@spoco
the "official" government theory on what happened is also a conspiracy theory.
and there are always political underpinnings on where blame is placed, and how.

I mean, it's a wonderful theory that a guy in the remote stretches of Afghanistan trained and coordinated a bunch of Saudis conducting an URBAN airport operation. he must have had terrific cel service at the batcave.
it's a dumb theory, but still a theory.

and i'm quite sure invading Afghanistan had nothing to do with the largest amount of untapped rare earth minerals anywhere in the world. what a lucky coincidence!
and given that a modern empire needs to have 2 essential things to maintain it's empire - energy and technology, there is absolutely NO WAY we are in Afghanistan for anything but killing that dude, women's rights, feeding the orphans, and keeping us snuggly safe and secure.

>> ^probie:

Can we drop the origin stories and the "with great power comes great responsibility"-words-of-wisdom-from-the-relatives?

Usually I would agree but in the case of Superman, the coming of age story is the only interesting thing you can do with him. He's an alien orphan with enough power to do whatever he wants. Once you've told the story of how he came to terms with all that, he's just a giant unstoppable boyscout with all the powers; maybe the most boring character in all of comics.

I might like to see a reimagining of Superman. Dial back the powers. Give him something to struggle with besides green rocks and wedgies. He'd probably still be boring as hell, to be honest.

Pfft... I once threw a Frisbee directly upwards at 11.2 km/s.

Besides, he probably killed an orphan in Switzerland or something.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:
Hah! But no, seriously.
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/lantern53" title="member since August 6th, 2010" class="profilelink">lantern53 knows.. that depriving servers of a living wage and forcing them to bust their asses for 5% gratuity on a $130 check.. you know, builds character.
Struggling in quasi-poverty for years of your life is what the American Dream is all about! duh.
That's why Mitt Romney is such a great American and needs to be President.
He knows what it's like.. to force people to struggle. For their own good.
p.s. - Everyone knows that raising the minimum wage is just another Socialist/Marxist scheme by Obama to disenfranchise the Job Creators in this country.
While I completely agree that people should be paid a living wage, I don't really have a problem with tipping. People should bust their asses in their job, especially if your job is customer facing. Customer service in the USA is so much better than almost anywhere else I've been, (it's particularly bad in NZ)


Just a meaningless anecdote (just find it funny that you mention it):

I went to Sydney once (15 years ago) and the very first day, I went to a place called the Juba Cafe. My friend and I were surprised to find porridge on the menu, because all I knew of porridge was from Oliver Twist or Little Orphan Annie. Our server, who's name was Anna, was really surprised to hear it, so she bought us porridge to convince us it was good. It was. Then, after we ate (before we tipped her) she invited us over to her apartment for some wine that night. When we got there, she had invited all her friends over to meet "her new Americans." They gave us wine, we talked for a long time about NZ (where she was from) and they rolled me the first "baseball bat" that I ever smoked, with the the little cardboard filter in it and everything. They also introduced me to Aphex Twin (the "Richard D. James Album") and we bonded over Ween, which I was surprised to hear they knew all about, even in 97'. So, after we were completely blitzed, Anna and her friends took us out to dinner, where we ate and drank and talked for hours and didn't pay a dime while these guys all treated us to a great first night in their city. I'm not even sure how we got home, but they sure didn't let anything bad happen to us.

The reason I mention it, is that I would say it was, easily, the best service I've ever had in my entire life, anywhere. We had to leave town the next day and I never saw or spoke to any of those guys again. I really wish I'd kept in contact with them because I owe them so much more than a night out. I still roll a fat bat and pop in the Aphex Twin on a pretty regular basis.

I'm gonna *beg for another look at this one. Kenyan kids! Sweding the '86 World Series! How did this possibly happen? Here's how:

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/group-kenyan-orphans-scored-youtube-hit-recreating-game-191052583--mlb.html

Simply humbling. No other word for it. Read the article linked in the neatorama post.

Wow - just wow.

*eia

Don't get out of the car!! Seriously though, don't get out. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2132211/Congo-war-orphan-19-escaped-disease-famine-to-U-S-dies-freak-tragic-car-accident.html

>> ^legacy0100:

Wait... I gotta watch this twice...


No! You're only licensed to watch this once! You just ruined a hundred jobs and stole $150,000 from illiterate, starving inner-city orphans. You monster!

I wonder, how many of the kids in those freeze-frames might have been orphaned or otherwise had a family member killed during the occupation?

>> ^Grimm:

RP wants to end all the needless wars. If any war is worth fighting then he would only require that Congress "declares war" as it is outlined in the Constitution.


Exactly, I think that would answer some of @bcglorf 's hold up on isolationism. Like isn't so black and white, especially on matter of war. Which is why he is an advocate of declaring war, not the president just going in willy nilly. We can never really answer the question of if a particular war is good or not morally for every person at once, but we don't want to leave that moral choice in the hands of one man for no good reason other than self defense. My like the recent stop to the SOPA legislation due to pressure from the outside, the same kind of pressure could of been used to help in Libya..but only if the supporters of that action could sway enough people to support that decision...just like a democracy should. And I don't think hiding behind things like NATO or the US should undermine our Presidents responsibility to us, he works for us first after all. Like in most questions of this nature, there isn't really a right or wrong when the action is taken or not taken in the most strict sense...only what was the most supported.

I think it is a little, in that light, to say that we couldn't declare war on the Libyan government. We are just so used to the President going to war for us, that we have basically abdicated our responsibility in this area. That is one of the major dangers I see in Statism is when you outsource responsibility, you usually don't relegate much thought to it. The plumber fixes my pipes, I don't concern myself with how they work. Likewise, when you place all sorts of powers in agents hands, you tend to concern yourself with the goings ons...till they break. I think a Statism and Libertarianism have the same net effect if the people don't take an active concern in all forms of domestic affairs. I think that Statism might have a higher entropy, though, because it invokes an active outsourcing of all matters of life to agents. While that could work if you are always haggling your agent to make sure he is doing his best, and not up to shenanigans, why not just cut out the middleman and keep up with the basic concern yourself?

I think the idea of the Democracy is starting to fail, not because of some flaw in it that wasn't already widely known, but the culture we find ourselves in. For a Democracy to exist in a healthy way, each citizen has to see his role as a citizen to provide enrichment for the body politic. In this way, the Wests focus on individual rights and Libertarian ethics sorts of causes entropy on this notion. We would much rather be watching a movie, or some other form of playboy recreation, then running down to our local City Council and partake of our duty (not only to others, but ourselves).

I don't mean to ramble, but I wanted to make that point, that it doesn't matter if you are a federalist, or a anti-federalist. If your voting body is poor in intellect, will, and a toxic cultural environment, then no matter of political philosophy will save you. I think Jefferson foresaw that this entropy, and the saying, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." comes from; that things have to get really bad enough for us to actually care about democracy for it to work again for us, and more importantly, us for it.

But more to @bcglorf 's point on genocide, and cowardice. I don't think it is fair to say cowardice when your only course of action is making more widows and orphans. And more importantly, it is an entirely different thing for some president to commit you to that course of action without any "due process", in this case, a declaration of war. I don't think it is cowardice, persay, to not want to kill someone that doesn't want to kill you, and might have a legitimate claim to kill the person they want to kill. But that is neither here nor there, a moral question that most likely will never see commonly, the point is, that each of us should have a voice in the action we collectively have to take, action or inaction. The benefit of defaulting to inaction is that it doesn't stop someone morally convicted like yourself to fund operations of support for whatever side. That is why I usually side with Libertarian answers for complicated issues, sometimes, you don't need one answer for everyone. Sometimes, dare I say most times, it is actually better to let those whom are convicted on the goodness of something to take the risk themselves and not try and hedge everyone in with them.

They're not just focusing on income inequality or ownership of resources. Just because one clip focuses on it doesn't mean that the entire movement is fixated on one stat. There are a lot of stats the left are focused on, such as unemployment to name another. And it's not a stupid statistic to focus on. If there is too much stratification of wealth, and there is such a thing, then what other statistic would illustrate that it's gotten out of hand?! For the good of the economy, for everyone across the income range, if the rich possess too much wealth, there won't be enough people with money to purchase goods and services being produced. This hasn't a thing to do with the little orphans you helped in Mexico.

Is it being trumped to the point it's being played like an emotional dagger instead of being analyzed rationally? Of course. But come on, if you're gonna sit there and say that only the left is guilty of that, then you're being partisan. How is raising the marginal tax rate on the super rich a few percentage points "communist" or even "socialist" on an objective scale? Or even using those words to elicit a knee jerk reaction by people to say it's bad just because of the word instead of rationally discussing the policy? Or when anyone suggests raising taxes on the rich, it's automatically "class warfare"? Or you using derogatory terms like "NeoProgLibNaziCommunistSocialist" blah? Give me a break.

And yes, some wealth stratification is good. You want the people who work hard or are more talented to have more income. It keeps incentives in the system. I have no problem with that. But you're pretending that the income gap between super rich and poor is static, which misses the entire point. It's not static. It fluctuates. We're too the point now where it's getting absurd to the point that it's hurting the economy. You're also pretending that the stats only illustrate the gap between the super-rich and the poor, and that's not the case. The stats are showing the gap between the rich and everyone else, including middle class, which is being decimated.

You have very little patience when you hear a college-age son's of yuppies whining about they only earn $30K/yr for their liberal art major degree? What about me, the son of a solid middle class family who got one of those horrible liberal art degrees (Master's in Education, Bachelor's in History, Minor in International Studies) and got a "fake job" as a history teacher in a public school? Are you kidding me with this? (BTW, what a good person you are to say whose jobs are of value and whose aren't!) What I did for a living for four years combined produced less value than a commodities trader did in one year, whose job is essentially speculation that artificially drives up prices on the things they trade? You don't find something extremely absurd about that?

Let's do the math. At those salaries, a public school teacher is producing less than 10% of the value of what a commodities trader does, and a commodities trader isn't even required to have a college degree, and we're not even including the better benefits and bonuses. I'm not naive enough to think a public school teacher would ever be paid that well, but when the gap is getting wider, and wider, and wider, and you're seeing a public school teacher's benefits getting reduced, particularly retirement, I'm sorry, but something is horribly wrong here. The market is failing to address a basic societal problem. I'm not advocating a state controlled economy (aka Communism) to even it out. I'm advocating the gov't make it moderately more equal by raising the rich's taxes, and ease up on the poor and middle class. Tax capital gains like it's income, subject to the same brackets, etc.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Or is that a typo for "ProgLibDytes"
As with "neolibs" it is a word of my own creation which I used to describe the crazed, hardcore, insane left-wing liberal denizens of the world. Neolib was my default for a long time, but lately the vitriol of the left has gotten so prone to hate, anger, and insanity that I have moved to defaulting with "ProgLibDyte" to describe them. It is perfect because it is so close to "Troglidyte" (cave dweller) and covers "Progressives" and "Liberals" together. ProgLibDytes. Cave dwelling political liberals and progressives. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Which one should we obsess over?
How about not picking just one, and looking at all of them - or at least a LOT of them? Regardless, examining only the gap between the ultra-rich and the poor is about one of the stupidest metrics one could examine when it comes to economics. It means absolutely nothing in terms of either real income, economic trending, or any other meaningful metric. Such a myopic stat serves only one purpose, and that is to angry up the blood of the lower class.
There are always going to be really rich people who have so much money that they could eat gold bricks and crap diamonds. These guys are always going to exist in the same nation as people so poor they scrape the very bottom of the economic barrel. The difference between the top 0.1% and the bottom 5% is utterly meaningless. It is pure nonsense to get mad about the difference between Bill Gates and the guy who pumps gas. It tells nothing about anything.
I personally donate my time to help the poor. I've helped the poorest of the poor in US cities and I thought I knew what 'poor' was. Then I volunteered to help little towns in Mexico. When kids and widows weep in your arms just because you came to them with a few bags of cement to put a small concrete slab in thier one room dirt-shanty then you know you've hit the real thing.
In the US, even those who live in so-called 'poverty' have cars, TVs, homes, cable, internet, clothes, and money to spend at McDonalds on a lark. So I have very little patience when I hear college-age son's-of-yuppies whining about the fact that they only earn $30K a year (with benefits) for thier liberal-art's major compared to Wall-Street guys (who are actually performing a real job) earning 300K plus cash bonuses. Boo-freaking-hoo.

OH, that is sooo sweet.

I am a complete sucker for a guy being sweet like that. Oh it IS lovely to be petted!

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/bareboards2" title="member since July 3rd, 2009" class="profilelink"><strong style="color:#ffa200">bareboards2
"What's up?
on to the tummy again.
I should never have let him in.. it'll go all wrong. (bear sleeping).
No reason to roll off, is there?
It's hard enough as it is.
It's hard enough as it is.
Oh it's lovely to be petted.
So good."

Hey Enoch,
yeah we agree on some things but disagree on more.
To clarify, I'll take the central point as you have mentioned above:

"why would somebody find a video where a man admits,on VIDEO,how he almost killed himself due to his addictions and lost that which was most dear,and his consequent "recovery",be perceived as a bad thing?
and the only conclusion i could come up with was the "jesus" factor as being the bitter pill"

I don't understand why this is the "only conclusion" that you could come up with when I've already stated the contrary and given the central reason *twice*. I've also stated that I'm glad he kicked the habit by whatever means, including religious ones (no matter how misguided I feel these reasons to be) and that my criticism lies in the style and tone of the video production. To me it reminds me of a Maralyn Manson video that attempts to glorify the darkness in life and the attractiveness and worthiness of suffering. Allow me to try again.

The style and the tone of the video screams "listen to this worthy man for he is wise through the experiences he has gone through, and his words have more weight than yours".

To entirely take religion out of my point: I have the same problem with how public figures such as Kurt Cobain are deified after their suicide. That somehow through ending his life he gave his words more weight and his outlook more credos. That now he was a tortured glorious soul, that really knew the truth about life. So now rather than his death being a tragedy for himself, his child, and the mother of his child, it was re-contextualised into some form of glorious statement.

The same is true in the coverage of suicides in the media here in Europe. Always there is an air of romance in the notion of killing oneself due to some form of suffering. That's what I abhor, and that's what comes across in this video.

To re-state my very first comment:
"... I have a huge problem with the way he's portrayed in this video. It glamorizes the perceived value of having put his life in the toilet for years. Let's remember that this guy was an idiot who took drugs to the point of it ruining his life, and his daughters life - and still didn't quit after his wife died from the very drugs he was taking. These actions don't give him a ticket to sagedom. Among his tattoos he should have one that states - "I am capable of making the worst possible decisions and taking actions that could have led to my death, and made an orphan of my daughter"."

The religious aspect is an absolute sideshow.

"Has been to hell and back"...

... I have a huge problem with the way he's portrayed in this video. It glamorizes the perceived value of having put his life in the toilet for years. Let's remember that this guy was an idiot who took drugs to the point of it ruining his life, and his daughters life - and still didn't quit after his wife died from the very drugs he was taking. These actions don't give him a ticket to sagedom. Among his tattoos he should have one that states - "I am capable of making the worst possible decisions and taking actions that could have led to my death, and made an orphan of my daughter". So where's the moody, weighty video for the guy who tried drugs a few times and decided to stay away from them because they were a bad thing in his life? I'd hold that guy in a lot higher esteem than this idiot.

The moment that he "put his life in gods hands" and took a massive hit of drugs could also have been the moment of his death. His fleeting faith in the possibility of a deity acting as a safety net in his life could have led directly to his death.

To me that is negative.


>> ^Sagemind:

This guy has been to hell and back.
He has reached up and grabbed on to religion and used it to empower himself and find redemption.
He used faith to inspire positivity and truth in his life.
I know people want to shout him down for believing in a God, but how could anyone ever deny him that which saved his life and likely his daughter's life as well?
I know there is a lot of negativity about religion on the Sift but those at the end of their rope can turn around and use religion by embracing it to find grace.
In my mind, this is where faith redeems itself for me. It's that one intangible thing that a person can latch on to when there is nothing else.
On the negative side, Yes, there are always people embraced in religion that seek to exploit people at this stage and all the crap that goes with that. But when you hit the lowest low and you want out of the muck that has become your everyday, sometimes "faith in an idea" can be more powerful than even the chemicals that are used by the scum of the earth (dealers & pushers) to enslave people.
To me that is positive.

What do we call these roles? Jimmy's playing the role of some unusual straight man making us all laugh by being very straight faced insisting that Rosanne is not just joking. It makes it funny, because she'd have to be insane to be serious.

That was the bit, right?

Tell me that was the bit.

Or do we honestly have another celebrity that seriously believes that orphans in places like Liberia, Darfur, the Congo and North Korea wouldn't be starving if only there was more food grown in America?