This puts the finger on just what I've been thinking this last year.

Ideology is insanity. It was only good during the revolutions, to make something better of the way we were ruled and society. Now it's just like glasses making everyone see in distorted visions.

I thinked mainly of political ideology, but the same really goes for religious as well.

@enoch, thanks for your comments. I thought it better to respond directly to your profile than on the video, about which we're no longer discussing directly. Sorry for the length of this reply, but for such a complex topic as this one, a thorough and plainly-stated response is needed.

You wrote: "the REAL question is "what is the purpose of a health care system"? NOT "which market system should we implement for health care"?"

The free market works best for any and all goods and services, regardless of their aim or purpose. Healthcare is no different from any other good or service in this respect.

(And besides, tell me why there's no money in preventative care? Do nutritionists, physical trainers/therapists, psychologists, herbalists, homeopaths, and any other manner of non-allopathic doctors not get paid and make profit in the marketplace? Would not a longer life not lead to a longer-term 'consumer' anyway? And would preventative medicine obliterate the need for all manner of medical treatment, or would there not still remain a need to diagnose, treat, and cure diseases, even in the presence of a robust preventative medical market?)

I realize that my argument is not the "popular" one (and there are certainly many reasons for this, up to and including a lot of disinformation about what constitutes a "free market" health care system). But the way to approach such things is not heuristically, but rationally, as one would approach any other economic issue.

You write "see where i am going with this? It's not so easy to answer and impose your model of the "free market" at the same time."

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. The purpose of the healthcare system is to provide the most advanced medical service and care possible in the most efficient and affordable way possible. Only a free competitive market can do this with the necessary economic calculations in place to support its progress. No matter how you slice it, a socialized approach to healthcare invariably distorts the market (with its IP fees, undue regulations, and a lack of any accurate metrics on both the supply-side and on the demand-side which helps to determine availability, efficacy, and cost).

"you cannot have "for-profit" and "health-care" work in conjunction with any REAL health care."

Sorry, but this is just absurd. What else can I say?

"but if we use your "free market" model against a more "socialized model".which model would better serve the public?"

The free market model.

"if we take your "free market" model,which would be under the auspices of capitalism."

Redundant: "free market under the auspices of free market."

"disease is where the money is at,THAT is where the profit lies,not in preventive medicine."

Only Krugman-style Keynesians would say that illness is more profitable than health (or war more profitable than peace, or that alien invasions and broken windows are good for the economy). They, like you, aren't taking into account the One Lesson in Economics: look at how it affects every group, not just one group; look at the long term effects, not just short term ones. You're just seeing that, in the short-run, health will be less profitable for medical practitioners (or some pharmaceuticals) that are currently working in the treatment of illness. But look at every group outside that small group and at the long run and you can see that health is more profitable than illness overall. The market that profits more from illness will have to adapt, in ways that only the market knows for sure.

Do you realize that the money you put into socialized medicine (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, etc.) is money you deplete from prevention entrepreneurship?

(As an aside, I wonder, why do so many people assume that the socialized central planners have some kind of special knowledge or wisdom that entrepreneurs do not? And why is there the belief that unlike entrepreneurs, socialist central planners are not selfishly motivated but always act in the interest of the "common good?" Could this be part of the propagandized and indoctrinated fear that's implicit in living in a socialized environment? Why do serfs (and I'm sure that, at some level, people know that's what they are) love the socialist central planners more than they love themselves? Complex questions about self-esteem and captive minds.)

If fewer people get sick, the market will then demand more practitioners to move from treating illness into other areas like prevention, being a prevention doctor or whatever. You're actually making the argument for free market here, not against it. Socialized bureaucratically dictated medicine will not adapt to the changing needs as efficiently or rapidly as a free market can and would. If more people are getting sick, then we'll need more doctors to treat them. If fewer people are getting sick because preventive medicine takes off, then we'll have more of that type of service. If a socialized healthcare is mandated, then we will invariably have a glut of allopathic doctors, with little need for their services (and we then have the kinds of problems we see amongst doctors who are coerced -- by the threat of losing their license -- to take medicaid and then lie on their reports in order to recoup their costs, e.g., see the article linked here.)

Meanwhile, there has been and will remain huge profits to be made in prevention, as the vitamin, supplements, alternative medicine, naturopathy, exercise and many other industries attest to. What are you talking about, that there's no profit in preventing illness? (In a manner of speaking, that's actually my bread and butter!) If you have a way to prevent illness, you will have more than enough people buying from you, people who don't want to get sick. (And other services for the people who do.) Open a gym. Become a naturopath. Teach stress management, meditation, yoga, zumba, whatever! And there are always those who need treatment, who are sick, and the free market will then have an accurate measure of how to allocate the right resources and number of such practitioners. This is something that the central planners (under socialized services) simply cannot possibly do (except, of course, for the omniscient ones that socialists insist exist).

You wrote "cancer,anxiety,obesity,drug addiction.
all are huge profit generators and all could be dealt with so much more productively and successfully with preventive care,diet and exercise and early diagnosis."

But they won't as long as you have centrally planned (socialized) medicine. The free market forces practitioners to respond to the market's demands. Socialized medicine does not. Entrepreneurs will (as they already have) exploit openings for profit in prevention (without the advantage of regulations which distort the markets) and take the business away from treatment doctors. If anything, doctors prevent preventative medicine from getting more widespread by using government regulations to limit what the preventive practitioners do. In fact, preventive medicine is so profitable that it has many in the medical profession lobbying to curtail it. They are losing much business to alternative/preventive practitioners. They lobby to, for example, prevent herb providers from stating the medical/preventive benefits of their herbs. They even prevent strawberry farmers to tout the health benefits of strawberries! It is the state that is slowing down preventive medicine, not the free market! In Puerto Rico, for example, once the Medical Association lost a bit to prohibit naturopathy, they effectively outlawed acupuncture by successfully getting a law passed that requires all acupuncturists to be medical doctors. Insanity.

If you think there is no profit in preventative care or exercise, think GNC and Richard Simmons, and Pilates, and bodywork, and my own practice of psychotherapy. Many of the successful corporations (I'm thinking of Google and Pixar and SalesForce and Oracle, etc.) see the profit and value in preventative care, which is why they have these "stay healthy" programs for their employees. There's more money in health than illness. No doubt.

Or how about the health food/nutrition business? Or organic farming, or whole foods! The free market could maybe call for fewer oncologists and for more Whole Foods or even better natural food stores. Of course, we don't know the specifics, but that's actually the point. Only the free market knows (and the omniscient socialist central planners) what needs to happen and how.

Imagination! We need to get people to use it more.

You wrote: "but when we consider that the 4th and 5th largest lobbyists are the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry is it any wonder that america has the most fucked up,backwards health care system on the planet."

You're actually making my point here. In a free market, pharmaceutical companies cannot monopolize what "drugs" people can or cannot take, sell or not sell, and cannot prevent natural alternatives from being promoted. Only with state intervention (by way of IP regulations, and so forth) can they do so.

Free market is not corporatism. Free market is not crony capitalism. (More disinformation that needs to be lifted.)

So you're not countering my free market position, you're countering the crony capitalist position. This is a straw man argument, even if in this case you might not have understood my position in the first place. You, like so many others, equate "capitalism" with cronyism or corporatism. Many cannot conceive of a free market that is free from regulation. So folks then argue against their own interests, either for or against "fascist" vs. "socialist" medicine. The free market is, in fact, outside these two positions.

You wrote: "IF we made medicare available to ALL american citizens we would see a shift from latter stage care to a more aggressive preventive care and early diagnosis. the savings in money (and lives) would be staggering."

I won't go into medicare right now (It is a disaster, and so is the current non-free-market insurance industry. See the article linked in my comment above.)

You wrote "this would create a huge paradigm shift here in america and we would see results almost instantly but more so in the coming decades."

I don't want to be a naysayer but, socialism is nothing new. It has been tried (and failed) many times before. The USSR had socialized medicine. So does Cuba (but then you may believe the Michael Moore fairytale about medicine in Cuba). It's probably better to go see in person how Cubans live and how they have no access to the places that Moore visited.

You wrote: "i feel very strongly that health should be a communal effort.a civilized society should take care of each other."

Really, then why try to force me (or anyone) into your idea of "good" medicine? The free market is a communal effort. In fact, it is nothing else (and nothing else is as communal as the free market). Central planning, socialized, top-down decision-making, is not. Never has been. Never will be.

Voluntary interactions is "taking care of each other." Coercion is not. Socialism is coercion. It cannot "work" any other way. A free market is voluntary cooperation.

Economic calculation is necessary to avoid chaos, whatever the purpose of a service. This is economic law. Unless the purpose is to create chaos, you need real prices and efficiency that only the free market can provide.

I hope this helps to clarify (and not confuse) what I wrote on @eric3579's profile.

I'd down vote too if I could. Not because of anything to do with cannabis, but because you are distorting the meaning of the concept that's being described in the video.

As the video explains, willful blindness is when people who know the same truth choose to ignore it. Not because they disagree with it, but because acting like it's not true is more beneficial than acting upon it being true.

It does not apply to people who rely on different information; and it does not apply to everyone who simply disagrees with you.

Rewatch the video, especially the part where she gives examples; and discusses her findings on people working at corporations who don't speak up about things they know.

Too bad audio gets distorted... Would've love to sample that..

Odd that I can remember when sift was moderatly decent, and didn't go off into the deep end of failing to understand the law. It's also useful to note after watching the video, that the entire opinion piece is missing some key facts. Such as, Martin was known to police. The only reason why he didn't have a felony rap sheet was because the "juvenile justice" program kept him out of the courts. Fun to note that if you pay attention between what this guy is saying, and look at the physical evidence about 30-40% of what has been said is either a distortion, or a lie.

It's also fun to know that you don't always do a toxicology report on the person who shoots, especially on grounds of self-defense. It's even more fun, to note that he wasn't arrested because the police found no probable cause to do so. It wasn't until the DOJ got involved, along with POTUS to make it into a racial issue--that it happened.

Now it's even greater that Angela Corey failed to meet the grounds for an affidavit for probable cause. Instead directly mislead, and lied in the one that was submitted. The entire case was a sham trial, and if you'd rather believe what some flappy headed person NBC, or CNN, or YT is telling you, then feel free to wallow in your own ignorance.

Miss Janes' rockin' that meta-programming...

How many generations would it take to fix the North Korean peoples? One, if you separated the ones just pulled from the matrix from the ones already fried.

Wouldn't take long without the distortion-

wtf...that's some shitty blurring tech. Anyone who even remotely knows this woman would know who she is. They don't distort the voice, the blurring is trivial and then you can see the unblurred face just a few minutes earlier...what...the..fuck.

well first off, I think to answer your first point. As with most things, there's a grain of truth to most scandals, but it's distorted, exaggerated and sensationalized.

But here's the thing, I freely acknowledge that I make no claim to understanding the whole topic and I call BS on most people who do. Because of the sorry state of our 4th estate. I assume there is some bias one way or the other in just about everything they report, especially when it's political. You don't trust gov't? I don't trust media. With gov't even people who are just ultimately seeking power, they're typically seeking power because they think they can wield it for good. even if they ultimately do bad things with it. No one wakes up and says "you know what? I'm going to totally use my power to fuck over some people, woo hoo!" Even the most crazed elected official deep down thinks they're trying to help out. or they honestly believe their ideas will ultimately benefit everyone.

meanwhile, with the media, it's just pure profit motive there. give me ratings, give me money.

as for your remaining arguments. I think the whole privacy issue is a bit hypocritical. Whenever you buy something with a credit card, that's a fingerprint that gets left behind that can track you. Whenever you use your smartphone GPS, that's something that can track you. Whenever you use the internet, there are a myriad of technologies all designed around tracking you. all for the sake of selling you something, to extract more money out of you.

..and we accept that, hell we demand it.

But when gov't does it, suddenly it's bad. But they're supposedly using that tracking to catch terrorists. So let's see, catching people who mean to do us harm, or ads and methods to extract money from you. I know which one I'd rather have. Sure, both types of surveillance could be abused, but one we tolerate, the other is not. I think that's rather hypocritical. either it's all bad, or it's not.

I also just tend to think our sense of privacy is exaggerated. (and no I felt this way even when Bush was in power). While I don't agree with the Patriot Act, I do think our fears of surveillance and are outdated and as I explained above, hypocritical. Just like virtually every tool, there are good positive uses for surveillance data, and the tool can be abused as well. That doesn't stop us from using it, we just try to put safeguards in place to try and reduce the incentive to use it for harm.

I think our sense of privacy comes from two things. Either we're doing something we shouldn't be doing..ie illegal or unethical, in that case tough shit. Or we're doing something that we consider embarrassing. In that case you're just being human and really shouldn't be embarrassed about it at all.

lets take two cases. First one: homosexuality. Lets say it was the 80s when most people were still quite firmly in the closet. and bam. because of no more privacy, everyone was instantly outed. no more hiding. Everyone knows. People would be forced to accept it. Even though they would be in the minority, there would be just too many people out to dismiss it anymore. You couldn't lock them up or ostracize them without committing holocaust-level atrocities.

Same thing with my 2nd case, marijuana. If it were suddenly possible to know each and every person who ever smoked. It would force the issue out in the open. You couldn't lock them all up as there would be too many. Even if you could, it would be a huge hit to our workforce and our families. We'd be forced to re-evaluate it and legalize it.

it would be impossible to commit physical abuse if there was no privacy.

In many ways, our views on sexuality and privacy are SO puritanical. In the long run things would be so better if we could just get it out there in the open and thus solve problems and help.

I get what you're saying about corruption and power. but historically speaking, ANY time there has been widespread corruption and abuse of power, it's always been stamped out in some way. It has to be. corruption and abuse of power are ultimately unsustainable and it eventually falls apart and gives way to something better that is sustainable. otherwise we wouldn't have survived this long.

If enough people are wronged, they WILL do something about it. If things were REALLY that bad here in America. There wouldn't be pundits talking about revolution and tyranny. There WOULD be revolution and tyranny.

Talk. is. cheap.

I din't know Bell was a Scotsman-Could have sworn I'd heard this recording before and it sounded just as distorted...Is this process supposed to clean an old recording up or to get the track off of an otherwise unplayable source?

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin with news that the National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top secret program on Thursday, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. But an Apple spokesperson said it had "never heard" of PRISM and added, quote, "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," they said. Other companies had similar responses.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist, attorney, and blogger for The Guardian, where he broke his story in—that was headlined "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal." This comes after he revealed Wednesday in another exclusive story that the "NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers." According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers. Glenn Greenwald is also author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He’s joining us now via Democracy—video stream.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out this latest exclusive that you have just reported in The Guardian.

GLENN GREENWALD: There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, "Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check." And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, there is a chart prepared by the NSA in the top-secret document you obtained that shows the breadth of the data it’s able to obtain—email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype chats, file transfers, social networking details. Talk about what this chart reveals.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, as you reported, the PRISM program—not to be confused with prison, the PRISM program—is run with the assistance of the companies that participate, including Facebook and Apple, but all of those who responded to a Guardian request for comment denied knowledge of any of the program. This is what Google said, quote: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege [that] we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.

This is exactly the kind of debate that we ought to have out in the open. What exactly is the government doing in how it spies on us and how it reads our emails and how it intercepts our chats? Let’s have that discussion out in the open. To the extent that these companies and the NSA have a conflict and can’t get their story straight, let them have that conflict resolved in front of us. And then we, as citizens, instead of having this massive surveillance apparatus built completely secretly and in the dark without us knowing anything that’s going on, we can then be informed about what kinds of surveillance the government is engaged in and have a reasoned debate about whether that’s the kind of world in which we want to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business record section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Dianne Feinstein. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong. The idea of the PATRIOT Act was that when the government suspects somebody of being involved in terrorism or serious crimes, the standard of proof is lowered for them to be able to get these documents. But the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous, and Democratic senators are the ones saying that it has nothing to do with that law.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.

SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. Speaking on MSNBC, she said the leak should be investigated and that the U.S. has a, quote, "culture of leaks."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Should it be—should the leak be investigated?

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think so. I mean, I think we have become a culture of leaks now.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, being questioned by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Glenn Greenwald, your final response to this? And sum up your findings. They’re talking about you, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

But look, what she’s doing is simply channeling the way that Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power, which is, if you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we want to thank you for being with us. Is this threat of you being investigated going to deter you in any way, as you continue to do these exclusives, these exposés?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, it’s actually going to embolden me to pursue these stories even more aggressively.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper. We’ll link to your exposés on our website, "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal", as well as "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily"." - Democracy Now!

I must admit that Israel, in my humble opinion, is damaging herself in the long run. We are aggressors. we have this "kill before get killed" way of thinking for the past I don't know how many years. We are doing basically whatever we like, running around with a hall pass from our big brother the U.S., knowing that almost nothing will be done to us due to the severe consequences. I can assure you that people in Israel have a distorted view of things, due to the long standing feud in the middle east. Oh, and another example, you will not see students been taught that Israel started any war. The arabs were always the aggressors.

I can only imagine what acts will be taken if Syria decides to attack a missile shipment from the U.S. coming to Israel...

Great video, but id like to see him expand this into digital modulation, ala QPSK / QAM, and how we use it to deliver data streams of whatever the hell we want.

He didnt focus enough on fundemental frequency noise products either, carrier tripple beat / second+ order distortions. Pretty important because a single band can cause noise in heaps of places across the spectrum.

....I work in telecoms, this audio video seems like fundementals to me

You raise an excellent point, which really tarnishes the possible good intentions that people surely put into this kind of publicity stunt. On the one hand it's a positive thing to try to expose the distorted self-image women are pressured to have of themselves, but it is ultimately a system of playing good cop bad cop in order to sustain the status quo and, above all, sell loads of shit.. "You're fat and ugly and a bad lover!" "No, you are beautiful and sexy and deserving of pampering!" Bottom ground: "you are all about looks and sex and gives us your money now please."

/steps off soapbox

About this film, to just highlight some of the heights of absurdity that the so-called intellectual property (which isn't really "property" at all in any consistent definition of the word) can reach, here's something an anti-IP expert, Stephan Kinsella (who, as it happens, is, ironically, also an IP lawyer) said about this new movie, 'Oz the Great and Powerful':

"So, for IP reasons, it's not technically a prequel to the 1939 movie by MGM. This is a Disney film, and it has to follow the original Baum books, not the 1939 movie. That's why in one scene, the witch in the new movie doesn't say "my pretties." She says something like "my pretty ... one." And that's why MGM and Disney lawyers had to meet to come to an agreement on what shade of green was permitted on the skin of the bad witch in the new movie. And that's why no reference to Dorothy's ruby slippers was permitted (that was from the 1939 movie, not the book, which had silver slippers). So once again, copyright distorts culture and life and meaning."

His theory, or argument, was based on gross misinterpretations of Christian doctrine. It would be like if I said that videosift is a morally bankrupt website because the majority of its videos are child pornography. Of course this is patently untrue so all I have there is a strawman argument. I have painted videosift as something it isn't so I can trash and attack its character. This is the same thing Sam Harris is doing. He has painted Christianity as something that it isn't and trashed and attacked its character based on distortions and untruths. It sounds very persuasive if you are not actually familiar with the subject material. Sam is presenting himself as an authority on the subject but as I showed in my reply he lacks even a grasp of the very basics. If you feel my refutation is inadequate in any way, please specifically show me where.

The convincing evidence I have received is personal revelation. To know God He must reveal Himself to you, otherwise you won't know anything about God. Why do you think its impossible that there is a God? Do you have any church background?