Tags for this video have been changed from 'Paul Brady, Irish, Folk, Arthur McBride' to 'Paul Brady, Irish, Folk, Arthur McBride, 70s, 1977' - edited by rasch187

The soldiers are wearing Magav uniforms, which means Border Patrol, and make them part of the Israeli Police and not Army. Small technicality, but it does make them answer to a different set of rules.

Nabi Saleh has population records going back to 1922 on Wikipedia. I could only find a Hebrew version though. The settlement across from it is called Halamish, and was founded in 1977. According to Wikipedia it's a religious settlement, which doesn't really surprise me. Google maps can show you how ridiculously close they are.

I have no idea what this incident was about, but the Magav guys don't appear to be looking for anyone in particular, just going in looking for trouble and to cause fear. Their most likely reason is that someone was throwing rocks at cars on the road.

At any rate, this video makes me sick. Fuck anyone who thinks this is an appropriate way for people to behave, fuck their commanders for sending them there so obviously to generate a response, and fuck them for arresting people on their own home. Even if they were there to stop people throwing stones, how the hell are they supposed to find out who it was?

Fuck.

If you haven't seen this Russian classic you really should.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Mimino-intro-classic-USSR-film-1977

In 1997 I worked for a large food production company in the IT department. My team shared a large cube space near the business line. Across the aisle, there was a woman who refused to use computers, insisting they were a "fad", and that we'd all regret it someday. To that end, she found and utilized the loudest typewriter she could... all day, every day. When I complained to her boss that the device was distracting, his response was "we'll have to wait and see... she might be right". (mind you this was 1997, not 1977!)

I wonder what they're doing career-wise today....

>> ^xxovercastxx:
Considering his first marriage ended in 1977 and he didn't remarry until 2009, and that he began hosting "this show" (The Late Show) in 1993, it's rather likely that no infidelity was involved, at least on Dave's part. Even Late Night debuted in 1982, so he'd already have been divorced.


He's been with Regine Lasko since 1988, so infidelity was involved.

Considering his first marriage ended in 1977 and he didn't remarry until 2009, and that he began hosting "this show" (The Late Show) in 1993, it's rather likely that no infidelity was involved, at least on Dave's part. Even Late Night debuted in 1982, so he'd already have been divorced.

At a Manhattan dinner party in 1977, Mailer threw his whiskey in Vidal's face, head-butted him and punched him in the mouth. When the hostess, Newsweek and Washington Post journalist Lally Weymouth, begged other guests to pull the men apart, Clay Felker, then editor of Esquire, told her: "Shut up. This fight is making your party."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/10/AR2007111000518.html

Some say he even hit Vidal backstage before the show.

*dupeof=http://www.videosift.com/video/Tom-Waits-Waltzing-Matilda-live-1977

This video has been declared a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by gwiz665.

I can attest that this is 1000% the footage in the original 1977 cut.

Also, this: http://www.videosift.com/video/Death-Star-Suspense-A-New-Hope-Extended-Ending-Scene

notice the mobile phone interference in the first minute.
strange seeing as it was 1977...

:-o

Tags for this video have been changed from 'tonight show, john denver, carl sagan, planets, mars, astronomy, discussion' to 'tonight show, john denver, carl sagan, planets, mars, astronomy, discussion, 1977, 70s' - edited by arvana

The wage conversation is a bit of a tangent, but from my point of view the right answer is to expand unemployment benefits and welfare, rather than reduce the minimum wage. I might be convinced that yes, people in certain situations should be able to work for less, but I'd rather the market just adjust to knowing that projects that rely on cheaper labor can't be done here.

As for your assertion that the entire housing asset bubble was caused by Fannie and Freddie and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act...I'm disappointed. I'd thought you were more well-read than to believe that story.

Here's the most basic, simplistic response -- if it was all Fannie and Freddie's fault (two formerly privately-owned and operated companies, BTW), why are other banks in trouble? Why is AIG in trouble?

I agree that the problem here was moral hazard, but I disagree that it was government that created that situation. It seems that the market's own mechanisms for accurately gauging risk failed utterly.

>> ^gtjwkq:
Money spent by govt is, in principle, rarely spent as wisely as money spent by people, because people work to earn and therefore value their money, they usually have to be productive to earn it (which isn't easy), while govt is just politicians and bureaucrats deciding over money they easily appropriate from productive people. I don't know how I can put this in simpler terms.

I hear this a lot from Austro-libertarians. If this were true, banks should never work right, either. The people making the investment choices, and choices about loans are not the people who own the banks. The most risk they have to bear is getting fired, and often they get lavish severance packages even when they are fired, and are almost immediately rehired by another bank.

I agree that having some skin in the game helps motivate people to be more wise with their money, but I don't think there are any people in government who're casually disinterested in how taxpayer money is spent -- on the contrary, I think they're highly interested in either spending it on altruistic things (like unemployment, healthcare, green technology incentives) or spending it on selfish things (tax cuts/subsidies for industries that donated to you, aid in skewing regulation to benefit donors). I like to vote for the former, and call for the latter to be jailed (though it seems they're all guilty of both in varying ratios).

I also think government spending is best directed at things that are unlikely to turn a direct profit, but are useful for humanitarian purposes, or a general positive impact on the economy (e.g. infrastructure).

I would like to see less military spending, but I think that will be politically difficult when there are two wars going on, and a recession. I like the way Obama/Gates have shuffled the military budget in terms of reallocating money between different military projects, but I'm annoyed that the budget did still get an increase for next year.

As for the bank bailouts, I feel like they were a necessary evil. I would rather they'd asked more in the way of concessions from the bank in return, but I do think letting them fail would have just made things worse.

When I give you money, the money is now yours, what you do with it is your own business. But when I'm the govt, and I give you money, I'm giving you money that IS NOT MINE and that I SHOULDN'T BE GIVING TO YOU (at least that's what I'm arguing, a keynesian might think differently). So there lies the root of the problem: govt is to blame for handing out free money, not what people did with it, because it's expected that people will be careless about money that is freely handed to them, as opposed to money that is earned.
People with guns don't inevitably commit murder. About the bus driver, it's expected that he'll drive poorly and crash when drunk (maybe not though if he's lucky), even though I said he was force-fed the alcohol, which is not accurate since I'm not sure investment banks were legally obligated to accept govt money, but it's easy to imagine how a bank might be strongly influenced to accept money if it has no strings attached and it's also offered to its competitors.

This, I think is a crucial part of our disagreement. Say you're a well-known investor who's made ridiculous profits through shrewdly investing in successful business. I walk up to you, give you a million dollars, no strings attached. Are you going to necessarily be reckless and wasteful with that money, simply because it was a gift? What if the money had come from some investment that simply performed better than your expectations? Does that make you unwise?

Would it make any difference how I got the money I gave you? Even if I conned it out of a bunch of nice old ladies, wouldn't you still invest it correctly? That's why I think the Austrian theory doesn't make sense, especially on this topic.

It would make sense if the government, before the economy went haywire, said "do whatever ya like, we'll absorb all your losses" -- but it didn't do that, implicitly or explicitly.

All that said, I disagree with your characterization of there being a qualitative difference between money given to companies being theirs, but that money given to government to pay taxes still somehow remains yours. It's this whole idea that government is operating as a giant racketeering organization (which seems utterly incorrect). It's like the managing corporation of a condominium. By living here, you agree to a contract with the government, and you have to abide by the obligations in the contract, like obeying the laws, and paying taxes.

Regardless of how you think government got the money to give away, I don't see why money government gives to banks somehow will automatically be frittered away, especially if they say "this is yours, no strings attached".

Even though I think Ben Bernanke is an idiot, he's smart enough to be the current chairman of the Fed and even he thinks the Fed helped cause the Great Depression. The conclusions one can take about what happened in the 20's and 30's are not as clear cut as you'd think. What is important to understand are the motivations behind those that acted and those who interpret what happened.

I think you should perhaps read that speech of his more carefully -- I find what Bernanke says about the Great Depression persuasive. He's mostly talking about how much he loves Milton Friedman, but the key paragraph is:

Friedman's emphasis on avoiding monetary disruptions arose, like many of his other ideas, from his study of U.S. monetary history. He had observed that, in many episodes, the actions of the monetary authorities, despite possibly good intentions, actively destabilized the economy. The leading case, of course, was the Great Depression, or as Friedman and Schwartz called it, the Great Contraction, in which the Fed's tightening in the late 1920s and (most importantly) its failure to prevent the bank failures of the early 1930s were a major cause of the massive decline in money, prices, and output. It is likely that Friedman's study of the Depression led him to look for means, such as his proposal for constant money growth, to ensure that the monetary machine did not get out of order. I hope, though of course I cannot be certain, that two decades of relative monetary stability have not led contemporary central bankers to forget the basic Hippocratic principle.

He doesn't go into why the Fed thought what it was doing was the right idea here, but it should sound refreshingly Austrian -- they were worried about deviating from the gold standard too much, and weren't concerned about bank failures because they figured, as you do now, that banks failing is a blessing in disguise: ownership just moves from incompetent managers to competent ones, no muss, no fuss (liquidationism, it's called these days).

What Bernanke believes is that the Fed should have known better and reacted by massively expanding the money supply to stave off deflation, and rescuing the failing banks. What it actually did was contract the monetary supply and let them fail, and that was pouring gasoline on the fire (or as one economist said of Austrian advice at the time, it was "to cry, 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's flood.")

I don't contest that the Fed has a lot of power, and that if wielded incorrectly it can cause a lot of damage. But I think the period of time between the Great Depression and now is a testament to the stability a central bank can create. There were recessions, but no Depressions, or Panics. There's already a debate about whether Greenspan could have prevented this one, but so far that debate is leaning towards the relaxation of banking regulation being at fault, rather than a FRB monetary policy error.

I don't really think debate on the history of the Great Depression is over; Keynesians and Monetarists are still fighting about aspects of it. But Austrian economics fell out of the mainstream in the aftermath of the Great Depression, largely because their policy prescriptions were carried out, to disastrous results. Present-day Austrians don't even deny that a contractionary monetary policy in the late 20's was a bad idea, they just deny it was their idea, even though it's what people like Hayek and Schumpeter were calling for at the time, and what they're calling for now.

That's why I can be perhaps a bit over the top when trying to quash Austrians as quacks; in my opinion their policies caused both Depressions.

Wow, I didn't know all that. I'll do a bit more research before making such an assured assertion next time. Thanks for the enlightenment.

In reply to this comment by Trancecoach:
^Wrong.

Krippner (1977), Rao (1984), Targ & Puthoff (1977, pp. 182-186), and Tart (1982b) have all documented glaring errors made by James Randi who has failed on numerous occasions to award the money when he has been proved wrong. Instead, he makes up reasons after the fact about why an experiment failed to meet his criteria.

Dennis Stillings has demonstrated that "Randi is capable of gross distortion of facts" (Truzzi, 1987, p. 89). Randi has been quoted as saying, "I always have an out" with regard to his $1,000,000 challenge (Rawlins, 1981, p. 89). Puthoff and Targ (1977) documented a number of mistakes. In a published, handwritten, signed letter, Randi replied offering $1,000 if any claimed error could be demonstrated (see Fuller, 1979). Fuller proved Randi wrong. In a rejoinder to Puthoff & Targ (1977), Randi reversed himself (for a clear example, see point number 15 in Randi, 1982, p. 223). Randi should have paid the $1,000, but he never did."

Big surprise.

^Wrong.

Krippner (1977), Rao (1984), Targ & Puthoff (1977, pp. 182-186), and Tart (1982b) have all documented glaring errors made by James Randi who has failed on numerous occasions to award the money when he has been proved wrong. Instead, he makes up reasons after the fact about why an experiment failed to meet his criteria.

Dennis Stillings has demonstrated that "Randi is capable of gross distortion of facts" (Truzzi, 1987, p. 89). Randi has been quoted as saying, "I always have an out" with regard to his $1,000,000 challenge (Rawlins, 1981, p. 89). Puthoff and Targ (1977) documented a number of mistakes. In a published, handwritten, signed letter, Randi replied offering $1,000 if any claimed error could be demonstrated (see Fuller, 1979). Fuller proved Randi wrong. In a rejoinder to Puthoff & Targ (1977), Randi reversed himself (for a clear example, see point number 15 in Randi, 1982, p. 223). Randi should have paid the $1,000, but he never did."

Big surprise.