That is a riot. I could watch a whole season of that. They need to do firecrackers next. |)

Oppenheimer pulled this exact same jape in his lab and inadvertently made the world's largest firecracker. What a guy.

It'd be great if sound of the shot was really one of his sober buddies throwing a firecracker. He thinks he just shot the gun and falls on his arse down the hill.

>> ^TickTock:
Someone needs to start lighting firecrackers...


I would pay very good money to see that.

Someone needs to start lighting firecrackers...

From Wikipedia:

As Nasty As They Wanna Be and "Me So Horny" controversy
The group released their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989, which also became the group's most successful album, largely because of the single "Me So Horny", which was popular in spite of little radio rotation, thanks, in part, to prevalent play on MTV. The song was based on a quote from a Vietnamese prostitute in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and took a sample from Mass Production's Firecracker. This album was also produced by Mr. Mixx.
The American Family Association did not think the presence of a "Parental Advisory" sticker was enough to adequately warn listeners of what was inside the case. Jack Thompson, a lawyer affiliated with the AFA, met with Florida Governor Bob Martinez and convinced him to look into the album to see if it met the legal classification of obscene. In 1990 action was taken at the local level and Nick Navarro, Broward County sheriff received a ruling from judge Mel Grossman that probable cause for obscenity violations existed.[2]
Navarro warned record store owners that selling the album may be prosecutable. 2 Live Crew then filed a suit against Navarro. That June, Judge Jose Gonzalez ruled against the album, declaring it obscene and illegal to sell. Charles Freeman, a local retailer, was arrested two days later, after selling a copy to an undercover police officer. This was followed by the arrest of three members of 2 Live Crew after they performed some material from the album at a live performance held at the Futura Night Club in Hollywood Florida. They were acquitted soon after. In 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned the obscenity ruling from Jose Gonzales, and the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear Broward County's appeal. A notable feature of the case was the distinguished literary critic and now Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as an expert witness on behalf of the defendants. He argued that the material that the county alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-American vernacular, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.
As a result of the controversy, As Nasty As They Wanna Be sold over two million copies. It peaked at #29 on The Billboard 200 and #3 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. A few other retailers were later arrested for selling it as well. Later hard rock band Van Halen sued over an uncleared sample of their song "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" in the 2 Live Crew Song "The Fuck Shop". The publicity then continued when George Lucas, owner of the Star Wars universe, successfully sued Campbell for appropriating the name "Skywalker" for his record label, Luke Skywalker Records. Campbell changed his stage name to Luke (and changed the record label's name to Luke Records) and the group released an extremely political follow up album, Banned in the USA after obtaining permission to use an interpolation of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. 2 Live Crew paraphernalia with the Luke Skywalker or Skywalker logos are usually sought after as collector's items.

In slow motion you can totally see a suicide jerboa with a firecracker on its back, jump into the pan as the kid pours the lava out.

I always wondered how the hell Alfred Molina was able to keep himself from jumping each time one of those damn firecrackers went off? I know he's wearing an earpiece for the music but still!

>> ^jwray:
The United States federal government is not paying for its deficit spending by printing excessive amounts of money. It is borrowing instead. Inflation is at 3.66% and falling. It peaked at 5.6% in July, before the economic upheaval.


Oh really, is that why it takes 3x as many dollars to buy an ounce of gold today than it did ten years ago? Of course the government is printing obscene amounts of money. Stop picking and choosing little short term windows of time where the trend is not apparent, nothing goes in a straight line. Do you even know what monetization of debt means? If foreigners are no longer interested in buying our government debt (bonds) that the treasury issues every year, the Fed has to raise interest rates to lure them in, because that's the yield on their loan to us. But they're LOWERING THEM. Yields are NEGATIVE. You loan money to us, you will be paid back in depreciated dollars that buy less than what you had before you loaned. So now that foreigners aren't doing that, guess who has to step in and buy those bonds? The Federal Reserve. Except that money isn't someone's savings, it isn't backed by a product in the world. It's pure inflation, pure funny money. That's what's coming, their balance sheet is going into the TRILLIONS.

This is the symbiosis that enabled government excess. A tax is an honest appropriation, people see it and are far more likely to resist it. Inflation is arbitrary money creation in a back room that siphons value from existing dollars. You can pull a curtain over that, lie about how much you're doing it, and watch as people see prices go up 10% in health care, food, per annum with absolutely no idea what hit them. After all, the government weatherman says that prices only went up 3%.

http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/2005/0624.html

The calculations are a joke, after we left the gold standard in the 70s, they kept changing them to understate real inflation and welfare obligations so they could spend more and more without it being easily noticed. They no longer include homes, energy, or food. Also, they introduced a subjective concept called hedonics adjustment, which negates price increases as inflation by discounting an assumed increase in quality.

The most galling result of this Keynesian nonsense is it blinds people to where inflation is going. Keynesian economics is the equivalent of teaching astrology instead of astronomy. First, they change the definition of inflation to mean prices instead of money supply. The correct definition of inflation is an increase of the money supply with the common RESULT being higher prices. After doing this, they then categorize inflation (to them: prices) into "asset-based" and "goods-based," and tell us that they don't fight asset-based. But asset-based inflation is what causes bubbles in assets like homes and stocks. We want things we own to go up and things we consume to go down, of course, but we don't want our assets to go up from artificial demand created by inflation. That's an illusion. So when inflation goes into tech stocks or homes, nobody sees it as inflation. Not the Keynesian Fed Chairmen, not the Keynesian financial managers, almost anyone with a degree in economics was less reliable than A COIN FLIP. That's when you know when your "science" has a problem. And then boom, when it starts going into commodities futures after the implosion, it exposes the inflation at all once that people were previously blind to.

And then here's a guy like Schiff, Ron Paul's economic advisor and Austrian economist, who was warning the whole god damned time since 2000, telling people to get into gold when it was $275 and getting laughed at by every confused Keynesian educated retard on television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucDkoqwflF4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

>> ^dtmike07:
Austrian economics has about as much credibility as scientology. They don't even believe in empirical evidence, for crissakes. Mainstream economics does't have a much better theory - essentially its an extended and mathematized version of Austrian economics. But at least mainstream economists know what the data says and use statistical techniques to analyze it. You know, like real scientists. And regarding the Austrian "theory" of the Great Depression - they pretty much pulled it out of their asses. Its just an attempt to blame the whole thing on the government, and exempt the free market. Austrian economics is a religion - the free market is God and government is the Devil.

You are 100% dead wrong on this. Keynesian "empirical data" is bogus, I've only scratched the surface on how they try to complicate simple concepts into a symbiotic swindle by redefining inflation, making up new terms, and it keeps blowing up in their face no matter who's in charge because that's the whole point. For you or Stukafox to even compare this problem to the firecrackers of banking panics (from fractional reserve lending, a legalized form of fraud that persists to this day with government backstops, an entirely different debate) is unbelievable, there's no proportion to a decade long depression and a bunch of shitty banks going under to remind people not to carelessly deposit all their money in banks.

Second of all, economics is a study of human behavior. Keynes was an idiot whose theories arose from a complete misunderstanding of what caused the great depression. He basically threw classical knowledge out the window and decided that economies needed central direction and stimulation by government. See, like the dumbfucks in this video, most people thought letting the banks fail was what caused the depression. It wasn't. It was what came before and after it. The inflation of the 20s was what caused the crash in the first place, you don't have a crash without a Fed-created bubble. You don't have withdrawal without being high on drugs.

But while withdrawal symptoms suck, they're actually the solution to the disease of the high. Hoover and Roosevelt saw the hangover as the disease, and began administering shock therapy. Over the course of many years, they raised tariffs, raised taxrates, and nationalized industry. The economy would have recovered, capital and jobs would have reallocated on its own. Instead, anyone who had any money after that crash had no incentive to invest or employ anyone, because now government was promising to take 90% of your profits if you made any. So unemployment got worse. The tax revenue the government did manage to appropriate, it used to pay for new government jobs that were extremely inefficient (being immune to bankruptcy, financed by theft, and having no competition tends to be an unproductive business model, ask the soviets). FDR also ordered livestock slaughtered and fields plowed under because he believed falling food prices were bad for farmers. No, I'm not making this up. Deflation being bad is another Keynesian myth, they think more efficient production lowering prices makes people sit on their money rather than invest it. Which is totally untrue if you look at the computer sector where prices fall IN SPITE of inflation and have never had problems raising capital or selling well despite falling prices and obsolescence. FDR is the same asshole who allowed Pearl Harbor to be a massacre and issued unconstitutional orders to confiscate gold from the poor, hungry citizens who had just seen the banks absolved for destroying their savings. The man was a fucking monster, it took four terms to get rid of him.

What got us out of the depression was a just war and FDR's death. WWII had the entire country up in arms because we were attacked by another country. People were willing to sacrifice their wants and contribute to the war effort, this was no pushover on a third world country, it took everything we had. People were buying warbonds based on patriotic fervor alone. Massive amounts of infrastructure was built to produce wartime materials. That manufacturing base remained after the war for private industry, taxes came down, trade resumed, and we emerged as a leading producer of wealth in the world. By default. Because the rest of world was in shambles, only the Soviets were left to compete and their socialist economy eventually crumbled. We didn't plan it that way, it just happened. We were also still on a semi-gold standard, we still had a savings rate, and we became the largest creditor nation. We've lost ALL OF THAT. It's all gone, we're the direct opposite now. No gold standard, negative savings rate, largest debtor nation in the WORLD.

Keynes main problem is, politicians have no precise idea what all needs to be produced and created to please everyone in a PEACETIME economy, it's impossible. The free market is millions of individuals with diverse wants and needs, there's no way in hell you can centrally manage that. But they think they can and want to spend, that's why they picked Keynes as a replacement for old models, because his theories completely justified what socialist academics had been wanting to do all along. They honestly believed they could spend money more efficiently than its earner. That's impossible, the earner has a stake in the money. If he throws it away, he loses the labor he spent to obtain it, so he has a natural incentive to be thrifty. A politician spending it loses nothing, they have no incentive to be thrifty. They're people motivated by self-interest, just like you and me, their only legitimate job in the economy was to make sure force and deception is not used when we are out here transacting with one another. That's what graphs and "empirical data" doesn't explain, and it's why history will show Keynes to be a failure.

Far from our free market roots, we centrally fix interest rates, we declare lending standards discriminatory with goofy programs like the community reinvestment act, we redistribute capital from good businesses to failed ones, savers to speculators, and pass all kinds of anti-competitive laws. That's what Ron Paul understood and was going to put a stop to. He was going to end the monopoly on currency that forced us all into accepting the bill for government excess. He was going to end the useless military expenditures overseas. He was going to eliminate the income tax and cripple the ability of politicians to engage in collusive campaign dealings, or "engineer" society by issuing special credits to certain types of marriages, incomes, families, or investments. He knew the enablements, he understood how seemingly innocuous program could change human behavior. Politicians are just lawyers spending and accepting millions of dollars to get a low-paying position of controlling other people's money. That's it. And if you think they should be controlling 50% of our money in life, you deserve everything that's coming to you. Your employers are all going to close up shop to avoid the tax, your education is going to suck, your welfare dollars' value is going to be pissed away on foreign entanglements and overpaid execs, your gold is going to get confiscated (again). It's all coming, comrades.

>> ^MINK:
lithuania has a fairly free market because it's fucking corrupt, and i can tell you it's not beneficial to the consumer. the lies they get away with in unregulated advertising are shocking. of course they do it, because they can and it works.
corruption is what humans do unless someone with a bigger gun tells them not to.
individual freedom will always fuck up the common good. crime does pay. if you legalise business practices which are currently criminal, you'll get more of it, not a magical balanced free utopia.
Imstellar, in your version of a free market, who would stop Microsoft dominating the place with shitty software? I think we need MORE regulation there, not less. How is it efficient for microsoft to keep churning out that crap? you are asking for everything to be a marketing, bribery and advertising contest.
here on the sift we have a free market of ideas and video uploads, and look what happens, a bunch of cliques and lolcats and vote whores and the noise level is so high that you can't find the good shit without watching 10 crappy videos. Can you imagine what it would be like here if siftbot stopped checking for sock puppet accounts?


You're confused, I blame the all-encompassing buzzword of the day "regulation" for this, people don't understand the markets and have come to take it as meaning "government making it all better and overseeing greed." Government indeed has desirable functions in law enforcement and offering recourse through courts for disputes. They should NOT be price-fixing, monopolizing money, or handing out taxpayer money under socialist ideals of directing industry or "enhancing market confidence," this has collusion and corruption written all over it. Politicians are humans and someone spending millions of his own money to get in a low-salary position of controlling other people's money is probably going to be a more harmful source of greed than any businessman. Because even though Henry Ford became a millionaire, thousands of people got cars out of the deal. Not sure the same would have come from government expenditures...

But many would consider this form of corporate wealth redistribution "regulating" the market. I don't.

Your example of false advertising is an example of where law enforcement should take place. Can I sell a product that purports to do something it doesn't? No, that's a swindle, the contract was not upheld, and you can go to government-provided courts to be compensated. Similar things apply to other swindles, though in most cases even the government can't prevent you from falling for some e-mail scam to a Nigerian clearing house. Unless, of course, you agree to have them snoop all your incoming e-mail to check for this stuff. I'd hope you understand that that's a pretty stupid of you, though, for giving up your privacy in order to protect yourself from being gullible. Not understanding cost/benefit ratios is a huge socialist mistake. They're always missing the potential costs and focusing on the benefit.

Gun bans, for example, have the intention of reducing violence but in reality remove the deterrent criminals otherwise have against a society that does have them, causing crime to increase. Plus, it makes you defenseless to oppressive government. The utopian allure of creating a "perfect" society where no gun crime exists and everyone can live in peace and trust is what gets them to miss the greater cost incurred that any thinking man would have foreseen.

The Fed is another one. Fractional reserves caused a lot of bank runs in the old days. Instead of banning this practice, they backstopped it with a central bank, but the central bank price fixed interest rates, causing a crash in 29. Further temporary socialist measures turned it into a fifteen year depression, a nuclear explosion compared to the firecrackers of the original problem. Then the FDIC was created. This incentivized a lot of risk and borrowing, which has helped the current problem fester. See how the failure to correctly solve one problem has led to a cascade of "solutions" that create even more problems that beget even more solutions? That's socialism, my friends. It just builds and builds until eventual collapse.

I would say that another socialist mistake you are making is that law enforcement itself is a proper regulatory measure. Not when they're selective, they're not. There is plenty of legislation out there that legalizes something for one industry, but not the other. Banks can loan out money they don't have at interest. Any other industry, and you're thrown in jail for fraudulent lending practices.

LOLskers at your Microsoft argument, too. Who prevents Microsoft from churning out crap? Consumers, mayhaps? People were free to not adopt Windows ME or Vista, and that's exactly what happened, their sales were disappointing for both. Anyone investing in Microsoft don't like failures leading to lost earnings. But Microsoft is smart and continues to sell XP, which is a perfectly good OS even today. But if they currently get any tax credits or subsidies, they shouldn't. No company should have access to forcibly appropriated money, period.

I think the real scary thing about all this, besides the fact that you don't understand it, is that you seem to be implying that a government office operating on forcibly appropriated money is capable of greater efficiency than the private sector. Maybe it comes close for laying pavement and picking up garbage. But in the grander scheme, no. It wasn't the case with Chernobyl and it ain't today, buddy. You take a hell of lot of innovations and products for granted if you believe that.

... Yeah, she does yell "I'm Hit"..

I'm curious as to what, because the gun didn't go off, and he wasn't using any firecrackers that launch anything.

Hey, my fellow Windy Citizen, congrattttulations! Excellent work, parades and firecrackers to you.

I'm jumping in early here because, my God, the fireworks already!?! How does everybody know!!?! I just heard more, I didn't realize how many of my neighbors were here! So, the parade this morning...OH no, really!?? I gave it a passing glance as I walked the dogs...I am so humbled. Nobody told me it would be like this when you reached 100. You sneaky devils, I would have lit a firecracker and cheered at your parades too!

My brother had a rotty that attacked firecrackers.

This is absolutely incredible.

"Would you take your trousers off?"

"Have you got a firecracker?"

These two are tremendous.