Thanks for your help with the Rachel Maddow video ... I don't understand why so many "official" videos released through the network YT channels are going dead so often lately. It's perplexed and frustrating

^ and this motherfucker....Hey there gwix, what's shakin'?

Ok I had a pm from Mr Houston that calmed me right the fuck down-I won't be getting the choggie channel back and agree with his sentiments, though the process to arrive at the decision perplexes and bewilders me.

I shall remain the Mexican whore that I have created and sit quietly in the corner with the pointy hat again.

blankfist, bring some lube to our next conversation...Oh wait, I forgot. douchebags don't engage in conversation and they work it dry...

KP, leave me the fuck out of any of your banter, please. Hope yer on yer meds.

Apologies once again to miss J, she's kind and gracious to a fault and I am grateful that I was chosen as one of the strays to come in from the cold for some warm cream.....Next time please, tell me who yer inviting to the trough, I have a hard time getting along with douchebags but I understand that certain breeds are attracted to them....

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

Lyrics per @ant's request.

Is there Anybody going to listen to my story - all about the girl who came to stay?

When I say a girl I really mean a girl and cat, they're connected symbiotically.

Ah Pumkin ....
And Storm ...

Well I've never seen the top 15 filled by one user- till that day that Pumkin came along.

Or maybe Storm posts at night while Pumkin's snoozing. Either way their methods can't be wrong

Ah Pumkin ....
And Storm ...

Leaving MintBBBehind and Zifnab in her dust she's moving up

Ant is feeling quite perplexed
His ant hill's getting dwarfed you bet

She's moving moving moving

Ah Pumkin ....
And Storm

Yah, was gonna say head to Newfoundland if ya wanna be perplexed by the peep-speech of a province...

I am a little perplexed by your interpretation because it seems you are just agreeing with what @jonny said. The comparison of military invasion versus illegal immigration is the one to which the Native American fellow in the video is alluding. He's almost speaking as if the murderous conquest of this land somehow equates with illegals trying to make a home here. (That's the "serious flaw" jonny referenced.)

But I think all the guy's really saying is "You're here illegally too, so STFU... P.S. Fuck you and your ancestors for waging genocide against my ancestors."

I guess I'm considered a NOOB since I haven't even been here a year yet so this power point change has been quite perplexing for me. To be honest, I do feel a bit cheated now. If I hadn't upgraded to charter [which ups my total to two PP's], I would be limited to ONE PP only for the next year and three months. Though I rarely promote my own videos, under the new rules I wouldn't be able to do that at all without the charter status. If my unsifted video queue is full I wouldn't be able to use two points for an "extra" submission either. I love using my PP's to quality and promote other sifters videos* and I do so frequently. This new system severely limits my opportunity to spread the love.

As it stands now, any power point bonuses "earned" for making the top 15, achieving a number one video or an applauded comment are NOT credited at all if you are currently at your limit. What is the benefit/reward of a bonus system then? It seems to me that earned rewards should be considered exempt. Though certainly not the end of the world, it just doesn't seem fair to those who actually work at achieving success.

[* edit: I should clarify that I only promote/quality videos "I" feel are actually worth it. And, as expected, I actually watch ALL of the videos I vote on. No behind the scenes shenanigans here]

That is just too weird! My settings for the Upcoming Video page are: Newest Queue Date - Hide None. I just tried a few other settings [fewest comments, title Z-A and randomized ... all with hide none] then scrolling through ALL of the listings [on both pages] it is definitely NOT there for me. If it helps, this is the page I get when I do a video title search: http://videosift.com/search?q=the+suicide+mission

Again, clicking on the Unsifted link under Navigation on my channel page just now still brings up only five videos [though it indicates there should be six there].

Perplexing to say the least. It IS a bit reassuring to know that it just seems to be an issue with me however.

BTW: I like the new placement for the Sift Lounge link at the upper right corner, out in the open. I keep such odd hours that there normally isn't more than one or two [if any] people there. This placement will make it much easier to try and catch a few more people I hope

What a perplexing pair of questions. Hot girls in skimpy clothes and dog racing robots: seems about as hetero as could possibly be.>> ^cracanata:

why it has to be over the top gay? or cool this days equals gay?

Visually stunning, yet I'm perplexed. WHO serves raw eggs at a tea party? "Would you like some salmonella with that Earle Gray?"

I'm perplexed that no-one here is pointing out that the original PKD story was really short.... and had alien mice, and was called 'We can remember it for you wholesale'. The Total Recall movie took the tiny nugget and spun a whole thing from it.

Depending on whether this is more based on the movie or the short story it can veer off in all sorts of directions.

But being that it's directed by the Underworld guy and Beckansale is in it, it'll be crap

A friend of mine says exactly the same thing, and this argument perplexes me to no end. You're talking about a relationship with God. The one in the bible. You follow, I assume, a system of belief. The one in the bible.* You are therefore religious, and follow a religion, by definition. If you want to make a distinction between organized religion vs. your own personal "take" on Christianity, so be it, but it seems to me that telling people "religion is bad, god is good" is just a convenient loophole you can use to distance yourself from all the horrible atrocities that have occured over history as a result of the belief in your god.

You should listen to your friend. Religion is simply the traditions of men. Christians worship God in spirit and in truth. Foremost, it is a personal relationship with God, and we have direct experience by the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us.

Hebrews 4:12

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

It isn't an institution we're following, or a set of rituals and regulations, but rather the experiential relationship we have with God through His word and Spirit.

* You cherry pick the things from the Bible you like, and discard those you don't, of course. And this is good, because otherwise you'd be executing your children for disobeying you and beating your slaves on a regular basis.

You assume I would do so, because you don't understand the bible. You're referring to the mosaic law, which were for Israel in that time and place. Jesus fulfilled the law and brought us under a New Covenant. There was a change of priesthood, and so christians follow the law of Christ.



>> ^offsetSammy:
>And no, I am not defending religion. Jesus hated religion. Christianity is a relationship with God, not attending church and saying grace.
A friend of mine says exactly the same thing, and this argument perplexes me to no end. You're talking about a relationship with God. The one in the bible. You follow, I assume, a system of belief. The one in the bible. You are therefore religious, and follow a religion, by definition. If you want to make a distinction between organized religion vs. your own personal "take" on Christianity, so be it, but it seems to me that telling people "religion is bad, god is good" is just a convenient loophole you can use to distance yourself from all the horrible atrocities that have occured over history as a result of the belief in your god.
You cherry pick the things from the Bible you like, and discard those you don't, of course. And this is good, because otherwise you'd be executing your children for disobeying you and beating your slaves on a regular basis.

>And no, I am not defending religion. Jesus hated religion. Christianity is a relationship with God, not attending church and saying grace.

A friend of mine says exactly the same thing, and this argument perplexes me to no end. You're talking about a relationship with God. The one in the bible. You follow, I assume, a system of belief. The one in the bible.* You are therefore religious, and follow a religion, by definition. If you want to make a distinction between organized religion vs. your own personal "take" on Christianity, so be it, but it seems to me that telling people "religion is bad, god is good" is just a convenient loophole you can use to distance yourself from all the horrible atrocities that have occured over history as a result of the belief in your god.

* You cherry pick the things from the Bible you like, and discard those you don't, of course. And this is good, because otherwise you'd be executing your children for disobeying you and beating your slaves on a regular basis.

Just because the universe might be eternal, does not mean that God is the automatic solution, nor the simplest explanation. That's just the one that makes sense to you. I would say that an eternal universe filled with rocks and gas is a little less complicated than an eternal, thinking, feeling, all-powerful being. But again, that's just my opinion. Those are large concepts, and the rules of physics, or even the seemingly bizarre rules of quantum mechanics do nothing to help explain them.

To me it is simply a probability argument. If you say that everything is equally unlikely, then if you strip away all other concerns, you just have the question..was the Universe deliberately created? The answer is either yes or no. You have evidence that perhaps there is design, which implies an intelligent (and powerful) creator. You have evidence that perhaps it could have happened by chance, by naturalistic processes. From there, you have to figure out what explanation best matches reality. You could ask, does something as wonderful as life and as amazing as the Universe just happen by itself? You could ask, am I just a bunch of atoms moving through space or is there something more to me than that?

Is an eternal God hard to grasp? Yes, but easier I think than something from nothing. If it is something from nothing we will always be ignorant of the initial conditions. If God created it, He will (presumably) educate us about the mystery of His existence. He promised this:

1 Corinthians 13:12

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

It is basically saying that God promises full disclosure when His Kingdom is established on Earth..

Occam's razor is simply a pragmatic way to find a solution, it does not prove anything, but just suggest what a likely answer might be. People use that argument about the complexity of universal laws all the time, but the fact of the matter is, we still don't understand 99.99999999% of the universe or how it works. We can see that if we "tweaked the dials", it would probably look much different than the universe we know, but there isn't a scientist out there in this world that could tell you with any certainty what would happen. Only that on a large scale, things might fall inward or burst outward faster, or that water might not congeal the same way.

Well, just in the initial conditions of the Universe, you have several values which just defy any naturalistic explanation. Even atheist scientists have to admit that a straight forward explanation indicates a designer:

Fred Hoyle, Astronomer said

"A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

This has major implications for scientific theories, because it isn't simply a matter of it being incredibly unlikely, it is also matter of contradicting the predictions of standard models. I think you'll enjoy this article:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0208/0208013v3.pdf

Speaking of complexity, here's an exercise for your brain: Think about a mountain, on part of that mountain, pressure builds up, and a rock slide starts to fall. When it finally settles, the rocks, all the little pebbles and large boulders and particles of dust are arranged in just a certain way. Even though it's just a pile of rocks, it contains within it an inconceivable amount of complexity. Nowhere else in the entire universe, will there ever be a pile of rocks that have the exact specifications of this one. And even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of the same stone, And even if was, the elements that make up the stone wouldn't be arranged the same way. Nor would it be the exact same temperature, unless it was in the exact same relative position in the universe with an identical sun, with all the particles of gas and dust in between them arranged in exactly the same way.

In a way, the pile of rocks, when you think about it, is an impossibility. And yet it exists. There is no simple solution to explain it. An eternal creator, or the laws of physics? Either way, the true meaning is something that neither of us can comprehend. And to say that either one is "simpler" than the other is merely a statement of faith. Not fact.

Sure, taken by itself, such a thing is astonishing to behold. Divorced from its circumstances, it is perplexing to say the least. Yet, either explanation for the origin of this impossibility leads to a definitive conclusion. If it was naturalism, there is no meaning to it. It just happened that way and at best you can invent a meaning for it and decide to believe it. If it was created, however, it was created for a purpose. It has meaning because of that purpose; it is invested with meaning. In naturalism, you are practically looking at something alien. It is cold, dead, inexplicable, and doesn't care about you. Under creation, you are at the least staring this quote from Einstein dead in the face:

"I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

I go a step further because I believe God has revealed a bit about his Dewey Decimal System, but essentially, I am in staring at this in awe and wonder. I think those rocks are amazing and startling, but I also praise God for making them that way.

>> ^Ryjkyj:
We love you too. (but it's a rough, heathen love)
Just because the universe might be eternal, does not mean that God is the automatic solution, nor the simplest explanation. That's just the one that makes sense to you. I would say that an eternal universe filled with rocks and gas is a little less complicated than an eternal, thinking, feeling, all-powerful being. But again, that's just my opinion. Those are large concepts, and the rules of physics, or even the seemingly bizarre rules of quantum mechanics do nothing to help explain them.
Occam's razor is simply a pragmatic way to find a solution, it does not prove anything, but just suggest what a likely answer might be. People use that argument about the complexity of universal laws all the time, but the fact of the matter is, we still don't understand 99.99999999% of the universe or how it works. We can see that if we "tweaked the dials", it would probably look much different than the universe we know, but there isn't a scientist out there in this world that could tell you with any certainty what would happen. Only that on a large scale, things might fall inward or burst outward faster, or that water might not congeal the same way.
Point being, just because we can tell that the universe would be different, doesn't mean that it was designed. It just means that it is this way.
Speaking of complexity, here's an exercise for your brain: Think about a mountain, on part of that mountain, pressure builds up, and a rock slide starts to fall. When it finally settles, the rocks, all the little pebbles and large boulders and particles of dust are arranged in just a certain way. Even though it's just a pile of rocks, it contains within it an inconceivable amount of complexity. Nowhere else in the entire universe, will there ever be a pile of rocks that have the exact specifications of this one. And even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of the same stone, And even if was, the elements that make up the stone wouldn't be arranged the same way. Nor would it be the exact same temperature, unless it was in the exact same relative position in the universe with an identical sun, with all the particles of gas and dust in between them arranged in exactly the same way.
In a way, the pile of rocks, when you think about it, is an impossibility. And yet it exists. There is no simple solution to explain it. An eternal creator, or the laws of physics? Either way, the true meaning is something that neither of us can comprehend. And to say that either one is "simpler" than the other is merely a statement of faith. Not fact.

I see this video and I'm struck by how much has changed in just my brief lifetime. We're now a society where the death of a tech company's CEO is noted more highly than that of, say, Mother Theresa's was.

I remember when having any skill with computers put a wall between you and your peers. We're not there any more.

Then I look at the dates and I'm no longer sure what's more perplexing - how important people such as Jobs have become, or how fast everything's happened. Ipod - 2001. What the hell?

In the end, I generally agree with you, but I don't think it's accurate that the debt crisis is resolved by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Tax increase would obviously help, but it won't solve it alone.

The debt crisis was born of a few factors:

-Stimulus package (temp, self-correcting since it's ending)
-Massive increase in federal spending in the 2000's bread by two wars, homeland security, senior drug benefit, medicare, medicaid
-Tax revenue declines due to Bush tax cuts
-Sudden sharp declines in income and capital gains tax revenues due to economic collapse

We can't solve the whole thing by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. In fact, I would argue the first step in resolving it is get the economy back on track to increase income tax revenues naturally as the unemployment rate would fall, and pay would increase. I would also argue that we're gonna have to massively cut defense spending at some point. This could be done many different ways, such as pulling out of Iraq and/or Afghanistan, etc. But it's gonna have to be done at some point, although it maybe difficult to do in the short run. That leaves us with what is currently being debated by Congress and the President. I'm actually pretty perplexed that they're prioritizing the debt issue without first remedying the economy. I think the debt is a very important issue, but I also don't believe it will be resolved until unemployment returns to more normal rates, unless we're refusing to acknowledge what leaders may already know - it ain't gonna get better for a long long time regardless of what the gov't does, so we might as well stop adding to the debt.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^MarineGunrock:
What we really need is a law that says no member of congress shall be allowed to receive any money from any lobbying firm, business or individual who is a high-level employee (board member type guys) of any large company worth over "x" amount of dollars. Loopholes need to be closed, but social programs also need to be cut or seriously re-vamped. What REALLY needs to happen is to close behemoth and redundant federal offices that are better left to states or that sates already have.

Well, I'd definitely love to see some sort of reform aimed at the outright bribery we see going on in government. I'm not sure how we get that to happen, though.
As far as the debt goes, my opinion is that all the Congress can do in 2011 is set the budget for 2011 and 2012. Come 2013, it'll be a new Congress, and possibly a new President. There will be another new Congress in 2015, and another in 2017, plus a definite non-Obama President in the White House.
A little mentioned fact about this debt "crisis" is that all we need to do to balance the budget is for Congress to do nothing. No more Doc fixes, no more AMT patches, no more extension of the Bush tax cuts, etc. If we just let current law play out as it was written, the budget problem will no longer be an issue.
Even if congress doesn't do that, fixing our health care system has always been the real problem with the long-term budget. If we could get our medical costs down to just the level of the second-most expensive country in the world (Germany), then we'd be seeing big budget surpluses year after year. Maybe the HCR bill passed will do that once it's all in effect (in 2017!), but it's way too early to be putting those into the budget estimates. Maybe by 2020 we'll find out that we've actually put ourselves on track to be cheaper than Germany, and our budget picture will look really awesome.
I say we just focus on getting people back to work right now, and worry about the long-term debt in the long-term, especially since it might not actually be a problem in the long-term.