Hey argument mongers! YEAH YOUSE! This is a great video so why don't we respect it and resist the temptation to turn this into another gun rights flame war (incidentally, another war that cannot be "won"). There is a place for that discussion and it's not here. Move along. Theenks.

I love when retired police officers step forward and slowly rip apart the drug war with facts, experience and wisdom. Seems the sad truth is that the U.S. government, (which is currently in the habit of displaying a level of insanity fit for a corporate-emperor-giant-king via what it says to the public versus what it actually does in its slowly eroding privacy) clearly doesn't seem to actually want to end the drug war or the war on terror for that matter any time soon. i guess there is too much profit to be had from the institutions that are already in place at this point.

With luck, the Nixon/Reagan-esque dinosaurs of free will control, hiding behind the thin guise of morality, which they surely are not the paragons of, will soon be trapped within their sedimentary prison for all time and We the people will be able to choose what kind of substances we ingest without the looming shadow of silent oppression casting its all encompassing umbra upon us.

Woot! Thanks for fixing it, it is definitely one of my favorites of your finds...

In reply to this comment by AdrianBlack:
Nevermind, I figured it out! (ha, amazingly) If you would like to see it again, here you go!

Nevermind, I figured it out! (ha, amazingly) If you would like to see it again, here you go!

I am late in saying thank you! You have great taste.

In reply to this comment by oblio70:
Love me some Infinite Loops. I Upvote!

A very belated thank you!

In reply to this comment by dag:
Very nice.

Oh thank you so much! A double promote, my very first - you spoil me!

In reply to this comment by NicoleBee:
*doublepromote!!

Thank you for putting my video back into the queue!! I lost my P because of your awesome act of kindness!!

In reply to this comment by siftbot:
Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, October 1st, 2010 4:32am PDT - promote requested by bleedmegood.

Thank you SO much for the quality comment, it sure feels good to lose that P!

In reply to this comment by siftbot:
Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Fusionaut.

Adding video to channels (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://music.videosift.com" style="color:#D4A973">Music) - requested by Fusionaut.

Automata are really interesting, and the French took the art to new heights. From wikipedia:
A new attitude towards automata is to be found in Descartes when he suggested that the bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines - the bones, muscles and organs could be replaced with cogs, pistons and cams. Thus mechanism became the standard to which Nature and the organism was compared. Seventeenth-century France was the birthplace of those ingenious mechanical toys that were to become prototypes for the engines of the industrial revolution. Thus, in 1649, when Louis XIV was still a child, an artisan named Camus designed for him a miniature coach, and horses complete with footmen, page and a lady within the coach; all these figures exhibited a perfect movement. According to P. Labat, General de Gennes constructed, in 1688, in addition to machines for gunnery and navigation, a peacock that walked and ate. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher produced many automatons to create jesuit shows, including a statue which spoke and listened via a speaking tube, a perpetual motion machine, or a cat piano which would drive spikes into the tails of cats which yowled to specified pitches, although he is not known to have actually constructed the instrument. He also wrote an early description of the magic lantern, in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671).
The world's first successfully-built biomechanical automaton is considered to be The Flute Player, invented by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson in 1737. He also constructed a mechanical duck that could eat and defecate, seeming to endorse Cartesian ideas that animals are no more than machines of flesh.
In 1769, a chess-playing automaton called the Turk, created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, made the rounds of the courts of Europe, but in fact was a famous hoax, operated from inside by a hidden human operator.
Other Eighteenth Century automaton makers include the prolific Frenchman Pierre Jaquet-Droz (see Jaquet-Droz automata) and his contemporary Henri Maillardet. Maillardet, a Swiss mechanician, created an automaton capable of drawing four pictures and writing three poems. Maillardet's Automaton is now part of the collections at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia.