Have a hammer around as long as there's a nail to be driven in or pulled out.
Keep a shovel around until mastery over matter manipulation affords the effortless ease of moving earth from a to b points with a word or wave...

Have a gun, legally or illegally, until they don't exist any longer.....a tool is a tool, do what you will, the all of the law, with a brain that works and a heart that beats, yer fine. Fuck a constitution, fuck a congress, and , do as you please protect yourself from stupidity and dumb-ass motherfuckers is all....what was the point of this foray into fora anyhoo??....You want flowers in gun barels farhads?? -

Underlining Mark Thirlwell's point about the multitude of opinions with regards to the current economic crisis is this video of Naomi Klein and Joseph Stiglitz:

Liberal commentator Naomi Klein blames Alan Greenspan for the current economic crisis, citing the former Federal Reserve Chairman's push to deregulate financial systems such as derivatives markets as a key element of the crisis.



Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz criticizes American financial leadership in the run-up to the current economic crisis, and declares free-market fundamentalism "dead" as a guiding principle of the U.S. economy.



Full video is at http://fora.tv/2008/10/20/Naomi_Klein_and_Joseph_Stiglitz_on_Economic_Power

Full Program from ForaTV:

Heres the full video/talk - 1:22 h

http://fora.tv/2007/06/21/Secret_History_of_the_American_Empire

1. Thumbnails for all the preferred video hosts. Not every video host on the planet, mind you, but the just for the 16 preferred hosts. Hosts that currently need thumbnails (as far as I know):
- Yahoo
- Dailymotion
- Google
- Myspace
- The Onion
- Video Jug
- SpikeTV (formerly iFilm)

2. New video hosts so that sub-Gold members have more choices. A few suggestions:
- Veoh
- Funny Or Die
- blip.tv
Make sure they get thumbnails too if they're brought on board.

3. Get rid of Fora.tv and V-Social as preferred hosts. No one ever uses them.

4. Add a new tab along the top row next to "Blogs" called "Other Features." Here's what I'd like to see in the "Other Features" section:
- tag cloud
- Top 15 new comments
- and other small features that members would like to see

BTW, can anyone help me with the difficulties with embedding from Fora.tv? They recently changed their format and now I can not embed. VideoSift keeps telling me that it is not valid (for all the videos I wanted to submit.) I admit ignorance here and have no idea how to figure it out.

As an extra reward beyond the glowing feeling you will get from helping me, I will build a huge, elegant, powerful and imaginary statue of you. It will have a plaque on the front labeled, "<insert name here>, Savior of Mankind." All the people in my head will cheer and have daily celebrations in your name.

I have browsed FORA quite a bit because I like to hear intelligent debate on subjects instead of a one-sided news story. It gives me a little more information from both sides to help build a base for an semi-educated opinion.

One of my strong passions is for personal liberty. With personal liberty comes personal responsiblity and personal rights - it's a group package in my mind. Being American has no doubt subjected me to countless years of conditioning of the great dream is to own your own house and land. (Of course being more aware, I know this is not strictly an American dream.) Eminent domain is needed for public function, but I've seen it abused (and then justified by the Supreme Court) to not build public projects, but buildings for private profit. I think that is wrong.

It's akin to picking on the unpopular kid in grade school. It's akin to police using the Patriot Act to spy on regular criminals when the entire basis of it was to catch terrorists. It's used because it shortcuts personal liberties. It is supposed to be hard to convict someone. That what protects personal liberties. In my experience when I bring this up, people will question if I don't want the criminals caught. WTF? Any functioning society needs rules and 'punishments' for those who break the rules. In every society there will be criminals. Period. Not every society will value or protect personal liberties though. Which is more important? On which side shall we error?

Well, I seemed to go off on a mini rant there. Have good day!

In reply to this comment by marinara:
In reply to this comment by curiousity:
Glad you enjoyed it. It's an issue that seems to whimper through the night unless it is your property they are taking.



I never thought I would be interested in eminent domain, but the video was exciting, perhaps it was the personality of the debaters?

I have a housing forclosure crisis playlist here on videosift, and I like CSPAN type stuff.

So do you just browse through the FORA website to find stuff? or what focused you on the eminent domain issue?

In reply to this comment by curiousity:
Glad you enjoyed it. It's an issue that seems to whimper through the night unless it is your property they are taking.



I never thought I would be interested in eminent domain, but the video was exciting, perhaps it was the personality of the debaters?

I have a housing forclosure crisis playlist here on videosift, and I like CSPAN type stuff.

So do you just browse through the FORA website to find stuff? or what focused you on the eminent domain issue?

good presentation.

really like the tools in the fora.tv interface, too.

FORA.tv could be the new TEDtalks, if only they have a faster bandwidth...

For those interested, the full talk is here.

I'd like to commence the whining by whining about your spelling of "whining." Come on dag, you're an American abroad. Don't make us all look like idiots.

I already gave a few suggestions in an earlier Sift talk, so I won't rehash those here. However I have come up with a few more ideas to improve this site:

1. Make the default search include all videos in the Dead Pool. I think that the primary use for the search engine is to look for dupes, so the Dead Pool needs to be included.

2. When an an account is banned, automatically switch the video tags to just "banned" or "redacted", and then lock them out to prevent further changes, rather than allowing them to be switched to "has no dick" or "rapes dead sheep".

3. Create a new invocation called *destroy. I would like for this invocation to only be used:
a. For a video that's already been discarded, and
b. It can only by invoked by the user who originally submitted the video, that way no one else can mess with your discards.

Why have a *destroy invocation? Mainly to remove all the discarded dupes from the system. It cleans things up a bit, and also precludes the possibility of a discarded dupe being * saved by a well-wisher who didn't notice that the video was discarded for being a dupe.

4. Ditch V-Social from the Sweet Sixteen list of approved video hosts. Who really wants to sift a video about a marketing or promotional campaign? And I can't even find where their damn videos are anyway. I'm also inclined to suggest ditching Fora.tv because it also is rarely if ever used, but I do realize that they have some quality content so I'm not going to push hard for that. Possible replacements for either or both of these sites:

- Megavideo
- Funny or Die
- Veoh
- Glumbert
- eBaumsWorld
- Mojoflix
- SuperDeluxe

None of these sites are going anywhere any time soon, so I think they're acceptable.

5. Happy Hour from 5 - 7 pm every day.

That is all.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Sorry wazant - that Fora.tv bug has been fixed.

Yes. Universities should give invited speakers at least ten minutes of uninterrupted time. After all, the rational argument is that universities should be free and open fora of ideas conservative and liberal.

However, the more fun and irrational argument is that, when you are presented the opportunity, you should get the little 'Minuteman' soccer dad racists in your sights and take them down.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone has to pay the least bit of attention to your speech.

Predictably, Bill 'Cut His Mic!" O'Reilly is very, very angry at the liberal bastard students.

Thanks for the link, sfjocko...the forum (fora?) was shockingly informative. I did some Googling myself, and I went into the WWASP sites to see what it would be like for a parent to coming in. Oh, MAN. What a bunch of slick BS. How can a parent not see through this??

My concern is for the kids who were sexually abused. I was talking with a friend this morning about it (she works with victimized children) and she said that it is a common to turn the blame around to the kid...which is why a lot of this stuff is allowed to go on.

Abuse never ever ever goes away for the victim...it sends shockwaves throughout the rest of their life. If they are lucky, they can learn coping skills to help them handle the reverberations...but a lot of victims aren't.

One quarter of our population has been sexually abused...that's ONE in FOUR people you meet. How can we let this continue? How can we let programs like WWASP to continue?

Ok...I'm off the old soapbox.