I have questioned my belief in Capitalism. I've often said if there's a better system, I'd be for it. I'm not convinced Socialism or any variation thereof is a better system. One of my good friends, a Marxist, has petitioned to me about the greatness of such a society. But, for that system to work you cannot question it, because once you do the proverbial house of cards comes crashing down around him. It's not that he doesn't explain it well. No, the contrary he's one of the smartest men I know. Has a Masters in Business Administration from Cambridge and hates Capitalism, as well.

But, one thin we agree on is that when people bandy about the term Capitalism, they really mean Corporatism. This isn't me creating an idealistic view of Capitalism by removing it from the association of Corporatism and large Industrialists. My largest fears rest in them.

It comes down to who owns the means of production. You believe it should belong to the workers, while I believe it should belong to whoever puts up the capital and takes the risk. I want to know how that is to happen without violence? How can we make a peaceful transition to Socialism? Beyond that, I don't find it moral to steal, and by remove power from individuals who "own" a company and give it to many, it is stealing. It would be like us revolting on VideoSift and taking the ownership of the site away from dag. It wouldn't be moral.

You asked, "When was the last time Ron Paul made an effort to curb corporate power?" He always votes against Corporatist interests. He strongly opposed the bailouts. He doesn't agree with government giving in to Corporatists and excluding smaller businesses, and so far his plane hasn't crashed in the sea. The health industry is a complete morass thanks to government "restrictions" which excludes smaller businesses from competing and practically handed that entire industry over to the Corporations. You think if some public option was passed the Corporations wouldn't be the ones to benefit? Government is the problem; not the solution.

You said, "You use the term 'government' as a pejorative, and consider democracy tyranny." And, yes, I do believe Democracy, when direct, is tyrannical. If 51% of the Christian population wanted to put prayer back in school, do you think it would be fair for your children if they had to pray in school because of it? Or if 51% of white people decided the minority races should be made into slaves? Direct Democracy is dangerous. How can it not be? Please explain to me how Democracy isn't 51% of the population taking the rights away from 49%?

And, I'm absolutely cynical of my government. Why shouldn't I be? We know they lie to us (Waco, Gulf of Tonkin, Weapons of Mass Destruction, etc. etc. etc.), so why would I want them to have even more control over my life and my labor when they've proven to be beyond the capacity of trust? You Democrats are just like the Republicans. When your guy is in office, it's unpatriotic to go against government. But, when the other guy is in office, it's patriotic. You and NetRunner and KnivesOut and the other Social Dems on here didn't have a single problem with me when I was speaking against the Bush Administration, but let me say one cross word against Obama and I'm a heretic.

I ask for you to explain how Socialism would work. Give me an example how we could possibly make that transition.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday

This show is great! Thanks for the introduction.

The chemistry between Jimmy Carr and David Mitchell interests me greatly. They're quite similar -- they're both extremely smart and funny and cynical. My two favorite comedians of their generation. They're only two years apart and both went to Cambridge. I would imagine them being almost too similar to get along with each other.

I want to let the independent commission do it's job. If it is truly independent, and they actually base their decision on the facts and not race politics, the truth will bubble to the surface. From the evidence I have seen (not hearsay or opinion), the actions the police took were justified and according to protocol.

The previous weeks in Cambridge involved multiple home invasions in that area. During the day. Front door busted in. The police were on high alert, and reacted accordingly to a 911 emergency call to investigate a potential invasion/burglary in progress.

Mr Gates should take care not bite the hands that protect him, his home, and his community. Should he really need their help in the future, he wouldn't want them to be hesitant or second guess their actions in a dire situation where mere moments could mean life or death.

Police have reasonable doubt when approaching any emergency situation. Cooperate, be cordial, answer any questions asked clearly and accurately, and their defensive posture to protect THEMSELVES will diminish. Verbally assault them and refuse to immediately fork over identification or cooperate in a cordial manner. You are going to jail. Who cares how rich or famous you are.

I'm sorry to say, but all evidence points to a race/class card being played. This is going to hurt Prof Gate's credibility here on out for certain. Time will tell where this leads, though it won't be the first time where someone slipped through the law's fingers as a result of the race/celebrity card being played...or have we forgotten OJ already? At least bad karma caught up with that guy. Sure this isn't murder, but it once again proves that money, name, and 'friends' in high places makes one immune to the laws that the rest of us are required to abide by.

FYI I am a local resident, know the area well, and understand the crime situation. Bank Robberies, burglaries and other crimes are on the rise with the bad economy. A lot of people are hurting, and some people are desperate and take measures they should not.

Gates is well advised to be quiet, let the commission investigate, and stay out of the lime light. Let the system work. Though he likely wants some press attention to get his books some direly needed plugs.

Sounds like you're involved in some pretty interesting circles!

In reply to this comment by honkeytonk73:
Yes, a really nice guy. His talk was quite 'out there' by most standards, but a man of his stature most definitely has the right to go out on a limb with ideas that challenge the establishment and help foster alternative ways of thinking. If you check the twitter for 'exoplanetology.org', they have a pretty good running commentary on what was discussed Friday/Saturday during the crossroads conference at Harvard.

I also met Prof David Charbonneau, one of the leading astronomers in the search for exoplanets. Really nice guy as well. I got some pointers on how I could contribute to the search. Being an amateur astronomer/astrophotographer, I wanted to try to get more involved and help provide observations/data. Of course I suspect I have a bit of a learning curve to climb, but that is half the fun.

They have a month of science in Cambridge/Harvard every year. With events, talks and the like. I suspect they'll try to put together another such event next year. Search for the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics. A person by the name of Christine Pulliam has a mailing list for sponsored events.. from talks by scientists, to SciFi B-Movie night. Quite funny. Sometimes these talks are webcast, so for certain events you don't have to be local!

Yes, a really nice guy. His talk was quite 'out there' by most standards, but a man of his stature most definitely has the right to go out on a limb with ideas that challenge the establishment and help foster alternative ways of thinking. If you check the twitter for 'exoplanetology.org', they have a pretty good running commentary on what was discussed Friday/Saturday during the crossroads conference at Harvard.

I also met Prof David Charbonneau, one of the leading astronomers in the search for exoplanets. Really nice guy as well. I got some pointers on how I could contribute to the search. Being an amateur astronomer/astrophotographer, I wanted to try to get more involved and help provide observations/data. Of course I suspect I have a bit of a learning curve to climb, but that is half the fun.

They have a month of science in Cambridge/Harvard every year. With events, talks and the like. I suspect they'll try to put together another such event next year. Search for the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics. A person by the name of Christine Pulliam has a mailing list for sponsored events.. from talks by scientists, to SciFi B-Movie night. Quite funny. Sometimes these talks are webcast, so for certain events you don't have to be local!


In reply to this comment by budzos:
Really? You met Freeman Dyson? That's fucking awesome! He's one of my heroes!

In reply to this comment by honkeytonk73:
VERY nice clip. Surprised to see Professor Freeman Dyson there. I just met the man just a days ago. We were both heading to the same place, and accompanied him to a talk near Harvard College. He was among a few other amazing speakers. They discussed the future of mankind, the search for exoplanets, detecting live elsewhere and the like.

So where's this i9/11 I've been eagerly waiting for? I called BS and I stand by that call. Don't care where he graduated from, he was off his meds making a claim like that based on a single flimsy source.

>> ^nomino:
>> Ha ha. You're funny. You should go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself. Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School. Lessig earned a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Management (Wharton School) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Trinity) in England, and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.
Prior to joining Stanford he taught at the Harvard Law School, where he was the Berkman Professor of Law, affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the University of Chicago Law School.
I think this guy knows one or two things about litigation. And I for one will take his word over yours any day, EVEN if you are named after a freedom fighting toy.

Agreed on it needs to be legalized at least off of schedule 1 so we can regulate rather than pretend we can make it go away like we do now. Can't even do many types of research now since we can't "distribute" so can't do controlled studies.

On your second point, Snap right back at ya In "MEMORY, ATTENTION, AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION" as you put it there's a small catch involved. Similar to the way the risk of psychotic disorders is badly overstated (almost nothing to a hair over almost nothing) this is overstated and badly as well. The effects are mostly WHILE intoxicated, for casual use that doesn't extend much if at all past that. You wouldn't know that from the scare stories though. I'll offer you some sources for further research if you'd care to follow up on it and a decent source for a bunch more.

"The results of our meta-analytic study failed to reveal a substantial, systematic effect of long-term, regular cannabis consumption on the neurocognitive functioning of users who were not acutely intoxicated. For six of the eight neurocognitive ability areas that were surveyed. the confidence intervals for the average effect sizes across studies overlapped zero in each instance, indicating that the effect size could not be distinguished from zero. The two exceptions were in the domains of learning and forgetting."

Source: Grant, Igor, et al., "Non-Acute (Residual) Neurocognitive Effects Of Cannabis Use: A Meta-Analytic Study," Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (Cambridge University Press: July 2003), 9, p. 686.

"In conclusion, our meta-analysis of studies that have attempted to address the question of longer term neurocognitive disturbance in moderate and heavy cannabis users has failed to demonstrate a substantial, systematic, and detrimental effect of cannabis use on neuropsychological performance. It was surprising to find such few and small effects given that most of the potential biases inherent in our analyses actually increased the likelihood of finding a cannabis effect."

Source: Grant, Igor, et al., "Non-Acute (Residual) Neurocognitive Effects Of Cannabis Use: A Meta-Analytic Study," Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (Cambridge University Press: July 2003), 9, p. 687.

"Nevertheless, when considering all 15 studies (i.e., those that met both strict and more relaxed criteria) we only noted that regular cannabis users performed worse on memory tests, but that the magnitude of the effect was very small. The small magnitude of effect sizes from observations of chronic users of cannabis suggests that cannabis compounds, if found to have therapeutic value, should have a good margin of safety from a neurocognitive standpoint under the more limited conditions of exposure that would likely obtain in a medical setting."

Source: Grant, Igor, et al., "Non-Acute (Residual) Neurocognitive Effects Of Cannabis Use: A Meta-Analytic Study," Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (Cambridge University Press: July 2003), 9, pp. 687-8.

A Johns Hopkins study published in May 1999, examined marijuana's effects on cognition on 1,318 participants over a 15 year period. Researchers reported "no significant differences in cognitive decline between heavy users, light users, and nonusers of cannabis." They also found "no male-female differences in cognitive decline in relation to cannabis use." "These results ... seem to provide strong evidence of the absence of a long-term residual effect of cannabis use on cognition," they concluded.

Source: Constantine G. Lyketsos, Elizabeth Garrett, Kung-Yee Liang, and James C. Anthony. (1999). "Cannabis Use and Cognitive Decline in Persons under 65 Years of Age," American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 149, No. 9.

"Current marijuana use had a negative effect on global IQ score only in subjects who smoked 5 or more joints per week. A negative effect was not observed among subjects who had previously been heavy users but were no longer using the substance. We conclude that marijuana does not have a long-term negative impact on global intelligence. Whether the absence of a residual marijuana effect would also be evident in more specific cognitive domains such as memory and attention remains to be ascertained."

Source: Fried, Peter, Barbara Watkinson, Deborah James, and Robert Gray, "Current and former marijuana use: preliminary findings of a longitudinal study of effects on IQ in young adults," Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 2, 2002, 166(7), p. 887.

# "Although the heavy current users experienced a decrease in IQ score, their scores were still above average at the young adult assessment (mean 105.1). If we had not assessed preteen IQ, these subjects would have appeared to be functioning normally. Only with knowledge of the change in IQ score does the negative impact of current heavy use become apparent."

Source: Fried, Peter, Barbara Watkinson, Deborah James, and Robert Gray, "Current and former marijuana use: preliminary findings of a longitudinal study of effects on IQ in young adults," Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 2, 2002, 166(7), p. 890.

Source for those and more, lots of sourced detail which includes perspective rather than tossing bold claims out without that perspective, can be found at the following. Yes, it includes both the good and the bad and the root site for that page covers medical marijuana and other drugs as well.http://www.drugwarfacts.org/marijuan.htm

The problem in part is that people use pot (and other drugs) sometimes to hide from life or to make themselves feel better about their failures and we try to assume the pot caused the problem rather than the problem caused them to find a way to make themselves feel better, in this case with pot. Association doesn't automatically mean cause and effect. It's not brain food, but it's not all that dangerous in casual use either. Even with heavy use function tends to drift back to the baseline with time, you just have to quit abusing. Better to look for the reasons for abuse than to blame the substance which isn't all that dangerous or toxic in itself.

>> ^SDGundamX:
Such utter BS. I can't believe people are actually uneducated enough to listen to a guy like this--who presents absolutely no evidence to back up his claims. The Patriot Act was sitting around in someone's drawer for 20 years? Really? I guess the people who drafted it were psychic then since they knew about the Internet and email in advance and decided a priori that the government would one day need to do more to control it. And a large part of the Patriot Act targets immigrants. Why on earth would the government target immigrants 20 years ago back when it was a non-issue and then sit on it until now?
This guy is about as credible as most people who claim to have seen Bigfoot. The vid deserves to be on the Sift only for laugh value at the gullibility of the conspiracy theorists who eat this stuff up.


Ha ha. You're funny. You should go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself. Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School. Lessig earned a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Management (Wharton School) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Trinity) in England, and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.

Prior to joining Stanford he taught at the Harvard Law School, where he was the Berkman Professor of Law, affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the University of Chicago Law School.

I think this guy knows one or two things about litigation. And I for one will take his word over yours any day, EVEN if you are named after a freedom fighting toy.

Short answer - Canadian universities are WAY younger than those in the States, so we adopted the 'classic' European terminology. I mean, U of T was founded in 1827 (yeah, guess where I graduated from), and there may be some older universities in Canada (I don't know which), but probably not as old as, say, Harvard.

>> ^Sarzy:
I've got a question which is semi-related to the topic at hand: what's the deal with the terms college and university being seemingly interchangeable in the states? In Canada, college and university are two different things (college is generally a one or two year program in which you learn a trade, whereas university is a three or four year deal in which you learn something a bit more abstract (ie. political science, english, physics, etc.). Is this not the case in the U.S.?


Yeah, American terminology like that bothers me - where's the UNIVERSITY GRAD option???

Anyway, enough people were annoyed by this like us to make a small essay on the topic - the Canadian system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#Canada

And here's the bit about Amerika
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College#The_origin_of_the_U.S._usage

The founders of the first institutions of higher education in the United States were graduates of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. The small institutions they founded would not have seemed to them like universities — they were tiny and did not offer the higher degrees in medicine and theology. Furthermore, they were not composed of several small colleges. Instead, the new institutions felt like the Oxford and Cambridge colleges they were used to — small communities, housing and feeding their students, with instruction from residential tutors (as in the United Kingdom, described above). When the first students came to be graduated, these "colleges" assumed the right to confer degrees upon them, usually with authority -- for example, the College of William and Mary has a Royal Charter from the British monarchy allowing it to confer degrees while Dartmouth College has a charter permitting it to award degrees "as are usually granted in either of the universities, or any other college in our realm of Great Britain."

Contrast this with Europe, where only universities could grant degrees. The leaders of Harvard College (which granted America's first degrees in 1642) might have thought of their college as the first of many residential colleges which would grow up into a New Cambridge university. However, over time, few new colleges were founded there, and Harvard grew and added higher faculties. Eventually, it changed its title to university, but the term "college" had stuck and "colleges" have arisen across the United States.

Eventually, several prominent colleges/universities were started to train Christian ministers. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown all started to train preachers in the subjects of Bible and theology. However, now these universities teach theology as a more academic than ministerial discipline.

With the rise of Christian education, renowned seminaries and Bible colleges have continued the original purpose of these universities. Criswell College and Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas; Southern Seminary in Louisville; Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois; and Wheaton College and Graduate School in Wheaton, Illinois are just a few of the institutions that have influenced higher education in Theology in Philosophy to this day.

In U.S. usage, the word "college" embodies not only a particular type of school, but has historically been used to refer to the general concept of higher education when it is not necessary to specify a school, as in "going to college" or "college savings accounts" offered by banks. "University" is sometimes used in such contexts by Americans who wish to avoid ambiguity, for example in the context of Internet message boards where the reader hail from a different English speaking country.

^
Hitch is American.

Uh, WilloTheWisp, he has had United States citizenship for less then a year. Probably a dual citizenship. Born in England, schooled at Cambridge. Unless you mean he's 'American' as in 'I think he's great, and all things that are great are obviously Americun', American.

Excellent article. I had always assumed that the theory of how the edge of heliosphere would fluctuate based on the amount and types of cosmic rays it encounters emenating from the center of our Galaxy (similar in a way that the planets in our solar system are bombarded with solar energies yes our atmosphere and magnetic field protects us from many of them.)
The "atmosphere" of our solar system would act in a similar way, however there are still many unknowns that are yet to be discovered still. Voyager II is expected to pass through into interstellar space within 7 to 10 years and it supposedly has enough power to last until 2020.


"The Sun is moving upwards, out of the plane of the Milky Way, at a speed of 7 kilometers per second. Currently the Sun lies 50 light-years above the mid-plane of the galaxy, and its motion is steadily carrying it further away.

But the gravitational pull of the stars in the Galactic (Milky Way) plane is slowing down the Sun's escape. The astronomer Frank Bash estimates that in 14 million years the sun will reach its maximum height above the Galactic disk. From that 250 light-year position, it will be pulled back towards the plane of the Galaxy. Passing through, it will travel to a point 250 light-years below the disk, then oscillate upwards again to reach its present position 66 million years from now. We crossed the plane 2 million years ago. We are currently in the thick of the galactic disk and our view of distant regions is largely blocked by dust but 10-20 million years from now, our motion will allow a full view of our starry galaxy.

The Sun-Galactic center distance is 25,000 light-years -- plus or minus 2,000 light-years. The galaxy is thought to be 100,000 light-years in diameter and we are thought to be about halfway out from the center (used to be thought that we were two-thirds out).

If you have a good idea of the Sun's distance from the Galactic center, then the solar system's speed can be approximated. Using speed measurements of the gas at different distances from the Galactic center, the Sun appears to be cruising along at 200 kilometers per second and it takes 240 million years to complete the grand circuit around the Galaxy. This speed is an absolute speed."

Note:
1 light-year = 9.46*10^{15} meters
1 parsec = 3.08*10^{16} meters

^ From the book: _Guide to the Galaxy_, 1994; Henbest and Couper; Cambridge University Press.

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Hey MarineGunrock, stop looking up at shit and define "I rest my case". Oh wait here it is:

something that you say when someone says or does something that proves the truth of something you have just said

Your statements do not make any sense. You can not make this simple just by wishing it. You proved nothing, and no one else's statements proved your point for you.

I understand that you are angry that not everyone believes 100% what you think, but you have to persuade them. Yelling at them or using 3rd grade logic does not persuade people. Personally I'm in agreement that knowing one's rights, understanding the constitution and being aware of current events is very important. However the discussion, as far as I am concerned, is about the context in which the message was given not the message itself.

I must say that I am watching the complete lecture and I find it interesting even if he does strew a few fallacies here and there. I found it ghastly at first when I was under the false presumption that he was a history teacher. But now that I know he is a politician,... well I reserve final judgment until I've seen the entire thing.

In the fall of 2003, Jack L. Goldsmith was widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament. A 40-year-old law professor at the University of Chicago, Goldsmith had established himself, with his friend and fellow law professor John Yoo, as a leading proponent of the view that international standards of human rights should not apply in cases before U.S. courts. In recognition of their prominence, Goldsmith and Yoo had been anointed the “New Sovereigntists” by the journal Foreign Affairs. [ ... ]

Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants. [ ... ]

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions — both drafted by Goldsmith’s friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office — about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations. Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law — although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted,” he told me recently. [ ... ]

After leaving the Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith was uncertain about what, if anything, he should say publicly about his resignation. His silence came to be widely misinterpreted. After leaving the Justice Department, he accepted a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, where he currently teaches. During his first weeks in Cambridge, in the fall of 2004, some of his colleagues denounced him for what they mistakenly assumed was his role in drafting the torture memos. One colleague, Elizabeth Bartholet, complained to a Boston Globe reporter that the faculty was remiss in not investigating any role Goldsmith might have played in “justifying torture.” “It was a nightmare,” Goldsmith told me. “I didn’t say anything to defend myself, except that I didn’t do the things I was accused of.”

...

Read the full article at NYT Magazine.

I guess you're right, because octopus comes from the greek language..

from the cambridge dictionary:

octopus
noun [C] plural octopuses or octopi
a sea creature with a soft oval body and eight tentacles (= long arm-like parts)

from the oxford dictionary:

octopus

• noun (pl. octopuses) a mollusc with eight sucker-bearing arms, a soft body, beak-like jaws, and no internal shell.

— DERIVATIVES octopoid adjective.

— USAGE The standard plural in English of octopus is octopuses. However, since the word comes from Greek, the Greek plural form octopodes is still occasionally used. The plural form octopi, formed according to rules for Latin plurals, is incorrect.

— ORIGIN Greek, from okto ‘eight’ + pous ‘foot’.