@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 ...

>> ^enoch:

this all began under bush and one of my biggest hopes was that Obama would recind that abomination of extended presidential powers.
that whole "hope for change" deal.
instead the Obama admin has not only continued the bush doctrine but expanded it!

jesus wept.


It's the end of the two party system. We have one party now.

>> ^longde:

I thought our engagement was supporting our NATO allies with fuel and such, and sending in unmanned drones to do reconnisance and bombing. Does that rise to the level of a war? We must be at war with half the planet, then.


Yes, we must be...

I don't know what the man's race has to do with the policy; but as long as his opposition keeps tendering characters that are many times more trigger-happy, unstable, and mendacious, he and any other rational, cool-headed person of color will have a decent shot at the job.

>> ^ForgedReality:
First and last black president ever.

Okay, this is a pure example of racism.

http://videosift.com/video/Crime-Fighting-Mom-Chases-After-Beer-Thieves

Big discussion there about the subtle racism in our society. @chilaxe and @longde, here it is.

Whether Forgedreality means it or not -- the message is clear -- if one black person screws up, all black people must bear the burden of that one person's actions.

This. Is. Fucked. Up.


>> ^ForgedReality:

First and last black president ever.

Too bad they're all crazy. RON PAUL FTW.>> ^bobknight33:

Yet another reason to go back to a strict limited government such as the Tea party is promoting.

>> ^Morganth:

This was supposed to be a fund-raiser. Then someone jumps him with an unexpected question and everyone whips out their camera phones to put this on the internet. If you think Obama is being short and blunt, it's because he is and it's intentional. His every word will be scrutinized by CNN, FOX, MSNBC and plenty of foreign news agencies.
Imagine being invited to a party and while you're there someone pulls out a camera to ask you your position on controversial issue x. You have no prep time and what you say can't be taken back because it's going to be available for the world to see within minutes.
As for Manning, he's not being held indefinitely and he's not in some secret holding cell. He's in Kansas. And his pre-trail hearing is in May. For those of you who think he's some sort of reincarnated Rosa Parks, here are his own words, "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" or how about, "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history...i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?"
He did it simply because he was bored, he could, and he hated his crappy job with the Army sitting in front of a computer all day in the middle of a freaking desert. He ended up getting caught because he bragged about it wanting hacker fame.
Assange hasn't broken any US law. Manning's lucky that the prosecution isn't seeking the death penalty, which 'Aiding the Enemy' (one of the 23 charges against him) carries.


Well...he was a constitutional law professor. You'd think he'd know a little something about the presumption of innocence.

He is the president its a pritty simple question you dont need prep time thats the whole issue with polatics is that polatitoins can just say smarmy bullshit and get away with it. noone has a clue as to what or who abama is or what he realy wants to do .

>> ^Morganth:

This was supposed to be a fund-raiser. Then someone jumps him with an unexpected question and everyone whips out their camera phones to put this on the internet. If you think Obama is being short and blunt, it's because he is and it's intentional. His every word will be scrutinized by CNN, FOX, MSNBC and plenty of foreign news agencies.
Imagine being invited to a party and while you're there someone pulls out a camera to ask you your position on controversial issue x. You have no prep time and what you say can't be taken back because it's going to be available for the world to see within minutes.
As for Manning, he's not being held indefinitely and he's not in some secret holding cell. He's in Kansas. And his pre-trail hearing is in May. For those of you who think he's some sort of reincarnated Rosa Parks, here are his own words, "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" or how about, "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history...i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?"
He did it simply because he was bored, he could, and he hated his crappy job with the Army sitting in front of a computer all day in the middle of a freaking desert. He ended up getting caught because he bragged about it wanting hacker fame.
Assange hasn't broken any US law. Manning's lucky that the prosecution isn't seeking the death penalty, which 'Aiding the Enemy' (one of the 23 charges against him) carries.

This was supposed to be a fund-raiser. Then someone jumps him with an unexpected question and everyone whips out their camera phones to put this on the internet. If you think Obama is being short and blunt, it's because he is and it's intentional. His every word will be scrutinized by CNN, FOX, MSNBC and plenty of foreign news agencies.

Imagine being invited to a party and while you're there someone pulls out a camera to ask you your position on controversial issue x. You have no prep time and what you say can't be taken back because it's going to be available for the world to see within minutes.

As for Manning, he's not being held indefinitely and he's not in some secret holding cell. He's in Kansas. And his pre-trail hearing is in May. For those of you who think he's some sort of reincarnated Rosa Parks, here are his own words, "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" or how about, "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history...i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?"

He did it simply because he was bored, he could, and he hated his crappy job with the Army sitting in front of a computer all day in the middle of a freaking desert. He ended up getting caught because he bragged about it wanting hacker fame.

Assange hasn't broken any US law. Manning's lucky that the prosecution isn't seeking the death penalty, which 'Aiding the Enemy' (one of the 23 charges against him) carries.

Next up - A BOOM in new case sales - unprecedented highs!

>> ^spoco2:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/budzos" title="member since October 30th, 2006" class="profilelink">budzos Why do you say that? Is it not amazing to have a self contained machine being able to listen to, understand, and correctly answer natural language questions better than humans?
Is it not difficult to see that this is a pretty amazing step along the way to creating machines that can converse with us with spoken word like robots in Science Fiction Films?
How is that not exciting?


I agree with the sentiment of the answer! AI has been my sci-fi hope for as long as I can remember. Probably why I thought "The moon is the harsh mistress" is the best book ever. When I was back in college, one of the papers I wrote was on the current state of AI, and the likelihood of the AI we see in TV and movies coming to fruition. It is amazing, and frustratingly slow field of discovery. It has taken 30 years just to begin to start to code machines to interpret language. In pursuit of this, we have come to a better understanding of how complex human speech is, and how powerful the brain is in understanding this very complex arena.

With that said, Watson doesn't "understand" or answer questions better than humans. There are many clips of the respondents just failing to beat Watson to the buzzer, most likely possessing the correct answer. Watson is the same level of impressive as the normal champs, but with mechanical reflexes. Give the humans robotic arms, and I am sure it would be a level playing field. Or, give Watson the questions one word like the humans have to do. He gets his input all in one text file and starts parsing for information before the humans have had the entirety of the question read to them (though, Watson's speed might be as such that this is trivial).

Also, as of yet, computers don't have "understanding". They can answer questions in a way that seems to make them intelligible, but they don't understand. Understanding comes from consciousness. It is still only understands the wold in terms of syntax. It is able to apply this language of syntax to properly answer trivia, but has no understanding of what the question even means. It doesn't have any experiences which are necessary for understanding. It is like if you train a parrot to respond with the correct answers to trivia questions, it doesn't actually know what it is saying.

Watson is the better parts of a parrot, and a repository of human facts. Philosophically, I am convinced that true "AI" is impossible...but I hope I am wrong! None the less, this is still super exciting, and unprecedented...how can you compare it to Sanjaya!

In reply to this comment by Yogi:
I think bcglorf you should look at Noam Chomsky's extensive writing on this subject. He was after all a youth Zionist leader back when it wasn't in style.

No, I think you might want to be more critical of the film. It can't even agree on the basic facts it wants, and contradicts itself within the first 6 minutes.

At the introduction the narrator tells us:
For 1300 years, since the very beginning of Islam, Jews and Muslims lived together in an unprecedented religious and cultural harmony.

Minutes later, at the 6:03 mark the very same narrator has a very different statement:
At the end of the 19th century, there were hardly any Jews living in Palestine.

Seemingly, the unprecedented harmony was made possible by having hardly any Jews to live in harmony with.

"Guess Who?"

by

Thomas Sowell

Guess who said the following: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work." Was it Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Karl Rove?

Not even close. It was Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of FDR's closest advisers. He added, "after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . And an enormous debt to boot!"

This is just one of the remarkable and eye-opening facts in a must-read book titled "New Deal or Raw Deal?" by Professor Burton W. Folsom, Jr., of Hillsdale College.

Ordinarily, what happened in the 1930s might be something to be left for historians to be concerned about. But the very same kinds of policies that were tried-- and failed-- during the 1930s are being carried out in Washington today, with the advocates of such policies often invoking FDR's New Deal as a model.

Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed the country's woes on the problems he inherited from his predecessor, much as Barack Obama does today. But unemployment was 20 percent in the spring of 1939, six long years after Herbert Hoover had left the White House.

Whole generations have been "educated" to believe that the Roosevelt administration is what got this country out of the Great Depression. History text books by famous scholars like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia have enshrined FDR as a historic savior of this country, and lesser lights in the media and elsewhere have perpetuated the legend.

Although Professor Schlesinger admitted that he had little interest in economics, that did not stop him from making sweeping statements about what a great economic achievement the New Deal was.

Professors Commager and Morris of Columbia likewise declared: "The character of the Republican ascendancy of the twenties had been pervasively negative; the character of the New Deal was overwhelmingly positive." Anyone unfamiliar with the history of that era might never suspect from such statements that the 1920s were a decade of unprecedented prosperity and the 1930s were a decade of the deepest and longest-lasting depression in American history. But facts have taken a back seat to rhetoric.

In more recent years, there have been both academic studies and popular books debunking some of the myths about the New Deal. Nevertheless, Professor Folsom's book "New Deal or Raw Deal?" breaks new ground. Although written by an academic scholar and based on years of documented research, it is as readable as a newspaper-- and a lot more informative than most.

There are few historic events whose legends are more grossly different from the reality than the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And there are few men whose image has been more radically different from the man himself.

Some of the most devastating things that were said about FDR were not said by his political enemies but by people who worked closely with him for years-- Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau being just one. Morgenthau saw not only the utter failure of Roosevelt's policies, but also the failure of Roosevelt himself, who didn't even know enough economics to realize how little he knew.

Far from pulling the country out of the Great Depression by following Keynesian policies, FDR created policies that prolonged the depression until it was more than twice as long as any other depression in American history. Moreover, Roosevelt's ad hoc improvisations followed nothing as coherent as Keynesian economics. To the extent that FDR followed the ideas of any economist, it was an obscure economist at the University of Wisconsin, who was disdained by other economists and who was regarded with contempt by John Maynard Keynes.

President Roosevelt's strong suit was politics, not economics. He played the political game both cleverly and ruthlessly, including using both the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to harass and intimidate his critics and opponents.

It is not a pretty story. But we need to understand it if we want to avoid the ugly consequences of very similar policies today.

If there was really this 65% land-slide of conservative opinion, why didn't you take back the senate too?

Simple math. The Senate has a total of 100 seats. Before the 2010 mid-term, the Democrats held 57 of those seats, and the Republicans only held 41 (with 2 Independants). In order for the GOP to "take the Senate" they would need to obtain 10 senate seats to have a simple majority. That kind of swing is almost unprecedented in the Senate. It just was really unlikely. The house has had volatile swings in the past, but the Senate is generally pretty stable. Considering the GOP had to win in liberal bastions like Delaware, New York, Barbara Boxer's seat, and so on I'd say they did pretty good. And it has to be said the GOP shot itself in the foot when it refused to back tea party types like Angle or O'Donnel. They were long shots sure, but refusing to help them at all when they are the only game on the ground isn't smart either. In the end, Democrats lost their veto-proof majority in the senate, complete control of the House, huge numbers of state governorships and massive numbers in state legislatures across the country. To quote Obama - they got shellaqued.

BS to claim everyones mad at Obama particularly when they stay home in droves showing their disdain for the entire system.

The turnout was quite high. The people who stayed home were Democrats, and largely because they have had to admit that their policies are utterly failing and that their golden boy is to blame.

And the best part of the election is that Mr. Doofus hiself - Alan "Insane" Greyson - lost in a landslide. So long, Mr. Doofus. You will not be missed and America is better for losing you.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

I think it's more of a philosophical issue than one of semantics, though there's definitely a semantic component.
...
There are probably many logical conclusions that you could take my premise to, but I do not take it to the particular one you insist is required.

That's why I'm saying the issue I'm raising is largely a semantic quibble. I don't think you mean what you're saying. I think you mean to say something close to, but not exactly what you said.

I think you meant to say this:

A totalitarian system has to break the will of every person trapped inside it before freedom can truly be eradicated. Even then, it seems that eventually it springs up anew in people, sometimes it just takes a little longer than others.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
To say one has freedom of speech doesn't mean there are no repercussions for speaking freely. If I go downtown and start screaming racial obscenities, I'm probably going to get my ass kicked (and rightfully so). That doesn't change the fact that I can do that if I want to.

True, but the threat of those repercussions constrain you from acting as you would like to. To draw on the Babylon 5 clip above, they told him to submit, or die. He was already locked in a cell. He'd already been tortured. He'd been beaten. Starved. Deprived of sleep. Poisoned. They even threatened his father's life. The lives of everyone he'd ever loved. In the end, they threatened his own life. They even staged a mock execution, and only at the last second...they just started over at the beginning, as if nothing had happened.

Had he submitted, would you consider his freedom stolen, or surrendered willingly?

>> ^xxovercastxx:
Understand that, in this context, I'm talking about freedom as in our 'self-evident', 'inalienable rights'. Clearly, being imprisoned takes away your physical freedom, but I draw a distinction between that and what I'm talking about. I realize many (most?) people do not.

Yeah, but are they really self-evident? Are they really inalienable? Those were beautiful words, and they were a massively revolutionary sentiment at the time, but it wasn't really a statement of fact about how the universe works. It was a declaration of how things should be, not how they are.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
Or maybe they do. How many people here on VideoSplif are waiting for pot to be legalized so they can have a joint? And how many people light up whenever they feel like it? Do you believe the government has given us the right to smoke pot, or is it a right we've taken?

Since pot is still illegal, it's clearly not a right government has given us. It's also clearly not a right -- I can't demand that I can smoke pot, anywhere, anytime, regardless of how anyone else feels about it. I also can't expect pot to be provided to me, whether I can pay for it or not.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
I disagree that liberals are "pro-freedom" and conservatives are "anti-freedom"; they simply have different definitions of freedom or, at least, different priorities.

I agree with that, and I was phrasing things the way I was more to illustrate those different ideas about freedom than because I'm enslaved by some black and white view of the world.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
What freedoms do you believe have been given to us by government?


For one, property rights only exist as function of government. Otherwise, "property" would just be whatever you could stop other people from taking away from you.

Most "rights" follow a similar pattern, e.g. right of habeas corpus, right to vote, right to a redress of grievances, etc.

As for "freedoms", you are free to change jobs (or quit entirely) because of government. You are free to demand, and expect pay for your labor. You are free to walk around unarmed thanks to the expectation of law enforcement. No one is allowed to force you to do anything, and if they try, the government is expected to stop them.

Government makes it so there is a threat of violence hanging over the head of those who refuse to respect individual freedom, and that's counterbalanced by a strong societal value that if the government stops respect individual freedom, that we have a duty to remove that government.

As I see it, there seem to be powerful people who are hell bent on eroding the laws and traditions that make up that equilibrium. (And yes, I think they largely wield "conservatives" as a blunt instrument to that end, using them like an auto-immune disease to kill government, so they can go back to the good old days of monarchy)

People on the right seem to act like rights and freedom are something they have that can't be taken away. I think that's insane. Without government, your "freedom" will be taken from you before you can say "caveat emptor." Freedom can and has been stolen, all throughout history. If anything we live in an unprecedented golden age of man where freedom is for most intents and purposes is in the hands of the individual, largely because we turned our governments into democratic collective entities charged with creating a society where individuals can expect to be free.