I considered it to be more of a documentary than a "reality" show.

That's what I tell myself anyway.

>> ^Boise_Lib:

I'm against all "reality" shows.
I stumbled on this show by accident and now I'm hooked. Pretty funny.

>> ^longde:

Read the book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea to see how these bastards fubar'd their country.
I think the dynasty just ended. The son has nowhere near the devotion his father garnered.


Well, technically Kim-il Sung's preserved corpse was still the President, right? Now that Kim Jong-il is dead, does he now succeed him in that post?

Kim Jong-un could possibly keep the charade going as long as he claims a direct line of communication to the spirit of his father/grand-pappy, no? Jong-il wasn't nearly as popular as his father when he died either (though probably much more so than Jong-un at the time of his father's death, as he was publicly groomed for future leadership for, what, 15 years prior?).

I'll check for that book next time I'm at the library. It's a shame Hitchens had to go right before this arshole, I would've loved to hear his opinion on this entire situation. Prolific as he was, it's likely there are some articles/videos out there concerning Jong-un's suitability/future as heir presumptive.

>> ^longde:

Read the book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea to see how these bastards fubar'd their country.
I think the dynasty just ended. The son has nowhere near the devotion his father garnered.


I'm afraid the son will believe he has to show how strong he is--by starting a war.

Read the book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea to see how these bastards fubar'd their country.

I think the dynasty just ended. The son has nowhere near the devotion his father garnered.

This video is a very biased, Euro-centric view of the world.

11th Century and on was a very turbulent era in Far east Asia. Battles between Temujin's Mongols against Jamukha's Jadrans, Goryo against the United Mongols, the Jurchens versus the Song Dynasty, multiple rebellions against the Yuan dynasty, the list goes on and on.

Majority of the battles from far east Asia seems to heavily focus on Japan, only because westerners love how Japanese are all 'bad-ass Ninjas with Samurai swords'. Woo Hoo.

No, perhaps you should re-read, the bible has NO historical authority. Like a broken clock it can, rarely, be right, but I can't reasonably accept anything from it without outside corroboration

Oh really? So why is that archaelogically, it has proven to be 100 percent historically accurate?

“No archeological discovery has ever controverted [overturned] a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries.” Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publications Society of America, 1969

There have been over 25,000 discoveries which prove its historical accuracy alone. Seems like far from being right accidently, it's always on time.

Sooo...You are claiming that these books have not been under the same copy/editorship for millennia ? My point does not require a by-line match, only that the folks copying (and editing) the canonical versions are in control of both, and have incentive to make them seem more impressive. Are you claiming this was not the case?

Of course I'm claiming its not the case. It also doesn't make any sense. You don't think the jews at the time would notice that people were editing in prophecies later? They were fanatical about these kind of details..so unless you're claiming it was a gigantic conspiracy your view seems illogical. The jews were very careful about copying..the earliest manusciprs we have and the oldest ones have very few discrepencies.

Wow, nice straw split. The portion of the testimony that claims the divinity of jesus is cut from whole cloth, that is what you were talking about, that is a forgery. You wish to interpret it as a testimony of divinity, when the historical record strongly supports the contentions that these parts were not in the original text, and are not attributable to Josephus => forgery.

The vid you post takes the safety position that since the original appears to be about jesus that it is proof of his historicity. The original text, as far as we can reconstruct it, as well as all the other non-fake historical documents don't actually claim that jesus was real or divine, they only convey the story as stated by christians.

I can also state the christian story, as a matter of historical record, without validating it or accepting it myself, the fact that christians existed is not proof that jesus did.

lol..so, when a historian talks about someone in history, its not evidence..what kind of evidence do you want? Photographs?

"Josephus includes information about individuals, groups, customs and geographical places. Some of these, such as the city of Seron, are not referenced in the surviving texts of any other ancient authority. His writings provide a significant, extra-Biblical account of the post-Exilic period of the Maccabees, the Hasmonean dynasty, and the rise of Herod the Great. He makes references to the Sadducees, Jewish High Priests of the time, Pharisees and Essenes, the Herodian Temple, Quirinius' census and the Zealots, and to such figures as Pontius Pilate, Herod the Great, Agrippa I and Agrippa II, John the Baptist, James the brother of Jesus, and a disputed reference to Jesus (for more see Josephus on Jesus). He is an important source for studies of immediate post-Temple Judaism and the context of early Christianity.

A careful reading of Josephus' writings allowed Ehud Netzer, an archaeologist from Hebrew University, to discover the location of Herod's Tomb, after a search of 35 years — above aqueducts and pools, at a flattened, desert site, halfway up the hill to the Herodium, 12 kilometers south of Jerusalem — exactly where it should have been, according to Josephus's writings."

Read that? His writings were so accurate that we were able to find a mans tomb 2000 years later. Turn off your schitzophrenia for a moment. You're claiming Jesus isn't a historical figure, even though this historian, whom you say is accurate for Cyrus, verifies that He is. I'm not talking about whether He is divine, just that He existed. You can't have it both ways. He's a historian who obviously checked his sources..he's isn't telling stories, he is relating facts. You just want to throw the ones you don't happen to agree with.

I see what you did there, let me see if I can recreate your "logic":
1)I claim the testimony has been forged
2)Therefore I must accept Josephus as completely unreliable
3)Therefor the bible is the only source of the story
4)Therefor the claimed historicity of the events depends on the bible
5)Therefor for the Cyrus claim to hold the bible must be divinely inspired

Step 2 does not follow, most of Josephus is considered sound. The fact that your predecessors felt the need to lie in his name does not invalidate all his writings, only those which we have reason to believe have been altered. As it turns out, your boys tended to do a pretty unconvincing job in their historical revisionism.

Again, forget about the divinity claims which were interperlations. He records the existence of the historical person of Jesus. So, if its good enough for Cyrus, its good enough for Jesus. You can't have it both ways. Your pathogical unbelief is amusing, but unwarrented. So your only sources are one that claims Jesus is real, and another that claims God frees the slaves. Again, not helping your case in any respect.

@TheGenk @Skeeve @Boise_Lib @gwiz665 @packo @IronDwarf @MaxWilder @westy @BicycleRepairMan @shuac @KnivesOut

Evolution is pseudo-science. It exists in the realm of imagination, and cannot be scientifically verified. At best, evolution science is forensic science, and what has been found not only does not support it, but entirely rules it out. I don't think any of you realize how weak the case for evolution really is. None of them quotes, as far as I know, are from creation scientists btw

No true transitional forms in the fossil record:

Darwins theory proposed that slow change over a great deal of time could evolve one kind of thing into another. Such as reptiles to birds. The theory proposed that we should see in the fossil records billions of these transitional forms, yet we have found none. When the theory was first proposed, darwinists pleaded poverty in the fossil record, claiming the missing links were yet to be found. It was then claimed that the links were missing because conditions conspired against fossilizing them, or that they had been eroded or destroyed in subsequent fossilization.

120 years have gone by since then. We have uncovered an extremely rich fossil record with billions of fossils, a record which has completely failed to produce the expected transitions. It has become obvious that there was no process that could have miraculously destroyed the transitionals yet left the terminal forms intact.

The next theory proposed was "hopeful monster" theory, which states that evolution occurs in large leaps instead of small ones. Some even suggested that a bird could have hatched from a reptile egg. This is against all genetic evidence, and has never been observed.

The complete lack of transitional forms is not even the worst problem for evolution, considering the big gaps between the higher categories, and the systemic absence of transitional forms between families classes orders and phyla.

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"

Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History (and a hardcore evolutionist), in a letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979 admitting no transitional forms exist.

"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

Ronald R. West, PhD (paleoecology and geology) (Assistant Professor of Paleobiology at Kansas State University), "Paleoecology and uniformitarianism". Compass, vol. 45, May 1968, p. 216

"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"

-Charles Darwin

"In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."

-Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins University

Fossil record disputes evolutionary theory:

According to evolutionary theory we should see an evolutionary tree of organisms starting from the least complex to the most complex. Instead, what we do see in the fossil record is the very sudden appearance of fully-formed and fully-functional complex life.

If you examine the fossil record, you see all kinds of complex life suddenly jumping into existence during a period that evolutionists refer to as the "Cambrian explosion".

None of the fossilized life forms found in the "Cambrian period" have any predecessors prior to that time. In essence, the "Cambrian period" represents a "sudden explosion of life" in geological terms.

Evolutionists try to disprove this by stretching it over a period of 50 million years, but they have no transitional fossils to prove that theory before or during.

"The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed"

-Paleontologist George Gaylord

What disturbs evolutionists greatly is that complex life just appears in the fossil record out of nowhere, fully functional and formed.

A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.

-Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki (an evolutionist)

"It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative."

-Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker', W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, pp. 229-230

Evolution can't explain the addition of information that turns one kind into another kind

There is no example recorded of functional information being added to any creature, ever.

"The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus)."

Species just don't change. Kind only produces kind:

"Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it."

Evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University

Not enough bones:

Today the population grows at 2% per year. If we set the population growth rate at just 0.5% per year, then total population reduces to zero at about 4500 years ago. If the first humans lived 1,000,000 years ago, then at this 0.5% growth rate, we would have 10^2100 (ten with 2100 zeroes following it) people right now. If the present population was a result of 1,000,000 years of human history, then several trillion people must have lived and died since the emergence of our species. Where are all the bones? And finally, if the population was sufficiently small until only recently, then how could a correspondingly infinitesimally small number of mutations have evolved the human race?

"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

-Professor Louis Bounoure, past president of the Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum and Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research.

Try to debunk this if you can
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=tYLHxcqJmoM&feature=PlayList&p=C805D4953D9DEC66&index=0&playnext=1

More fun facts:

There are no records of any human civilization past 4000 BC

"The research in the development of the [radiocarbon] dating technique consisted of two stages—dating of samples from the historic and prehistoric epochs, respectively. Arnold [a co-worker] and I had our first shock when our advisors informed us that history extended back only for 5,000 years . . You read statements to the effect that such and such a society or archeological site is 20,000 years old. We learned rather that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately; in fact, the earliest historical date that has been established with any degree of certainty is about the time of the First Dynasty of Egypt."—*Willard Libby, Science, March 3, 1961, p. 624.

Prior to a certain point several thousand years ago, there was no trace of man having ever existed. After that point, civilization, writing, language, agriculture, domestication, and all the rest—suddenly exploded into intense activity!

"No more surprising fact has been discovered, by recent excavation, than the suddenness with which civilization appeared in the world. This discovery is the very opposite to that anticipated. It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilization ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case."—P.J. Wiseman, New Discoveries, in Babylonia, about Genesis (1949 ), p. 28.

Oldest people/language recorded in c. 3000 B.C., and were located in Mesopotamia.

The various radiodating techniques could be so inaccurate that mankind has only been on earth a few thousand years.

"Dates determined by radioactive decay may be off—not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude . . Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand."—*Robert Gannon, "How Old Is It?" Popular Science, November 1979, p. 81.

Moonwalk disproves age of moon:

The moon is constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust particles. Scientists were able to measure the rate at which these particles would accumulate. Using their estimates according to their understanding that the age of the Earth was billions of years, their most conservative estimate predicted a dust layer 54 feet deep. This is why the lander had those huge balloon tires, to be prepared to land on a sea of dust. Neil Armstrong, after saying those famous words, uttered two more which disproved the age of the moon entirely "its solid!". Far from being 54 feet, they found the dust was 3/4 of an inch.

Evolution is a fairy tale that modern civilization has bought, hook line and sinker. Humorously, atheists accuse creationists of beiieving in myths without any evidence..when they place their entire faith in an unproven theory even evolutionists know is fatally flawed and invalid. Evolution is a meta physical belief that requires faith. Period.

Evolution is false, science affirms a divine Creator
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Books,%20Tracts%20&%20Preaching/Tracts/big_daddy.htm

Though most of this is undisputable, I'm just getting started..

Böttger was a German Alchemist held against his will and forced to turn lead to gold - since he obviously couldn't do it - He discovered porcelain when he was stalling in order to save his life. He spent most of his years in prison and was forced to work.

Any money he made was stolen from him and his Porcelain discoveries were also stolen.
When he was finally released, he died from yet-unrealized sub-standard lab environments and exposure to poisonous chemicals such as lead and cobalt.

The point is, as an Alchemist (the oldest Philosophy in the world today that out-dates ancient Egypt and even the Chinese dynasties), Böttger was forced to life imprisoned for that Philosophy and inadvertently discovered the arcanum, or secret formula, for making porcelain.

Read the book - It's a good read:
The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story
See link above...
>> ^bareboards2:

Upvoting for minute one and later -- loved seeing the artisans work.
As for this being on the philosophy channel?? What percentage of Sifters understand German enough to know if that is true or not?

@sepatown Yeah that Red Shield stuff bothered me too. The idea that the Rothschild dynasty controls all the banks is pretty ludicrous. However, if you think of it symbolically, they are all using profiteering tactics that the Rothschilds came up with. So it kinda works. I think it would be better if all the Red Shields were different bank symbols, though.

@shagen454 Good luck finding a country that doesn't have this exact same problem.

>> ^gwiz665:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/calvados" title="member since November 16th, 2006" class="profilelink">calvados I was surprised at the lack of quality in the speak. I mean, she speak the lines well and all, but just production values. At one point she even blows into the mic and it's really, really clear "woosh". I mean, couldn't they have done another take? Were they in a hurry to go the the strip club or wtf?
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/ant" title="member since March 2nd, 2006" class="profilelink"><strong style="color: rgb(0, 136, 0);">ant @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/EMPIRE" title="member since October 21st, 2006" class="profilelink">EMPIRE I loved dune 2000. I remember recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pBRHKv_Pqk from one computer to the other with a mini-jack to mini-jack from one sound card to another. Good times.
Emperor was a more bold game, which tried to do a lot of things. It was one of the first 3D RTS games, which pretty much killed it for me, not because it was ugly, but because it freaking killed my PC at the time. The story was much more true to the book in that one too, with different houses and factions.
Dune 2000 was a straight re-make of Dune 2, but with the lessons they'd learned from C&C and Red Alert, ie. it was great.
>> ^calvados:
This was a really good game. Does the intro narrator have to speak so slowly though? It sounds like she has a nailgun nail in her frontal lobe.



I didn't like Dune 2000 that much. It wasn't bad.

So old Dune2ers, did you try http://drackbolt.blogspot.com/ yet?

@calvados I was surprised at the lack of quality in the speak. I mean, she speak the lines well and all, but just production values. At one point she even blows into the mic and it's really, really clear "woosh". I mean, couldn't they have done another take? Were they in a hurry to go the the strip club or wtf?

@ant @EMPIRE I loved dune 2000. I remember recording http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pBRHKv_Pqk from one computer to the other with a mini-jack to mini-jack from one sound card to another. Good times.

Emperor was a more bold game, which tried to do a lot of things. It was one of the first 3D RTS games, which pretty much killed it for me, not because it was ugly, but because it freaking killed my PC at the time. The story was much more true to the book in that one too, with different houses and factions.

Dune 2000 was a straight re-make of Dune 2, but with the lessons they'd learned from C&C and Red Alert, ie. it was great.
>> ^calvados:

This was a really good game. Does the intro narrator have to speak so slowly though? It sounds like she has a nailgun nail in her frontal lobe.

>> ^Wingoguy:

GREAT game. The first excellent RTS, paved the way for a genre. If you never played this, you missed out. The game was actually much deeper and well done than this trailer lets on.
You can get a freeware, modded version of the game here (but I can't vouch for it):
http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?gameid=1090


BTW, your link is broken.

>> ^EMPIRE:

I really miss them too. I loved the Kyrandia games. I was REALLY into adventure games back then, and very recently I bought back a Legend of Kyrandia III: Malcolm's Revenge copy I had sold


Ah, I couldn't get into those adventure games, text games, etc.

>> ^EMPIRE:

Yes I did actually
I liked Emperor. But nothing replaces the original. If nothing else, for that feeling of nostalgia you can never recreate.


Ditto. I finished it too. Dune 2000 was OK too. I laugh at Dune 2 now because it is SO old. I love Command & Conquer (excluding Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 3, and C&C4) too. I miss Westwood Studios!

>> ^EMPIRE:

this is definitely a classic. I loved this game. And this is one of the best cinematics ever done IMO. Westwood had in general really good cinematics.


Speaking of EMPIRE, did you play that version?