You are certainly welcome to your opinion, I just disagree.
I find it easy to believe that closely held military techniques could have been lost once the tool (bow) was no longer useful in the military. That is certainly the case for sword fighting/making.
As he mentioned, the method used today is better for stationary target shooting, the kind of shooting done today. Old school methods are so lost that most people believe in the back mounted quiver, which he showed clearly doesn't work in practice. Aiming with one eye also doesn't work on moving targets at different ranges, you need both eyes to determine distance properly.
As for armor, long bows penetrate plate armor, with mail beneath, and leather beneath that, at serious distance. It seems like a non-broad head arrow should penetrate chain mail and leather padding relatively easily, it would only need to split 1 or 2 rings to get through as I see it, which isn't that much. Also, I note at least one of his bows is not totally old school, but seems to be an odd compound style, probably giving him more power than it seems.
Shooting the arrow out of the air, I won't call fake, but probably took dozens of tries to get, even though the arrows were lobbed at him. Splitting one was likely unintentional, but still cool!

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That is such a long bow to draw- I had no idea what you were talking about, even after three or four viewings. There is racism in the world, but this is not it.>> ^qualm:

At :47 and elsewhere you hear the camera guy's normal voice. I'm sorry to disappoint your "Tea Party" theorizing. It's a pretty common racist "joke" here in British Columbia - to mock FNs with that stereotyped speech pattern.

>> ^examininglibertarian:
"Rotten tomatoes rating" - Moral based movies typically only do well among their target audiences. Look at the recent war movies for an example. Pretty weak attack vector.
True in a sense, but also Rotten tomatoes takes the ratings of many, many reviewers and is one of the best gauges of a movie's perception in the wider world. And to say that a 'moral' movie only does well in its target audience... does that mean that a movie should only be judged on how well the already converted see it?

"Science leads you to killing people" - entire section taken out of context. He is talking about the scientific explanation of the origin of life as a dehumanizing influence. He is NOT claiming that every scientific advance is evil.
No, he pretty much is saying that science is evil. If you asked him to rationalize it after giving him the given examples of science doing good, he would say something like that sure, science can do good, but it needs a tempering hand from religion to guide it. Which of course is complete nonsense as all religion has done for centuries is tried to stifle science whenever it proves their beliefs to be wrong.

"Naked vulnerable superpower" - The United States has military alliances with all the countries he mentions. I cannot fathom the link here in trying to Make Ben Stein a bloodthirsty warmonger. War that cannot happen? I agree that all of them happening at once would be virtually impossible, but individually... The US would not have to unilaterally attack anybody, they would be pulled in by military treaties that they have already agreed to. Now, Ben Steins argument is weak too, US military spending is [s]ufficient and just needs to get more [e]fficient.

But his whole argument is based on 'now imagine if they all happened at once. And also to suggest that the US military spending is ANYTHING but grossly inflated is insane. He is using fear mongering to... well, actually I don't know what, what is his aim in his rant? He just wants a bigger army for the US? Yeah, that's a compassionate person.


"Contemptuous regard for rule of law" - The narrator was really fishing for a soundbite on this one. He creates a very nice straw man and sets up Ben stein as a law-shunning malcontent, when he merely differentiated between law and ethics. It IS possible to disagree with laws and still follow them. The fact that he is not in prison is proof of this.
Ben is a little off, but the narrator is worse.

I do agree that he drew a long bow here and twanged it pretty hard. But I think the point he started to make before he went off the rails is that Stein is picking and choosing which laws he wants to adhere to, and suggesting that laws have zero baring at all on issues where he doesn't agree with them.

Stein is someone using nothing more than scare tactics to try and force a world of ignorance onto people. He continues to use the dirt/mud hit by lightning bullcrap as this preposterous notion that he expects people to scoff at.

Even if it were true that science thought that life may have started via a lightning strike into a puddle of mud... I'd have no problem with that if they had good evidence to back it up. These creationists seem to have GREAT issue with thinking that we've evolved from anything lesser than humans, they find it abhorrent to think that we evolved from apes. Why? What's so horrendous in thinking that our long ago forbears were apes? How does that really change who you are, are you repulsed to think that some of your behaviors can be explained because they were born from earlier times in the wild?

This 'I either don't understand or don't like the truth so I'll invent this cushier, softer fantasy and believe in that' notion really, really shits me.

>> ^dag:
So we're pinning Spitzer's hooker binge on Bush now? A long bow to draw I think.
More likely the reason he fell so hard is because he had placed himself as a paragon of moral virtue- and we always like to see these types crumble.
When it first came out- I did have a few conspiracy tingles come out- because it seems so dumb for a former AG to get snared in something like this. I was thinking more of a mob blackmail job.

Check these out:

Feds shift strategy in bid to snare Spitzer: Campaign finance

King of Swing?

I don't know if there's wide-ranging conspiracy against Spitzer, but it appears that at least a couple of prominent Republicans had it in for him.

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So we're pinning Spitzer's hooker binge on Bush now? A long bow to draw I think.

More likely the reason he fell so hard is because he had placed himself as a paragon of moral virtue- and we always like to see these types crumble.

When it first came out- I did have a few conspiracy tingles come out- because it seems so dumb for a former AG to get snared in something like this. I was thinking more of a mob blackmail job.

>> ^arsenault185:
Well, even discover is liable to make mistakes once in a while. At any rate, I myself was surprised to find out that super-adhesive glue and fiberglass were both used in authentic traditional "long" bows.


Well, in their defense, they do say "today's" long bows. Not ancient ones.

Well, even discover is liable to make mistakes once in a while. At any rate, I myself was surprised to find out that super-adhesive glue and fiberglass were both used in authentic traditional "long" bows.

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bouncing fruit symbolism is a long bow to draw - but this was really good.

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Oohh, good one. This is going to be a polarizer.

Allow me to chime in. As much as I dislike W, Rummy, Dick and the rest, I can't believe they are evil enough to plot something like this against their own people. Misguided, xenophobic, ignorant - yes --but it's a long bow to draw to consider they got together in a room and said - "hey, I know what will really get things going, let's blow up the World Trade Center".