Urban dwelling Australians and Americans think that their lifestyle offers the most freedom available to humankind. With 10, 000 km of no fences, the nomads of Central Asia, to my mind, know far more freedom than I will ever experience in my little suburban world.

He began:

-- Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.

His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smoke ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?

-- And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.

From the Fathers
It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That's saint Augustine.

-- Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.

Nile.

Child, man, effigy.

By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.

-- You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.

A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:

-- But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai's mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.

He ceased and looked at them, enjoying silence.

Also: Molly Bloom.

Morbo wishes stalwart nomads peace amongst the Dutch tulips.

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
"Well, we're here, so how we got here is irrelevant."

That's what I mean about lazy.. you just don't want to get it. It's like looking at a river valley and saying.. "it's a good thing these hills come together to form a perfect vessel for this mountain snow melt." It is that simple. The river runs there because it is the lowest point. The valley is formed because the river runs there and makes the valley deeper.

That's exactly why humans use oxygen. It's why some people from northern climates are really pale and people from really sunny places have lots of pigment. God didn't make some people black and some people white. They all "started out in his image". Or is that microevolution.

The garden of eden and Noah's flood are simply oral traditions from nomadic tribes that got assimilated into modern culture. Your Bible has been arbitrarily modified for thousands of years. It's been a political device capriciously modified and edited as the ruling powers saw fit.

I do take exception to how off-handedly dismiss the Bible, though. The Bible has been validated through historical accuracy of events depicted, is a unique document in all of human history, and is validated through the fulfillment of prophecy over time.

Studies have verified that the transcripts have held up without material alteration according to the earliest known records.
The type of forgery necessary to corrupt the Bible we know today is a feat I doubt would be possible even in this day and age. You'd have to destroy every prior copy and convincingly alter remnant copies, all the while leaving no historical footprint to tell the tale.
I posed a scientific question to see how entrenched you all were about the notion that God could not exist. I'm still not impressed with the answers.


You obviously don't know much history about your religion. You can't honestly believe that what we call the Bible was just a filtered set of gospels. And then even certain aspects of those were shaped, such that original Christian sects allowed women to hold honored positions, and even preach. All references to such things were removed by non-holy means.

How can you say there is no alteration? Really old greek, latin.. always interpreted. Heck, wasn't there usually margin notes up until the King James which has it's own history. Aren't there like four or five "King James" Versions.. The wording is different in them all.

You really can't be serious. "Studies have shown"... ok.. "It's been proven that".

---------------
You are not impressed because it's your job to think for yourself. It's not anyone else job to make you believe something. Making someone believe is childish. You have to want to discover new information, think for yourself, be open to new ideas. You refuse to look and even try to see the other side.

If you had tangible, observable, logical evidence in your ideas, people would listen. But you don't have anything to bring to the table. You only have a belief and faith. There is not competing idea, just this never ending game religion plays where they find an area of human understanding that is lacking, and say God did it. Thousands of years ago it was rain, lightning and crop yields... Now it is before the big bang, and primordial ooze. Since it is hard to "prove" or demonstrate millions of years of time and natural forces, religion jumps in there and say, "you have to teach both sides".

They don't have another side or theory or evidence or progress. Intelligent Design should be bringing scientific discovery and break throughs and new inventions. Especially since they have God and prayer and holy water and host wafers. Shit, I forgot about all the prophecies. Certainly that would be a HUGE advantage!

Can you not even concede that Christianity declared the world flat and sun went around the Earth. These were equivalent to the modern Creationist meddling with a competing theory. But instead of proof or science... Religion just demands equal treatment, just because. Just because they have faith they must be right. How many years of scientific progress was stiffle or murdered over the Sun going around the Earth based on measurements and THEORIES. Do you really think the theory of planetary orbit is any different from the theory of natural selection?

from my understanding,the coverings originally were meant as a sign of respect but not mandatory.of course with many religious scriptures this was taken to its extreme and made cause to become mandatory in some islamic communities.
what many westerners see today is not indicative of the egalitarian society that islam brought to not only women,but the nomadic arabs as a whole.
it was nice to see these women explain the choice they made and show that it is not a mandatory subscription.

Should i laugh?

or stoutly refuse any reasoned analysis of parables passed down over 3-4 thousand years from early nomadic hill people.

I just came by to pin a little ribbon on you for an excellent comment. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by raverman:
It happened at the same time we built suburbia, and everyone had to live in the same nuclear family, in the same style 3 bedroom house.

It stopped being acceptable to have a different lifestyle, because as a culture we became so obsessed with "owning" things, cars, houses. We no longer had jobs but had to have long term "careers"

Even though the nomadic life style has been natural to humans for thousands of years, we grouped homeless people with druggies, alcoholics, criminals, and mentally retarded.

and as with most oppressed minorities - as we marginalized and ostracized them - they became what we expected of them.

It happened at the same time we built suburbia, and everyone had to live in the same nuclear family, in the same style 3 bedroom house.

It stopped being acceptable to have a different lifestyle, because as a culture we became so obsessed with "owning" things, cars, houses. We no longer had jobs but had to have long term "careers"

Even though the nomadic life style has been natural to humans for thousands of years, we grouped homeless people with druggies, alcoholics, criminals, and mentally retarded.

and as with most oppressed minorities - as we marginalized and ostracized them - they became what we expected of them.

Actually Arabs are descended from nomads and relatively non-religious tribal groups. The Islamic tradition in the Arabic world is quite new compared to the total history of their culture. Much like Christians still have Christmas Trees, Easter bunnies and celebrate Halloween, it can be very difficult to completely supplant traditional behaviour simply with a pure religious doctrine. There are many Arab traditions that have been accepted into Muslim culture and vice versa.

On the Road has been described as the defining novel of the so-called Beat Generation, a disparate group of poets, artists, filmmakers and musicians who shared certain broad philosophical affinities. By far the most popular of Kerouac’s works, it strikingly portrays a mysterious, semi-nomadic subculture dramatically at variance with the conformist and materialistic American culture of the 1950s.

In late 2002, Jim Irsay offered to exhibit the Scroll across the United States. The official tour of the Kerouac Scroll began in Orlando in January of 2004 and is scheduled to conclude at the end of 2009. In addition to Orlando, it has been exhibited at Emory University in Atlanta; Marquette University in Milwaukee; University of Iowa Museum of Art; Las Vegas Public Library; Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, San Francisco Public Library, Denver Public Library and the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It has also been exhibited in Rome, Italy at the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo.

Favourites

1) Season - Autumn
2) Place in the world - Livingstone, Zambia.
3) Children's book - Guards! Guards! Guards! by Terry Prachett
4) TV Series - The wire, BSG, mad men and the x files.
5) Word - Clover Gs (don't ask)
6) Film - Bladerunner and there is alot more...
7) Curse - fuck
Creature - chameleon
9) Past time - gaming and ill informed political banter
10)Person - my buddy.

Which one?

11) Dog or cat - cats
12) Sweet or savoury - savory
13) Cereal or Toast - toast?
14) Tan or pale - both in equal measure
15) Shoes or barefoot - shoes?
16) Desktop or laptop - desktop
17) Drive or walk - walk
18) Drama or comedy - sci fi
19) Sex or food - yes
20) Futurama or Simpsons - both jumped the shark.

The Sift

21) Your fave personal submission - all my videos are favourite submissions, but my Luna playlist has my fav muscial picks.
22) A great comment on one of your vids - The whole Andres Segovia comment thread! DOWN WITH JAKE SIKAKAKBURORMO!
23) Most off the wall member - choggie
24) Favourite user name - plastiquemonkey
25) Your most used channel - music and obscure
26) Personal dumbass moment - sifting and commenting drunk, then waking up reading what I wrote.
27) Best avatar - Rickegee and Ravenika.
28) Partner in crime - Mink and Kulpims. The Eastern European Mafia.
29) Do people offline know of your sift problem - Not really. I kinda dropped the habit.
30) Idea for the site - The LONG FUCKING CHANNEL ironically we waited a LONG time for it too.

About you

31) Where do you live - Kuwait
32) Smoker/non-smoker - occasionally
33) Left or right handed - right
34) Hair colour - black?
35) Relationship status - single
36) How tall - 5 '4
37) Children - no
38) Ever had an operation - Yes, I enjoyed the drugs alot.
39) Best feature - I guess it's interesting to talk to me?
40) Use four words to describe yourself - nomad, aware, misanthrope

If you could...what, who, when etc

41) Bring a famous person back from the dead - Martin Luther King
42) Give 50 grand to any charity - Amensty International
43) Send someone on a one way ticket to the moon - Everyone...
44) Relive a moment in your life - My trip to Turkey.
45) Have a superpower - cloaking
46) Find out one thing you've always wanted to know -
47) Have the opposite gender deal with something you have to - crazy irrational emotionally unstable women.
48) Be president for one hour - Dissolve the Fed. open all state secret archives from 2000 down.
49) Delete a period in history - Bush's presidency.
50) Achieve one thing - Learn to fly a helicopter.

Civilisation as we know it began with the discovery of agriculture about 9000 years ago.

Where as previously people had lived a nomadic lifestyle and were constantly on the move tracking game and hunting, agriculture caused people to for the first time settle in villages with fields and even irrigation.

Agriculture meant that one man could produce enough food to feed many people, freeing others to specialise is trades such as carpentry. They produced goods and the settlements quickly grew as they attracted trade. The rest, as they say, is history.

I guess this must have been one of the first settlements. The Babylonian tribes are thought to have settled around about the same time around the Euphrates river in what we now call Iraq.

Now I'm off to play Civilisation 4. See you in 12 hours!

Morbo wishes these stalwart nomads peace among the Dutch tulips.

>> ^MarineGunrock:
Uh, it's just clips of Crysis with a logo at the end. Some fucking trailer this is.


I think that's because Warhead is really just Crysis repackaged. You're basically paying for the same game, but this time you play as Psycho instead of Nomad. "God willing, we'll all meet again in Crysis 2: The Search for More Money."

To Farhad2000:

Just for argument sake, the Yuan dynasty that the video maker referenced IS the Mongolian horde, and it is generally considered part of Chinese history. The Han Chinese are very good at assimilate other cultures through out history. Many times, nomads form the north (either invaded China or was invaded) decided that they would like to become Chinese and either invent or request a Chinese family name for their tribe. The Mongol invaded China, but turned out becoming part of the Chinese civilisation (just like the Manchurians of the Qing dynasty which was also mentioned).

I personally think borders are imaginary (though documented not unlike certain book about a certain god that supposed to exit) lines, so why fight about something that doesn't exit? I'm not defending the Chinese government's actions in any sense, but I do think most westerners are mislead by the media regarding many aspects of China, especially how most Chinese feel about the matter, and this video present some fair responses to some of the arguments that Tibet independent activists pushed out. I do however agree that this video uses an overly offensive tone and that's really not helping his argument.