Dunno about you but...

[Fiach]

....This scared the s#!t out of me :

stupid americans Asked simple questions but you will be surprised by some of the answers

[Art Blade]

 ???

I had to stop after 2 minutes, can't stand it

[durian]

I watched this vid before at another forum but it still cracks me up when I'm watching this again  ;D

[Art Blade]

hehehe :-D In my case, all I was thinking was, "why would I want to spend my time on other people's lack of education or ignorance?" so I educated myself and ignored them.  :-()

[durian]

I skimmed the vid, only watched about 1-2 minutes.

Some of the most hilarious answers (IMO) are:
- Who is Fidel Castro ?
- A singer

- Which country is in the axis of evil ?
- Germany 

- Who won the VN War ?
- We did

;D  :-D

[Art Blade]

yep, hehehehe, and

- "what currency does the United Kingdom use?"
-"Queen Elisabeth money?" 

[mandru]

I would have liked to have seen at least one person interviewed from beginning to end to see how he was selecting them, where he was intercepting these people (most looked like they were coming straight out of the restrooms of a Greyhound bus terminal after a long long ride) the selection and approach process, as well as the chat up and set up to get these people to agree to answer questions.

Presented as a humorous news bit it was a mash up of quick scene cuts and splices separating answers from questions asked.  Admittedly there were maps that were provided where the countries were mislabeled.  Most notedly Australia was seemingly the maligned in this being re-dubbed as Iran and N. Korea and (God forbid) France!  I'm pretty sure given the chance I could fire off ten or so quick but carefully selected questions to this interviewer and with the luxury of an editing room remix his answers to make him look like a drooling imbecile.  I'm just saying not every person interviewed got every question wrong.  Well there were a few true losers in the mix.  ::)

But then I can't argue the uninformed nature of many people here in the U.S. (note that to be completely fair the description "Americans" covers two continents).  Most lead a globally carefree life under the premise that we've elected people to attend to that for us and it is within reason that individuals would be more concerned with working, family and getting through their daily lives.  Not everyone needs to be an international news correspondent and most of them wouldn't go out of their way to try to belittle another person by making them look stupid but it doesn't stop us all from having opinions.  Good or bad.

Maybe he would have been given even better material to poke us Americans in the eye with by attending any Ivy League college frat party in full swing and asking the same questions.

:(

1. The Fed takes over issuing student loans
2. Colleges seeing that there's lots of easy money for loans continue to raise tuition and fees year after year
3. Students being told "w@&k smarter not harder" take out loans that puts them in debt for 20-30 years whether they get a job in their field of studies or not
4. Go back to step 2 and raise the fees again

The outcome being that most people (if they are able to find something) end up in jobs that require some level of a college degree but it's almost never in their field of study which means almost any diligent w@&k oriented person could have stepped in and done the job making the requirement for a degree meaningless.  ???

It used to be that a hard working student could attend medical school and hold down part time jobs to put themselves through school.  That condition no longer exists.  Now a doctor comes out of the diploma mills with crippling debt and will most likely be stuffed into an Health Maintenance Organization where the decisions for how health care will be distributed is made by a panel of financial administrators instead of doctors and based on cost effectiveness instead of patient need or how badly doctors want to apply their skills.

*Deep breath... 1... 2... 3... to 10*

We have a president who on the eve of 9-11 (just a couple days ago) gave a nationally televised speech to rally support in his plan to aid the rebels in Syria who are directly linked to the very same terrorists who committed the attack on the twin trade towers in NYC.  Americans stupid?  I would suspect that insanity may be a better description.

We've all heard the definition of insanity "doing the same thing over and over expecting different results'.  I've come to understand the opposite side of that coin in defining sanity is something like "The ability to recognize and bring the most truth into any given situation - Absolute truth = absolute sanity."

Spoiler

*Damn! I have to say a few things now that I'm fired up.  Sorry PZ I'll try to maintain some decorum.  :-\\ *

The really unbelievable part of his plan is that he wants to (in my admittedly highly biased conservative point of view) attempt what I consider to be a freaking international incident in the form of a "Gangsta Style Drive-by" to let Assad know he's irritated with him.  Could it be anymore obvious that having someone who spends more time with union leaders and delegates from the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) than he does with our own congress and considers himself to be (and is revered as) a Rock Star who like to hang around with all the paparazzi harassed "In Crowd" for president really sucks.

The unholy marriage of Fed and teacher's Unions have turned our schools into an institution for keeping teachers employed not for education.  Under this president (the leader of the "We'll drag them to it" party) the fed has taken over almost all of the nation's educational programs by pumping massive amounts of money into the already over bloated teachers unions is currently bringing about a paradigm change in the teaching models.  Our schools are supposed to be controlled at the level of each State not by the Fed.  The fed's interest in controlling schools is to train students with a nationally uniform study agenda to remove all opposing opinions from future citizens.  Look to the fed for all your life's decisions. They'll take care of everything for you.

For example math teachers are being instructed to adopt the point of view that it is more important for students to be able to explain how they arrived at their answers for a math problem than it is for the answers to be right.  I was stunned when I saw a video clip of a visiting fed official explain this newly designed concept to math teachers at a school district conference.  This is math being described not debate club!  :D

And that's just seagull poop on the tip of an iceberg mostly concealed through fast talk, subterfuge, lots of U.S. tax dollars being spread around to grease the right palms and lies hiding even more nefarious corruption of our youth.

Students given approved radical concepts by their teachers are being told "Don't bother talking to your parents about this because they're old and won't understand.  Their not smart like you".  School w@&k is being performed on computers at school and parents are not being allowed to see the content of their children's curriculum consisting of federally prepared class materials that educate the children to divorce themselves from the sentimental nonsense of things like patriotism, values of family relations and morality.  You don't like something your parents are doing?  Report them and the president will find someone who will take much better care of you.  How many guns does your dad have? and on and on.  >:((

Let's face it - The Dems love loose morals and especially sluts and many of their policies strive to crank them out en masse but then to be as honest as possible doesn't every guy at some level have at least a passing soft spot for tramps and cheap bimbos.  It's just that some of us are able to maintain something approaching moral standards.

Make the public a slave to the government dole and in turn they'll keep voting the party that gives the best swag to stay on the teat they are addicted to.

It's enough to make me glad I'll be dead before it all of what is headed our way comes to full fruition.

[Art Blade]

that was quite a rant  :-D

Note that my first reply was that I couldn't stand it (that nonsense) and the second reply did not contain "stupid" but instead, uneducated and to top it off, ignorant. Because we were shown how someone was either uneducated or ignorant or both, but what the hell does that prove? Like you said, we're covering two continents and a handful of people can't possibly represent that. Plus, like you said, we don't know under which circumstances those "interviews" were conducted.

You were absolutely right about what I call the manipulative nature of that clip. If 10 people were interviewed and only 1 of them got the answer wrong and if only that one poor sod was presented as someone representing all Americans, we wouldn't know. That sort of asking "random people on the street" is something that's not to be taken seriously at all. Which is why I don't like that sort of entertainment at all. You don't even know whether they were paid to say something stupid or if they got it right, whether they had been told the correct answer before recording the reply. Stuff like that is not representative at all, it is simply manipulative. That clip however is representative of what I hate about TV in general and why I don't watch any.

[fragger]

No matter what country you're in, you can find dunderheads if you go looking for them - and if you have plenty of time on your hands, a capacity for clever film editing and a penchant for self-aggrandisement coupled with selective maliciousness, you can make the population of any country look as stupid as you want.

What makes me angry about that clip (I've seen it before) is that it presents Australians in a worse light than the supposedly backward geographically-challenged Americans it attempts to poke fun at. That deadshit who was asking the questions is an embarrassment and an insult who needs a good stout whack upside the head with a 3-iron, and I'd like to be the one to administer it. He seems to conveniently forget the countless contributions that America has made to the world over the centuries that have led him to be able to enjoy the quality of life he takes for granted today. Just one example - the inventiveness of the Wright brothers, whose efforts ultimately allowed him to be able to fly to the US in order to have a good wank there. One example from thousands.

Not to mention the fact that if it hadn't been for America in the 1940s, that jerk wouldn't be free today to indulge in his pathetic little attention-seeking stunts.

And I have to add, that obnoxious dick is about as representative of Australians as the victims of his witless pranks are of Americans. He's a smug arsehole (I know who he is) who should have been neutered at birth to prevent him from causing a further buildup of malodorous slime in the shallow end of the human gene pool that he so enjoys wallowing in.

Whenever I've seen that clip (or bits of it - I can't watch very much of it without getting cranky), I feel like I want to go and apologize to any Americans I can find for our country inflicting such a complete and utter trog on them. In fact, I will - on behalf of my country, I apologize to all Americans for not only throwing up that worthless piece of s#!t but also for enabling it to get out of our country and spread its self-serving brand of infantile sprog in yours :-[

[Art Blade]

His deeds are neither your fault nor responsibility, fragger, you simply can't apologise for him. However, you are an ambassador on your own and by golly, I wish all Australians were like you. Well.. that might be understood in a way I didn't mean it..  :-D let's just say, you're doing a damn fine job representing your country. :)

[mandru]

Was he Australian?  ????

fragger I didn't even catch that and it wasn't the basis for my rant.  :-[

Guys the U.S. is coming apart in at least a dozen different ways.  We are so unbalanced from the axial ideals of our founders and spinning so fast I wouldn't make a $10 bet that there will even be a U.S. in 15 years.

The trend to ridicule national pride is so prevalent that it even infuses the oval office of the White House.  It's only natural for the jackals and other scavengers  to swoop in when a great beast is dying.  My frustration is that our mortal wounds are all self-inflicted.

[fragger]

Thank you Art, that's a very nice thing to say :)

mandru, whether or not the U.S. is in trouble, that guy's attitude doesn't sit well with me. I know your rant wasn't about him being an Australian. That's my rant, not yours :-() I know you're too intelligent a man to evaluate a nationality solely by the words or actions of a few of its individuals, and certainly not by one such as that arrogant Aussie berk.

There is no shortage of ignorant bozos in this country either. If our population was increased about 15-fold to match America's, we'd probably have about the same number of idiots here. What that guy did was a prime example of a pot calling a kettle black.

This country too has its problems and I see it changing in ways I don't like. But there are still plenty of good and knowledgeable people here, as I'm sure there are in the U.S., and I wouldn't like it if they were unfairly misrepresented for the entertainment value of folks in another country via a process of selective humiliation. I think both nationalities can laugh at themselves and can take some good-natured ribbing, but grossly distorted implications such as that the ones that guy was putting across go over the line. It's just insulting to the intelligent people of both our nationalities.

I couldn't help but wonder how many of those people he made look foolish w@&k in jobs that actually contribute something of value to their communities, as opposed to wasting time engaging in pointless attention-seeking exercises that benefit nobody other than the one seeking attention.

I still think he's a wanker ::)

[Art Blade]

you see:

Show that video to idiots capable of understanding the English language as such and they will "like it" with a " :-X" on facebook and the likes and even recommend it to their "friends."

Show that video to thinking individuals with an intellectual capacity exceeding that of a peanut, and you'll get a cascade of exquisite rants condemning those who publish and spread that manipulative content, wishing there was a way to abolish such polemic toxic waste.

:-D

[mandru]

The insanity deepens and the ominous hand of the death clock looms closer to midnight.  :D

Spoiler

Here in the U.S. today is Constitution Day.  On September 17th 1787 our constitution was signed into effect and has served us very well ever since.  It's not perfect but then neither are we.  It does however serve very well to give us a grounding point to recenter on when trending politics of the day drag us too far away from the ideals our country was founded on.

Our president *spits* earlier this morning celebrated this day by waving a congressionally enacted law we have that is intended to prevent a U.S. citizen from giving arms and military aid to known terrorists or any country (or enemy faction) that has openly declared war against us.

He knows that these people have sworn to bring about the fall of the U.S. and continue to strive in that effort.  The fact that he went through the moves to wave that established law so that he could announce that he was going to assist them shows he is in full knowledge that these people are no friends of ours and that he (our president) would be breaking the law by assisting them in any way.  ???

I think this mad man really believes that the oval office is a genie lamp and all he has to do is keep rubbing it to get infinite wishes.

There have been a lot of speculative comments about Russia's leader Putin tweaking our president's nose regarding the planned assault on Assyria but I think it comes down to a powerful well established tyrant being able to easily put a lesser and bumbling petty tyrant in his place.  All our dog in the fight over Assyria (that very few sane people here want in the first place) can do now to save face is say "Oh, uh... It was our plan all along to have Russia step in and help us."

If we have a single law maker in the U.S. with anything approaching a spine I would love to see treason charges filed and the constitutional legality of the actions of a sitting president waving a law so that by doing what he's planning on doing doesn't break it.

[Binnatics]

Lol, I had to read that twice, and think it over again to get the point. And still, it's so complicated.

The world has become too small to be able to ostrich about an ongoing civil war. Political interests have become too obvious, yet too ambiguous with this burning financial crisis, which is in fact a capitalist crisis.
US debt ceiling has to be pushed further up to being able to keep going. This goes on and on. It seems to become a parabolic line the last few years.
US debt is the world's standard for value and trust. If the US is no longer able to meet its debts the worldwide financial system will be upside down and reinvented. The death clock ticking towards the moment suprème where shut-down will have irreversible consequences draws all attention towards this burning point where politics and capitalism meet eachother.

I once stated here somewhere that money acts like gravity; the bigger the amount of money, the more money it will generate. Banks become too big to fail. America is too big to fail. What happens if this goes on and on, with no stopping? In terms of gravity it will result in a super massive black hole.
With such a monster knocking on my door I would be happy to be able to distract the folks a bit with some muscle-war-on-terror-talk, although that would also show my lack of power in the Syria conflict.

I hope for BO that he can find some solace in his better half. A big kiss for Obama then

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