I assume (but don't know)---in the San Francisco sequence as he psychotically departs from the intersection of Hyde and Chestnut Street down the Hyde St cable car tracks towards the Ghiradelli Square/Aquatic Park area---that the black thing he is holding in his hand is some sort of control of for a disc brake on the rear wheels? The rotors and pads of which...would be glowing red hot and dripping bits of flaming debris as he comes to a stop before being mashed to by crossing traffic on Bay street at the bottom of the hill? Sort of like in those emergency runway brake tests they do for airliners?

You make words like caveman!

YOU are the one being asinineningly stupid with ideologically rigid statements that simply do not match historical fact. I don't consider governmental involvement in society inherently good or bad. It can hurt; it can help. I never claimed any utopia whenever government gets involved. There are no easy answers. You said the private sector is ALWAYS better. That is absolutely ridiculous, and easily refutable.

You just said before that if you are dependent on government, than you have no self pride, and weren't brought up well. So I blew that idiotic argument out of the water by simply proving how you are dependent on government. Now you change your thesis to this chestnut - it's only good for government to do anything if it corrects a horrific problem within the private sector.

And this is also total utter complete bullcrap.

Tell me - what change in the last 150 years made the biggest change in literacy rates in the US? Compulsory education laws in conjunction with the formation of the public school system. Absolutely, without question, this is the case. You can complain all you want about the public school system today, but there is no denying the impact they had on making society more skilled and knowledgeable, and they were governmental institutions by enlarge, and still are today. This came about during the banning of child labor, but it goes well beyond outlawing gross negligence in the private sector, yet, it was absolutely a big net positive for society.

See? It's really not hard to find examples to kill delusions formed by ideological rigidness. You just have to not be so insanely blind, that you miss obvious historical examples of these kinds of things.

And once again, I NEVER said governmental intervention is always good. You however DID say that private sector solutions are always better, when they clearly aren't always better, and that anyone who depends on the government for anything lacks self pride.

And you're dead wrong. Even your analysis of the ACA is idiotic. If Obamacare is government overreach, and government overreach is what causes prices to go up, why then did cost increases slow as ACA came online? Why do so many countries with larger government overreach in the form of universal single payer health care have lower costs than we do? Mind you that I am NOT saying their health systems are better, but it's an absolute fact they cost less than ours.

You're full of crap!

What Neil deGrasse Tyson and some of the other scientists/doctors (myself include) have are saying is that the IDEA of GMO's is a great one. The fact that we can engineer our foods to get the traits we want or add additional beneficial traits is an incredibly useful tool. We've already engineered rice that is able to produce vitamin A, which has been a huge help for places with vitamin A deficiencies and we can engineer potatoes to absorb less fats and oils when we fry them, there is also a professor at SUNY-ESF who is using GMO's to try and save the American Chestnut tree from extinction.

GMing is simply another tool in humanity's struggle to survive. First it was finding which foods were safe to eat, then it was breeding organisms within species to make inbred organisms that had the traits we wanted (think cattle, dogs, cats, corn, banana's; some of these things are more inbred than the Hapsburgs), then we starting creating our own hybrids across different species, and now we have GMO's.

However, what I object to is the current corporate use of GMO's to exploit farmers over patents, and breed for traits that people do necessarily need. NdT I'm sure is not advocating for that, but is advocating for the use of transgenic organisms/GMO's to solve some of the world's most pressing issues.

GMO's are probably the most powerful tool we have to curb world hunger, and mal-nutrition, and it could also be the thing that allows humans to venture beyond the solar system. What the Sift seems to be objecting to, and the rest of the "developed" world is the use of GMO's by greedy corporations who care more about turning a profit than solving world problems (there isn't very much money in feeding the needy and hungry). They are the one's making what appear to me more or less useless and potentially dangerous GMO's. Turn your anger away from GMO's specifically and narrow it to the ill use of GMO's by greedy corporations.

Lastly, the argument that "we don't know what they'll do" is for the most part unfounded, there are a decent amount of studies (find them yourself sorry) which show that GMO's in general won't cause harm (though it really depends on what you're trying to make). The same argument was made about the LHC "We don't know what will happen when we turn it on!" but everyone was fine.

Congrats! Couldn't be more deserved.

Now, if you'll allow me to bust out an old chestnut format:

There once was a gal from UK
who had so much to say
through all her work, rose like captain kirk
to a galaxy far far away.

Stalin and Mao? Please don't pull out that old chestnut. Claiming to be an atheist does not make you one. Stalin and Mao were the godheads of their own cults of personality with followers(read worshipers ) no different than the fanatical followers of many religions. Are they really so different from Jim Jones or David Koresh?

Crazy, I just started my vegan diet today as well. I am excited, I had stuffed grape leaves (rice, onion, dillweed, and mint in a nice lemony sunflower oil) for breakfast I know that is weird but I really wanted em. Then for lunch: paradise island tempeh (orange juice, agave, ginger, coconut, lime juice, cilantro, cashews, pineapple, green onion, a minuscule amount of jalapenos mixed in rice... it was goooood) and a side of mixed broccoli, water chestnuts, snappy green peas and ginger. Then dinner was just a carrot and shitloads of dates. I have a feeling dates are going to be a major reoccurring theme YUM

You should get some dates, they help with DOODOOO and they taste like little caramel treats!! And they are good for you, I cant even believe it! Why have they hid from me for so long?!!

You gotta send me recipes!!!

16:20 - I would be interested in seeing the complete category list for whichever governing body or organization bestows an award for taking five loads on the face.

Btw, Monté... no, she's not a whore. Not at all. And neither are you for sticking around for the money and nice clothes. After all, it's just a job, right? Just a job. Temporary. It's just what she does NOW. I see a bright future for you both as a couple. Country home, white picket fence, two dogs, cat, kids. Grandkids spending Christmas with you and grandma Cagney some number of years from now, the whole setting right out of Rockwell's brain. The Christmas tree you all went and cut down yourselves, tied to the roof of the station wagon, mounted to a stand you made out of 2x4s and an old sign, decorated with ornaments you and your wife collected over decades and popcorn strung buy the children, a roaring fire in the fireplace (a wonderful necessity since moving from Cali to Montana), four stockings hung over it with names lovingly embroidered in gold by grandma Cagney, and there, atop the mantel, grandma's award for Best Multiple Cumshots to The Face Scene. Can't you just smell the chestnuts?

I'll have the mixed melon salad to start, chicken dumplings with chestnuts, taters, and coconut cream pie for dessert. And a milkshake!

If I may dust off an old chestnut.

Not as cute as the cuddlefish.

@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 ...

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Who left because of a roast?


http://parody.videosift.com/talk/Roast-IX-Who-the-fk-is-this-guy

>> ^blankfist:
I only remember one person leaving because of a roast. Let's do another one. I'm ready to get mean as piss and make someone cry. Monocle smile be damned!


I like to exaggerate.

I have normal sized penis...see?

Agreed, 100%. They've done this before, as an "antisocial experiment". @dag or @lucky760, could one of you unhobble him, please?>> ^campionidelmondo:

See I told you guys to pay more attention to those two before they start play-acting again.

Nobody gives a shit about what you have to say. Take your Feminazi bullshit out of here for good, SyphilisBea.
>> ^peggedbea:

you keep posting your inane thoughts here much longer and im gonna leave.

Based on this chestnut: