Bob is posting Christopher Hitchens videos?!? Have the wolves begun living with the lambs!?!
Do you know what he said about Christian fundamentalism @bobknight33? It’s not flattering.

As a side note, and on topic with the video, every terrorist act perpetrated in America since 2017 has been committed by a right wing “Christian”.
The United States Department of Homeland Security reported in October 2020 that white supremacists (all right wing Christians) posed the top domestic terrorism threat, which FBI director Christopher Wray confirmed in March 2021, noting that the bureau had elevated the threat to the same level as ISIS.
A 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that out of the 85 deadly extremist incidents which had occurred since September 11, 2001, white supremacist extremist groups were responsible for 73%, while radical Islamist extremists were responsible for 27%. The total number of deaths which was caused by each group was about the same, though 41% of the deaths were attributable to radical Islamists and they all occurred in a single event — the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting in which 49 people were killed by a lone gunman. No deaths were attributed to left-wing groups.
-wiki

Kids Channel by James Roe
Sandbox for Sift Tots. This is a realm for videos that are suitable for children to enjoy. Non-kid-friendly videos that simply happen to contain a kid do not belong here.

He is intentionally posting adult content on the channel reserved for children after repeated warnings by multiple sifters and a short hobbling for the same thing. Perhaps another longer one is in order?

And because he continuously misassigns videos about racism as war on terror......

War on Terror Channel by raven

This Channel is for the aggregation of all videos related to the "Global War on Terror"...
As defined by Wikipedia.org:
"The War on Terror (also known as the War on Terrorism) is a campaign initiated by the United States government under President George W. Bush which includes various military, political, and legal actions ostensibly taken to "curb the spread of terrorism," following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States... Both the phrase “War on Terror” and the policies it denotes have been a source of ongoing controversy, as critics argue it has been used to justify unilateral preemptive war, perpetual war, human rights abuses, and other violations of international law."

This Channel aims to become a place that will foster discussion of the war, and the numerous controversies surrounding it as well as the video material coming out of it; both in the form of News Media reports, and videos shot by the soldiers themselves.

"Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-warns-ofeconomic-fallout-if-congress-passes-9-11-bill.html

That's an interesting threat, if true. US treasury securities are the safest asset there is, and given the ginormous shortage of AAA assets worldwide, those would be vacuumed up in a split-second. Hell of a threat, really.

Seth MacFarlane was supposed to be on American Airlines flight 11 on 9/11/2001. He missed the flight by 10 minutes because he was hung over and had the wrong flight time.

And don't forget that the first flight with passengers after that crash, was on September 11, 2001. Not a good time for aviation or travel in general.

>> ^criticalthud:

"Al Queda" is a term created by the US government for a loose collection of groups who do not admire US foreign policy.

I'm the one who used the name Al Qaeda. The AUMF says this:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Not incidentally, that is also the AUMF for the war in Afghanistan as well.

>> ^SDGundamX:

The most important and relevant part of that case is that the courts decided that, although Bush had the presidential authority to name any American citizen an "enemy combatant," the American enemy combatant also had the right to challenge that status in court.

In the Jose Pedilla case, they arrested him when he came onto American soil, and then held him without trial on the basis that he was a prisoner of war, and not a criminal.

In the court battles that ensued, the courts decided that Jose Pedilla could challenge whether he was in fact a prisoner of war in court.

That does not mean that the government has to try all enemy combatants before killing them.

It means that people who get taken prisoner under some sort of wartime doctrine have the right to a day in court to challenge their status as being a participant in war.

>> ^SDGundamX:
He was not killed on a battlefield during combat (which would have been a legal killing)--he was quite clearly assassinated by his own government and without due process.

What's the definition of "battlefield" and "during combat"? Are soldiers in war never legally allowed to attack first? And what's the battlefield mean when we're talking about a non-state entity engaging in guerrilla warfare from strongholds located in many countries?

Again, I say all this not because I think it's right, but because it's where we're at now.

Obama didn't create this legal precedent. Obama isn't violating the law by using this to go after terrorists. I wish Obama was fighting it rather than using it, but wishing doesn't make it so any more than wishing it was illegal makes it illegal.

Obama deserves some shit for this, but I think Tapper's got exactly the right tack on the type of shit he deserves -- make the administration come out and explain a) what exactly they claim they have the right to do, b) explain why they think they have the right to do it, and c) explain whether their answers to a and b jives with their own view of American legal traditions.

The people who want to make this into "Obama committed a crime" aren't helping fix this, they're just helping Republicans win the next election.

Accuracy isn't memory's primary concern. Memory is highly functional, just not in the way you think it is. I never said memory was always inaccurate, but it often is.

Your reaction is one I encounter all the time. People are perfectly willing to accept that other people's memories can be inaccurate, just not theirs. It doesn't bother me, because unless you study memory and understand how it works, it's difficult to accept.

But I'll say this again, because it is worth repeating until people really stop and think about what it means: Confidence is not related to accuracy.

You have also misinterpreted the research I linked to. Yes, they found that emotional features were remembered poorly, but so were non-emotional features. The emotional features were just remembered more poorly. If you would like to read the entire article and not just the abstract, there are even more surprising data they present.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Like I said, I don't doubt that memory is inaccurate, but if it were always inaccurate to the degree you're describing it wouldn't be very functional at all would it?
I remember the names of all of my teachers from first through eighth grade
Mrs. Henyadas
Mrs. Summers
Mrs. Walters
Mr. Polinski
Mr. Leonard
Mrs. Bagget (which I will NEVER forget b/c my sixth grade brain always wanted to call her Mrs. Faggot)
Mr. Syzniak (sp?)
Mrs. Lessner
I highly doubt that I imagined teacher's names from entire years of my life, I will dig out my old report cards and photograph them if you like (but you'll probably just say I forged those and forgot about it while I was sleep walking through an entire week).
On the other hand, the link that you provided even says "the strong emotional reactions elicited by flashbulb events are remembered poorly, worse than nonemotional features such as where and from whom one learned of the attack"
So when you say "you will be completely wrong about where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing when the attacks happened" to me it doesn't seem to jive with the research YOU have provided. I'm sorry my memory isn't as faulty as you are doing a poor job presenting it to be.
Wait what were we talking about?
>> ^berticus:
Yes, it is precisely the time to bring them up. And yes, your memory really is that faulty. Everyone's is. I'm very sorry memory doesn't work the way you want it to.

Like I said, I don't doubt that memory is inaccurate, but if it were always inaccurate to the degree you're describing it wouldn't be very functional at all would it?

I remember the names of all of my teachers from first through eighth grade

Mrs. Henyadas
Mrs. Summers
Mrs. Walters
Mr. Polinski
Mr. Leonard
Mrs. Bagget (which I will NEVER forget b/c my sixth grade brain always wanted to call her Mrs. Faggot)
Mr. Syzniak (sp?)
Mrs. Lessner

I highly doubt that I imagined teacher's names from entire years of my life, I will dig out my old report cards and photograph them if you like (but you'll probably just say I forged those and forgot about it while I was sleep walking through an entire week).

On the other hand, the link that you provided even says "the strong emotional reactions elicited by flashbulb events are remembered poorly, worse than nonemotional features such as where and from whom one learned of the attack"

So when you say "you will be completely wrong about where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing when the attacks happened" to me it doesn't seem to jive with the research YOU have provided. I'm sorry my memory isn't as faulty as you are doing a poor job presenting it to be.

Wait what were we talking about?
>> ^berticus:

Yes, it is precisely the time to bring them up. And yes, your memory really is that faulty. Everyone's is. I'm very sorry memory doesn't work the way you want it to.

Yes, it is precisely the time to bring them up. And yes, your memory really is that faulty. Everyone's is. I'm very sorry memory doesn't work the way you want it to.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

>> ^berticus:
As someone who studies memory distortions, I want you all to know that many of you will be completely wrong about where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing when the attacks happened. Importantly, your confidence is not related to the accuracy of your memory. Even the process of recalling that moment and writing it down here has permanently changed your memory.
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2009-05547-001
I too have a vivid and confident memory of where I was when I heard about it. But it's probably wildly inaccurate.

Meh, is this really the time to bring up memory inaccuracies?
While I will agree with you that m

emory can be very unreliable, it's a bit of a misstep to discount memory as much as you have here.
I know where I was because I saved a newspaper I was folding from that day; I remember where I was standing because I saw the face of the other teacher as he darted to and from the doorway; one of my responsibilities on the newspaper staff was circulation manager so I would have to have been there on a morning when the paper was coming out, etc.
I watched the news reports before/while/after the second plane hit. Unless my memory is so faulty that I'm replacing entire days, I'm fairly certain what I have is accurate.

>> ^Lann:

September of 2001 was generally a horrible month for me.
I was a sophomore (2nd year) in highschool when it happened. I didn't hear anything until my cousin Jacob (who was giving us a ride) told us about the first building being hit. We had no idea what happened until we got to school (we lived in the country so it took a while to get there). We just sat and watched the news footage in my first period American History class. No body really said anything we just watched. After that, most teachers choose not to follow and continue with our normal lessons so I was left out until I was able to use a computer for my last class of the day which was data entry.
When I got home no one was there so I called my other grandparents.
The only reason I remember it was on a Tuesday was because exactly a week later my brother's best friend Brandon killed himself. Part of the reason I hate all this "Never Forget" rhetoric is that it reminds me of him.

>> ^dag:

My parents called me at 3 in the morning (Australia time) and woke me up. I thought someone in our family died, as you always do if you get a call in the middle of the night.
I sat up the rest of the night and watched the live CNN feed downstairs while the kids slept.
I went in to work in the morning and felt kind of weird because everyone wanted to give me their condolences. I was the only American in the office and it really effected everyone here in Australia too, So they wanted to say they were sorry to me.
For weeks afterwords people would ask me if I knew anyone who died in the towers.


Weird. I assume you didn't know anyone in the towers? The closest are my cousins and aunts who live in NY, but had no idea if they worked in/near WTC. They're all alive today so no.

>> ^berticus:

As someone who studies memory distortions, I want you all to know that many of you will be completely wrong about where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing when the attacks happened. Importantly, your confidence is not related to the accuracy of your memory. Even the process of recalling that moment and writing it down here has permanently changed your memory.
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2009-05547-001
I too have a vivid and confident memory of where I was when I heard about it. But it's probably wildly inaccurate.


Meh, is this really the time to bring up memory inaccuracies?

While I will agree with you that m
emory can be very unreliable, it's a bit of a misstep to discount memory as much as you have here.

I know where I was because I saved a newspaper I was folding from that day; I remember where I was standing because I saw the face of the other teacher as he darted to and from the doorway; one of my responsibilities on the newspaper staff was circulation manager so I would have to have been there on a morning when the paper was coming out, etc.

I watched the news reports before/while/after the second plane hit. Unless my memory is so faulty that I'm replacing entire days, I'm fairly certain what I have is accurate.

@marbles:

First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens.

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson, but I used the term conspiracy theory, not conspiracy. Conspiracy theory has a separate and more strongly suggestive definition (this one from Merriam-Webster): "a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators."

I openly acknowledge that the government of the United States has and does commit conspiracies, as you define the word. (You mentioned Operation Northwoods in a separate comment; a post on Letters of Note from few weeks ago may be of interest to you, too, if you haven't already seen it: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/08/possible-actions-to-provoke-harrass-or.html.) The actions described therein, and other such actions, I would aptly describe as conspiracies (were they to be enacted).

Definitions aside, my problem with posts like that of @blastido_factor is that most of their so-called conspiracies are easily debunked. They're old chestnuts. A few minutes' worth of Google searches can disprove them.

It may be helpful to distinguish between what I see as the two main "conspiracies" surrounding 9/11: (1) that 9/11 was, to put it briefly, an "inside job," and (2) that certain members of the government of the United States conspired to use the events of 9/11 as justification for a series of military actions (many of which are ongoing) against people and countries that were, in fact, uninvolved in the 9/11 attacks. The first I find no credible evidence for. The second I consider a more tenable position.


The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside?

Once again, much of what you mention can be attributed to poor communication between the FAA and the government agencies responsible for responding to the attacks (and, for that matter, between the various levels of government agencies). And again, this is one of the major criticism levied by the various 9/11 investigations. From page forty-five of the 9/11 Commission: "The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex, but they play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet."

Furthermore, it seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes made by a lot of the conspiracy theorists who fall into the first cateory (see above) is that they judge the events of 9/11 in the context of post-9/11 security. National security, on every level, was entirely different before 9/11 than it is now. That's not to say that the possibility of this kind of attack wasn't considered within the intelligence community pre-9/11. We know that it was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-knowledge_debate). But was anyone adequately prepared to handle it? No.

In any event, when's the last time you looked at a map of Washington, DC? If you look at a satellite photo, you'll notice that the runways at Ronald Reagan airport are, literally, only a few thousand feet away from the Pentagon. Was a no-fly zone in place over Washington by 9:37 AM? I honestly don't know. But it's misleading to suggest that planes don't routinely fly near the Pentagon. They do.


And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?

In truth, I don't know enough about ballistics to speak for how well a titanium engine would withstand an impact with a reinforced wall at hundreds of miles an hour. But, if you're suggesting that a plane never hit the building, here's a short list of what you're wilfully ignoring: the clipped light poles, the damage to the power generator, the smoke trails, the hundreds of witnesses, the deaths of everyone aboard Flight 77, and the DNA evidence confirming the identities of 184 of the Pentagon's 189 fatalities (64 of which were the passengers on Flight 77).

Regarding the debris: It's misleading to claim that only small amounts of debris were recovered. This from Allyn E. Kilsheimer, the first structural engineer on the scene: "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box ... I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts." In addition, there are countless photos of plane wreckage both inside and outside the building (http://www.google.com/search?q=pentagon+wreckage).


Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found?

You help prove my point with this one: "almost always located." Again, I'm no expert on the recovery of black boxes, but here's a point to consider: if the black boxes were within the rubble at the WTC site, you're looking to find four containers that (undamaged, nonetheless) are roughly the size of two-liter soda bottles amidst the rubble of two buildings, each with a footprint of 43,000 square feet and a height of 1,300 feet (for a combined volume of 111,000,000 cubic feet, or 3,100,000,000 liters). (You might want to check my math. And granted, that material was enormously compacted when the towers collapsed. But still, it's a large number. And it doesn't include any of the space below ground level or any of the other buildings that collapsed.) Add to that the fact that they could have been damaged beyond recognition by the collapse of the buildings and the subsequent fires. To me, that hardly seems worthy of conspiracy.


Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.

Here, finally, we find some common ground. I couldn't agree more. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more ardent critic of America's foreign policy.

>> ^marbles:
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is ...

Unknown Unknowns

By Thomas Sowell (Jul 13, 2011)

When Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense, he coined some phrases about knowledge that apply far beyond military matters.

Secretary Rumsfeld pointed out that there are some things that we know that we know. He called those "known knowns." We may, for example, know how many aircraft carriers some other country has. We may also know that they have troops and tanks, without knowing how many. In Rumsfeld's phrase, that would be an "unknown known" -- a gap in our knowledge that we at least know exists.

Finally, there are things we don't even know exist, much less anything about them. These are "unknown unknowns" -- and they are the most dangerous. We had no clue, for example, when dawn broke on September 11, 2001, that somebody was going to fly two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center that day.

There are similar kinds of gaps in our knowledge in the economy. Unfortunately, our own government creates uncertainties that can paralyze the economy, especially when these uncertainties take the form of "unknown unknowns."

The short-run quick fixes that seem so attractive to so many politicians, and to many in the media, create many unknowns that make investors reluctant to invest and employers reluctant to employ. Politicians may only look as far ahead as the next election, but investors have to look ahead for as many years as it will take for their investments to start bringing in some money.

The net result is that both our financial institutions and our businesses have had record amounts of cash sitting idle while millions of people can't find jobs. Ordinarily these institutions make money by investing money and hiring workers. Why not now?

Because numerous and unpredictable government interventions create many unknowns, including "unknown unknowns."

The quick fix that got both Democrats and Republicans off the hook with a temporary bipartisan tax compromise, several months ago, leaves investors uncertain as to what the tax rate will be when any money they invest today starts bringing in a return in another two or three or ten years. It is known that there will be taxes but nobody knows what the tax rate will be then.

Some investors can send their investment money to foreign countries, where the tax rate is already known, is often lower than the tax rate in the United States and -- perhaps even more important -- is not some temporary, quick-fix compromise that is going to expire before their investments start earning a return.

Although more foreign investments were coming into the United States, a few years ago, than there were American investments going to foreign countries, today it is just the reverse. American investors are sending more of their money out of the country than foreign investors are sending here.

Since 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal, "the U.S. has lost more than $200 billion in investment capital." They add: "That is the equivalent of about two million jobs that don't exist on these shores and are now located in places like China, Germany and India."

President Obama's rhetoric deplores such "outsourcing," but his administration's policies make outsourcing an ever more attractive alternative to investing in the United States and creating American jobs.

Blithely piling onto American businesses both known costs like more taxes and unknowable costs -- such as the massive ObamaCare mandates that are still evolving -- provides more incentives for investors to send their money elsewhere to escape the hassles.

Hardly a month goes by without this administration coming up with a new anti-business policy -- whether directed against Boeing, banks or other private enterprises. Neither investors nor employers can know when the next one is coming or what it will be. These are unknown unknowns.

Such anti-business policies would just be business' problem, except that it is businesses that create jobs.

The biggest losers from creating an adverse business climate may not be businesses themselves -- especially not big businesses, which can readily invest more of their money overseas. The biggest losers are likely to be working people in America, who cannot just relocate to Europe or Asia to take the jobs created there by American multinational corporations.

@bcglorf: He went back and forth claiming and then denying any involvement with the attacks. Anyone can claim they did it if they think it'd help their terrorist cause.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that classified[114] evidence linking al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the attacks of September 11 is clear and irrefutable.[115] The UK Government reached a similar conclusion regarding al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's culpability for the September 11, 2001, attacks although the government report notes that the evidence presented is insufficient for a prosecutable case.[116] Bin Laden initially denied involvement in the attacks. On September 16, 2001, bin Laden read a statement later broadcast by Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite channel denying responsibility for the attack.[117]

So they have 'evidence' that no one is allowed to see and that wouldn't hold up in a court of law. I hardly put that as ironclad knowledge that he actually had anything to do with the attacks.

So, yeah, IF.

Then you don't see the difference between fighting a war, and enforcing the law.
No, you don't see that whether at war or not, you don't just start treating people like sub humans. Law does not go out the window with war, at least it shouldn't, and if the US wants to stop being seen as a global bully then it should be holding itself to a higher level of morality than it currently does.

If you want any respect for your opinions on this from me your passion needs to be matched by your knowledge of the situation, not your ignorance
Wow, high opinion of yourself much? I really couldn't give a fuck whether you 'respect my opinions' or not, why would I care?