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There is no authority, spiritual or otherwise, so... no.

Obviously a 10 minute video on this topic is going to be simplified and fail to highlight a number of relevant points. It's designed for the kind of person in our society who doesn't read books, who has no experience, who gets most/all of their knowledge from quick internet sources. But at least there is a source for these kind of people. A hundred years ago, people who couldn't (afford/be bothered to) read books or get out and experience the world or have discussions with others just didn't know anything at all. People like that still abound, and these days a quick YouTube video can help to enlighten them a little -- and maybe even you, too. Refusing to watch it because it's on YouTube, or calling it a load of crap because it doesn't fit snugly within your violently capitalist POV, highlights something about you. The video does highlight some relevant points, offering some interesting things to talk about... and this topic is on page 2 already without most of them even having been mentioned! Religion, culture, government organization, infrastructure, geography, etc etc -- in the modern world, obviously all of these things play a role to some degree in the prosperity of a nation. And Michael S is right in saying that it's not always obvious which is cause and which effect. In my opinion, though, in the modern world, everything mentioned in the video is responsible to some extent for the failure of any given nation's prosperity, and all are worth discussing.

Dude.. you're ignoring all available evidence.. I won't go through it again, but will pick up on one thing: The meteor was not noticed until it entered our atmosphere. We had no idea. So yes, assuming we had some way to deal with them, the trick might be seeing them early, but... we generally don't..

Any asteroid or comet? Completely obliterate? Keep in mind that below planets in terms of size we have classified dwarf planets, asteroids (which should really be called planetoids), and comets, among others. Asteroids can be hundreds of kilometres across, and comets tens of km. And there are loads of them... like, loads and loads. They're all over the galaxy, we haven't observed the vast majority of them, and if one were coming at us, it's not guaranteed that we'd see it before it hit. There is a lot of space out there. It's theorized that an asteroid/comet only 10 km across caused the last dinosaur extinction; something like that would be more than enough to wipe out life as we know it. If the object coming towards us is, similarly, 10 km across, and is traveling at around 25 km/sec, it's going to be over 2 million km away just 24 hours before it hits. We would not see something that size from that far away. And even if we had powerful enough telescopes, it would only potentially be visible in the first place if we could see the Sun's light reflected from it; if it's traveling from the other direction, it's dark to us. As for being able to obliterate such an object... to launch a nuclear bomb into space with the accuracy to hit an object, at such short notice, thousands if not millions of km away, traveling at such speed? I really don't think it's likely. And the most powerful nuclear weapon we have would still only (as far as I am aware) be able to break it up into many smaller pieces, many of which would likely hit Earth anyway -- the numerous impacts would probably be just as lethal to us. So.. yeah. 'They' might be lying to us about many things, but I think the maths/science is fairly accurate.

Aren't you against cronyism? Nepotism, cronyism, very much the same. They don't disappear with the government. Education does determine success, to a large degree. Not entirely, we will always be able to find exceptions, but by and large the people I know who had a private education have been far more (academically and economically) successful than those who went to a state school. I find it hard to believe that in a school system run entirely privately, a greater gap would not develop between rich and poor. True. Economy or economic system refers to the production, trade, and consumption of goods between agents. If I farm and you build and sew, we have shelter, clothes, and food to eat. We have formed an economy of two. Given the right circumstances, one of us can easily manipulate the other. There will always be someone who benefits from war, no? To be honest, I agree with you to a large extent. I've left parts of your response out because I feel no need to argue with them any longer. My opinion (as someone influenced greatly by Daoism) is that people should be left free to do what they like -- as long as they're not harming others. A free market is indeed a part of that. Indeed, I've read (on Wikipedia, so I don't know how true it is) that the original proponents of laissez faire were influenced greatly by the concept of wu wei. I was, though, not really impressed by the video or its assertions. I do not think it does a very good job. But I am happier with some of your answers.

Firstly, I'd like to point out that you left my main point entirely unanswered. Namely, "parental/family situation, economic status, education, location", etc. What laws in this free market prevent nepotism? Give poorer people equal opportunity to have their children educated to a satisfactory level? Make sure that areas do not become economically segregated to the point that people miss out on opportunities because of where they are brought up? etc... Your phrasing makes it sound straightforward, but... it is not. The person with the higher quality service/labour and, importantly, the greater ability to market said service/labour, has the greater opportunity to sell their labour to the highest bidders. That person's choice and quality of labour will, much of the time, have been informed in large part by the factors mentioned above. Blame it all on the government? If there were no (or less) government, all the corporations would start behaving well? It's government that corrupts people, not people that corrupt business and government? How? Well, there is... it's called "the economy". It is a system ("a set of connected things or parts* forming a complex whole"), and of course it is manipulable. * the parts being people/their labour Maybe there's a set of laws that would eradicate dishonesty... if there is I would love for you to let us in on the secret..? It "wouldn't make this worse." I at least appreciate your honesty in not claiming that it would make things better in this regard.

I did not say that it does not You know what a "starting point" is, I'm sure: it's the point from where one starts. One isn't "raised to" a starting point, one begins there. I clearly wasn't talking about 'making' every person the same -- somehow giving everyone the exact same intelligences and skills and ambitions etc. And I think you know that. I'm talking about everyone having the same opportunity to understand and exploit the (economic) system. I think it's fairly safe to assume that from a young age a person's parental/family situation, economic status, education, location, and various other factors all have an effect on that person's understanding of the political, economic, and cultural systems in which they grow up and the extent to which they are willing and able to become engrossed in and take advantage of these systems. This is not to say that all poor people grow up to be poor, or that all rich people grow up to be rich. Far from it. I don't need any rags-to-riches stories, I'm well aware of them. They are not the norm, though. In the oh-so-fair and moral free market that the video man is talking about, we're to assume that everyone does fair work for fair pay -- that everyone benefits from simply doing their bit, because everyone is honest and content with their lot. There are no selfish, economically-advantaged people capable of manipulating the system or any particular people or groups of people within it. Nobody benefits from war or poverty. There's no knock-on effect from generation to generation. And having money is proof that you're a moral, hard-working citizen...

Well, under a 'perfect' free market, I'd agree that (most of) what he says holds true. But in no modern society is there a 'perfect' free market, and in no society anywhere or at any time is having money in itself proof of anything. Furthermore... most people do not adequately understand the responsibilities placed upon them -- or, if they do, perhaps do not accept the responsibilities placed upon them -- by the freedom of the market, and are very much susceptible to manipulation by those who do. For a free market to work in the way that he claims it does, everyone would have to be raised from the same starting point, educated to the same level, etc. They are not.

I think they should be saying, "Yes, it is inevitable that something really really big is at some point going to crash into Earth and wipe out life as we know it. And it could happen this month, or even tonight, but it could be another hundred million years from now; the truth is, we probably wouldn't know about it until a second before we were incinerated. Either way, there's nothing anyone can do about it, so don't bother worrying. And it is of course highly unlikely that this lunatic has predicted anything of the sort, so please ignore him."

I'm curious to know what curried grouse would taste like. But not particularly keen on trying it again any time soon.

We can certainly agree on this

The scorpions are fairly tasteless. You're not missing much. When I first went to Wangfujing (the famous food street), my Chinese was quite poor. I was up for eating anything back then, and purchased a skewer of what I thought was horse meat. The crunching of sharp bone alerted me to the fact that I'd just bitten the head off a little bird. Not pleasant. Tonight I had roasted grouse, shot (by someone else) on the moors in the north of England. A very strange flavour, not like any other game bird I've tasted. Yes, many people's diets do not seem to see them comfortably into their later years. My belief, though, is not that vegetarianism itself is healthy -- a veggie diet could consist entirely of lettuce and tomatoes, which would of course be atrocious -- but that a vegetarian diet, if properly balanced, can be as healthy as any other, and perhaps even suit certain people in certain places better than any other diet. Most vegetarians and vegans are unaware of how to manage this. I very much agree with a large part of your outlook. Thanks for your response. I'll keep the book in mind.

Sure, we can describe people in terms of physical and physiological characteristics; we can describe people in terms of their differences. And I have not argued that specific populations do not share certain characteristics; clearly they do. I'm not denying ancestry, I'm not trying to suggest that all humans are exactly the same. No, it is never a clear categorical function. The whole point of the concept of race was to categorize humans into clear groups based on phenotype. This is, as all competent scientists agree, impossible nonsense. If it floats your boat, you can generalize. All white people have less melanin than all black people. All white people are tall? All white people have light eyes? All white people enjoy the music of Frank Sinatra? All white people love to subjugate and murder foreigners?

I'm not contesting that. But this does not separate and "Africans" and "All others" into separate "races". It does nothing to demonstrate a clear and universal division between "Europeans" or "Asians" and "Africans". The Neanderthals were a separate class of human -- an actual separate "race". If I share 1% of their DNA, does that make me a separate class along with them? One could take a population sample from Sweden and another from Kenya and describe each population, in terms of DNA, in quite different ways. But samples taken from Algeria, or Greece, or Croatia, will probably lie somewhere in between -- exactly where would you like to draw the line? Everyone with remnants of Neanderthal DNA makes up one race, and everyone else another? So Europeans and Aboriginal Australians and Chinese and Indians etc are all the same race, only Africans set apart? I'm the same race as Vladamir Putin, or Mao Zedong, even though geographically and genetically I'm probably closer to a Spaniard, who's closer to a Tunisian, who's closer to a Nigerian...? If I add a drop of yellow to a big bucket of red paint, does it turn into ice cream?

I have no desire to get personal either.. I will consider buying it. Certainly nutrition is an area of interest for me, and I have not made my mind up by any means. For now, perhaps you would be willing to address a couple of questions I have about the introductory passage: I'd like to know where she's getting all this from, especially the last part. As far as I am aware, it is not possible to accurately date any organic matter beyond around 75,000 years using carbon-14, and all other dating methods are pretty unreliable. I can't find evidence of (known) human coprolites older than 13,000 years. The oldest known human remains might date as far back as 230,000 years, but these are bones, and it's possible that they're as young as 145,000 years -- we can't know for sure as, again, other methods of dating (e.g. luminescence) are not very reliable. If this is all true, I find it unlikely that the author knows of a sample of human coprolite that she can confidently date to 50-300,000 years old, or that she has managed to figure out exactly what is in it. Now...there's a 30,000-year-old Neanderthal coprolite that is said to contain evidence of a lot of meat and a "significant plant intake". This fossil predates the end of the last glacial period, but there was apparently enough edible plant life in Europe at that point for plants to make up a significant portion of their diet. Is this all addressed in the book, or are we just expected to take her word for it?

I appreciate the honesty. Yes, we all like to be right, even if many don't admit it. Some are absolutely incapable of letting go of their dogma; this is, much of the time, where our biggest problems lie. In the last year or 2 I've been doing my very best to recognize my own preconceptions & dogmas, etc -- and it's because of this I've come to the understanding, contrary to everything I used to believe, that we don't need meat to be healthy, and indeed that many of the healthiest, fittest humans alive are vegan. This is not despite their diet, but, at least in part, because of it. Each to their own, though..it's not for everyone. Oh..yeah.. veggies/vegans can be pretty vehement. I get it, though. Many are city-dwellers, very much disconnected from the primal, fundamental realities of life, and their perspective spirals out of control. They end up believing that humans are responsible for all the 'evils' in the world and that if we weren't around all the animals would be living in a fuzzy wonderland. But I can't judge them too harshly. In my opinion, someone who does not, at some point in their life, evaluate their consumption of animals (whether or not they choose to become vegan), somone who has never felt any kind of remorse -- just a twinge of sadness -- at the idea of various animals being slaughtered for their daily meal, is missing something. Compassion is important.

Why?

As this is your only post since my last, I suspect this must be directed at least partly at me.. but I have no idea why you would call me either a vegetarian or a "corporate science brainwashee", so I can't be sure. So I'll shut up till I know either way.

Not sure what you all mean by "race". It is impossible to separate humans into distinct categories. The idea of race is of no value or meaning. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC515312/ cobi: "The African are the only race that is pure homo-sapience DNA" -- this statement is meaningless. There is no "African race". There is more difference between populations on the African continent than any other. Do you separate all of them into "races"? No. They're just "black", or "African". A convenient label, not a separate biological group. To suggest, as people generally do, that there are distinct categories such as Black, White, Asian, Latino, etc, shows a remarkable lack of understanding of human geography and biology. People should have children with whomever they choose. I'd love to see more people reaching across borders for love, proving just how meaningless all these self-imposed categories really are. But as we are all basically the same, "race mixture" isn't going to create some super-breed.

Not sure what 'junk science' you're referring to...but let me start again. Let's say we agree that a 'primal' diet of some sort is beneficial. I then assume that we agree that cutting out a majority of the foods that are available on supermarket shelves is consequently beneficial. So many of these 'foods' (and drinks) are high in severely processed and lab-produced materials, and it is my belief that these are partially responsible for modern levels of obesity (& diabetes), heart problems, cancers, etc. I think this is actually something that most modern advocates of 'alternative' diets agree upon, though they don't like to say so. For all of their posturing and contest, advocates of Paleo, Raw till 4 vegan, Keto, Fruitarian, etc, are basically united in discarding modern processed garbage foods. So we take all this garbage out of the picture. We can probably agree, after that, to go back even further: agriculture itself has been harmful, and many animals and plants that now exist have been engineered far beyond their 'natural' state. But beyond that, we don't know. We can only guess as to what it is that we 'should' be living on. Anyone who claims to know the precise dietary habits of a particular historical people, and their average lifespan, is full of shit. Most dietary materials are 'invisible' to us after a few thousand years, and there's literally no way of knowing exactly what a paleolithic diet consisted of, nor, really, any way of knowing for sure that it was the best diet for us. In my opinion, large-scale epidemiological evidence and personal experience are the 2 best ways of judging what is best. I tried a period of low-carb, high-protein eating; I ate primarily meat and veg and cut out processed foods almost entirely, and though I felt good (and my headaches disappeared), it's as nothing to my current diet: high-carb, high-fat, medium-protein, but a minimal amount of meat. I have more energy now than at any point in the past, and am much fitter.

Long term, our primary energy supply is our adipose tissue, secondary our glycogen stores. But short term, our primary energy comes from sugars, and a high-carbohydrate diet is healthier than a high-protein or high-fat one. Look at human life expectancy worldwide and this becomes apparent. Meat-eaters don't fare as well as fruit-and-veg eaters. Of course, it shouldn't be 'either/or' -- we are primarily adaptable animals, able to consume whatever we find in order to survive. We should consume a variety.

Well thanks No, it's not clear cut, but the statistics are undeniable. I'm not suggesting a direct causal relationship between guns and violence, but rather that [a] it is obvious that we are not subject to as much gun violence as people in the US, and it is also apparent that we are less subject to other forms of violence, and this could well be partly due to less of a weapon-loving culture. Yes..and they can't hurt people.. I have never relied on the police, and I intend not to. If people come around here being violent I will be violent right back. But people are far less likely to, and if they do are far less likely to cause so much harm because they don't have instant access to semi-automatic death contraptions. Hmm.. I'm not sure blaming a centuries-old government is the way to go. The situation is as it is -- and in the USA it involves far more guns. I'd remove the government right now if I had the means. But I don't, and never will. Not sure that having a gun would make much difference in either case.

At risk of derailing the thread.. Firstly: in case it wasn't apparent, the tuck and roll thing was a little jest... Secondly: the evidence shows, clearly and beyond doubt, that (in terms of violence/murder) the UK is a safer place overall than the USA. We are at far less risk of violent abuse and murder. Any 'statistics' that claim otherwise have been very much skewed or taken out of context. I fully realize that this is not entirely down to gun control, but either way, I'm very happy that we have the gun laws that we do... God knows what kind of extra trouble would pop up if handguns were more freely available.

Sure. I've always liked the idea of being a vigilante. Not sure what skills I can offer. I've been practising my tuck and roll recently...that seems quite important in gun fights..

Recently reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, I've been struck by 2 things (aside from the obvious wonder at the nature of things and the brilliance of those great thinkers who've furthered our understanding of the nature of things). Firstly, I find it funny to think that so much of what I think of as simple and obvious was not known or understood by anyone until very recently. Even a process like plate tectonics, which I grew up learning about and has always seemed very much like common sense to me, was not properly theorized until the mid-20th Century, and not universally accepted until the 1980s. Preposterous, it was. Secondly, what really stands out is the dogmatic tendency of the majority. Almost everything that we now 'know' (or believe ourselves to understand) about the nature of things was, at some time and to some people, absolutely unthinkable. Pretty much every subsequently accepted theory was, at one point, opposed (or just ignored) by some portion of the scientific community, and some of the most brilliant thinkers fought decades- or even life-long battles in order to be able to throw out all sorts of (what now seems like completely laughable) religious and 'scientific' dogma. Point being: what seems like nonsense often isn't, and what seems like truth is often based on a fundamental but inescapable lack of understanding about the 'deeper' nature of things. Don't disbelieve purely because the theory sounds outlandish.