The establishment clause was put into the constitution because of the church of England. This is why many people fled from England to America, because of religious persecution. It was to prevent a state religion, and by religion we aren't talking about Christianity versus Islam, we are talking about different Christian denominations.

Look at what George Washington said in his inaugural address:

"Such being the impressions under which I have, in obedience to the public summons, repaired to the present station; it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official Act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe, who presides in the Councils of Nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the People of the United States, a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes: and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success, the functions allotted to his charge. In tendering this homage to the Great Author of every public and private good I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own; nor those of my fellow-citizens at large, less than either. No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency. And in the important revolution just accomplished in the system of their United Government, the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many distinct communities, from which the event has resulted, cannot be compared with the means by which most Governments have been established, without some return of pious gratitude along with an humble anticipation of the future blessings which the past seem to presage. These reflections, arising out of the present crisis, have forced themselves too strongly on my mind to be suppressed. You will join with me I trust in thinking, that there are none under the influence of which, the proceedings of a new and free Government can more auspiciously commence."

With a soon-to-be 6-3 Corporate Conservative SCOTUS in place, I would not put money on maintaining a legal route to abortion and already civil liberties of women & LGBTQ have begun to be stripped away, with more on the way. There will be no Velvet Revolution here; buckle up.

2020, the year the second American Revolution began.

...but then again, I'm an incorrigible optimist.

There are a few problems they skipped.
First, that bigger pie is still finite, but we act as if it's infinite, pretending that one person having billions doesn't adversely effect others, but that's simply not true.
Second, it overlooked the fact that those countries going through industrial revolution often do so by using other non industrial countries resources, making it impossible to industrialize everywhere....we would need at least one more planet to harvest.
Third, it never pointed out that the GDP increases caused by industrial revolutions were met with massive increases in population, which decreases the per capita net worth significantly. Doubling GDP while tripling population makes the average person have less, not more.

I'm disappointed they didn't mention the French revolution, caused largely by the wealth disparity they're discussing.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.

This video seems to be a long winded version of 'a rising tide lifts all boats'.

Ahh yes...I had actually forgotten the original 'revolution' kicking out the Russian installed president before the Russian counter revolution.
My bad...I'm wrong then. They did do it peacefully.
Thanks for reminding me.

Yes, people should be able to have the same weapons their local police have. If a weapon is too powerful for the public to have, the cops don't need it either. If the shit gets too hot, call in the national guard. As far as spawnflagger saying active military or SWAT owning an AR15, why wouldn't they just train with it and keep it at their department? There's no need for them to own it themselves to be able to use it.

A big part of any overthrow of government is getting the police and military to defect or refuse to fire on the resistance. Peaceful revolutions work much better for this than armed ones, although it seemed to work in Ukraine.

And the post 1990 borders of Texas include historically Mexican lands populated by Mexican people...so what. It was sovereign and Russia acknowledged that, agreed to it, and signed binding treaties ratifying it permanently.

Those keys and systems would have been quickly replaced had those treaties not been enacted...enough of them to be a deterrent. Had we not agreed to defend them and Russia agreed to never try to annex or otherwise take them over, they would have been a nuclear nation and safe from Russian expansion.

As I said, not defending them was a violation. I'm not defending the US's actions.
Opportunity kicked off Russian land grabs, make no mistake.

That statement reflects our undeniable obligation under clear international treaty, not any personally desire to be at war.
Nuclear powers often go to war...by proxy. We've been in one in Syria recently. Edit: according to Russia, they weren't there anyway, so they would be hard pressed to complain about US military in the Ukraine fighting what Russia said were all Ukrainians, no?

Regarding collusion-This isn't a legal forum, you can debate legal terminology and specific charges on one, here, we all understand what collusion means and none of us are swearing out specific legal charges.
Definition of collusion:secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose; acting in collusion with the enemy

Edit: As for the coup, many called it the revolution. It was a coup by the populace, who largely thought the elections were rigged for pro Russians. That said, it was probably a violation for us to eventually support it (I think we waited until after Russian incursions, though). It still, in no way, excuses the Crimean or Ukrainian invasions and annexations.

I upvoted your video because I appreciate the fact you're trying to present a cognizant backing for a lot of the things you say and believe.

I don't know if this was your strongest card, 'tho. He's well-spoken, with impressive CV and an interesting argument. The problem is he's cherry-picking the entire video and sometimes even resorting to rank hypocrisy (it's anti-American to campaign to minorities with a grievance, yet pulling the same stunt got Trump elected when he did it with white people).

I notice he falls back on the Coastal Elite trope, as if being successful and having ideals is somehow an antithesis to all that's good and pure about corn farmers in Kansas. Somehow, it's all those darned people living in that magical wonderland of those who can smell sea salt from the front porch of their homes that fucked middle America.

No. Sorry. Wrong answer.

40 years of Republican-dominated rule, 40 years of a sick social experiment being run by the disciples of Any Rand, is what fucked those people. 40 years of tax cuts for the rich and excess taxation on the poor; 40 years of stealing from schools to pay for subs; 40 years of setting the wolves among the sheep in the form of stripping consumer protections; 40 years of historical revisionism; 40 years of the kind of government that should have landed the perpetrators 12 steps from 6 hooded men with 5 loaded rifles.

Republicans have been calling the shots since Reagan, but yet 8 years of the black dude somehow set the country on a frenzy of self-destructive idiocy unseen since the French Revolution?

Look, I appreciate that you're trying to raise the tone with videos like this. But if you're trying to intellectually shore up the dike, I've got bad news for you: the facts will rarely be on your side.

There are 100 million people with day to day access to arms in the U.S. (granted, of all ages, not all of fighting age).

There are 1.4 million military members.

Bombs destroy the very assets you wish to control. Nukes would be useless.

Tanks run out of fuel, as do jets, without a civil population to resupply them.





I already mentioned the Arab Spring. Governments with tanks and Jets fell to people with rifles.

Soldiers have families. When their families participate in revolt (and become targets of the government), soldiers change sides. Good example would be the Russian revolution against the Tsar, where the army stood down and abandoned the monarchy.

But yes, the military can do its own thing.
Afghan military in the 70's siding with Russia against its government.
Turkey's military ejecting their government whenever it goes bad (*minus this last attempt)

Or even the people can coup vs the people.
The 2014 Ukrainian coup, ethnic Ukrainians ejecting their government to make a new one that deprives ethnic Russians of representation.

-scheherazade

I'm part way there. In government buildings, city parks, etc., sure -- take 'em down. State flags incorporating the confederate flag? Yeah. Probably time to change.

Civil war battlefields / memorials? Leave 'em up. Stone Mountain? Leave it. Placards noting that these people fought for the wrong side, for wrong reasons (90% of which boils down to slavery) can / should be included. Make it clear that the efforts of these people to try to keep slavery around were evil and wrong.

I've seen it noted that there are no monuments to Hitler in Germany. True, but reminders of the terrible Nazi legacy remain, in Germany and elsewhere. Concentration camps remain, still standing as a reminder of the human capacity for evil. Nazi flags, logos, and equipment remain in museums.

In China, images and monuments to Mao are everywhere. In spite of the fact that even the Communist Party there admits that his policies and actions were terrible -- the devastating Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc. Some Chinese can remember and celebrate the good that Mao did (perhaps a small list) while simultaneously acknowledging his extremely tarnished legacy.


I think that being very quick to say that ALL people on the Confederate side of the Civil War were evil and wrong while their counterparts in the Union were clearly the "real Americans" is entirely too easy. The CSA was founded almost entirely in support of a very evil primary goal -- to keep slavery around. But the people in it, even the people running it, were different from the people on the other side mainly due to accidents of birth location. They fought for what they thought was necessary / right. They were wrong. But, they were real Americans -- and acknowledging that they could have been wrong in that way reminds us that the potential to end up on the wrong side of history also exists for us.

I don't think zerohedge is a reputable source.
Why wasn't this found before the event., not that there's anything odd about looking for photographers at a KKK/Nazi rally. Of course you would want them to be comfortable participating in protests, you have to be to get decent photos of them.

Zerohedge : In April 2016, the authors writing as "Durden" on the website were reported by Bloomberg News to be Ivandjiiski, Tim Backshall (a credit derivatives strategist), and Colin Lokey. Lokey, the newest member revealed himself and the other two when he left the site. Ivandjiiski confirmed that the three men "had been the only Tyler Durdens on the payroll" since Lokey joined the site in 2015. Former Zero Hedge writer Colin Lokey said that he was pressured to frame issues in a way he felt was "disingenuous," summarizing its political stances as "Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft." Zero Hedge founder Daniel Ivandjiiski, in response, said that Lokey could write "anything and everything he wanted directly without anyone writing over it." On leaving, Lokey said: "I can't be a 24-hour cheerleader for Hezbollah, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Trump anymore. It's wrong. Period. I know it gets you views now, but it will kill your brand over the long run. This isn't a revolution. It's a joke."

Well, that's one step in the right direction that you now admit the undeniable fact that global temperatures are rising....finally.
Interesting, then what is your theory, seeing as natural cycles would have our temperatures falling right now, but since the industrial revolution they've been trending higher. You can't blame volcanos, there've been no massive volcanic releases to cause it, only minor ones that barely register.

Yes, true, the Paris accord is too little too late, that's not somehow condemnation of the idea that global climate change is man made. Only one nation even questions that, and really only <1/3 of that nation.
Did you ever watch An Inconvenient Truth....I don't think so, because it said no such thing, I think you're repeating what a talking head told you it said. He did say we would probably see obvious effects by now...and we do. He did not say we would all be dead, not even in 100 years.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are not still here, they are dead of famine and wars caused by, and causing, migrating populations. Most of East Africa is in severe drought as bad or worse than Ethiopia in the 80's, just like Gore warned would be increasingly more likely due to climate change, and India and Asia are threatened with losing their main sources of water because of accelerated glacial melting.

Ian Welsh reminds us of a quote by Mark Twain:

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

What do real scientists say?
...the one's he worked with all said Lindzen is totally wrong, and his views are not held by the vast, VAST majority of other scientists that actually work in climatology. He's a political shill now, working for 'conservative think tanks' to deny climate change.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06032017/climate-change-denial-scientists-richard-lindzen-mit-donald-trump

Note, his graph at the beginning that appears to show no significant rise because as usual they start in late 97-98, a super hot El Nino year (the hottest on record) typically used as a starting point to pretend that temperatures aren't rising as fast as they are. Start at any other time to see how different the results are. This graph contains the hottest 15 years in recorded history over a period of the last 19 years. That's pretty telling by itself.

1)the climate is always changing-but according to natural cycles, we should be in a cooling period, not a warming period.
2)so at least in his mind, everyone agrees CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes warming...that's better than most deniers.
3)"little ice age"-During the period 1645–1715, in the middle of the Little Ice Age, there was a period of low solar activity known as the Maunder Minimum. The Spörer Minimum has also been identified with a significant cooling period between 1460 and 1550 (it was not caused by low CO2 levels), and CO2 is produced more in warmer temperatures than cold, so starting shortly after then you can claim the CO2 levels have been rising since well before the industrial revolution...which cherry picked like that may be technically true but is again misleading by starting at an unusually low level following a low level solar period, but the level of that rise has consistently risen since the industrial revolution, and is incredibly higher than any natural mass releases besides rare massive super volcano eruptions that caused mass extinction events.
4) just plain not true, and not agreed on by scientists.
5)What they actually said-
Improve methods to quantify uncertainties of climate projections and scenarios, including development and exploration of long-term ensemble simulations using complex models. The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system�s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential.

Confident prediction of future weather is not possible, weather predictions are based on statistical probabilities too. Because they aren't perfect doesn't mean they're wrong, useless, or should be ignored until they're 100% right every time. More funding for more study will improve the predictions consistently, but we are intentionally defunding them instead.

Religion channel? As in the religion of climate change denial? That's not what that channel is.
Philosophy channel? What?
Learn channel, only if the viewer looks into his BS elsewhere to learn the truth.
Lies, yep...controversy, yep....politics, yep....conspiracy,OK. His ilk are steeped in those, but you left out money, the driving force for all the deniers controversial, political lies and crazy conspiracy theories. ;-)