His strumming style still eludes me to this day.


He rakes on the upstroke, and then pops on the down stroke. Then does filler in between verses.

Amazing...

Doh! Thanks for the heads-up.

I'd really like to expand on this with more competitors, alas time, she continues to elude me...

>> ^budzos:
In fact, yes it's a UFO. Because UFO means "UNIDENTIFIED Flying Object". UFO does not mean "alien spacecraft" FOR FUCK'S SAKE.


Thanks for pointing that out Captain Obvious! Where in my title did I say, or elude to anything about an alien spaceship?

Wow, thats quite the compliment. Thank you!

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
Well said! Your words have a simple elegance which has forever eluded me.

In reply to this comment by imstellar28:
There are quite a few digressions in this thread, but I don't think anyone has actually addressed the content of the video. The speaker is saying that groups are merely abstractions; that you shouldn't forsake the trees for the forest.

We all want to live in a happy, peaceful society - collectivist or individualist. I don't think theres any denying that. What the speaker is trying to illustrate with his tree/forest metaphor is that the soul of these two ideologies is actually quite different - despite the fact they share the same goals.

Expanding on the tree/forest metaphor, one might define a "good" forest as one with a lot of healthy, thriving trees. If, in walking through a forest, you came across an area where the soil was nutritionally deficient and the growth of all the trees in the area stunted, you might view this forest as somehow imperfect. To correct this flaw, you could cut down the largest tree you can find, grind it up into fertilizer, and spread it around on the soil to help the stunted trees thrive.

What actually happens though, when you cut down a tree to grow a forest, as it were, is you lose sight of whats actually important. Yes, by some definition you are fulfilling "the greatest good for the greatest number" but if you have to lose your soul to achieve some measure of "good", what have you really accomplished? You thought you were saving the forest, but the forest doesn't exist. The forest is only how your mind perceives a group of trees; what existed was a group of trees sharing the same habitat. All you did was kill one tree, and use it to fertilize another.

So my question has to be: What glory is there in forging a perfect society, if it has no soul?

Well said! Your words have a simple elegance which has forever eluded me.

In reply to this comment by imstellar28:
There are quite a few digressions in this thread, but I don't think anyone has actually addressed the content of the video. The speaker is saying that groups are merely abstractions; that you shouldn't forsake the trees for the forest.

We all want to live in a happy, peaceful society - collectivist or individualist. I don't think theres any denying that. What the speaker is trying to illustrate with his tree/forest metaphor is that the soul of these two ideologies is actually quite different - despite the fact they share the same goals.

Expanding on the tree/forest metaphor, one might define a "good" forest as one with a lot of healthy, thriving trees. If, in walking through a forest, you came across an area where the soil was nutritionally deficient and the growth of all the trees in the area stunted, you might view this forest as somehow imperfect. To correct this flaw, you could cut down the largest tree you can find, grind it up into fertilizer, and spread it around on the soil to help the stunted trees thrive.

What actually happens though, when you cut down a tree to grow a forest, as it were, is you lose sight of whats actually important. Yes, by some definition you are fulfilling "the greatest good for the greatest number" but if you have to lose your soul to achieve some measure of "good", what have you really accomplished? You thought you were saving the forest, but the forest doesn't exist. The forest is only how your mind perceives a group of trees; what existed was a group of trees sharing the same habitat. All you did was kill one tree, and use it to fertilize another.

So my question has to be: What glory is there in forging a perfect society, if it has no soul?

^ That one always eluded me. That game got hard as shit.

tell me again why its not producing energy? ie why it can't be hella big and made into a generator

im not arguing for the possibility - the concept just eludes my tiny brain

If you'd care to post any info or clips about colour timing, that's one aspect of filmmaking that has eluded me thus far.

There was a fiction book... the name is eluding me... that dealt with the evil power companies killing a scientist who discovered "wireless" electricity....had a character who was a "fixer/professional" type guy .. named Jack... one word title... legions.. legacies... hmmm

it was good.

Ah, "broadcast power" was the term they use in the book...i find that a better term than wiricity... oh and it was maybe oil/energy companies in general against the technology

also

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090729210821.htm

News link: http://www.txcn.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/tv/stories/wfaa090629_wz_constablechase.1bc95a22.html

GARLAND — A pursuit that lasted 90 minutes and stretched through at least three cities ended with a violent collision at a Garland intersection Monday afternoon.

The chase began in Mesquite following a traffic stop by Dallas County Constables. It was not immediately clear what triggered the decision to pursue the driver, but there were indications that the man was wanted on felony warrants.

The Nissan's sedan eluded a phalanx of squad cars at speeds up to 100 mph on a back-and-forth route that included Interstate 30, LBJ Freeway and local streets. The suspect has been named as Shane Michel.

At one point, the he skidded out of control on a highway exit ramp and struck a highway sign head-on. The sign flipped over the car and shattered the car's rear window, but the driver kept going across a grassy median and resumed his flight.

Later, the car crashed through lowered gates at a DART light rail crossing in Garland.

A Dallas police helicopter and at least eight squad cars from several agencies were involved in the pursuit, which ended abruptly at the corner of Plano Road and Buckingham Road in Garland when Michel pulled in front of a pickup truck.

His sedan was struck on the driver's side door and skidded to a stop about half a block away. Paramedics used equipment to extricate him from the wreckage. He survived, but was injured. His condition at present is critical.

The driver of the pickup truck did not appear to be seriously hurt.

^carrot, I understand that you are eluding to the beneficial aspects of diversity, and I'm sure the guy is a genuine moron, but just because you brought it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreeding_depression

>> ^gtjwkq:
Setting working conditions and minimum wages is the art of benefiting the hired at the expense of the employers and the unemployed. Pretty soon a black market for illegal hiring will grow as businesses and people try to survive in tough times despite such ill-considered regulations. So you actually end up with 3rd world salaries that way.

Minimum wage is a whole other topic, but my read of what you're saying here is that 3rd world salaries in the US are unavoidable, and we should just accept it. Suffice to say, I disagree.

Just FYI, almost 70% of America's GDP accounts for consumer spending, its not reliable as an indicator of a nation's productivity. Over the years, a lot of that spending is just people borrowing with their home equity extractions and mostly credit card debt. Now that we're in a credit crunch, GDP will probably fall (unless statisticians come up with a more hedonistic interpretation for it).
In a recession like we're having, in the private sector you need more productivity and you need to flush out the malinvestments and money wasting businesses.

I agree with this, though I'd replace the Austrian-defined "malinvestment" with just plain "bad investments." Why did the market go for an asset bubble, rather than go after investments with a real long-term prospect?

In the public sector, you need less govt so it can be less of a burden on the private sector.
How can that possibly happen if govt borrows/taxes/prints a stimulus into existence (adding to the burden of debt), then proceeds to use all that taxpayer money to expand govt programs and spending (more burden),

How does laying off schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, closing VA hospitals, etc. Help recovery? It seems like a highly ideological statement to say that no one the government gives money to should be employed.

Being worried about the debt seems natural, but why you would say the spending itself adds burden? That seems to presuppose that money spent by government is automatically, intrinsically going to purchase nothing of value to anyone.

[It] bails out the inefficient businesses that should've failed otherwise (more burden)

For what it's worth, the left (myself included) isn't pleased about the bailouts. We're mollified slightly when the CEOs of several of these institutions is asked to resign. I'm not so worried about the auto bailouts (since they're all loans, and I suspect they'll be repaid), but the bank bailouts should involve more pain from people who aren't taxpayers.

and poorly hands that money out to businesses via govt contracts instead of letting consumers make better choices with their money themselves (burden burden burden)?

As a general proposition, I would agree with this, though we're "fortunate" in that successive rounds of conservative politicians have let our infrastructure crumble, so we have a very convenient, worthwhile target for stimulus. That's in contrast to Japan, whose stimulus mostly went towards things of little long-term economic benefit, like increasing their level of hurricane and earthquake resistance.

Blaming mostly investment banks for this recession is like force-feeding alcohol to a bus driver and blaming him for killing all the passengers in the resulting crash. Don't you have any idea of the Fed and other federal institutions' role in causing the market distortions that led to this recession? How can you give them a free pass as the major culprits?

I've seen Peter Schiff use this metaphor (and others like it) several times. It makes no sense.

You say government force-fed them alcohol, when really what it did is give them money. Why is government solely or primarily at fault for the investment bank using that money to make bad investments?

To me, this seems like trying to jail the CEO of Smith & Wesson for a murder committed with one of their guns, while holding the person pulling the trigger blameless.

It is a kind of selection, just not as brutal as you described, because its not the end of the world: people get fired, businesses go bankrupt, the assets of incompetent people are transfered to the competent people, people are hired again somewhere else and eventually the economy resumes growth.

Yes, people get fired, lose their health insurance, lose their savings (what's left of them), go even more deeply into debt, potentially lose their home...yep, nothing at all brutal in that!

The market is not an omnipotent unstoppable force, its complexity just eludes the narrow-mindedness of the fools that try to plan it, specially when they're the same fools that screwed it up in the first place. A market is already planned by those in it, and they have the best incentives in place to make the best plans, because they are usually the first ones to pay for their mistakes. Politicians and bureaucrats, on the other hand, are exempt from responsability and are seldom punished when they waste huge amounts of money. They are the ones who commited the worst sins.

Why are politicians exempt from accountability? Don't we have elections?

Which CEO of these companies is now on welfare or in jail? Seems to me, other people wind up paying for their mistakes, government bailout or no.

The terrible mistake in your criticism of the market is that you constantly blame its "emergent" irrationality as an excuse for thinking on its behalf. What you correlate to auto-immunity on an otherwise healthy body I would compare to a heavily medicated pacient that undergoes daily surgeries after years of treatment for what started out as a sore throat.

I think anyone familiar with the history of the Great Depression, and the 1920's generally would view things my way. This is why I decry Austrians with such venom -- they engage in revisionist history rather than adapt to the revelation that government isn't Satan, and that the market can indeed do the wrong thing all by itself.

Setting working conditions and minimum wages is the art of benefiting the hired at the expense of the employers and the unemployed. Pretty soon a black market for illegal hiring will grow as businesses and people try to survive in tough times despite such ill-considered regulations. So you actually end up with 3rd world salaries that way.

Just FYI, almost 70% of America's GDP accounts for consumer spending, its not reliable as an indicator of a nation's productivity. Over the years, a lot of that spending is just people borrowing with their home equity extractions and mostly credit card debt. Now that we're in a credit crunch, GDP will probably fall (unless statisticians come up with a more hedonistic interpretation for it).

In a recession like we're having, in the private sector you need more productivity and you need to flush out the malinvestments and money wasting businesses. In the public sector, you need less govt so it can be less of a burden on the private sector.

How can that possibly happen if govt borrows/taxes/prints a stimulus into existence (adding to the burden of debt), then proceeds to use all that taxpayer money to expand govt programs and spending (more burden), bails out the inefficient businesses that should've failed otherwise (more burden) and poorly hands that money out to businesses via govt contracts instead of letting consumers make better choices with their money themselves (burden burden burden)?

Seriously, if you're counting on govt to do anything productively, you probably got the wrong person for the job. People are far better at making choices with their own money than the govt is with money that they effortlessly take from others.

Blaming mostly investment banks for this recession is like force-feeding alcohol to a bus driver and blaming him for killing all the passengers in the resulting crash. Don't you have any idea of the Fed and other federal institutions' role in causing the market distortions that led to this recession? How can you give them a free pass as the major culprits?

AFAIK, creative destruction in economics is an often misunderstood sophism that doesn't apply to what I'm advocating. If an economy is moving towards a recession, the recession is not the problem, the artificial *boom* was the problem that the market is trying to correct with a recession. It is a kind of selection, just not as brutal as you described, because its not the end of the world: people get fired, businesses go bankrupt, the assets of incompetent people are transfered to the competent people, people are hired again somewhere else and eventually the economy resumes growth.

The market is not an omnipotent unstoppable force, its complexity just eludes the narrow-mindedness of the fools that try to plan it, specially when they're the same fools that screwed it up in the first place. A market is already planned by those in it, and they have the best incentives in place to make the best plans, because they are usually the first ones to pay for their mistakes. Politicians and bureaucrats, on the other hand, are exempt from responsability and are seldom punished when they waste huge amounts of money. They are the ones who commited the worst sins.

The terrible mistake in your criticism of the market is that you constantly blame its "emergent" irrationality as an excuse for thinking on its behalf. What you correlate to auto-immunity on an otherwise healthy body I would compare to a heavily medicated pacient that undergoes daily surgeries after years of treatment for what started out as a sore throat.

perfect example of the outcome when you give a human authority over others,
put a weapon in their hand and unleash them unto the world.
"the milgram experiment".
the suspect did put innocent lives in danger driving the way he did,and he attempted to evade and elude the officers,but in the end he gave up peacefully.
sad to see an officer of the law abuse his position and behave in a very unprofessional manner.
ok...
the pot starts at 25 bucks.
im betting two weeks paid administrative leave,extra "training" and a note in his permanent file.
who wants in?

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister - Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle - I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

"O! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it, sir."

"Tell us your name!" said the man. "Quick!"

"Pip, sir."

"Once more," said the man, staring at me. "Give it mouth!"

"Pip. Pip, sir."

"Show us where you live," said the man. "Pint out the place!"

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself - for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet - when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously.

"You young dog," said the man, licking his lips, "what fat cheeks you ha' got."

I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my years, and not strong.

"Darn me if I couldn't eat em," said the man, with a threatening shake of his head, "and if I han't half a mind to't!"

I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn't, and held tighter to the tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it; partly, to keep myself from crying.

"Now lookee here!" said the man. "Where's your mother?"

"There, sir!" said I.

He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

"There, sir!" I timidly explained. "Also Georgiana. That's my mother."

"Oh!" said he, coming back. "And is that your father alonger your mother?"

"Yes, sir," said I; "him too; late of this parish."

"Ha!" he muttered then, considering. "Who d'ye live with - supposin' you're kindly let to live, which I han't made up my mind about?"

"My sister, sir - Mrs. Joe Gargery - wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir."

"Blacksmith, eh?" said he. And looked down at his leg.

After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his.

"Now lookee here," he said, "the question being whether you're to be let to live. You know what a file is?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you know what wittles is?"

"Yes, sir."

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a greater sense of helplessness and danger.

"You get me a file." He tilted me again. "And you get me wittles." He tilted me again. "You bring 'em both to me." He tilted me again. "Or I'll have your heart and liver out." He tilted me again.

I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both hands, and said, "If you would kindly please to let me keep upright, sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick, and perhaps I could attend more."

He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped over its own weather-cock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:

"You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. I am a-keeping that young man from harming of you at the present moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?"

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in the morning.

"Say Lord strike you dead if you don't!" said the man.

I said so, and he took me down.

"Now," he pursued, "you remember what you've undertook, and you remember that young man, and you get home!"

"Goo-good night, sir," I faltered.

"Much of that!" said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. "I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!"

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms - clasping himself, as if to hold himself together - and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy, or the tide was in.

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered - like an unhooped cask upon a pole - an ugly thing when you were near it; the other a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But, now I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.