when you do an obvious cut and paste job in the editing like this that is clearly designed to remove context, it draws questions to what it is that you're cutting out. she seemed adamant that there were other factors, but you haven't provided us with the ability to hear what they were and come to our own conclusions on the matter.

if she's involved with racist jewish supremacist or zionist groups that fund settler activities or support the continuing genocide of the palestinian people, her ability to remain neutral on certain issues is a valid question.

i'm not saying that's the case. i'm saying the editing job makes it seem like that's probably the case.

...and it brings up the question of the depth of imperialist zionist sympathies within the administration at ucla, which is unfortunately very common in the universities on this continent, no doubt partially for financial reasons.

it turns out that rachel is involved with pro-settler groups, the concern was regarding bds and the administration did get involved for that reason.

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/landslide-divestment-resolution

http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2015/feb/20/science-questions-ukip-renewable-energy

no call this week....

i'm just getting annoyed. i don't want to have to do this, but i feel as though i have no choice.

i have an appointment on tuesday (with a different doctor). i can't tell him what i'm planning because i need an element of surprise, so it's not really a factor. if i'm done this mix by monday, i'll do the suicide attempt then. otherwise, i'll give myself a few more days to get the mix done and go whenever it is - wednesday, thursday. it's just that if it goes wrong, i don't want a half done mix sitting here....

i *do* expect to be at least almost done by monday, so i'm looking at wednesday at the latest.

most of the way through the week. ugh. i hope i get a call tomorrow or the next day.

i mean, i'm not going to just walk in and start popping pills. i'm going to need to get a response first. but unless it's "here. done." or "it'll be done tomorrow.", it's going to get messy...

like, for example, if she tries to give me the forms back? no. you said you'd fill them out. you've wasted my time. i don't have time to find somebody else. so, there are going to be consequences for that.

this somewhat ironically explains why i discarded social media and went back to traditional media.

the cat pictures were admittedly bad. the memes were worse. but what really permanently turned me off was the lack of filters, combined with a disturbing level of mass ignorance.

i was hooked up to a number of "libertarian" type political movements, most leaning towards the socialist brand of libertarianism (anarchism). occupy, idle no more, groups against tar sands development and other protest groups with similar purposes that organized large protests and generated substantial interest.

i'd guess that roughly 75% of the articles that i'd read that had gone "viral" within that political spectrum were absolute nonsense. the stuff on gmos was particularly illiterate. and, it would just get shared by dumb hippie after dumb hippie after dumb hippie. it's the perfect example of how lies can become truth if they're repeated often enough - which in this case means if they're shared over enough feeds.

i reacted, of course. you send out crap in your feed, i'm going to correct you. but, what it lead to was a lot of interpersonal tension, accusations that i wasn't on "their side" and just general close-mindedness to criticism. the meme was authoritarian truth; how dare i challenge it with my puny citations!

what i learned was that social media isn't a replacement for anything - it's merely an evolution of the mob mentality. it reminded me of how important good journalism really is, and why it can't be tossed aside as a relic of the past.

i think that free-thinking people ought to be very cautious of how social media might shape social movements in the future, mostly for the worst. it really pushes a conformist mob mentality, with little interest in fact checking.

i think we can probably blame the anti-vaccine campaign on social media.

i fear it's just the beginning.

i heard a lot about pay increases in this video, but not a word about revolutionizing the ownership of production.

the left has lost the plot.

there's some loose ends here that suggest it was orchestrated. two hours is a long time for a kid dressed like that in that weather. that's a case of hypothermia, so he likely wasn't there that long. and, whether the guy they picked was actually homeless or not, he's there earlier in the frame. my guess is that the thing was probably set up, and there isn't more footage than was uploaded.

that said...

i would've stopped. and i know i would've stopped because i have stopped. but, the message they're sending is very wrong. this isn't the kind of thing that well-meaning individuals can do anything about. i say i would have stopped, and i would have, but it would have been to try and figure out why he's on the street rather than in a shelter and to get him directions to somewhere else.

i think it's important that the issue has attention drawn to it. with the current economic and political status quo, we have millions of homeless people and millions of empty houses. but it's equally important not to trick ourselves into thinking that this is an issue of "goodwill" or that it can be solved through acts of kindness or charitable donations. giving the homeless guy $1000 dollars doesn't actually solve anything. this is a systemic economic issue, and it requires political solutions.

i've stopped on the street more than once to give people directions to the welfare office, and talk about possibly getting on disability for mental issues. i've been told flat out that it's not enough for an addiction, which is sad, but the reality. but, usually, people aren't aware that they have systemic options.

a kid that age should be helped to child welfare services; you shouldn't toss quarters at him. it's not a tale of two fucking cities out there. we're a little past that.

fucking weather. i really don't care if it's hot or cold, it'd just be nice if it could keep it steady so i'm not passing out...

i'm getting half a stomach ache. which is weird, considering that the reports are not indicating spring. but, it's a specific wrench. and my stomach is never wrong. i think what it's telling me is that the absurd cold is over, that this morning is the end of deep winter, if you will, and the beginning of a warm up to normal winter.

but we could be in for a pleasant surprise, too.

from what i can gather, it's a biological response to shifts in atmospheric pressure. i guess the high pressure could always come back. but when it gets like this, it really indicates seasonal shifts.

walls update

jessica
hi.

i've got a point form conclusion at the end. this'll be the last time i bug you about this. i just want to get my final conclusions across.

so, it looks like the worst of it is probably passed. i started off saying the walls were badly insulated, then backtracked a little when i plugged the doors and noticed a difference and am now going back to where i started, with the shift in tone to the unusual nature of the current extreme cold. they're not badly insulated relative to the expected climate, but they can't handle this weather, either..

it really seems to depend on what the temperature in the unheated part of the basement is. i think i tricked myself into thinking the walls were better insulated than they were; it seems like the temperature in the basement had risen, at the time, to something more reasonable, which slowed the heat flow out. so, it seemed well insulated when it was really just not a large enough temperature difference for serious leakage.

as the temperature has fallen over the last week and stayed low, the leakage has increased. it has reversed during brief warm-ups. i still think weatherproofing the doors are a good idea, but the temperature difference appears to be a basic, irresolvable problem from inside the unit. that is to say that this unit is heating the entire basement through convection, and so long as that is true and it is very cold then it will be expensive.

it wasn't quite as cold overnight tonight, and it was very stable around -16/-17, so i tried to turn the heat down a little. it took about four hours to go from being a little warm in here to feeling the cold radiating off the walls (which is actually the heat radiating out). so, the temperature outside is not the dominant factor in being able to reduce the heat. the basement temperature has to also increase before the unit temperature can come down.

it's a temperature *difference* thing, of course. if it wasn't so cold, there wouldn't be so much flow. judging from the fact that i didn't really have to turn the heat up until the temperature got below -20, i think that, under a normal winter, and with normal heat sources, ambient heating may even be sufficient. it's just that it's been so unusually cold...

i'm coming from ottawa, where it is often much colder than we've seen this year and last year. these are my first two years here. it seems badly insulated.....relative to what i'd expect for ottawa. and i'll say that if we start getting cold like we've seen the last two years here regularly, this is going to be structurally expensive. i'd argue that you'd have no real choice but to heat the unfinished part of the basement to a basic point (5, 10 degrees, something like that) in order to stop the flow out of here.

but, all factors considered, the walls seem to be able to keep the heat in so long as the temperature outside is not below -15 or so for a significant period of time. once it gets that cold, the walls leak hard - because the basement is unheated. heating the basement with a cheaper source would reverse the issue. but that seems to be rare here.

so, yeah - i started off saying the walls were badly insulated. it's more like they can't handle this weather, but are ok under regular circumstances.

so, final point form suggestions on ways to reduce leakage:

(1) there are big gaps in the doors, and blocking them helped a lot, so weather-proofing the doors would likely make a big difference.
(2) there appears to be a missing plastic strip around the outside of the bedrooms that would likely reduce a low-lying draft if replaced.
(3) the walls are unable to stop leakage when it is very cold, which is the result of a big temperature difference between the inside of the unit (heated) and the unfinished part of the basement (unheated). this appears to be structural, but (once the doors are blocked) is only noticeable when it is unusually cold.

the landlord
I am working on putting a new furnace into the unit next to Paul's unit. I have dropped the temp in that unit since it is vacant and this also affecting the temperature in the basement below. Hopefully within 7 days we will have the new furnace heating with cheaper heat that I can afford. I plan to put a new front and back door with good seals when I can. If you are cold let me know and I will jack the heat up in the unit above the open basement. Please be patient, money and time are available at a slower pace. I have one vacancy also.

jessica
i'm not cold, i'm just trying to get you information regarding the unit from inside of it.

the landlord
Thanks

this is actually legitimately more accurate than most of the contrary arguments, which are based in debunked pseudoscience and hippie bullshit. the reality is that your body doesn't really care what you're giving it, it just cares if it can digest it. it also cares how much of it you're giving it.

real simple formula:
energy in - energy out = energy stored

nothing more to it than that.

now, there's probably enough fuel and nutrients in that meal to last you the whole day. you don't want to eat that twice a day. ever. but if you were to eat it once a day (and nothing else) every single day and not be a total fucking couch potato, you'd probably come back absolutely healthy after a year. conversely, if you were to eat a kg of tomatoes daily while glued to your couch, you'd come back with diabetes.

the key is not what you eat. it's how much you eat.

you really shouldn't be measuring your calories with a calculator, a schedule and a government guideline. healthy people get this little feeling in their stomach that tells them it's time to eat. i'd guess most americans aren't familiar with this, but it's a great tool to use in measuring your calorie intake.

the problem isn't this. the problem is that people eat this as a lunchtime snack, then go home and eat twice as much for supper. it's the sheer bulk of food being consumed. if they were to skip the second or third (or fourth...) meal, they'd be fine with this as a basic fuel source. and, what's at the core of that is this persistent agriculture industry propaganda that we need to be eating three times a day. you evolved to be lucky to eat a significant meal once a week, while you're running around in circles (screaming, with hands in air) avoiding angry lions.

you're fat because the biggest government-subsidized industry out there told you that you need to eat three times a day in order to drive to work in an office, not because you eat high efficiency food from time to time.

i would like to propose that the next american election be devoted to a contest regarding the extent of public displays of affection for america. it should be televised, in prime time. this contest should replace the debates (which have frankly been useless for years, anyways). there should be a call-in or web vote to determine the winner, who will be immediately inaugurated, afterwards, to the tune of the miss america pageant music.

"folks, it seems like bob dole is giving the statue of liberty a handjob. that's going to be tough to beat."

listen....

there was an aircraft carrier on it's way to dock in sevastopol. the americans denied it, of course. "routine patrols". but, it was sailing in that direction.

if you consider the ramifications of a nato aircraft carrier docking in sevastopol, you understand why putin actually prevented (or at least postponed) a major war from breaking out.

it's one of those "minor details" that most people will never really be aware of, but was the dominant factor in the action.

so, you ask "what else could they have done?", but you miss the context.

well, he's a douche bag, sure. but he's not acting in any kind of a professional capacity, other than perhaps behaving in character. he's under no obligation at this point to not be a douche bag. that puts her at a disadvantage in the encounter, but she initiated the encounter...

idiots arguing with idiots...

1) there's literally absolutely zero scientific evidence that homosexuality is genetic. it's actually coming from two different things.

i) a legal argument. now, it's a pretty smart legal argument. and it actually worked. the person couldn't be held liable for "sodomy" because there wasn't a choice. texas. now, i'm going to come back to this at (2), but is this really what you want, from a legal perspective?

ii) scientifically, it's a guess. the logic is something like "we can't make sense of this, so it's probably genetic". the amount of positive evidence that exists is zilch. and a little thought should demonstrate that it does not make sense to suggest that we have no agency in the matter. unless you think god made us all as snowflakes. this is what you're really getting at, here - not science, but the softer, more liberal take on christianity. the "god made us all special" kind.

2) it's far more empowering that it's a choice. i'm transgendered. i hate the idea that i didn't have any agency in this, that i was born with some defect or something. no. i woke up one day and said "i'd rather be a chick", i went to the doctor, i explained it and i got some drugs for it. that's empowerment. empowerment is not "i'd change if i could, but i can't". empowerment is "i could be straight if i wanted to, but i want to be gay, and fuck you and your god if you don't like it".

3) sexuality is fluid. you need to do the research on this. there are not categories. sexuality does change.

i don't want to argue about rhetoric. find me a peer-reviewed article, or shut the fuck up. not fucking slashdot. peer reviewed. actual science - that thing you talk about, but obviously don't know anything about.

if you actually go through this process, what you will learn is that:

(1) sexuality is not fully understood, but is thought to be a complex result of primarily environmental factors.
(2) sexuality is fluid.
(3) sexuality is an essential aspect of identity.

...meaning that what the science actually states is three-fold:

(1) sexuality is malleable.
(2) individuals choose their sexuality based on their perceived identity.
(3) it is oppressive to alter people's identity through coercion or force.

i need to be clear that i'm not interested in debating with idiots [and there's as many on the left as the right] and have no patience for patronizing tones on this topic, of which you are so wrong about, and which the actual professional literature is so clear regarding. i will delete your responses unless they include links to peer reviewed literature. and, doing this research for yourself will hopefully allow you to actually learn a few things.

you want to avoid any kind of activist groups. they're as bad as the religious groups. you want to avoid popular science literature. and you want to avoid the mainstream press.

it's a very unfortunate situation, where you have these civil rights groups taking advantage of a legal loop hole to push mass ignorance. the aims of these legal groups are admirable. and the success of the defense says a lot about the incompetence of the legal system. but, from a scientific perspective, this is all wrong. and learning that is a question of doing basic research from respectable sources.

and, as i've noted, a real liberal rights supporter would not line up with these groups. they're pushing religion by stealth.

the science aligns with the rights theory, here: we're autonomous individuals that have the right and ability to make decisions about our personal lives. real atheists should be challenging anything that attempts to contradict that. the absolute deficit of any evidence whatsoever aside, dna is not a magical force. it does not attempt to control our thoughts. the premise is incoherent.

queers need to stop hiding behind the state as a protective sheer, take responsibility for their decisions in life, build allies with other oppressed groups and mobilize against the forces that wish to restrict their personal freedom. this should be a revolutionary flashpoint. instead, it's just more fucking welfare state bullshit. successfully brainwashed.

this is the important week, coming up. the doctor has the papers. by next monday (march 1st), i will either have them completed and ready to mail or i will be forced to generate a crisis. there's no further adjustments or wait-and-sees, it's time for action.

given that i'm planning around a suicide attempt over the next few weeks, it may seem like a weird time to quit smoking. but it's just been far too cold out; bundling up for that kind of weather every hour or two just hasn't been appealing. so, i'm actually at two weeks now. and it seems like it might legitimately hold, this time. the in and out has really lost it's appeal...

we'll see if that changes when the weather warms up. but, for now, i prefer my warm blanket and don't foresee any forthcoming desire to work the constant trips outdoor back into my daily routine.

you would probably expect me to say i love norm macdonald.

and you'd be right.

i suspect that sponge bob could do a much more worthwhile parody of this guy.

this is truly awful

i had some doubts when it happened, but it does appear to be that phil hartman is, in fact, dead - as evidenced by his zombified corpse appearing in these videos.

you're all missing the greater context, here: bill should really be recognized for his war service. i think there should be a petition to get him a medal for his bravery.

i have a good name for the award:

the fletcher memorial home award for excellence in journalism

it should be accompanied by immediate admittance to the home, as a public service, free of charge.

high protein diets create heart problems, not muscle mass. if you want to save the bros, you should be taking this stuff away from them and giving them spaghetti, instead. but, personally? i'd say good riddance.

the consequences of their vanity in this regard are actually quite fitting.

that's a good analysis on the eu in the latter part of the show, i just want to connect the dots a little.

it seems crazy to call the eu "socialist". but you have to understand that the audience doesn't understand what the word means. "socialist" = "bad guys". it's not a political or ideological debate, it's just a smear tactic. they might as well be calling them "poopyheads", it carries as much depth in the discourse. what the british right dislikes about the eu is the same thing that the american right dislikes about the un - it's seen as a threat to what they call "sovereignty", which is in fact their ability to remain rogue states.

you see the same thing in the u.s., where you have these establishment spokespeople like alex jones labeling everything they don't like as "socialism". there's no meaning to it. it's built on cold war propaganda, activating this latent distrust of the red menace and whatnot.

so, you're not going to get anywhere trying to make sense of it. it's absurd, but it doesn't matter. and, perhaps a moment's reflection on how unfortunate the situation is is worthwhile, given the resources that the anglosophere continues to control.

i think you need to separate two different kinds of "mean", here. i hear what you're saying, but i think you're overgeneralizing.

i post a lot of music criticism; some of it is downright ruthless, because i have absurdly high standards. but, i'm criticizing an art form. in turn, i get a lot of hateful reactions. something i'll run into fairly regularly is that i'll post a page length critique of something, and get fifty dumb one-liner responses telling me to impale myself on something. you won't see many of them, because i have a zero tolerance policy on it and delete them on contact, but it's a routine that i need to delete twenty insults when i wake up every morning.

am i being a hypocrite? no. because i'm criticizing a form, not insulting a person. there's a tremendous difference. it doesn't often come off obviously due to the way people express themselves. but, notwithstanding the low level of discourse in the comments sections online, it remains true that "your music is dumb" is not the same thing as "you're dumb".

here's the thing: if you're going to put yourself out there (whether in the form of creating something or reacting to it), you have to expect some criticism. that criticism is fundamental to an open society and inherent in the artform itself; the simple, blunt reality is that it doesn't fucking matter if you like it or not, you've just gotta bloody deal with it. but, it's reasonable to expect that that criticism is grounded in something that's being presented for some sort of interaction and consumption, rather than something irrelevant.

so, the way i see it is that there's really not a need for people to be less mean - you have no right to tell people not to react to something you post. what there is is a need for people to be more relevant in their reactions, and more focused in their criticisms. this ultimately reduces to a failure of the public education system, which needs to be addressed at it's systemic cause, not flailed against with internet slacktivism.

social criticism is itself an artform, when done at a high level of discourse and emotional investment. it can take on the role of being an essayist, the role of performance art, the role of the comedian, the role of the social activist or the role of a punk or folk musician to name a few approaches. the comments section opens up new opportunities to fill this role. and, yes, sometimes it can be downright mean. brutally so. it can ruin people. but, this helps us come face to face with our errors and move forwards. we don't correct ourselves by getting together in these circle jerks and ignoring the outside world. this is the error of modern activism, the dominant reason it is so useless. we have to be constantly challenging our assumptions and biases, and we have to remove ourselves from our mental shelters and barriers in order to be constantly tearing down those preconceptions and assumptions.

but, yeah - i could do with a few less responses along the lines of "u r gay, die homo".

so, i think that if we follow too many rules we'll be putting ourselves on the path to a stagnant society. it's one of the main criticisms that the punk generation had of the hippie generation - that if we end up stuck in this fake huxleyan dystopia, we'll just be floating towards our demise. if you're going to throw a lot of hippie bullshit around, i'm going to have little choice but to throw molotovs at you to wake you up a little.

most of the time, when somebody insults you it's because you deserve it. let's get that point down. getting offended by an insult is consequently kind of the retarded way to react to it - and i mean that literally. it's indicative of an inability to react; the reaction of an unformed mind. it's stupidity. an insult is either an entirely wrong observation and should be ignored, or it's something to learn from. the mere concept of "being offended" is just being ignorant to the concerns of others.

but, it's necessary for the insult to be articulated well to get anything out of it. i can't learn anything from "u the gay, die smell" - well, other than that i ought to block that person. that's the crux, here. we don't need less mean. we need less dumb.

1. overdiagnose autism.
2. ?????
3. profit.

at least they're getting some answers in for 2.

reality: if this works, your kids were never autistic. they were just neglected.

seven kids is a big class size...

Johnny
Middle Eastern women are beautiful. I sincerely hope that ISIS, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban don't decide to behead this one for committing the sinful act of smiling..........

Ariq
I agree with you, but just to help you not get any hate from others in the future, call them Arabs, Arabic is language :)

Johnny
If I'm not messing something up, it's probably because I'm sleeping. Actually, now that you pointed it out, I think it's supposed to be "Arabian". Anyway, thanks for the free education my good sir....

SM-721
She is Iranian, Iranians are not arabs.

Johnny
SWEET MOLASSESS IN THE MORNING!!! You're right! OK, third times the charm. I'll go with "Middle Eastern" and hope for the best.......

SM-72
It's fine man. Middle eastern is okay. Iranian is better though. I hope I encouraged you to learn a little more about Iran (hell, start with wikipedia)

QueenSabaa
As an Iranian, ISIS has nothing to do with Iran, I am a Muslim Iranian girl who practices Islam. we do not support ISIS. Also we can smile and laugh in Iran!!, come on now, that is ignorant to say...

deathtokoalas
the iranian plateau is in a strategic fork between europe and asia, and has consequently experienced large amounts of migration, and, unfortunately, several rounds of genocide. the dominant cultural group in iran is a complex melting pot, and a good case study in separating the various aspects of a cultural group.

the earliest inhabitants would have been darker-skinned and probably migrated westwards from india. they have some descendants in persia. the keyword is balochistan. however, this substratum of iran is very deep and it's legacy today is largely subconscious.

next, there would have been a large migration into iran by people that would have looked like modern day russians. they have left their language to the region, as well as some religious customs; the jewish stories that claim abraham came from persia may have been meant to demonstrate that the monotheistic and dualistic aspects of the religion were persian in origin.

persia quickly became the dominant empire in the region, before embarking in a thousand year war with europe - first greece, then rome. rome and persia would periodically devastate each other, call a truce and then repeat. during one particularly devastating break in the fighting, arabs rose up to take advantage of the situation and conquered all of persia and most of rome at the same time. this is technically the end of the persian empire. for the next five hundred years, iran is inhabited by a primarily european people with shi'ite muslim customs.

then, the mongols appeared. what we now call iran dealt with the worst of their destruction. millions and millions of iranians were slaughtered, and replaced with advancing turkish peoples. the devastation was so severe that iran is understood as having gone through centuries of pure anarchy. and, the truth is that the continuing backwardsness in the afghan highlands is the consequence of the region never fully recovering.

around the year 1500, a new iran arises out of the destruction of the old one. the ethnogenesis mixes turkish genetics and arabic religion with the persian language and a complex cultural tradition drawing from every direction.

so, no - iranians are not arabs. they are generally very light-skinned, and have a similar ethnic background (iranian-turkish) to the great part of the russian federation.

saltyninja
Iran may have nothing to do with ISIS but your social and religious laws are still medieval. It's  crazy. Here from Wikipedia: "Bad hijab" - exposure of any part of the  body other than hands and face - is subject to punishment of up to 70 lashes or 60 days imprisonment. [11][12]  In April 2007, the Tehran police, (which is under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's supervision),  began the most fierce crackdown on what is known as "bad hijab"  in more than a decade. In the capital Tehran thousands of Iranian women were cautioned over their poor Islamic dress and several hundred arrested.[13]"

QueenSabaa
Maybe years ago but NOW there are no lash punishments if your hair is showing, you clearly don't know about Iran. I am a proud Muslim woman. Religion is a choice as mentioned in the Quran and so I don't agree with any "religious" government law but then again it is not like women get killed/lashed for showing hair...

deathtokoalas
i do believe that the laws in iran are rather harsh, if somewhat laxly enforced.

Can Yildirim
I live in middle east and you girl, are lying. it has gotten milder in capitals but harsher in general.

They cant cuz she propably isnt living in iran. and dont believe these lyin comments situation is still somewhat the same. These women has stockholm. Their parents and social environment did that to them..

deathtokoalas
throughout most of the area, the state is generally more violent than the people. so, you have these two things working against each other.

it's like marijuana in the west. there are laws against it, but they generally aren't enforced, and pretty much everybody thinks the laws should be abolished. but, if the state doesn't like your politics or your skin colour or something else then it will enforce the laws as a way to "get you" for that something else. they even use similar language in the united states, where the federal laws have become stricter under obama even as the prohibition is being locally abolished. i'm a canadian on the border. as i was getting my visa information together last year, i learned that marijuana use  (even medical use) was in a list of "immoral behaviour" that could lead to being permanently banned from the country for life. that's the language. "immoral". and, there are border guards, with guns, upholding this "morality". but, how many americans would look at the situation and react with anything but embarrassment? so, how can it really be enforced?

so, yes - the laws are terrible. but they don't really reflect the culture (except on the arabian peninsula) and are consequently not really enforced unless the aim is to punish something else.

regarding women's headdresses, i believe it's largely a generational concern that has no future but abolition. there was an absurd, conservative reaction against a type of forced liberalization. once that reaction dies off, the country should re-open from the ground up. the lesson is that you can't force people to "modernize", you have to let them make their own choices.

Pirouz Kas
+QueenSabaa Hi, I am Atheist. It is hypocrisy, that you built up an Islamic Republic by massacring apostates. I feel so sorry for the HUMANS, who have suffered or fled from their home country.
Can you Islamic Republic supporters tell me, why it is worth it??

But before answering, just read a little from these two links please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_diaspora
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight_from_Iran

deathtokoalas
i'm not a supporter of the islamic revolution, or much into foucault, but i need to caution against wiki as a source for politicized information of this nature. it's open nature and quasi-authoritarian tone makes it an ideal tool for state propaganda.

Pirouz Kas
You do not need sources for that. If you live in the west, just go and search for any Iranian. 99% high educated, 90% not religious.

deathtokoalas
all states have unjust laws, and the culture in iran is of course very different, religious or not. a lot of the issue is consequently dependent on the actual brutality of the state. and there's propaganda coming from every direction.

i don't wish to discourage the discussion. i'd just caution against sourcing from wikipedia on politicized issues.

i've never been much of a beck fan. i mean, it's hard to be a fan of high quality pop music and be unaware of his existence, but he's always struck me as more than a little bit boring. you have to respect the production work. but, when you strip it back, there's never really been very compelling songs under the gloss. he's never had anything worthwhile to say in his vocals, either, so you can't retreat to the poet defense like you can with dylan or whomever else. so, i'm not approaching listening to a beck disc with any kind of attachment. if anything, i would have relatively low expectations based on his previous output being very, very overrated.

to be blunt, i'm astounded by this. i'd have never guessed it was beck. where's the snazzy drum beats that i can write off as hipster goofiness? the ironic cool that i can look down on as trying too hard to appear to not be trying? this is just generic, boring white revivalism through the tiring veneer of the pretend 60s, as they've been sold back to us through the commercialist gloss of 90s revisionism. the grammies aren't exactly known for being current, but this is dramatically out of date. why not just drop the bullshit and give the grammy to the velvet fucking underground?

however, i think it's more than just another head scratching decision. it's reflective of something that's been happening in settler culture for several years, now. it's not white culture, exactly. i have white skin, but i can't relate to this. i'm of mixed background, but (excluding some aboriginal ancestry) have no ancestors on this continent before the year 1900 and none of them ever owned any property. they came over as labourers in the industrial period, not as colonizers. i'm an urbanite to the core, my ancestors have been urban as far as i can trace them, and i'm consequently only able to understand urban culture. so, i identify mostly with urban european art music and the north american forms that have developed out of it. while i feel no inherent connection to either of them, i understand jazz as an urban art form far better than i understand country music; as a rural form, it is entirely alien to me. so, it's an important distinction.

but, this choice is a cultural decision. it's the result of some kind of rural revival in the remnants of what could be called settler culture. it's the result of this increasing ethnogenesis of white, settler-derived america around 60s "liberalism", and the artforms that are seen as reflective of it. rock is dead, but this kind of folk carries on and will likely carry on for some time. in a cultural sense, this is american classical music - or on the cusp of becoming it.

the grammy was given to beck, but it was really given to bob dylan and lou reed and the music of the era, in general. beck is quite honestly being recognized for his whiteness, and his contributions in furthering what is perceived as a dying culture. the decision was made by people in the twilight of their lives, grasping to their own existence. it was meant to further the legacy of their generation and their culture, not to award a current album for it's excellence or importance.

kanye consequently has a valid point, even if the soundclips aren't able to articulate his position very strongly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqKeK8CIjxI

listen, i think it's a little unfair to assign all of this to racism. some of it, sure. most of it is actually entirely legit. i'm a hard leftist, and i was thinking a lot of the same things at the time about not really knowing who this guy was, who he was really working for or what we were going to get. his policy statements seemed to be entirely in contradiction with the media narrative. on the other hand, hillary was a known commodity, with decades of identifiable policy goals.

now, as a hard leftist, i wouldn't have considered voting republican. and, the truth is i probably wouldn't have been able to convince myself to actually vote for hillary, either, despite cheering her on as the lesser evil from the sidelines up here in canada. but, i certainly wouldn't have voted for obama, as i realized from the get-go that he was very right-wing. and hindsight has demonstrated that these concerns were legitimate. hillary supported single-payer healthcare, for example. i think she would have taken a far more progressive approach on a number of things, and may have even had a less aggressive foreign policy (although i know a lot of this is coming from the military, and the commander-in-chief is largely a figurehead nowadays). judging by bill's obstructionism on a few things, i don't think she's as "captured", either.

it's not quite an adlai stevenson circumstance, but i think it's rather apparent that the wrong choice was made. and, i think history will largely uphold that. obama was an unknown, and the result has been a conservative in disguise that's been a real disaster for progressive voters.

it's a legitimate question for historians to analyze, and one they'll be analyzing for a long time: how did americans make such a clearly wrong decision? and, by any objective basis, it's a wrong decision. there's a lot of excuses. hillary won the popular vote. obama was the establishment, wall street candidate. etc. but it's still a serious question that needs to be grappled with, and no doubt will be for a very long time...

again: elizabeth warren's solution to the crisis of capitalism is market theory. and this is somehow understood as left-wing? she's the textbook definition of a moderate republican. there's a really big problem when a right-leaning liberal republican like her is universally presented as "left". i mean, if this is as far as the spectrum goes then there's no answer to any of the problems in front of us...

the government tends to talk to her like she's an idiot. and, to a large extent, that's the right approach. it's a type of very hollow populism that seems geared for political mileage, but doesn't have any real answers connected to it. and, everybody in the room seems to realize it except the reporters.

lew is right. the size of the institution is not very important. that's what we learned in the 30s. you can split a cartel up, but you can't stop it from oligopolizing. much more radical solutions are required.

Gazzasore
No bail out should happen If a Bank fails close it. Jail the people that cause the problem  Look what Iceland did

deathtokoalas
did you know that, if you did that, then everybody that has their money in the bank would lose everything?

the bailouts were initially a type of social safety net. by setting up a lender of last resort, people can be sure that their money is safe when they put it in the bank. if you take that away, the entire nature of the economy shifts to one where bank runs start happening regularly, and the whole system becomes inherently unstable.

i mean, personally? if i didn't know that my money is safe in the bank through the lender of last resort, i would keep it under my mattress.

we don't need more social darwinism. we need laws that prevent the banks from gambling private savings.

se7ensnakes
Its not american taxpayers that get stuck with the bill, that is a misnomer.  The real people that get stuck with the bail out is anyone that uses money, because now you have inflation

deathtokoalas
this is correct. in fact, what we call "bailouts" are actually low interest loans and, in the end, taxpayers (in the vector of the state) actually make a profit from it.

the most current data suggests that the federal government has profited roughly 50 billion dollars (53.1 billion) on interest paid back on the loans, and there remains outstanding debt to collect. i have no idea where that money goes, but it's probably nowhere good.

the shitstorm is all media bullshit and opportunistic politics.

i'd much rather be hated and despised than loved or admired. love is mostly an illusion, driven by the false projection of idealized fantasies on to reality. love is solipsism. but hate is a real reaction, a legitimate interaction in objective existence.

psyssi
Adolf Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, Charles XII, and Napoleon were all men who thought they could conquer Russia in the winter.

Robert
Karl XII did not loose vs russia due to the winter. He lost because of an incompetent general, who led the last battle, and who surrendered with the bulk of the army intact, and thus because of the low morale of the army. Winter was never a matter of defeat for the swedish army vs russa.

deathtokoalas
it seems as though you need to add barack obama to that list.

José Ignacio Panario Güenaga
+Robert More to the contrary, actually. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Narva_(1700)

deathtokoalas
i don't really want to get into this, but the great northern war is fundamentally different than the invasions pushed by napoleon, hitler and, now, it seems, obama. it's not a good idea to do direct comparisons. 

The Basileus
Aha yes congrats to the mongols they are the true winners they conquered a land full of A: a whole load of nothing of other incompetent horse lords and a bunch of Russian principalities that were incompetent the only nations that were challenges for them was the Muslims and the Chinese and well the mongols are the master race right look at them today lets all face it people over glorify the mongols the European powers rocketed way above the mongols and the mongols will forever in history be known as a scourge and cancer had the mongols faced a united Russian empire under someone competent

deathtokoalas
the mongols were unable to conquer japan, despite several tries over several centuries.

Nickrr1992
+psyssi To be fair to Napoleon he did reach Moscow or what was left of it. Russia adopted a scorched earth tactic, so when the French army arrived there was no supplies or anyway to maintain the army also the Russian army was raiding supply escorts and coupled with the extreme cold the French army had a massive problem. Napoleon lost due to widespread disease, malnutrition and lack  supplies to continue forward so was forced to retreat

deathtokoalas
+Nickrr1992 i think the underlying context that everybody missed - and continues to miss - is that russia has never been a wealthy country. a look at the map can be misleading. when the rich parisians and berliners made it to the heart of the transcontinental empire, they seem to have been unprepared to adjust to the frugality of existence that is necessary at the northernmost tip of civilization.

the romans never conquered arabia. it wasn't because they couldn't - it was that they felt the land was useless.

jessica murray
think it through, guys. would a group opposed to a pipeline due to the threat of spills decide to blow one up, thereby spilling oil everywhere? does that make any sense? i've been involved with these groups, and let me tell you that "highly disorganized and mostly on welfare" is the actual truth of it. unfortunately, people end up drawn to activism after they've failed at something else, and there's consequently a substantial problem with a lack of education. under that, there's a core of utopian socialists and quasi-anarchists that keep it running through creative use of limited resources. the highly organized and well-financed movement (with foreign backers) is the petroleum industry.

www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/rcmp-documents-warn-environmental-groups-could-pose-threat/45699/?ddlMonth=month&ddlYear=2016 

MH
Sure, just like the FBI saying the same about Martin Luther King and his fellow "communist" Civil Rights Workers, and the RCMP planting evidence to claim Ludwig Weibo was planning to bomb pipelines. These activists aren't "anti-Canada," they're anti-the oil and gas companies who own Harper & the Tories and will stop at nothing to increase their profits. It's Harper & his cronies who are "anti-Canada"; they'll destroy the Canadian environment and sicken or kill Canadians to make that profit.

jessica murray
if these groups had any money or structure, they'd use it to lobby parliament, like every other well-funded group (including the petroleum industry) does in our money-buys-influence "democracy". street protests are always the behaviour of the disenfranchised.

reality:
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-top-lobby-groups-in-ottawa/

KW
The groups do have substantial funding. Vivian Krause has documented the money trail at http://business.financialpost.com/2010/10/14/u-s-foundations-against-the-oil-sands/ $6 Million is not chump change to fund protest groups. As for the risk of terror activities, one only has to look at Daniel Johnson formerly on the Green Party of Sask. executive as he demonstrates how to cause train accidents through sabotaging of signal lights. http://www.genuinewitty.com/2013/08/18/saskatchewan-green-party-executive-promotes-train-sabotage-feat-daniel-johnson/

jessica murray
keith, the kind of foundations you're talking about do exist, but the purpose is largely to fund business opportunities in renewable energy and whatnot. activists on the ground consider these groups to be working against their interests in actually ending the fossil fuel economy. the anti-pipeline groups i was involved with (who advocated forms of civil disobedience like what was seen in new brunswick last year) were actively campaigning against both the green party and the ndp. that's part of the reason they're being targeted. so, the error is in connecting these groups to the protest groups. these are two very different things, with very different goals, and you can't conflate them.

one of the dominant aims of the american military establishment right now is in blocking petroleum exports to china. the article that keith posted has a little bit about that. that's not environmentalism, it's trade obstructionism. you can see some of this in the ndp's line on the pipelines, as well. it's willing to support pipelines that are connected to local refineries, and opposed to pipelines that export oil to us refineries. that's not an environmentalist position, it's a position meant to create union jobs. the grassroots organizations pushing the visible protests mostly understand all of this stuff, although they may get tricked sometimes.

the longer you think that police exist to protect the citizenry, the longer they will oppress you. that's the lie that allows the oppression to function.

the police exist to uphold class relations, and particularly to protect private property. their function is to protect the rich from the poor.

mass consciousness of this point is an absolutely necessary prerequisite to dismantling the police state.

the sad truth is that this was the second highest selling single in the us in the 60s. the only thing that outsold it was i want to hold your hand. and while it's depressing that that tune is the biggest beatles hit, it's even more distressing that this outsold all the anti-war music. by leaps and bounds.

the 60s, as they have been sold to younger listeners, are mostly a lie. the beatles were very popular. but you need to go way, way down the list to get to dylan or mitchell or anything else with any kind of social conscience. the reality is that it was a fringe counter-culture.

but, you've probably never heard of this before, have you? the counter-culture was fringe then, but it became dominant because the fringe had the balls (with all due respect to the women involved) to stand up against the market and wave it's freak flag high. now, the 60s mainstream is lost in obscurity. you wouldn't recognize more than half of the most popular songs of the era, but you'd recognize all kinds of stuff that didn't sell at all.

people complain that the market doesn't respond to a counter-culture anymore. but it never did. building a counter-culture is not a profitable business venture. if it sees a financial reward at all, it's not going to happen for years or decades. it's about changing attitudes.

see, this is legitimately ridiculous. these people have no idea what this guy's views on the illegal occupation and ongoing genocide of palestine are. he could be the world's biggest noam chomsky fan; he could have helped fund some of those flotillas. what you're seeing here is flat out stupidity.

i got the impression that the doctor i saw today was finally taking me seriously. if i'm making progress, i'd rather play the process out than freak out. it's just that i'm running out of time.

i've set a mental deadline for the first. i have an appointment on the 3rd. if i get the papers in time, great. if not, the third is the proper opportunity....

i'm essentially certain at this point that i will be overdosing on aspirin at the windsor city health centre on the afternoon of february 17th. i do not expect the doctor i am going to see to take me seriously, and, as such, i expect this to be a necessary step. in order to pre-empt any malpractice by the staff there, and ensure they are held liable for criminal negligence should it occur, i would like to clarify a few facts about what is going to happen before it happens.

1) i will not be armed with any sort of weapon, and do not plan on harming anybody except for myself. should reports surface that i was armed, these reports should be understood as false.
2) i will not consume any aspirin before i enter the center.
3) i will inform medical professionals that i am about to consume the aspirin before i consume it.

2&3 together will provide ample time for an ambulance to arrive. should the ambulance not arrive, or should it arrive too late, the only conclusion will be criminal negligence, and i will expect that the relevant staff be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

4) my goals tomorrow are not to kill myself, but merely to draw attention to the high level of incompetency in the psychiatrists that i'm dealing with. i've spoken to several, and they all believe i am bluffing when i claim i am suicidal. but, i am not bluffing. the fact that i am not bluffing is the key point i need to get across. if there are professional consequences for gross incompetence in misdiagnosis, i believe they are appropriately enforced, in context. but the important point is that i'm able to get to a doctor that understands that i am not bluffing.

abstractly, i am reversing the work or die ultimatum that the market places on all of us and directing it at the doctors. they have the choice to diagnose or be held liable for the consequences. and, i'm a smart, and creative person - i can ensure that there are dramatic consequences.

the severity of these stunts will increase until the papers are filled out. i will broadcast certain aspects of the stunt before they occur, but not so much as would prevent them.

the one thing i want to make clear is that i have no intention of harming anybody else directly, through physical means.

however, the threat to myself will increase with each stunt as the necessity of diagnosis becomes increasingly clear and the liability for the doctors becomes increasingly dramatic.

i want to be clear that the only acceptable outcomes from my perspective are getting the papers signed or committing suicide; there is no third option.

so, this is all entirely preventable, if the right choice is made to fill out the papers.

the title is indeed some kind of weird civil war era troll baiting.

"yankees try confederate food"

who the fuck talks like that...

i can't believe he's still doing this skit...

triumph may very well be the most successful sock puppet comedian in american history.

i think you need to be careful with this animal.

he was obviously expecting you to throw him meat, and turned his back on you when you didn't. intentional or not, that's teasing it, and teasing a tiger isn't a good idea. it demonstrated it's displeasure.

the big area may seem like a good idea, but you kind of can't have it both ways with a "pet" tiger. you either need to leave it in your house and treat it like a dog, or you need to leave it in an enclosure and treat it like a wild animal. the reason is that the tiger is spending it's "alone time" being a tiger, rather than being a dog or a pet, which enforces various instinctual tiger habits. like eating humans, for example, which happen to be a part of a tiger's natural diet. there's an evolutionary relationship, there; a predator-prey relationship. don't forget that. but it's not really a consequence of a tiger being "wild" - the same thing happens when you leave a dog outside all of the time.

it's easy to think "a tiger should have a big area". and maybe that's true. but, a tiger in a big area stops being a pet and starts being a tiger. what's important is that that shift in mindset is not just understood abstractly but enforced concretely.

it seems like you want to put a lot of effort into this thing. and it's easy to anthropomorphize. but i see a lot of warning signs in this video, and need to request extreme caution.

as i grew older, i'm consistently amazed at how far-reaching the satire on the simpsons truly was.

that's dr. hibbert, right there. clear as day.

it's easy to ridicule them as backwards savages or whatever, but they've got somewhat of a point. they've been eating this stuff for centuries, but it just appears now? see, there's an answer to that or there isn't; i know records in the region are likely to be scant, but there must be a way to demonstrate that transmitting disease from "bush meat" is not new.

further, there's a history of industry acting like that. example: when the auto industry shut down public transit in detroit and toronto so that people would have to buy cars. and oil. you'd have to expect industry to try and demonize the black market any way it can. waving your hands at it doesn't negate the fundamental truth.

worse, we bloody well know that whites have done some pretty terrible things regarding vaccines and viruses, much of it aimed at blacks. every once in a while, you continue to hear stories about how involuntary sterilization still happens throughout the united states and also in western canada. that's just a surface observation on a global eugenics system that can get - and has gotten - downright gruesome.

so, it's one thing to point out that they're jumping to conclusions - and it's completely correct to point it out. but, you can't write their suspicions off. every single thing i heard in this video is an entirely plausible hypothesis. and, in the end, we may very well learn that there's a level of truth in some of it.

tigers can't pass the mirror test, which means that if you raise a young tiger with dogs then it will grow up thinking that it's a dog. worse, the dogs can't pass the mirror test either, so they think the tiger is just another dog. what you're seeing is hierarchical pack behaviour; none of the animals understand the danger they're in. which means there isn't really a danger.

it's interesting to note the practice of treeing cougars, who are thought to be the cheetah's closest relative. the logic in the video seems reasonable, and it would likely hold if you're talking about a wild cheetah vs. your cute golden retriever. but, you don't have to get as big and violent as a pit bull to instill a legitimate level of fear in most species of wild cats.

i think that variation is consequently the important factor. if 100 controlled experiments were carried out, i'd guess the cheetah would win something like 70 of them. but, i think there are some pit bulls that could pull it off.

i would expect that this dog will eventually maul it's owner for the purposes of eating it. that's like owning a pet tiger, basically.

it's horrific police state violence and everything, but you have to admit the guy deserves a darwin award.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-0uqFTBclo

we don't understand the causes and consequently can't make predictions; you can't take this seriously. however, the exceedingly weak maximum we're falling from right now does suggest that we can expect another five or six years of cold weather in the northern hemisphere. that's a long way from predicting an ice age. but it's absolutely an annoyance that the mainstream models need to come to terms with, and this is consequently worth listening to - even with that caveat. it's not as simple as to say more sun = more hot (otherwise mercury would be hotter than venus, right...), even though it comes off that way if you're standing in eastern north america, but the reality is that the strength of the sun seems to have a historical effect on the path the jetstream takes over the great lakes, and that that is and will continue to be a far more dominant weather occurrence than any kind of radiative process.......

if the sun rebounds in the next cycle, the result could be massive and almost sudden warning in a way that could be flat out catastrophic. and, while it didn't happen, i was hoping that the little bump at the maximum was going to be enough to save us from the worst of it for at least this winter.

but, for now, it seems like the medium term forecast in eastern north america is going to be very cold for the next several years. as the rest of the world warms...

as others have pointed out, the elamites had nothing to do with the kurds. there's almost two thousand years of history separating the decline of the elamites (and rise of the persians) and the first mention of the kurds in the arab invasions.

the kurds were probably merely displaced persians, fleeing the arab invasion. they have no history before that point in time.

the elamites would have been the westward extent of the indus valley civilization, rather than a euphrates-tigris one. the elamites are also your "black persians", but they would have been of indian rather than african background.

Murşil Manavis
İranians are Elamite origin.Kurds are Assyrian origin.Stop lying!

Murşil Manavis
+Pedram Mir What is real?Actually situation more complicated.Answers to your questions is perhaps in this! 

bznn
+Murşil Manavis kurds are not assyrian in origin. you stop lying .

Murşil Manavis
+bznn oh please! Kurds are Ancient Assyrian and Aramaic may be a hybrid. http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=19564#.U9Nn8vl_uT8

deathtokoals
+Murşil Manavis kurds are definitely not assyrians. there's actually a very sad history here, in kurdish responsibility for the assyrian genocide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_genocide

the kurds are not an ancient people. the name translates to something like "wanderers" and only first appears in the arab invasions. they were probably persian refugees from that period, who were kicked out of iraq by colonizing arabs.

bznn
+deathtokoalas kurds dosen't have a history. historian are trying to find but. I will gurantee you its useless. you cannot trace back their ancestors. they might of been here before anyone. point is you wil never. and I say NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER find their linage. PERIOD. Stop looking !!

"they were probably persian refugees from that period, who were kicked out of iraq by colonizing arabs."

"Proabably" is not enough. I tell you this as facts...you have better chance finding aliens, than find where they come from.

they have no relation dna to elam, medes or persian empire.

Murşil Manavis
Please read carefully my link!

bznn
+Murşil Manavis you have no real proof like many historians. just  thoeries. I have better argument. I'm gonna say kurds are gentically enginered by aliens. you can prove me wrong? NO. becuase you don't know where kurds come from. its just thoeries you have found. someone who has no history and have no forfathers meaning no direct dna. meaning my argument will stand for 1000 years or more. becasue you will never find their linage lol.

they are untraceable like the perfect murder !

Murşil Manavis
+bznn dude this is science.

deathtokoalas
well, it's more than probably. it's extremely likely. arabs move in, kick the persian-speaking people out, leaving them as "tent dwellers" to their north.

what is absolutely clear is that they are a product of the islamic invasion of sassanid persia. there isn't really another way to make sense of that fact.

the dna has to be interpreted very carefully, given that their ethnogenesis appears to be around the year 800 CE. with a date that late, in that area of the world, it's more or less useless in coming to much of any kind of conclusion other than that they're from that area of the world. there are exceptions like jews and assyrians, based on religion, but kurds don't fit the exclusionary exception. so, it's not going to help much.

i mean, what your link says is that there exists a genetic substratum under the iranian invasion. that doesn't say anything of origins. it just points out that when the iranians got there, they had sex with the people who already lived there.

bznn
+deathtokoalas they have no relation to persians from culture to language.  medes, elam and the perisan empire is as far as it goes for iranic and perisans.

Murşil Manavis
In addition, the Iranians are not the true Aryan. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707641081

deathtokoalas
+bznn well, they rather clearly do. and the elamites were not persians..

bznn
the oldest cave in the kurdish area is 60000 BC.

deathtokoalas 
+Murşil Manavis i don't know what "true aryan" means, but i stopped reading that article when i noticed it cited the charlatan colin renfrew.

well, ok, i read it...

i'd be hesitant to connect the movement of dravidian into india via farming. i'm sure there were population movements with the spread of farming, and that looks like the right direction. but that seems too late for dravidian. renfrew's influence here has not been positive.

when you said "true aryan", and i saw renfrew, i was expecting the usual noah's ark nonsense, but, thankfully, this article actually reads sforza correctly and upholds gimbutas on the matter, creating the proper invasion route around the caspian.

so, i don't know what you're talking about, what "true aryan" means or why you cited the article in support of that. the article upholds the standard kurgan dispersal theory, while being a little less informed about the age of dravidian.

bznn
+deathtokoalas it means pure race. by that meaning langauge and culture. not not skinn color. by that defination, they had to be green or purple. cuz black,yellow, brown and white is taken lol.

deathtokoalas
+bznn i think most experts would agree that the closest thing to a pure "indo-european" culture were the balts, pre-christianization. latvians, lithuanians.

the article says nothing about anything of the sort. it just speaks of the well understood indo-iranian invasions from the caspian, presents genetic evidence of a movement of people from iran to india during the neolithic and entirely speciously connects that to a movement of dravidian languages.

bznn
+deathtokoalas the cloest they have got to their origin is the zagros mountain. this is the earliest foundings of kurds.

deathtokoalas
+bznn that is correct. but it's a little silly to notice that the kurds showed up exactly when the arabs invaded, note the large population displacements that occurred and then not draw conclusions.

bznn
just their luck ? :P

Elam and assyrians and came first . to interrupt their way of living.

invasions by the armies of every nation that ever acquired fame and name in the Eastern world’s history-Assyrian, Parthian, Greek, Roman, Persian, the Arabs under Muhammad, and the Mongols- the fine stability of the race stand out, for among all the people of these lands they, the Kurds, alone have withstood every army, and retained pure their language and blood, and claim with a pride of race to which none can grudge admiration, that they are the pure Aryan, the “holders of the hills and possessors of the tongue.”

they have been the first (indigious) in zagros and antollia. both were parts of mesopotamia.

deathtokoalas
the indigenous peoples of these regions are not iranian. the iranians are invaders from the north. in very ancient times, this area would have been a conflict zone between insular caucasus mountain peoples to the north and more warlike semites to the south.

bznn
+deathtokoalas Again kurds are not Iranian. Get that through your head lol!

Later, the out-of-Medes theory of the Kurds was made popular worldwide by the Russian Orientalist Vladimir Fedorovich Minorsky (1877-1966).

Kurds are traditionally regarded as Iranians and of Iranian origin, and therefore as Indo-Europeans, mainly, because they speak Iranian. This hypothesis is largely based on linguistic considerations and was predominantly developed by linguists. In contrast to such believes, newest DNA-research of advanced Human Anthropology indicates, that in earliest traceable origins, forefathers of Kurds were obviously descendants of indigenous (first) Neolithic Northern Fertile Crescent aborigines, geographically mainly from outside and northwest of what is Iran of today in Near East and Eurasia. Oldest ancestral forefathers of Kurds were millennia later linguistically Iranianized in several waves by militarily organized elites of (R1a1) immigrants from Central Asia. These new findings lead to the understanding, that neither were aborigine Northern Fertile Crescent Eurasian Kurds and ancient Old-Iranian speaker (R1a1) immigrants from Asia one and the same people, nor represent the later, R1a1 dominated migrating early Old-Iranian-speaker elites from Asia, oldest traceable ancestors of Kurds. Rather, constitute both historically completely different populations and layers of Kurdish forefathers, each with own distinct genetic, ethnical, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. These new insights indicate first inter-disciplinary findings in co-op- eration with two international leading experts in their disciplines, Iranologist Gernot L. Windfuhr, Ann Arbor, and DNA Genealogist Anatole A. Klyosov, Boston, USA.

http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperDownload.aspx?paperID=19564

deathtokoalas
+bznn and, as i've pointed out, the article is incoherent in terms of defining ethnicity.

the kurds speak an iranian language, follow iranian customs and identify as an iranian people. the iranian government views them as displaced persians. the genetic evidence indicates that there's been some mixing, but it doesn't say anything else. it's not correct to suggest that the people that lived in the zagros mountains before the islamic invasion were kurds, whether one can construct some kind of genetic continuity or not.

stated a second time: what that article states is that invading iranians had sex with the indigenous people of the region (semites) and the result is what we today call kurds.

but, putting aside the fact that you're not understanding the article, the genetic argument is simply weak in terms of defining culture.

genetically, palestinians are not arabs, but jews. that is, they are the arabized descendants of the indigenous jewish inhabitants of the region, who have intermixed with arab colonizers. but, nobody is going to look at their dna and say "you are not arabs".

one could also look at spain and france. genetically, the people of the region are mostly celts. but, they are the cultural descendants of romans. nobody is going to argue that they are celts, not romans.

bznn
+deathtokoalas Exactly, We have no prove what they were before. But they were Iraniazed. Thats why they are related now.

Here is the story that goes...

They were from southside of Mesopotamia and got invaded by the assyrians from north. They fleed to Zagros mountian. There they got invaded and mixed up with the Medes. There the Medes invaded Assyria and conquered them.

deathtokoalas
+bznn i don't think there's any evidence of such a thing. we can tell stories all day, but it's not worthwhile.

nor is there any evidence of a kurdish people through the lengthy roman-persian wars. if they existed in antiquity, we would expect them to exist in roman records. they simply don't.

the kurdish dialect is also relatively recent.

perhaps it's as simple as it appears: perhaps there were no kurds before the arabs created them through displacement.

bznn
+deathtokoalas have it ever occured to you that he kurds legacy got wiped out of history? like ISIS are doing right now with babel and assyrians?

deathtokoalas 
+bznn this is not a grounded argument.

but, i'm arguing that the kurds were probably the iranians (or iranized mesopotamians) that occupied the area now called iraq before they were driven out by arab settlers. that wasn't documented well; very little of the consequences of the population movements that accompanied the spread of islam were documented well, because the colonizers simply didn't care. they didn't do body counts...

so, sort of. but i don't want to get stuck in the conspiracy theory view of history, here.

bznn
+deathtokoalas Most of the kurdish legacy wiped out this is no consipracy. Or you could say the real iranians who lives in Iran today are not the real persians. The ones who lived in Iran and Turkey are Imposters. The owner of that land belonged to Kurds. Just like the real Europeans were black not white like you.  You are an imposter and cave dweller lol.

deathtokoalas
+bznn ...or maybe the history doesn't exist because the kurds are not an ancient people, but one arising from events in the historical period.

i think we've hit an impasse, here.

bznn
+deathtokoalas And what do you define as ancient?

deathtokoalas
+bznn do you recognize the foreign policy implications of the view that iran "belongs to the kurds"?

i'm a canadian of mixed ancestry, part of it localized to the middle east and almost none of it from western europe (my winter whiteness is actually mostly finnish/uralic - north asian - and i get downright brown in the summer.). i wouldn't know what a real european is or identify with being one. but i do recognize that the inhabitants of much (not all) of europe before the kurgan invasions where likely mostly of olive complexion.

bznn
+deathtokoalas  Europeans are liars and thives. They have way of stealing history. Did you know bethoven was black. Thoven Bey was his real name. Socrates was black also. The Jews in the freaking Bible was black. The Americans and the Canadians are Europeans in origin. European also the reason why Kurds have no land. Read about world war 1. All you can do is steal history. Egyptian also black. Did you know you are subhuman?  you are a pale face devil, and you will pay for your ancestors did.  the fact is you have no history of your own.  you are a cave bitch commimg from the mount caucus. you are a Causcasian. A so called White.  an imposter of land. Your real home is back in the cave. Read your history. Canada was never the land of your caucus ancestors. So technically you have no right living there. you also didn't answer my question earlier . You said Kurds are not ancient people. So I am asking you again. WHAT DO YOU DEFINE AS ACIENT PEOPLE ?? And  I don't even know if you are a girl. And that person in the pic looks like a tranny lol !

deathtokoalas
+bznn *plonk*

horse dreamer
No the Elamites are Ahwaz nothing to do with Kurds or iranies

deathtokoalas
it's not clear, really, exactly where they came from or exactly what they looked like, but elam seems to have been some kind of meeting point between the pre-semite inhabitants of mesopotamia (sumerians) and the indigenous inhabitants of india (dravidians). it makes more sense to me to think that they probable expanded from the harappans, rather than the other way around, given the dates involved and the directions of influence; the sumerians seem to have come down from the caucasus mountains, whereas the elamites seem to have more in common with ancient india. but, barring some remarkable discovery, this is unlikely to ever really truly be settled..

horse dreamer
Maybe, but the Ahwaz I spoke to said they are, they also speak like iraqies, there accent, there just arabozied and yeah there Semitic, some of them are still sabian mandians and speak the old language, same thing in Iraq

deathtokoalas
one of the very few things we can be certain about the elamites is that they were neither semitic nor iranian, which is partly why they're so hard to place in any kind of system. we have elamite scripts, and they don't fit into any language group very well, but they seem to have enough similarity to tamil that some fringe theories have developed. the dravidian connection really seems almost inescapable, through a crude process of elimination.

but, to me, the stronger arguments have to do with the extensive trading networks that existed between elam and india, indicating that they seem to have seen themselves as culturally similar. we're talking about cultural trading - pottery, for example. when you see that, it usually indicates a cultural continuity. further, we're pretty sure that the elamites were probably mostly dark skinned (as in indian dark skinned), whereas we have enough evidence in the form of old statues to conclude that the sumerians looked vaguely like russians. they were white.

the agricultural theory i referenced above wants to argue that the spread of farming brought the movement of peoples in an eastward direction, but the ethnic and economic relationships i pointed out are not at all consistent with this idea. if the movement of farming spread any kind of language or ethnicity from west to east during the neolithic, that movement had clearly been undone by the rise of urbanization. renfrew is basically pushing a noah's ark story, and it simply doesn't add up with the facts.

if your friends look like arabized persians, they probably are. if they look more like balochis or pakistanis or tamils, they may have a deeper genetic history in the region.

horse dreamer
As u said we don't know that much, maybe Iran should let us go and study them in Ahwaz, they don't look Persians, they look like iraqies a lot , some blush call them selves Arabs lol

deathtokoalas
yeah. well, there was certainly a lot of arab immigration into persia after about the year 700 ce. but, these people would be as far removed (probably more removed...) from elam as english settlers in north america are from the indigenous population. we're talking at least a thousand years before present for the arab migration - and well over a thousand years before that since the fall of elam. and, of course, there's a very large iranian migration in between these things.

you're really simply not going to find elamites or descendants of elamites in today's world. the closest thing is probably the balochis, who today speak an iranian language.

Azari Parsian 
Todays persians in Iran are descendants of Elamites and Northern Mesopotamians. Barely any of them have Iranian ancestry.

deathtokoalas
there are plenty of ethnic iranians left in iran, which is seen mostly in their lighter coloured skin, which is very prevalent, but the most recent population movement into the region was turkic and mongolian. large parts of iran, today, historical and modern, are primarily turkic.

we can't really define what an elamite is, but they probably looked like modern baluchis and what is left of them is probably there.

there were never a significant amount of "mesopotamians" in iran, and there is virtually no trace of them there, today.

to get your head around the turkicization of historical iran (which includes most of central asia), you have to understand just how brutal the mongolian invasions truly were.

entire cities were razed to the ground. millions of people were slaughtered. there was mass depopulation. this was followed by mass rapes by the thousands, which repopulated the cities. it was a real ethnic replacement in just about the most brutal terms imaginable.

over time, the turks adopted the iranian language and customs. and, you'll see plenty of iranian markers in the modern population.

but, a broad genetic survey of iran identifies a very large percentage of the population as genetic descendants of turks - regardless of the language they speak.

Murşil Manavis 
+deathtokoalas this was done genetic studies. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707643523

Azari Parsian 
+Murşil Manavis I highly doubt the elamites were indian origin. You have evidence showing this?

Murşil Manavis 
+Azari Parsian http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707641081

Azari Parsian 
+Murşil Manavis Interesting i found this too http://www.israel-a-history-of.com/elamites.html

deathtokoalas 
+Murşil Manavis i still don't like the direction of dravidian suggested in both these articles (i think it had to come from the east to the west much later than the neolithic diffusion), but what i'm saying is consistent with that study. mtdna is female. so, it traces the flow of genetic information from mother to daughter, down many generations.

the turkicization of iran would be something that happened in the y-dna, on the male side.

the historical records tell us that modern iran was repopulated by turkish men raping iranian women. what you're seeing in this study is what you would expect to see if that history was accurate, at least on the female side.

Murşil Manavis 
reasonable but no references.

Azari Parsian 
+Murşil Manavis although, i do agree the Dravidian languages originated in the zagros mountains.

deathtokoalas
+Murşil Manavis i find the historical sources more convincing, and will tend to reject the dna studies when they don't conform to the history. it's easy to measure dna, but it's much harder to make sense of it.

i mean, i'm not suggesting that iran is entirely turkish (and turk, itself, is hard to define in terms of y dna, as it's a mix itself - you've got r, q and others in there, because central asia was a place where nomads met and intermingled, rather than a place where lineages settled and branched out. the best guess is probably that what we call turks were mostly the result of white men intermingling with asian women, creating white y dna attached to asian features). you're going to find substantial indigenous iranian (r - but not discernible from the turkish r) and arab (j) in there, too. and, it's all easy enough to understand. but, i hope i've gotten across that the diversity in iran really creates a hell of a problem in trying to disentangle it.

you can really work this out well enough using phenotypes. historical iranians and sumerians are pasty, european white. semitic people are darker skinned. we don't know for sure what elamites looked like, but we think they probably looked like indians. turkish people are light but not white and have vaguely asian features - likely as a result of them being a mix of white and asian peoples. because they tend to carry r, it was probably mostly male white intermixing with female asian that spawned turkic.

white iranians exist, but are a minority. most have light but not quite white skin and vaguely eastern features, indicating very strong turkish and arabic admixture. but you can't truly separate one r from the other. the asian features increase in numbers as one moves eastward and northwards from tehran and into central asia - where r (iranian/turkic) remains dominant and j (arab) begins to disappear.

Murşil Manavis 
+deathtokoalas but most of Anatolian Turks are indigenous people of Anatolia. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166218X08003661 and Iranians are hybrid. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0080673

Azari Parsian 
+Murşil Manavis also same with most persians of iran,

deathtokoalas 
+Murşil Manavis i agree that a good guess is that most anatolian turks are basically greeks and most iranians are hybrids, but what i'm saying is that it's very hard to correlate the genetic markers well.

to summarize what i said in the last post is this:

- there were plenty of arabs (j) in iran before the mongol invasions. but, the majority white iranians would have no doubt been r.

- when the turks invaded, they brought a bunch of stuff - c, q, n. but, they were also primarily r, because they were themselves a mix of iranians and mongolians.

so, there was an iranian r before the mongols. then, the mongols brought an iranian r. the dna cannot tell you who was there before the slaughter and who wasn't because it's the same y-dna haplotype.

you'd have to find some other marker, like a marker connected with "asian eyes". but, we don't do these studies because we like studies related to direct paternal (y-dna) or maternal (mtdna) descent, because we think this is more useful.

until we do these other studies, we're really better off relying on (1) the written history we have and (2) the phenotypes we can observe that uphold that history.

btw, that study on iran is again on mtdna. you really need to find one for y-dna to see what i'm saying.