No, not paid or "artificial".. Just impotent and without any directive or strategy.. Truth is, I don't know, and posted the article to find out...

"What are the objectives of this protest? How does it intend to accomplish them? Is it preaching to the choir, or will it actually convert fence sitters?"

@BoneyD

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^Trancecoach:
is it too cynical to think the entire movement is pretty much a smokescreen?

You think these people were...paid I'm guessing? I don't understand disinformation doesn't really understand either but that's not surprising.

>> ^Trancecoach:

is it too cynical to think the entire movement is pretty much a smokescreen?


You think these people were...paid I'm guessing? I don't understand disinformation doesn't really understand either but that's not surprising.

Well, that was an easy one to disprove. Via Wikipedia:

Riots in the 1970s
1970 - Kent State shootings, May 1970, (Kent, Ohio, United States)
1970 - Hard Hat riot, Wall Street, May 8, 1970, (New York City, New York, United States)
1970 - Harakat Tahrir riots, June 17, 1970 El-Aaiun[citation needed]
1970 - Falls Curfew (Belfast, Northern Ireland on 3–5 July 1970)
1970 - Fatti di Reggio, July 1970, (Reggio Calabria, Italy)
1970 - Koza riot, December 20, (Ryukyu Islands, United States, later Okinawa Prefecture, Japan)
1971 - May Day Protests 1971, May 1971, (Washington, D.C., United States)
1971 - 1971 Springbok tour (Australia)
1971 - Camden Riots, August 1971, (Camden, New Jersey, United States)
1971 - Operation Demetrius (Northern Ireland on August 9–11, 1971)
1971 - Attica Prison uprising, (Attica, New York, United States)
1971 - Indo-Pakistani War of 1971
1972 - Bloody Sunday (Derry, Northern Ireland on 30 January 1972)
1972 - Operation Motorman (Northern Ireland on 31 July 1972)
1973 and 1974 - Athens Polytechnic uprising, Greek student riots and revolution at National Technical University of Athens, military junta overthrown, (Greece)
1973 - Oklahoma State Penitentiary Prison Riot, (McAlester, Oklahoma, United States)[citation needed]
1973 - Ageo incident, Tokyo Metropolitan Railways Riot,(Tokyo and Saitama, April 1973)[citation needed]
1974 - Cherry Blossom Festival at the Richmond Stadium, (Richmond, Virginia, United States)[citation needed]
1974 - Ulster Workers' Council strike (Northern Ireland, May 1974)
1974 - Ten Cent Beer Night, (Cleveland, Ohio, United States, June 4, 1974)
1975 - Chapeltown riot Leeds, West Yorkshire ,England
1975 - Nieuwmarkt riot, March - April 1975 (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
1975 - Livernois-Fenkell riot (Detroit, Michigan, United States)
1975 - European cup Final 1975, Leeds United riot in Paris
1976 - Vitoria Riots, March 3 (Vitoria, Basque Country, Spain)
1976 - Kobe Festival Riot by motorcycle gangs (Bōsōzoku), May 15 in Japan
1976 - Notting Hill Carnival Riot (London, England)
1976 - Soweto Riots (Soweto, South Africa)
1977 - 1977 Egyptian Bread Riots, January, 1977, (Egypt)
1977 - New York City Blackout riot, July 1977, (New York City, United States)
1977 - Sri Lankan riots of 1977, (Sri Lanka)
1978 - Rameeza Bee Riots, (Hyderabad, India)
1979 - Disco Demolition Night, (Chicago, Illinois, United States)
1979 - White Night gay riots, May 1979 (San Francisco, California)
1979 - Greensboro Riot/Shootings, Nov. 1979, (Greensboro, North Carolina, United States)
1979 - Southall Riots, (Southall, West London, England)

>> ^quantumushroom:

Of course, watching an atheist angered by a lack of morality in the populace is hilarious. People didn't regularly act this way 40 years ago. What changed?
Not everyone proclaiming to be a Christian follows Thou shalt not steal all the time, but more of them have values than the ones raised with....NOTHING.


So what's the reason that all these god-fearing, morally-informed-with-superior-'Christian'-values people engaged in riots? Ummm... maybe it is because the proximate causes of a riot are based on economic and societal conditions and not prevented by a 2000 year old book. Also worth noting in the list is included Bloody Sunday, which, if I remember correctly, was part of a conflict based on rival gangs within your beloved Christianity kicking the shit out of each other.

If there is anything that would guarantee Obama's reelection, it would be Palin running against him.

I'm not sure it would be worth it. I would have to self-enforce 18 months of media blackout.

In reply to this comment by 9547bis:
Great sift.
However your summary is incorrect: this is the documentary Spin, released in 1995 and covering the influence of the media during the 1992 presidential election, and how those who understood the media's mentality and technology got to win (namely Bill Clinton, who won the election, and Pat Robertson, whose faction took over the Republican Party). So maybe adding "Spin" as a tag is in order.

The segment about Larry Agran, I am told by Wikipedia, has become a kind of textbook example of how a candidate can be brought down by a media blackout (he was one of the top four Democratic candidates, yet was disturbingly ignored by the media, and was excluded from all TV debates).

gah..it was a dupe.
whats even more pathetic is i had already seen that duc.
man...i suck.
thanks for the heads up bud.

Great sift.
However your summary is incorrect: this is the documentary Spin, released in 1995 and covering the influence of the media during the 1992 presidential election, and how those who understood the media's mentality and technology got to win (namely Bill Clinton, who won the election, and Pat Robertson, whose faction took over the Republican Party). So maybe adding "Spin" as a tag is in order.

The segment about Larry Agran, I am told by Wikipedia, has become a kind of textbook example of how a candidate can be brought down by a media blackout (he was one of the top four Democratic candidates, yet was disturbingly ignored by the media, and was excluded from all TV debates).

[redacted]

From Wikipedia:

The 2011 Egyptian protests are a series of street demonstrations, protests, and civil disobedience acts that have been taking place in Egypt since 25 January 2011. The demonstrations and riots began in the weeks after the successful Tunisian uprising, and many protesters are carrying Tunisian flags as a symbol of their influence. Specific grievances have centered around legal and political as well as economic issues: police brutality, state of emergency laws, lack of free elections, corruption, restrictions on freedom of speech, high unemployment, low minimum wages, insufficient housing, food price inflation, and poor living conditions. Mohamed ElBaradei, seen as the most likely candidate for an interim presidency, called for the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak as a possible objective.

As of January 29, at least 95 protester deaths had been reported (27 in Suez, 23 in Alexandria, 45 in Cairo), along with 10 policemen. 750 policemen and 1,500 protesters have been injured. The capital city of Cairo has been described as "a war zone", and the port city of Suez has been the scene of frequent violent clashes. The Egyptian government has attempted to break up and contain protests using a variety of methods. Anti-riot police groups have been responding to areas with shields, rubber bullets, batons, water cannons, tear gas and, in some cases, live ammunition. For the most part, the protest response has been non-lethal, although there have been fatalities. The government turned off almost all Internet accessand imposed a curfew, claiming that minimizing disruption from the protests is necessary to maintain order and to prevent an uprising of fundamentalist Islamic groups.

International response to the protests has generally been supportive with most governments and organizations calling for non-violent responses on both sides and peaceful moves towards reform. The protests have captured worldwide attention due to the increasing integration of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms that have allowed activists and onlookers to communicate, coordinate, and document the events as they occur. As the level of publicity has increased, the Egyptian government has made increasing efforts to limit internet access, especially to social media. On the eve of major planned protests on Friday, 28 January, a nationwide internet and mobile phone "blackout" began, though before dawn the following morning it was reported that the blackout for cell phones had ended.

We temporarily lengthened it to 4 days during the DNS blackout, but now that a week has gone by (and @Sagemind reminded us), we just returned it to the usual 2 day time limit.

Well, the decay of power is one thing that makes the current grid bad. There are others, I'm sure, but I can't name any. The point is, though, that this solution won't necessarily come from the power company. It'll come from consumers who will see this as a way to reduce their energy costs, with a one-time investment that will pay for itself over time.

Once they have power generating capabilities in their own home, and they see they can make as much as they need and then some, the next logical step is to try to sell the excess back to the grid. There are ways of doing that today with solar and wind, but they usually require installing an expensive replacement to your current electricity counter (the exact name of the device escapes me at the moment .

The power companies themselves might see this as a more economic way of producing power than building a nuclear power plant, or a coal one. Distributing these in neighborhoods across a city lets you avoid massive blackouts by one power plant going down, like what happened in New York a while back, increasing the survivability of the grid as a whole. I'm in IT, so we're always thinking about Single Points of Failure in a network

The battery ownership approach reduces the price of the car, because you don't need to buy a battery with the car. Electric cars and plug-in hybrids cost as much as they do because of the battery, not because the car is infused with gold. Buying just a car and a subscription for monthly "eMiles", to use Agassi's term, gives you the benefits of the electric car without the cost of buying a battery. Batteries also decay over time, meaning buying the battery with the car (like in the Chevy Volt) would either require replacing the battery every few years, or driving less and less on the pure electric mode.

The smart grid is necessary. It will save money, it will give power companies options they never had before in terms of power management, and it will let end users generate power and reduce their bills by installing green energy producing equipment on and in their homes. It's the only thing that will let us move away from coal burning plants, nuclear plants and the rest of the deal-with-the-devil type of power generation we have today.

I'm sort of enjoying this too... It's not often that I get a chance to actually discuss this topic and articulate my point of view. Keep it going!
>> ^Stormsinger:
This is getting interesting now. I'd rate this discussion quite a bit higher than the video.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the decay during transmission was estimated at 7.2% back in 1995 (and unlikely to have gotten worse). That's a lot better than when I had expected, and doesn't supply much reason to convert to a new technology.
I've heard a bit about the battery ownership approach (undoubtedly from one of the sifted vids), and that may well offer a solution for the first two issues. It doesn't strike me as helping price, though. We'll see.
I'm far less enthusiastic about using car batteries for grid storage. That sort of aggregated solution has been proposed in other areas. The ones I'm familiar with were mainly IT-related, like using local hard-drives in a company's workstations to store backups. So far, I haven't heard of one example that didn't have serious issues. Admittedly, electricity is fungible, while data is not. But I still think control and coordination is likely to make it unfeasible. Think about the start of rush hour...all those cars that were making up a shortage get pulled off the grid in a very short time. That sort of scenario would make temporary shortages even worse, not better.
It probably -can- be done. I'm less sure it can be done efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. My own prediction is that the approach won't account for more than a miniscule fraction of storage. I'd put my money on non-battery storage, either gravitational or thermal.

>> ^imstellar28:
Easy Killer.
Hilarious prank. What did he think would happen if he divulged his mortal fears around people he blacks out with? I think he was probably as angry about slamming his face on the ground as waking up in the box. Should have done it on the floor.>> ^LarsaruS:
it is actually possible to die of fright...
Or they can scar you, if I was in that kitchen I would have gotten a knife and stabbed the motherfuckers to death



If he is comfortable enough to blackout and or divulge mortal fears to them that means that he trusts them. To break that trust is a horrible thing to do and is a measure of their complete lack off character and possibly an indicator that they suffer from an empathy-disorder like borderline personality, psychopathy or sociopathy. Alcohol/Drugs are not an excuse to play with other peoples health and well-being. If you OD I don't give a shit, but if you injure someone else I believe that you are a complete idiot and should die to prevent the spread of your stupid DNA and increase the intelligence of the human species.

I do agree that it should have been done on the floor as a fall like that is extremly dangerous. If he had landed wrong (or in this case more wrong as landing on your face can't be seen as right in my book) he could have broken his neck, jaw, arm or leg not to mention the risk of biting his tounge off and then drowning in his own blood... Hilarious... not!

oh fuck it.
i'll throw in also:
1.grew up with an irrational fear of men and authority due to my father being extremely strict.yet he remains one of the most amazing people i have ever encountered.my life has been less since his passing.
2.in high school i was always the guy who protected the weaker from bullies and got in a lot of trouble doing but i dont regret any of that.
3.did so much blotter acid in high school that i am now strichnine(sp?) sensitive and now it just turns me into one big cramp.
4.did a tour in the navy and had the bright idea to get a free lift to spain upon discharge.couldnt find any work yet still stayed and spent all my money,had to panhandle in the airport to get the money to get back to the states.
5.while i am fantastic at starting projects i rarely finish them.dropped out of college three times and left seminary school after less then a month.though i did get my propulsion engineering degree it was from the navy,dont think that counts and i hate math.
6.while i am not the prettiest man i have always been able to date far above my league.dated 2 porn stars and quite a few you men here may have seen in your favorite nudey mag.
7.in my 20's i traveled around DJ'in for titty bars,and yes,i dated many of them also.
8.started writing poetry,bad poetry, when i was 7.i still think my poetry is bad.
9.was raised episcopalian but left the church at 14 when father ryan could not answer my questions in any sunbstansive way.
10.in my late 20's i married a beautiful abusive woman who would burn the bottoms of my feet so i would not fall asleep while she was screaming at me in a drunken blackout.i withstood this abuse for 3 years,which was constant,until i decided enough was enough and walked out leaving her everything.until this moment i had never realized just how passive aggressive and fearful i actually was.i actually give her credit for freeing me.
11.in my early 30's some friends introduced me to exstasy.while the drug was not something i indulged in for long i fell in love with the whole scene and traveled the raves for about 3 years and every now again i will participate but the things i saw and learned live with me still.
12,took a road trip with some friends from chicago(where i was living at the time)to san diego.after a drug induced crazy weekend they left me in a pool of my own vomit and went back to chicago.needless to say we are no longer friends,but san diego was nice,so i stayed awhile.
13.did a midnight move out when i lived in lauderdale,left everything.on the drive to tampa the rotor arm in my car snapped in alligator alley.i left it and signed the title over to a clerk at a chevron in naples because she said her car was dead.3 dollar part would have fixed my car.
14.hitch-hiked from providence to phillie with my best friend from childhood.think we were 16.the trip took us almost a week and we dropped between us 33 hits of acid.that was fun calling your dad to tell him you are in phillie and not to worry while tripping balls.
15.stole a car in my teens to save my friends girlfriend from her crazy ex boyfriend.we didnt even have our licenses yet.
16.music is everything to me.i am not a purist nor an elitist.if it speaks to me and my mood at the time i will love it.
17.i can be argumentative just for the sake of being contrary.i may even agree with your point but will interject a contrary view just to better understand the subject.
18.have no patience for egotistical lazy thinkers and respond accordingly.
19.over the years i have come to realize that the more i think i am understanding something the larger my ignorance seems to grow.this is frustrating as it is exciting.
20.while i do not subscribe to a religion.in fact i am vehemently anti-religious.i am a man of faith.closest definition would be gnostic-christian but i also subscribe to kabballah.
21.i consume far too much media and many times do not give a proper alottment of time to process all that information due to my adult a.d.d.
22.i have found teaching to be my hidden passion and hope for an opportunity soon to practice that passion once again.
23.i live by a code of :honesty,open-ness and respect.i am rarely offended because i never let anyone dictate how i should feel about myself.
24.i am most likely the most opinionated person you know but i always listen to what you have to say.
25.i dont regret anything that i have done,seen or experienced because i would not be who i am today.

i find the people on the sift fascinating.

Invocations (dead) cannot be called by blackout because blackout is not privileged - sorry.

>> ^blackout:
>> ^Wingoguy:
Flying with a pilot wearing glasses would make me very nervous...

I'm a helicopter pilot, I wear contacts. My vision has to pass the same standards as any other pilot. Actually I'm going tomorrow for my FAA required yearly flight physical.


I thought the Air Force required 20/20 or better vision of all their pilots? (i.e. no contacts or glasses, but laser surgery was ok)

Or is that just for fighter pilots?

Invocations (dead) cannot be called by blackout because blackout is not privileged - sorry.