probably a small segment of the viewing populace understood 'g.i. jane' reference. even smaller knowing the hair loss issue. being hollywood - the joke was mild by ricky jarvis' standards - and having come out w/her problem, was it any worst than...
- richard pryor addressing his first audience after he blazed himself, "y'all did some nasty ass jokes on my ass - oh yeah y'all didn't think i saw some of these mfers..." then did the lit match joke.
- paul reubens' "Heard any good jokes lately?"
- and the numerous running jokes about letterman's marriage/relationship after the extortion revelation
...they humbled themselves and rode it out.

but whada i know about it? wouldn't likely to be hired on as a variety reporter but thought jim carrey's take was the best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdofcQnr36A

The USA isn't the worst place to not conform to the standard state religion. ...But it sure as hell isn't the best either.

Growing up atheist (I started identifying myself that way around age 12-13 or so) in the bible belt (Kansas) in the 80's was tough. Not as tough as growing up gay at the same time/place, but I get the feeling that Millennials are miles beyond my generation (late Gen X) in terms of accepting sexuality. I don't think they have made as great strides in accepting atheists / religious differences, but progress has been made there also compared to my day.

About 10 years ago I moved to Thailand. I went from 85-90% Christian USA to 95% Buddhist Thailand. And yet even though I'm in an even smaller minority as an atheist here, it simply isn't an issue at all compared with back in the US. I don't think Christianity itself is to blame for that, because one can comfortably be an atheist in some other countries with rates of self-identifying Christians similar to the US. No, I think it is a cultural problem largely unique to the US. Which certainly contributes to my high level of comfort as an expat.

The stats were percentage of total population, not individuals. The Jewish (immigrant)population was growing exponentially faster than non-Jewish. The concern is because it was the Jewish ones that decided to permanently relocate in huge numbers (larger than all other demographics put together) across the continent to a single small country that could not stop them, and then take it by force, expelling the natives.
This "refugee from hostility" bullshit is just that as I see it. If, as you claim, the Arab population in Palestine was already hostile to Jews specifically (and I contend that if they were it was a function of massive illegal immigration, often by militants, that pushed them to it), then moving there would do absolutely nothing to alleviate the concern they might have for people that are hostile in Northern Europe. It's a complete red herring argument, ridiculous on it's face, and worse when examined closely.

"except for the holocaust part"....
Tell that to the families of the students murdered by police, or the tens of thousands of Guatemalans fleeing murder squads. State sponsored murder is state sponsored murder, it doesn't require total genocide (although the Jews don't have a monopoly on that either) and Mexicans and others have just as valid a claim that they are oppressed by it (not to the same extent as Jews under the Nazis, no, but as much or more than before the Nazis started their campaigns).

OK, let's play pretend...starting with pretending the rest of the world has an American constitution requiring equal treatment and denying discrimination based on race or religion....but I'll bite.
Almost all that happened in the 50's-60's....in case you weren't aware....without the Rwandan genocide part, or the backing by a foreign nation arming the black side. I think there were even attempts at succeeding by some groups back then....but they got no support, and were 'driven into the sea' in essence, mostly driven into prison, hiding, or a 6 ft box in reality.
Comparing the Arab league to NATO and the US is hardly realistic, unless the black nation in your "example" gets the military backing of Russia, China, Africa, South America, and parts of central America, and NATO only contains the US, Mexico, and Canada, and has no chance against new Africa and it's allies, which beats them mercilessly then expands north for decades. Also, you have to change the immigration from Rwanda, a tiny nation, to black "refugees" from the entire planet...and even then you don't have close to the same per capita immigration problem European Jewish immigrants posed to native Palestinians. All that said...I'm pretty sure some Northern leaders publicly declared they would drive the secessionists into the sea in the civil war, so it would be nothing new here. Also, it would be totally proper to do so in your hypothetical, IMO. Any invaders can be driven out by force by any nation...and that nation gets to decide who's an invader. Keep in mind that in your example, the black nation would expel all non blacks and seize their property....which is usually called theft.

I'll stick with my Mexican analogy, it's vastly more apt, IMO....it's as if you forgot that there are native Mexicans in the US that did have their property rights infringed on and were discriminated against (and still are)...and/or aren't aware that Rwanda is much smaller than the US or even smaller than many individual states, and/or ignored that the Arab League is much smaller and infinitely less capable than the UN or NATO, so not a decent comparison.....or aren't aware of.....well, that's enough, no need to harp.

When I get my 3D printer set up, I'm going to print me a tiny 3d printer, and then use that to print an even smaller version...

Don't forget the even smaller minority that simply want reason, fairness, "truth", and honesty, damn the 'cost'... many in this group aren't looking for power and they rarely get it. Perhaps this group is too small to define society.

You missed another perfect example, police that can't understand that individuals might not be criminal, because they only deal with those they assume are criminal in some way.

What about all the people that really, are not beautiful but we keep trying to tell them that they are? its like all the people that claim they are AVERAGE size.. UM.. no your not and the NEW average size its only because people eat to much so that does not make the new AVERAGE acceptable or attractive it just means that the selection pool just became even smaller.

Can you imagine the nerd rage if you needed a top of the line PC to run Sim City? Or if the cities were even smaller? The servers run some of the simulation so that the game could run on most machines. This is why Maxis is taking responsibility. Polygon.com had answers from Maxis very quickly where they explain all this stuff. Something about each user needing 80% more processing than during the Beta because of some problem with databases and the crazy load from selling way more copies than the pre-orders had indicated. Whatever code runs on the servers now I am sure they could eventually run locally but they probably weren't planning on doing that work for years. If something doesn't work you will be able to get a refund if you push hard enough. That is what I would have done if I had bought the game and it didn't work.

So. Are we all done pretending we just loooooove the new layout?

Is there any way to make the text even smaller and make the text color even more like the background? That way, I can REALLY struggle to read it. That would be kewl!

Great work! I'm still finding the changes a bit unsettling, but even good change is usually unsettling, isn't it?
My three criticisms are:
1) The 'top 15 unsifted but soon to expire' list on the side of all unsifted videos was a great way to bring attention to submissions that probably deserve it, before they disappear for ever into P-queue purgatory.
2) If someone went through the trouble of promoting a video in order to share it with the rest of us, it should have a reasonable tenure at the top of the front page. If promoted videos are taking up too much space, perhaps they can have even smaller thumbnails? Although, I think two rows of three videos would fit just fine with the current thumbnail size.
3) The lag I'm experiencing when typing and scrolling the page is maddening. Even typing this one comment has by body burning with frustration. That's not a feeling you want visitors associating with your site, because it will, consciously or subconsciously, train them to avoid VideoSift.

>> ^Deano:

Does anyone stop to think why the hell are we staring at flags like they're amazingly important and significant. I'm beginning to feel abnormal seeing the number of wide-eyed flag-waving Brits on the tv. They really buy into this nationalistic crap.


The reason to wave a flag is to support your "team" at the olympics, and perhaps for the home country to show the athletes how welcoming and encouraging we are towards their efforts. We're there, we're making noise, we're helping people get to events. Foreign friends are telling me "You're welcoming and friendly even if you don't know the answer." This is the most british i've seen britain in years and i'm loving it.

We're a small country and we're 3rd in the tables and top based on relative size. That's something to be pleased about and we've not had much to be pleased about recently. We also come from independant countries, and that makes us even smaller and more divided so when we wave a british flag, sometimes it's to show that we've come together and we're there to support each other.

I see people chatting to each other about the olympics in the street, and why's that a bad thing? Anything that brings us closer together has got to be good. I want people to take pride in this country because i want it to stop being a shit hole.

Light doesn't have one set speed. Each frequency of light travels at slightly different speeds. I've long had this theory, and NASA has since confirmed it. We have detected very slight differences in the time it takes different frequencies of light to travel a set distance.

As such, we cannot say light has "a" speed, but rather a range of speeds. Therefore, could it also then be possible that the speed of an individual photon can be adjusted by various means in order to either speed up or slow down?

The answer is yes. Scientists have managed to slow the "speed of light" all the way down to 38mph. How is this possible? Well, as light has mass (albeit, a very miniscule amount), it will slow when traveling through a material, such as water, glass, oil, or even air. Passing the light through a super-dense, ultra-cooled material magnifies this effect.

As we already know different frequencies of light travel at slightly different speeds, and as we also already know, we can only visibly perceive a very narrow range of frequencies (for example, we cannot see infra-red or ultra-violet, or x- or gamma-rays), isn't it then perceivable that there are frequencies of light outside of what we can see that do travel faster than "the speed of light"?

And if this is true, then what else could travel faster? Are there things we can't even hope to detect simply because they exist in our timeframe for an impossibly short amount of time?

Part of the reason light is able to travel as fast as it does is its incredibly small (by our standards anyway) mass. What if mass is infinite? What if you could shrink yourself down to the size of a photon, or better yet, small enough to live on that photon as if it were the Earth. From your new perspective, the photon would appear to be very large, and as you are now traveling with it, that photon does not seem to be going as fast. You may see things that are even smaller and appear to move even more quickly, but something like the Earth would be imperceptible to you because you are so miniscule. It would be as the Universe to you--impossibly large, and inconceivably tangible. While you would know it is there, it would stand before you as a gigantic, unknowable concept, and things even larger than that would exist merely as mists of an imaginary daydream.

Now, imagine that the electromagnetic spectrum is infinite in both directions as well. Consider the possibility that, along with light, x-rays, gamma radiation, radio waves, and all the other things we know to make up the electromagnetic spectrum, sound is also part of that spectrum. Consider that light, being high in frequency exists near the top of what we can perceive of the spectrum, and sound is near the bottom. The vibrations become so slow and so wide toward the bottom that they effect the air and other matter around us, creating sound. And while we cannot see it, we perceive it with other sensory organs. Imagine that you could slow down light to the point that you can hear it, or speed up sound to the point that you can see it.

Now take another hit before that feeling goes away.

You're such a troll, I'm impressed.

The brand of free market he espouses disappeared way before the Fed was even established. Please keep your inner socialist in check and stop slandering free markets blaming it for every kind of problem that arises from the lack of it.

It's like we live in a dictatorship for almost a century and liberals propose a different dictatorship while blaming freedom for all our problems.

Politicians who think like you, who can't understand something as simple as the insurance business model, make a sport out of subverting it, forcing companies to provide whatever crap you think they should, with no regard to the resulting oppression, cost increases, and undesired economic consequences of their actions, like the very ones Schiff points out in this video!

You can express your hatred towards Schiff all you want, my objection is that your just dropped your ad hominem and ran away. How about at least considering his points on the stupidity of the free birth control policy?

I think Schiff's attack on the OWS was a silly stunt too, arguing with clueless socialists that the blame is not on the 1%, it's not on the people who were bailed out and currently have our money, it's on the people who took our money in the first place. The truth is that these same people also oppress most of the 1%, while benefitting an even smaller fraction of that 1% at the expense of everybody else.

Btw, I don't know how you managed to reply without me getting any e-mail notification, please don't trick your way into getting the last filthy word again, thank you.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^entr0py:
Sounds like godless liberal elitism to me. Slow down there Lenin H. Rockefeller
http://factcheck.org/2012/02/college-kills-faith/
That's disappointing. College should kill faith. Well, maybe not kill it, but certainly wound it. If you go to higher education for a few years and you aren't exposed to ideas that make you at least question your faith, you and/or your college have failed in your education.


I agree with you, but what you are saying is EXACTLY what doesn't happen. I know many people that hold doctorate level degrees yet they still think creationism is great; even THOUGH the science they (literally) use in MANY instances is BASED on evolution and it working as purposed by many scientists--over a very long amount of time; and the evidence is ONLY getting thicker and higher not falling apart and slimming it's waistline--it's madness. BUT, the key thing here is that all of these people have one thing in common, all of them... They all wanted to learn about THEIR field, but when it came to anything else outside of it--even fields that are directly linked to their fields--it didn't matter, because they are of a single-minded process.

They happen to not be as curious as you or I and of course many other people that even when they learned a lot about what interested them, they realized that there was NO FENCE and that the rabbit hole (as it is said) keeps going. I think many other people have successfully quarantined sections of their life of from other sections. Their mind functions like the CDC and it is why we start ending up with people with seemingly underlying psychological issues like Rick Santorum, as they treat their life like it is literally a world alone unto themselves.

They can hear and see all the information you say, but unless you have gotten their curiosity they will treat it as a contamination and try to find a way to dispose of the information--meanwhile, if they have psychological problems, their brain is actively helping them in their routine.

I've been confounded as well, for a longtime. Like I said if you pay attention the one thing you SHOULD learn from EVERY class you have taken is that the rabbit hole has yet to stop. So it seems like education would in fact drive a wedge between you and any faith as you learn more, the more you should realize how much we still have to learn. It should make your faith seem even smaller than you feel compared next to the Universe if you ask me... Some people must just be too fat and get stuck in their relative rabbit hole.

>> ^criticalthud:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^criticalthud:
just out of curiosity, in the midst of global warming doubters promoting the theory that the earth is warming through solar/cosmic/natural means... has there been much consideration into the idea that the earth is currently in a cooling phase -- enormously offset by what we're doing to it?
second,
one large concern i have with global warming is "system adaption" - that being that it generally takes the ecosystem a bit of time to adjust to whatever is happening to it (ie: glaciers don't melt immediately). Meaning that the damage we caused 10 years ago is being felt now. Meaning also that even if we were to cease mucking about right now, we could expect continued and possibly even escalating ecosystem problems in the years to come.
so, is it time to panic? dunno. could be.

Which is why it's so important to understand things better. Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.

you seem to mistake me as someone who is arguing with you. i'm really only interested in insights.
I'm certainly not a climatologist. I work with spines. But in answer to your proposition that it would be chaotic if we cut back, I think the strength of the human species is in their ability to adapt, and as far as i'm concerned, the ballooning world population combined with a worldwide contracture in resources makes this inevitable (not to mention the growing climate change issue) - but it's up to us on how painful we want it to be.
Our entire economic system and our culture of consumerism needs to be revised. We are mindless automatons, with little awareness to our impact on the earth as a species. Our daily lives are almost entirely self-centered.
Secondly, as to "the" question of human contribution, I would offer the microcosm of the forest fire, in which carbon is suddenly released into the atmosphere. The overall effect is, clearly, very warming, almost suffocating. On a grander scale, the species is continually burning and releasing carbon into the atmoshphere all over the planet. How that would fail to warm the planet escapes me. but, like i said, it's not my field. peace out.


Sorry if my tone comes off as combative, it's not really my intent so please don't take my vehemence on issues personally. Maybe I'm just getting older but I'm of the mindset that the fastest way to know where I'm right and wrong is to be forward and assertive with how I understand things and allow the opportunity to be corrected where I'm wrong.

My thoughts on the human contribution are tempered by a few things. From the very top, that CO2's contribution is small compared to H2O(I count this an uncontested fact). Annual CO2 emissions are small(5%) compared to natural CO2 emissions(I again count this an uncontested fact). The experts do insist that the human CO2 emissions are building up and still driving the natural CO2 levels significantly higher each year. We don't understand the natural CO2 emission and absorption processes very well, so poorly in fact our margins of error on them are larger than the human contribution. There is evidence that CO2 levels are rising in the last 100 years, and there is a correlation there to human emissions. What we don't have strong evidence for yet is what impact that has on climate. We DO know it is warming effect, but the magnitude of it is still poorly understood. As I've outlined above the understanding of temperature trends over the last 2k years is still a work in progress with large margins of error(even systematic ones that are being worked out). The computer models we have by definition are no more reliable than that data, which places us without a strong correlation or confidence in what magnitude of change the CO2 will have when all other variables are considered.

As a side point, if you look at the IPCC or listen to certain climatologists, you may hear it sounding like they disagree and believe my last statement is disproven. What they have studied is the impact CO2 increases should have overall with the assumption of all other variables being equal. It's a useful figure to have, and the confidence in it is better than my last statement described. That is because I was talking about something different, I stated that CO2's impact, with all other variables being considered NOT equal, is still poorly known and has very low confidence levels. In the real world the impact of one climate variable impacts the role of all the others, and often significantly. The IPCC and a select few climatologists talk about CO2 projections that ignore that interaction as a base assumption and somewhere along the line between them and the public or them and Al Gore, that base assumption gets dropped off. That base assumption is central and vital, and it's why as our climate models improve we will see predictions for CO2 that fall outside the error margins of the IPCC models with that assumption. That doesn't invalidate the IPCC's work, it is an advancement of it and improvement upon it. Remembering the base assumptions is vital for the public to maintain faith in the integrity and reliability of scientific research. People need to know WHY the predictions they were told by the IPCC a few years back have changed so much and yet the IPCC insists they weren't wrong. The truth is simply that they were misunderstood.

As yet another rabbit warren, there is an even smaller set of people within the climate community who actively encourage that misunderstanding. They do it firmly believing that the impact of CO2 with all else ignored is still indicative of CO2 with all else considered. Which is even a reasonable and normal expectation. The trouble is it falsely communicates the level confidence and margin of error of current known facts. I can't abide that kind of thinking, it's what is supposed to differentiate scientists from priests and politicians, they are supposed to refuse to make that kind of compromise when presenting what they do and do not know is demonstrably true.

I say that's a wonderful validation for agnosticism. I just explained this to you the other day. We cannot know anything for sure because we only have our flawed senses and limited mental capacity to rely on. That's agnosticism.

As a former agnostic, I am familar with what it is. Are you agnostic?

Big bang theory doesn't say the universe sprang forth from nothing, it says the universe rapidly expanded from the singularity. All the matter of today's universe existed, in some form, in the singularity. Any proposals about the state of the universe prior to the Planck epoch are pure speculation. The rest of your argument is all based on this false presupposition so I won't bother refuting it.

Mainstream big bang theory says time and space had a beginning. If you don't want to discuss this, it's up to you.

Humans were social creatures long before they invented/discovered Yahweh. We lived in tribes. Hunters cooperated to bring home meat for everyone while gatherers collected fruits/vegetables to also share. Children were raised by the tribe as a whole. The tribe had safety in numbers. Members who were found to be stealing or cheating would find others were no longer willing to cooperate with them, possibly they would face exile. Tell me, would you be more likely to survive, especially in the wild, if you worked in harmony with the others or if you had to do everything for yourself? Similar traits are common in many mammals and birds. Warm-blooded creatures are generally too high-maintenance to be entirely self-sufficient. We can't crank out hundreds of offspring every mating season and walk away. We need to cooperate to survive. None of those non-human mammals have heard God's Word, either, and they seem to be doing pretty well.

As far as the animals go, it is written in the bible that God takes care of them. Yes, cooperation is necessary to survive but this doesn't account for all moral behaviors. The behaviors you describe all help perpetuate your existence because you are doing them to gain an advantage socially. What about behaviors that have no advantage, which are actually determintal to your survival? Self-sacrifice, for instance..Someone who runs into a burning building to save a baby risking death to do it. If all morality is just selfishness, how do you explain this behavior. It's foolish from that standpoint, because it makes you less likely to survive. Why do people risk their lives for others?

Coveting might lead to theft, murder, etc, or it might lead to nothing. Someone on my block drives a nice Audi A6. I see it now and then and think, "Man, I wish I had an A6" and then I go on with my day. I do not envy them, steal from them, assault them, or murder them. The line is drawn at which point I cause another person harm. Wishing I had an A6 doesn't hurt anyone.

Just because it doesn't lead to it every time, doesn't mean it won't eventually. It's suprising what people will compromise under certain circumstances. Personally, I've never seen anything good that came from it in my life. I think there plainly a wisdom to never coveting what you don't have, or refuse to earn for yourself. I know plenty of people who sit around jealous of other peoples things and accomplishments. They feel their lives are unfair because that everyone else has more than they do. Yet, if they just ignored that and did for themselves, to their own satisfaction, they would be much happier people.

I do not lack an objective standard for morality. Harmfulness is pretty damn objective. It's not my feelings, it's theirs. It's not ok to rape people because people don't like being raped, ergo rape is not morally justified in my world view. Is it justified in some peoples' world view? Yes, unfortunately it is, but they are a very small minority of the total population (though I'd be very happy for them to be even smaller).

It is so objective? What if you have three men, and two decide that the other cannot be trusted..so they kill him. They did harm, but they think it was for the best, so is that ok? This is what morality by concensus easily leads to, when it is just mere opinion and agreement. Do you know how much evil has been done in the world because of thinking like that? Feelings are not objective..they are really the most subjective thing you could think of. Without an absolute standard of good which people have to obey, it could only be subjective opinion. In which case people will just make it up as they go along. As a limited human with a subjective experience, how could your morality ever be objective?