>> ^quantumushroom:

Actually, they're government schools, preaching the "value" of big, tyrannical government. Don't let these socialist conformity factories get in the way of your education.

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^quantumushroom:
Has Moyers ever had a show that taxpayers didn't have to pay for?

Educating the public is important...it's why we have public schools.



I was never preached to in any public school about the value of big government or even where the money to educate us was coming from. If anything it's the opposite I was educated that America is always in the right...whatever our leaders tell us that is reality. Work hard and join a corporation and remember buy LOTS and LOTS of stuff. My Economics class was also sponsored by fucking Levis and we got to do Levis-centric problems all the time.

So no you're just wrong about this as you are about mostly everything all the time. It would be something if you would make a good point when you're spewing bullshit but you never do...the world is always the opposite of how you think.

The bible isn't some mythical book written by some omnipotent being. It is a collections of short stories, carefully selected and complied by the Roman Catholic church 200 years after some guy names Jesus may or may not have lived. They were hand selected and occasionally edited to create a book that the Roman Catholic church could use to control and scare the pagan and outlying sects of early christianity under one banner.....theirs.

The bible is the inspired word of God, and your read of history leaves much to be desired. First, many of the books in the NT were considered canon around 140 AD, just as the early church was getting its start, and there was no conspiracy in selecting them. The only issue in the selection process was to weed out the gnostic writings and the uninspired works from the old testament era. Second, the RCC was not an institution until much later. By the time the bible was canonized in 367, the whole church was in agreement about what should be in it. There is also no evidence of editing. We have the early manuscripts and can check this.

To say this nation was founded on Christian ideals is a complete and utter fallacy, one that has been force fed to you and every other American for decades. The entire revolutionary war and the rebellion against England had absolutely nothing to do with god or religion. It was due to the occupation of Boston, the taxes levied on everything imported or exported from the colonies and the fact that the colonials were fed up with totalitarian control from a king 3000 miles away. When those men were killed at The Boston Massacre in 1770, their religion, race or background played zero part in the aftermath and the birth of a revolution that soon followed.

That's as biased a read of american history as I have ever heard. To say that Christianity had nothing to do with the founding of this country is patently absurd. If you want evidence, feel free to read my other post, or do some *unbiased* research. I suppose you have never seen the Mayflower Compact?

http://www.pilgrimhall.org/compact.htm

Were members of the first Continental Congress religious? Of course. Were they highly educated and well read? Absolutely. The Bible was one of the most widely available books at that time and I am sure every one of them had read it. I am a staunch atheist and even I have read it cover to cover (ironically reinforcing my atheism). Of course references to the bible are in the early writings, documents and monuments of the day. The bible, while complete, man-made fiction, is still full of fairly useful and often poignant quotes.

It's impossible for you to understand the bible without the Holy Spirit. It might as well have been written in swahili for the good that it did you reading it. The accuracy of the bible is not just a historical matter but also in how it describes the human condition. That's why you have those quotes you have to admit are undeniably true, because the bible tells us the reality of the human heart. Yes, of course the founders read it (many of them went to seminary). There were many books in those days, and many philosophies, but they specifically chose the bible, and books based on the bible, as references to draft our nations founding documents, which itself is well documented. Most of them believed the bible was the inspired word of God, which was the reason they used it, not because it was a "popular book of short stories".

Freedom of religion is as much freedom FROM religion and it is to practice whatever religions you want as you see fit. The separation of church and state was not only to avoid having a state religion, but to also avoid the church taking over the government as it had so many times in history. Sadly, we have fallen right back in the trap where religion, specifically CHRISTIAN religion, has as much impact on policy in the America government today as it did during the crusades in Europe when people's lives were dictated by what the church deemed appropriate and right and not the people as a whole. When you have a president of this nation saying that he went to war, ignoring Congress in the process, in the Middle East because god told him to, shit has gone WAY too far.

Apparently you don't know but there was a defacto state religion; almost every state had its own church, and every state constitution mentioned God. Again, they held church every sunday in the house of representitives. Clearly the founders were not interested in removing religion from government, they were only concerned about the balance of power. The secular dream you think the founders had never existed; they loved God and deliberately included Him in public affairs. After they wrote the constitution, Washington declared a day of thanksgiving and praise to God

"to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God"

"http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/firsts/thanksgiving/"

>> ^Hive13

@shinyblurry:

The bible isn't some mythical book written by some omnipotent being. It is a collections of short stories, carefully selected and complied by the Roman Catholic church 200 years after some guy names Jesus may or may not have lived. They were hand selected and occasionally edited to create a book that the Roman Catholic church could use to control and scare the pagan and outlying sects of early christianity under one banner.....theirs.

To say this nation was founded on Christian ideals is a complete and utter fallacy, one that has been force fed to you and every other American for decades. The entire revolutionary war and the rebellion against England had absolutely nothing to do with god or religion. It was due to the occupation of Boston, the taxes levied on everything imported or exported from the colonies and the fact that the colonials were fed up with totalitarian control from a king 3000 miles away. When those men were killed at The Boston Massacre in 1770, their religion, race or background played zero part in the aftermath and the birth of a revolution that soon followed.

Were members of the first Continental Congress religious? Of course. Were they highly educated and well read? Absolutely. The Bible was one of the most widely available books at that time and I am sure every one of them had read it. I am a staunch atheist and even I have read it cover to cover (ironically reinforcing my atheism). Of course references to the bible are in the early writings, documents and monuments of the day. The bible, while complete, man-made fiction, is still full of fairly useful and often poignant quotes.

Freedom of religion is as much freedom FROM religion and it is to practice whatever religions you want as you see fit. The separation of church and state was not only to avoid having a state religion, but to also avoid the church taking over the government as it had so many times in history. Sadly, we have fallen right back in the trap where religion, specifically CHRISTIAN religion, has as much impact on policy in the America government today as it did during the crusades in Europe when people's lives were dictated by what the church deemed appropriate and right and not the people as a whole. When you have a president of this nation saying that he went to war, ignoring Congress in the process, in the Middle East because god told him to, shit has gone WAY too far.

Congress, FCC, and Lobby groups across the nation were up in arms and shocked at Janet Jackson's nipple slip. Fines were levied, apologies made, new FCC rules put into motion.. Howard Stern and many "shock jock" dj's had more fines due to new rules after the Janet Jackson nip slip, I remember stern talking about for weeks cause of that nip slip he's got hundred thousand dollar fines.

Now where's the controversy? I swear it proves they only used the jackson slip as excuse for bigger government and more laws and fines attacking free speech in the media and now that those laws are in place them not reacting to this shows their hypocrisy

>> ^ChaosEngine:

You are more than welcome to campaign against war, imperialism, etc. I'm actually right behind you on those issues. But you don't get to just decide not to contribute at all to society.


Not wanting to pay compulsory taxes on income is not the same as not contributing at all. I take offense I want to contribute. I just want to do so voluntarily and where I choose. You seem to think we need to give sight unseen where the money goes.

And I wonder if you're really right behind me on campaigning against warfare and corporate welfare. That doesn't seem to be the hot topic talking point of the Democratic party these days, assuming you support them.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

And I never said that what it's spent on less important than how it's collected. The two are orthogonal. I said I don't have an issue with paying taxes. I have have all kinds of problems with how it's spent.
In fact I pretty much said the direct opposite of what you claimed I said. I buy into the social contract by paying taxes, voting and so on.


But they do matter. What if tomorrow we added services and goods by Blockbuster, Halliburton, Wal•Mart, Exxon Mobil and General Motors to the social contract? And then after that we added the rest of the Fortune 500. Still think how and how much of your money is taken from you is independent to what it's spent on?

>> ^ChaosEngine:

You're not "pointing out a major flaw", you just want to throw your toys out of the pram without contributing at all. I think you missed the "without representation" part of "no taxation without representation".


Au contraire, mon frere. Income tax wasn't levied on the colonists. That's what we're talking about. Not all taxation is created equal. Some are more voluntary than others. And again here you are with the notion that cutting income tax means no contribution. It's a third of the federal revenue. Cut that and we'd still have a healthy defense budget and zero entitlement programs cut. Where's the problem?

@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 ...

I think the main liberal commentary is that the Tea Party thinks the Boston Tea Party was some sort of conservative anti-government protest against taxes levied on tea.

What it was actually a protest against was the 18th century equivalent of tax breaks for oil companies.

Now, if the modern day teabaggers wanted to earn the kind of rich ideological history they pretend they have, they'd actually be applauding centrist proposals from Obama that would close those kinds of loopholes to raise revenue and help reduce the deficit.

Instead they just mostly go around saying racist shit about Obama and talking about armed insurrection against their own government.

There is an actual historical predecessor for the teabaggers, but it's not the Tea Party -- it's the Confederacy.

Or just steal it?>> ^Krupo:

LOL, I read about this. If they deliberately KEPT playing the ad in the UK I might be tempted to go buy their product.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'chris brown, apology, andy levy, sarcasm' to 'chris brown, apology, andy levy, sarcasm, red eye, fox news' - edited by xxovercastxx

>> ^EMPIRE:

WTF??? I think it's the first time I actually watched something funny and enjoyable from Fox News.


I was just thinking that same thought. Awesome!!

Your video, TV's Andy Levy Apologizes To Chris Brown And His Fans, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'chris brown, apology, andy levy' to 'chris brown, apology, andy levy, sarcasm' - edited by doogle

>> ^kronosposeidon:

One of my favorite Biblical passages, Exodus 32:26-28:

32:26 Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD's side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.
32:27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.
32:28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

In reply to this comment by Stingray:
*dead


thanks, fixed

>> ^ponceleon:

Damn I just had an idea: I've been waiting to create my channel... what about zombie? Or perhaps undead?


"Just do it."

Yay for Chuck. NBC show should show this PSA. Oh and add hot Yvonne Strahovski/Sarah Walker.