But, Africa isn't able to feed itself. Regional instability being an overwhelming part of that. When farmer and family spend a year growing a crop and raising animals for food, only to have men with guns come and take it at the end of the year, your production next year goes down. It doesn't take more than a single generation to go from prosperous ag to mass starvation, and for a multitude of reasons Africa has been facing that problem for multiple generations.

If we can agree the reasons for it are many fold and complicated, can I get agreement that there DO exist circumstances where foreign intervention absolutely is in the interest of the local people? It seems undeniable if you look at Rwanda that all of Central Africa would've been better served by action than the inaction our world collectively provided.

You should upload a zip of that program to the internet!

Then post your story and a link to the software over on http://forums.zdaemon.org/

I'm sure you'll have a few grateful fans

Looking back what do you think the instability was caused by?

Drone strikes in northern Pakistan are not indiscriminate. Count how many of the Taliban and Al Qaida's top leadership has been killed off by them. That's some pretty impossibly lucky indiscriminate fire to so frequently end up taking out major jihadist leaders.

Do you have an alternative proposal for dealing with militant jihadists in Pakistan? They are killing civilians, and in particular women, children and students daily. During Pakistan's elections, the Taliban killed multiple candidates, including candidates lobbying extremely hard for an end to drone strikes, an end to military action in the tribal regions, and for talks with the Taliban. Even those candidates were declared enemies by the Taliban for taking part in elections and were killed by them. This isn't about protecting white christians from muslims, it's about jihadists killing off muslims and trying to stop them.

America can't take more precise policed action to arrest or capture militant leaders in Pakistan either. Killing Bin Laden led to even greater outrage than the drone strikes, but boots on the ground are the only method left with less risk of collateral damage. Even if Pakistan's military is finally persuaded to do so instead, it is guaranteed that it will again increase civilian deaths over the short term as any campaign to retake control of the tribal areas is put into action.

It's a mess and simply saying leave them alone is naive and stupid. The Taliban are actively working to topple a nuclear powered state that is particularly vulnerable to them. More over, we are not even sure just how removed from each other key leaders in Pakistan's ISI and military leaders are from jihadist leaders. This instability doesn't play out with a nuke thrown our way in the opening, it comes as jihadists getting enough influence to instigate sending one into India.

If all you pay attention is the idiotically simplistic, war is bad lets not fight pseudo commentators you miss the entire picture.

No, corporations are not included as individual people on this graph.

The problem with this kind of wealth inequality is that it historically leads to social and economic instability. The US's economic dominance in the 20th century was built in no small part on the solid middle class, whose purchasing power drove the economy.

That is increasingly vanishing. The richest are getting much, much, much richer, while the median income, adjusted for inflation, has been dropping for the past twenty years.

If I see someone completely naked in a public area then the possibility of a dangerous mental instability would certainly make me hesitate to put myself between them and their intended actions, especially with children nearby.

I'm considerably less concerned with the supposed horror of a child seeing what a naked human body looks like.

Personally I'd let them on the elevator, then quietly exit with the child.

Benefits:
1. If a government did decide to crush it's citizens by way of direct physical means, then the citizens would have a marginally increased chance of defending themselves against small task forces.

2. If someone without invitation enters your home lacking any degree of friendly intentions, then having a small remote control sized devise to 'turn them off' could be beneficial to yourself and your loved ones, provided you knew how to use it safely and could analyze a situations quickly and calmly enough while rationally determining when to and when not to act with said device.

As a general statement about the item and not the skill or mentality of using the item, I think guns are a very effective, reliable, strategically advantageous and intelligently engineered tool for destroying a target from range while increasing your level of safety as best one can.

.. and it is for this core reason above while combined with others that I think civilians should not have them for a reason as illegitimately justified as 'I want one'.
Combine the high degree of effectiveness of the tool, while noting what the single effectiveness is (i.e. quick ranged destruction), with mental instabilities and you have a potentially negative and hard to control situation. Arming more people to act as defenders only further pushes the negative potential to higher levels as they are also subject to fluctuations of rational thought.

For those who want to 'shoot down' this above statement as a curable and treatable problem of mental health, you are inherently and naturally wrong. Emotions are not rational thought, they are effective survival mechanisms precisely because they can easily blind us to some logical thought processes that could otherwise get in the way of us doing what seemingly needs to be done, depending on which emotion is in question and any circumstantial details of the specific situation.
Emotions evolved over a long period of time and subsequently are not geared beneficially for all the challenges we face in this modern world, the result is byproduct effects.

In regards to my 1st stated benefit, if someone genuinely thinks that because they have a tool that can spit out 600 rounds of lead a minute with an effective accuracy range of 800 meters, that this is going to give them a realistically decent chance of going head to head and holding their own against an army of people who are just like themselves (i.e. standard human attributes) with the difference of this activity being the life they have dedicated themselves to professionally for years.. then that pro-gun human is grossly delusional.
The previous point doesn't even begin to touch on the sheer difference of resources in terms of quantity let alone quality, in that if you actually managed to hold your own for long enough, you would get bombed into oblivion without ever having a clue it was going to happen until at best a second or 2 before it occurred.

Re my 2nd stated benefit, if the intruder has already gained access to your house before you have your tool in hand and aimed at them, then there is as reasonable a chance they could get to you before you can defend yourself, at which point that tool could then potentially be used against you or you loved ones.

PS: crap, that was meant to be a short post.

Too bad they used the tech in such a lame way. The inherent instability could have been used for a positive outcome rather than them trying desperately to do accurate light reflections. They also didn't do much of anything that couldn't be done by other means. Would love to see what The Chemical Brothers and their visual designer would come up with. More randomness, more use of the axis towards the crowd, things that would be hard to do with less mobile lights.

They were criminally reckless. Her disqualifying lack of knowledge was so extreme, there's no way she could have faked it until after the convention. Unless these other guys were clueless themselves about basic civics/history/world events, which is even sadder, but not hard to believe. They are political hacks, after all.

If you were interviewing a highly experienced engineer, you wouldn't ask him or her something basic like Newton's 3 Laws. But you would talk shop with such a person about issues that depend upon knowledge of the fundamentals. It wouldn't take 5 minutes to uncover an unsophisticated cad. So, I don't believe the book or the movie. They knew they were in trouble the first conversation they had with Palin.

On Edwards, it's not up to me to prove a negative. I don't know one way or the other. The McCain aid certainly can't prove his assertion, which is my point. I never was in the Edwards camp, but the fact that he was a lying philanderer counts for nothing. Wouldn't be the first time we had a president with those two flaws.>> ^shuac:

>> ^longde:
They should have pressed him alot more on why he knowingly put up an unqualified person as a candidate for the VP. He wasn't contrite enough, IMO.
Also, how does he know Edwards was unqualified?

While I agree that he wasn't contrite enough, you can't say he knowingly put up an unqualified candidate. They just did a crappy vetting job of her. And even if they had the time to fully vet her, I think she could've faked her way through it, she being a good politician.
The vetting process probably assumes a great deal about what a candidate knows because when you ascend to becoming somebody's veep pick, it's a safe bet that you know a few things about the world. In other words, they don't ever bother vetting a sophomore high school student because, why would they ever need to unless sophomore high school students is all we had? Yet that is the level of world knowledge Palin seems to have had...so the vetting questions do not start that far back, understand? My point here is that they didn't realize the full extent of her ignorance and instability until well after the convention. I read the book and saw the movie.
But my question for you about Edwards is this: do you believe he was qualified? You think a person with such crucially flawed judgement and character would be okie-dokie as president, is that right? Better than Palin? Probably, but that's not the only hurdle a potential president has to jump, is it?
So tell us why Edwards wasn't unqualified given his public record.

>> ^longde:

They should have pressed him alot more on why he knowingly put up an unqualified person as a candidate for the VP. He wasn't contrite enough, IMO.
Also, how does he know Edwards was unqualified?


While I agree that he wasn't contrite enough, you can't say he knowingly put up an unqualified candidate. They just did a crappy vetting job of her. And even if they had the time to fully vet her, I think she could've faked her way through it, she being a good politician.

The vetting process probably assumes a great deal about what a candidate knows because when you ascend to becoming somebody's veep pick, it's a safe bet that you know a few things about the world. In other words, they don't ever bother vetting a sophomore high school student because, why would they ever need to unless sophomore high school students is all we had? Yet that is the level of world knowledge Palin seems to have had...so the vetting questions do not start that far back, understand? My point here is that they didn't realize the full extent of her ignorance and instability until well after the convention. I read the book and saw the movie.

But my question for you about Edwards is this: do you believe he was qualified? You think a person with such crucially flawed judgement and character would be okie-dokie as president, is that right? Better than Palin? Probably, but that's not the only hurdle a potential president has to jump, is it?

So tell us why Edwards wasn't unqualified given his public record.

Your answer is, because you believe it is just a feeling, and that people can convince themselves of anything, therefore it isn't evidence..but this is all based on your presupposition that there is no God. God could obviously provide evidence of His existence to anyone. The fact is, there is a God who loves you, who does provide evidence of His existence. What you're doing is choosing to remain ignorant. Open your heart, because God has a plan for your life, and you could know this is true, today, and not something based on mere feelings

>> ^spoco2:
@shinyblurry if you can continue to argue that a feeling is empirical evidence, no matter how much you think it's a supernatural encounter, then there's no point arguing with you as you are arguing from a point of ignorance, not I.
You should do some reading into the absolute certainty that people can and have believed things that are absolutely, verifiably, demonstratively false. Interviews with people with mental instability that have been able to overcome issues through medication or other means, and can describe the unwavering belief that what they used to think was true, even though they know now it was false.
I am done here. No further responses...
Not to say I won't bite again if you pipe up on another video mind you.

@shinyblurry if you can continue to argue that a feeling is empirical evidence, no matter how much you think it's a supernatural encounter, then there's no point arguing with you as you are arguing from a point of ignorance, not I.

You should do some reading into the absolute certainty that people can and have believed things that are absolutely, verifiably, demonstratively false. Interviews with people with mental instability that have been able to overcome issues through medication or other means, and can describe the unwavering belief that what they used to think was true, even though they know now it was false.

I am done here. No further responses...

Not to say I won't bite again if you pipe up on another video mind you.

Some sort of spending policy was needed, but the bailout as it was put forth was pretty dismal in it's results. The companies that received it were the ones who created the mess for the most part (banks), and we really still haven't addressed punishing them OR putting laws in place to either:
A) Punish them if it happens again, really the laws now should be sufficient.
B) Make it impossible to happen again....all those acts, they repealed over the last 20-30 years.
C) Prevent some of the more insanity driven investing, such as over abundant speculation and similar cost creating but non-value creating (Call it a Private Tax, if you will) things.

Really the more I look back on the bailout, and look at the attitudes of most of the politicians at that time...they were saying let the auto industry fail. But the bailouts to the auto industries have at least halfway been paid back. Chrysler is likely going to short the government 1.3 billion last I read. GM gave the government stock and 22 billion. Stock is worth about 13.5 billion. They borrowed 50 billion. So 28 billion is what we have to get out of that stock to recover fully. And as far as I know there is no interest accumulated, so losing money in those deals is a kick to the crotch considering.

I think the auto industries might have been able to enter bankruptcy and come back out of it with some lessons learned. But vehicles like the "Volt" show that......they don't really know who they are selling to. Chrysler ended up being taken over by Fiat. And Ford handled it's own business. The one in the worst shape was GM, and I can't say that they probably didn't have it coming. And they still ended up pretty much killing the economy dead in my area despite the bailout when they shut their plants down that they really hadn't "kept up" in DECADES...place was really dumpy looking. No one would take it over because it was just utter trash when they left. I'm more against than for the bailout of the auto industries, but I can see that they were probably beneficial there although GM seemingly learned nothing of note from it.

Banks on the other hand......they took in 1.2 trillion. And a bunch of the borrowed money went to European firms. Along with other financial institutions. And many kept taking loans into 2010.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/that_federal_bank_bailout_in_2008_was_bigger_than_we_knew_a_lot_bigger.html

Has lots of info on it. I haven't taken the time to confirm every last portion of it, but we know the bailout/loans of 2008 that were announced ended up being MUCH larger than they told us. So the information is kind of hit and miss since they kept it hush hush for awhile.

But, the money was to help keep the banks off people's backs about foreclosures. It hasn't, in fact they took the money and foreclosed anyway to get both the cash to make it possible to allow the person to keep the house AND the house. That should be criminal.

The bailout of those institutions probably did stop a economic meltdown, but I think that bailout still should be criticized. The people who caused it suffered no punishment by law, financially, or by failure. And they have been fighting have regulations and such put in place to stop it from happening again and from practices like speculation being allowed in such quantities. It's affecting the oil prices and they are using it as a argument for "foreign oil" ALL the time.

Sure the bailout saved us from financial meltdown, but we aren't safe from it happening again. In fact we're probably even more precariously perched at the edge than we were before, and people are making money off that instability. If they could have made money during the total collapse, I don't think they would have gotten bailout to all those institutions.

So, we should criticize the bailout, simply because it has made it possible for the people who control the money to continue making money, and no one has corrected the conditions that caused the collapse in the first place. The people who caused it keep on keeping on, the politicians get some money stuffed in their pockets, and the people who got hurt most by the crash whether you lost your house, job, savings, pension, etc are just lined up to be knocked down again and no one is trying to fix it. The people who had money to weather the crash, are recovering and the people who didn't are still hurt by the crash they had no way of avoiding.

Too big to fail institutions are still too big to fail. Now they know that they can leech all the money from the government whenever they start to lean a little as a collective. Nothing was learned by anyone there, because nothing ended up happening to them besides some bad press...when they should have gotten a major investigation that was more like a full cavity search to determine wrongdoing.

>> ^cosmovitelli:

@bcglorf
I think it's about where you start from. Without opportunistic pillaging in these countries they wouldn't be a threat at all.
In fact they wouldn't have gunpowder let alone stinger missiles.
Obviously you can't unscramble the pudding and those now involved have to deal with it every day until the empire collapses under the weight (and this is the reason they all have sooner or later, ask the Brits, ottomans, romans etc). Still at least a couple of hundred fat families got a bit fatter - and will be able to buy large stakes in what comes next..
Btw as for Pakistan there was a whistleblower about nuclear secrets leaking who got totally crushed by the US gov a few years back. Pakistan going nuclear was a VERY shady episode that no-one seems to be free to speak about yet. Or maybe it's just slipped into the national ADHD..


I agree with it being where you start from, or with how you see our world. When I look at human history, I don't see any point in it where opportunistic pillaging wasn't the order of the day for whomever was strongest or able to. Perhaps that's why my bar for calling a national action 'good' is different, my view of history leaves me with extremely low expectations.

Pakistan has slipped into the national ADHD on the commoner level. At the decision making level, there has appeared to be a coordinated effort to say very little about Pakistan. I think largely due to the (IMHO correct)belief that Pakistan's current political environment is a giant house of cards being kicked at from all directions. Mark my words, by the end of this year I expect to see Pakistan once again under military rule. Currently it looks like the guise will be court appointed military rule to restore order and enable democratic elections in the near future.

The military leadership has consistently benefited from maintaining a degree of internal conflict and instability between the tribal regions and the government. Using the age old tactic of having a common enemy/opponent to unite the rest of the country behind. Of course, the military doesn't want a long term solution to that conflict, they want the conflict to go on forever as it is in their interest. The downside for us was that the Taliban gained enormous power and influence throughout the tribal regions in all that. They gained enough that they were a bigger challenge than the tribal regions themselves, as unlike the tribes the Taliban could hit back deep into Pakistan proper. Until the events of 9/11, the military(Musharaff at the time) handled this by having a pseudo alliance with the Taliban, basically allowing them to govern the tribal regions of Pakistan. After 9/11, American leadership decided they weren't comfortable with the Taliban by and large controlling large swathes of a nuclear armed state and maintaining an alliance with them of undetermined strength.

Of course, nobody in America is able to talk about it that way, because it would further strengthen the deeply anti-American sentiments in Pakistan already, maybe enough to tip the scales towards siding with the Taliban instead of America.

(top reddit comment) SixBiscuit 368 points 5 hours ago*

Predicting an Iraq war in April 2002 was not exactly difficult or limited to Ron Paul. The rest of the video has a certain amount of horoscope logic to it.

>> A major war... the largest since WWII.

Nope. Iraq is in no way larger than Vietnam even. -- http://www.lies.com/wp/2006/11/05/us-deaths-in-iraq-vs-vietnam-the-handoff/

>> The Karzai government will fail and US involvement will end in Afghanistan

Nope. -- http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/03/us-afghanistan-election-idUSTRE6320X220100403

>> An international dollar crisis will dramatically boost interest rates in the United States

Nope. -- http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/fed/key-interest-rates.asp

He is completely off on the scope of what he predicted. The video is manipulative. I'd really like to see a Paul supporter write these out and back them up.

For instance crude oil did shoot up to record highs but not because of an oil embargo. Does he get credit for predicting that? He's half right. Oil shot up because of instability in the region and speculation, not an embargo.

What about what he's left out. If he had such clever predictive powers why isn't Iran mentioned? Iran filling the power vaccum Iraq's destabilization left is something that could have been easily predicted but he doesn't.

Saying that the Arab Spring was the Islamic fundamentalist overthrowing their government is mischaracterizing what happened. Yes Islamic fundamentalist may end up in power in Egypt and Libya but they were not the instigators of the uprisings.

No doubt Ron Paul along with Hunter S. Thompson and a lot of people knew going into Iraq was a terrible fucking idea and would lead to ruin. That doesn't make him some sort of Cassandrian prophet. It means he was one of the few elected officials brave enough to speak out against it. Which is admirable but it hardly makes him alone. Powell believed it was a terrible idea at the time as well but was too chickenshit to stand up and stop it.

I think anyone can look at those graphs and see there is a problem. A very small group of people are rising above the rest and there's just no way this whole country can function with just that small group of people's skill set, earnings and knowledge. They want the money and the power, but the responsibility falls to "everyone" when it comes to keeping infrastructure and protections in place to safely keep their wealth rolling in.

If the laws weren't being enforced, what would keep the large group of people from simply taking everything from that small group of people?

Yet on the other side of it, why are policies being changed in favor of the rich at a substantial cost to the rest?

What will they do when a jury of your peers won't convict you no matter what you do as long as it's against a politician or 1% member?

Policies, laws, and infrastructure benefit us all, but I think those 1% get a much bigger benefit of not having everything simply taken from them by the 99%, yet they keep toying with policy and causing market instability and blaming the 99%s protections (unions, ss, welfare, medicare, medicaid, etc).