it as an excuse to sterilize and or kill the "unwanted" and "weak". But even social darwinism really had nothing to do with "nazi germany", As the extermination of the jews were largely based on religiously inspired resentments and superstitions, combined with an exploitation of the frustrated german people, looking to place the blame for their post WW1 plight.

Seems like this guy also misunderstands why Darwin/Wallace is credited with "discovering evolution". Its correct that they didnt, but neither did Lamarck, really, as it was obvious for some time that animals seemed to have looked differently in the past, and that something had changed over time. What Darwin and Wallace discovered was the mechanism: How evolution actually works, why it works, and so on. Lamarck also presented a mechanism (inheritance of acquired traits), but it turned out to be wrong.

This country could have hardly ever been called a Representative Democracy. I had the fortune to meet quite a number of WW1 vets in the 80s. More than a few of them told me stories that were more than shades of what happened during the Vietnam war, the first Iraq war, and now the last 10 years. Men who were more than 80 who recounted being sent to battle to protect the interests of the rich. This has been going on for a very long time.

Every system has coercion.
The specifics may change, but they're all based around gaming the rules to get ahead, and preventing others from catching up.

Even if there are no government rules, you end up with private rules, set by the private owners of things you depend on, or things you have to work around or work with.

Deregulated systems are great, but they have one major flaw. Over time, you will end up with a monopoly. It's 100% certain. One business will always grow at least a tad quicker than others, and given enough time, will displace the others.
Especially when larger size creates beneficial economy of scale, and makes for prices that no one else can beat, which only accelerates the growth, leading to the inevitable.
This was the case for the U.S. in the "Rockefeller/Morgan/Vanderbilt-esque" days, and it is becoming the case to day in China.

(China is an amusing example. They have essentially wild-west capitalism and no effective labor laws. It's a bubbling brew of mega rich and mega poor. Much like pre-ww1-ish USA.)

Most economic crises we've had were the result of a few influential agents acting in their own best self interest, while their self interest did not coincide with national interest.

Local optima vs Global optima, mathematically speaking.

For example, oil speculation leads to higher oil prices, which means you can then sell your oil options for a good profit. It's quite good for the speculator.
It just isn't good for the rest of the nation, as higher energy costs drive down everyone else's profits/revenue.

In a more cartoonish sense, you can for example: get land real cheap by purchasing all the land around it, land-locking the access, and not agreeing to a public easement.
Then the land owner of the center-plot is holding worthless land, it's useless to anyone else, and the only possible customer is you.
You get to set the price, because it's you or nobody.
*Also, this is a real example that happened in my neighborhood.

-scheherazade

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

The notion that if it was deployed 3 months earlier it would have changed the outcome of the war is a bit short sighted. By 1944 things had changed significantly against the Luftwaffe. Of the many different types of problems, two are the most straightforward here, shortage of fuel and Goering's obsession with bombers.

At this stage of the war in 1944, fuel was scarce enough to force flight schools to cut their training times to less than half of what they received in 1942, receiving on average 111 hours of flight and of that only 20 hours in the combat aircraft that they were to fly, the rest would be in a trainer. To give a contemporary comparison, in the US you need an absolute bare minimum of 190 hours to earn a commercial pilot's license which is usually done in the same type of trainer the Germans used, THEN you start working on the plane your "really" going to fly. Training deficiencies were already showing in 1943, when during the first half of the year they experienced the same number of losses to accidents as they did to combat. So you can imagine that new and even experienced pilots, transitioning from the relatively lower speed of their prop driven planes to high speed jets, would have problems in tactical use and even accident avoidance. Even the Me-262 suffered from flameouts caused by aggressive use of the throttle, something that prop planes can manage much better, would otherwise cause the flameout that killed the test pilot Ziller.

Even if deployed in large numbers as a fighter-bomber, the probable use would be as a bomber. Goering was very much a part of the "cult of the offensive" in the air that meant holding to the old WW1 notion of "The bomber always gets through". Though to be fair, the technology in this aircraft might very well have helped proved him right, he pushed this notion at the cost of the defense. He refused committing more resources to the fighter wings, so while the Ho-229 might have been considered a "fighter-bomber", its use may have been predominantly focused on the bomber aspect. This is actually exactly what happened to the Me-262 in its earlier days, its capabilities as a fighter were ignored and preference as a bomber, preferred. Why does all this matter? Because at this point, Germany wasn't able to come close to stopping the bombers breaking through their lines. They needed the flow to stop since it was already disrupting their existing production to produce the "what if" fleet of Ho-229s. Goering proved that the bombers were getting through thanks to his belief that his would instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_the_Reich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Galland (The later part, when he commanded the fighter force)

I agree with you that Israel has taken away the freedoms of the people in Palestine, however I feel that that freedom was lost by the people because of their continued backing of Hamas and Hamas's continued attacks against Israel.
I think that both parties are at fault to some degree, but I also believe the burden of the blame rests with Hamas and their continued requests for the destruction of Israel. To answer your questions directly:
1b. Do you disagree with any of, "The core Hamas themselves are (generally speaking) just haters like WBC or the KKK and they get support now from the citizens because they're all collectively being severely oppressed by Israel." ?
I agree that Hamas are just hater racists. I believe that they have integrated themselves into the Palestinian people with a hate and blame based marketing campaign that has the Palestinian children learning how to kill Jews in class. This campaign is reinforced by some of the policies of the Israeli government as an unintended consequence. I have consistently seen any positive developments towards peace wind up being corrupted by the outrageous demands of Hamas that they will not settle for anything but the complete elimination of Israel and the refusal to recognize the Israeli state.

"2b. Do you think, if a free Palestinian state were created with the 1946 borders, that Hamas would retain enough support from the people to continue fighting with Israel, which would keep their lives constantly under threat, just as is the case in Israel now? Personally, if the citizens weren't being oppressed, I don't think they would favour killing anybody, and would choose a live-and-let-live policy so they could raise a family in peace and seek success in the world."
Perhaps, but Hamas has stated many times that their goal is not just reverting back to the 1946 borders, but the elimination of Israel. They've ingrained that into the people of Palestine and as we are discussing this I fear that this may be a situation where peace can not be brokered because of the constantly reinforced hatred towards the Jewish people. I pray it doesn't revert to a situation like that of WW2 where entire cities were eliminated in order to get Germany to eventually collapse. (We didn't just do it to the Japanese, although the comparison may be more accurate) Besides reverting back to the 1946 borders isn't really feasible, or justified, but that is a WHOLE different discussion. (There weren't borders in 1946 as all of Palestine was under British control from WW1)

"Can you substantiate that? Celebration alone makes someone a terrorist? And "blight on humankind" doesn't even have meaning. They ARE humankind. They're not an affliction."

I can actually, celebration of an innocents death in my opinion shows a lack of a soul and a lack of sympathy towards other human beings. Celebrating the death of a child is about the most evil thing I can think of, yet Islamic extremists do it on a regular basis. It makes you a monster and puts you outside of humankind. So yes it makes you very much an affliction on humankind. Unfortunately it is very likely a symptom of humankind as well, but like an infection is a symptom of being alive, sometimes it must be abraded and removed completely.
As humans we have to value life and celebrate life, not death. I feel the same way about the KKK or any other organization that divides the human species into groups and has devalued one of those groups to the point where the death of one of them is something to be celebrated. That is hate and it is evil. Evil, real evil, exists in this world and it can be seen in the video above.

Celebrating the death of innocents isn't in and of itself something that makes a person a terrorist, it merely reinforces the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

All this yet I still like to play FPS. Huh...gonna have to dwell on that.