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USSR was not doing its damndest to expand westwards. Stalin promised not to support Greek communists and he didn't.

Whaaa? I suppose the Greek civil war was just a slapfight then. The Communists didn't overthrow the Czechoslovakian government? They didn't support the Chinese Communists? I suppose you're unfamiliar with the Long Telegram. Let's let the people who were there at the time speak:

Everything must be done to advance relative strength of USSR as factor in international society. Conversely, no opportunity most be missed to reduce strength and influence, collectively as well as individually, of capitalist powers.

Thus Soviet leaders are driven [by?] necessities of their own past and present position to put forward which [apparent omission] outside world as evil, hostile and menacing, but as bearing within itself germs of creeping disease and destined to be wracked with growing internal convulsions until it is given final Coup de grace by rising power of socialism and yields to new and better world.

In general, all Soviet efforts on unofficial international plane will be negative and destructive in character, designed to tear down sources of strength beyond reach of Soviet control. This is only in line with basic Soviet instinct that there can be no compromise with rival power and that constructive work can start only when Communist power is dominating.

We should also note the difference between the Soviet Union and Russia, which the Long Telegram does indeed do. They are two separate things. Two years after the Long Telegram was sent, Soviet-backed North Korean forces stormed into the South like Germany into Poland.

"Expansionist communism had been escalating its challenge with each postwar year. It had gained a foothold in Eastern Europe in 1945 as a byproduct of occupation by the Red Army. It had prevailed in Czechoslovakia by means of a domestic coup in 1948. It had taken over China in a civil war in 1949. If communist armies could now march across internationally recognized boundary lines, the world would have returned to the conditions of the prewar period. The generation which had lived through Munich was bound to react."
-- Henry Kissinger, "Diplomacy", 1994

Since about 1980, trickle-down has been failing more and more, in many countries. The "market" ain't working well for about 90%. GDP's grow, but most don't receive the benefits of that growth. Time for a Plan B.

You make it sound like the entire West switched to laissez-faire free market economics and massive cuts in welfare spending in 1980. In fact, the opposite is true. Oh, Reagan talked a lot about those things, but his policies were cosmetic. Social welfare spending on the poor has tripled since 1980 (in absolute dollars). Federal government spending along has gone from around $7000/capita in 1980 to about $12000/capita today (in 2014 dollars). The budgetary cost of federal regulations has gone from $18b in 1980 to $60b in 2017. Also, massive illegal immigration started in the mid-1970's, and illegal immigrants and their children have poverty rates of around 50-60%; that's a population of about 10 million illegals living in poverty, accounting for nearly a quarter of the 45 million people living in (relative) poverty in the US.

So, you correctly identify the time around 1980 as a good point for comparison. But far from a return to cut-throat laissez-faire capitalism, the period since 1980 has seen a massive expansion of government, welfare, and social spending in the US (and much of Europe), accompanied by a stagnation in wages and growth.

You're right: we need to stop going down that path and find a Plan B to what we are doing, namely cutting back government spending, government regulations, welfare programs, and illegal immigration, etc. to pre-1980 levels.

Which law says that H1-Bs have to be randomly assigned by lottery? Maybe there is one, but not that I know of.

Congress is *supposed* to make the laws, not the executive. Since about the 1970s (and to a lesser extent since 1929), Congress has passed more and more vague laws giving the executive the power to fill in the rest via "regulations". I don't like that, but it's reality. As far as I know, the executive was given significant discretion as to how to allot H1-Bs.

One Congresswoman from California has proposed a bill which make statutory law of the preference for higher salaries (relative to the average for the position). If it's well written, with unintended affects considered, I would support such a bill.

Strangely, president Trump has signed an executive order reducing the amount of "law" (regulations) made by the executive, sending that back to the Congress. His order is that for every new regulation made by the executive, they must remove two old regulations that are no longer needed (with exceptions signed off by cabinet level department heads). If we get to the point where we've gotten rid of most of the stupid regulations and we still need that stuff to be law, Congress can do their job and pass it as law, rather than having the executive promulgate more and more law as regulations. I'm sure there will be some unintended consequences, but I like the general concept of that. The executive has grown much more powerful vis-a-vis the Congress than the framers intended. This graph is informative as to the change in the cost of executive regulation:
https://regulatorystudies.colu...

Read this.

I don't see the relevance to my point.

Read this.

Except for all this.

Apparently flying spy planes over Russia is also not an act of war, but if Russia did the same thing would it be equally acceptable?

And they've blown a U-2 out of the air. Apparently you know very little about how the game is played.

It is also interesting how often we hear about "Russian incompetence" and "close calls" but not so much about US incompetence, lost weapons, accidents, etc.

Uhm.. it has it has been documented. I know somebody involved in one of the incidents, and his career didn't go very far after the fuckup... but then again, I get it: you just want to piss and moan about the US.

So, nowadays we have a re-emboldened Russia fucking around in Crimea and Ukraine knocking on Europe's door (make no mistake, a Western Europe with no US-backed NATO would be absolutely fucked), and China constructing artificial islands in the South China Sea.

Here's my attitude, motherfucker: you can't handle the truth.

If by better, you mean more effective, it's because we can detect ICBM launches which gives time to possibly intercept and destroy them. With this, they could drop a nuke from orbit and we would have very little time to react. Sure, we're going to be tracking this motherfucker and we'll know when it's overhead,

We'll know when it ascends, too.. It seems of limited use.

I must have missed that page in the history books.

You were probably too young to remember what was going on back then. A lot of people thought the whole thing was some crazy conspiracy theory until FOIA documents proved that it was a real thing. No, Ronald Reagan did not himself sling rock cocaine on the street. He did it through the CIA.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...

Probably not, but there's plenty of dislike in the US for Brazil's leftwing government, with plenty of attacking propaganda by US political pundits. The last time a coup happen in Brazil it was directly supported by the US. Combine that with the fact that the current president (the one they're trying to impeach) was tortured by US and UK-trained torturers, it's not that far-fetched to assume that some US citizens are also involved in these trolling campaigns (but again, I doubt it's the case for this Igw guy; he's probably just badly informed).

Yeah, that's a load of bullshit.

Yeah, I thought that too for years. But it turns out, like MK-ULTRA, the Reagain/Crack Cocaine connection is absolutely true. Documents have come to light since the 80s that prove it.

In fact, the Reagan Administration admitted to it in secret testimony to Congress.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...

I'm sorry, I must have missed your link to actual data.

Grow up.

Well given the CIA report entited "Bin Laden determined to attack US" mentioning flying planes into buildings... and with the spooks trying to get emergency meetings with El Presidente Bush, I don't think Thin Thread would have helped.

Your "given" is a lie. The Presidential Daily Brief containing the "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US" assessment doesn't make any mention of flying planes into buildings.

What is the basis for your suggestion that the CIA couldn't get a meeting with President Bush? Another lie?

The problem with 9/11 was a President who was too lazy to act, and was family friends with the Bin Ladens, so had a reason to ignore anything that might cause his friends/business partners bad press. It happened to suit his friends political agendas too. Giving them the excuse to pass Patriot act, and, as we learned from some of the leaks, the mass surveillance started 1998, and 9/11 Patriot act simply gave it a legal cover.

The problem with much 9/11 commentary is that it is uninformed, distorted, manipulative, dishonest, and partisan. It is unimaginably stupid to suggest the President Bush willfully overlooked an attack on the United States on the basis of "family friends" as you have, as is any suggestion that the attack was allowed for political advantage. You've suggested both.

Why don't you go to GWU and read the section of the Presidential Daily Brief and tell me what you would do based on that information?

Bin Laden Determined To Strike US

***** SPOILER ALERT ******** You and the AC are full of baloney.

Why don't you go to GWU and read the section of the Presidential Daily Brief and tell me what you would do based on that information?

Bin Laden Determined To Strike US

***** SPOILER ALERT ******** You and the AC are full of baloney.

What axe? I'm stating a fact. Bush had six months of daily warnings of an impending attack, INCLUDING Clarke's own statement a few days after Bush was sworn into office, and a briefing statement titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States".

Further, contrary to the lies of those in the Bush administration, the outgoing Clinton administration did leave them a comprehensive plan. We know this because it's been declassified.

If you like, I can keep going with the facts which show a) Bush had been warned, many times, prior to the 9/11 attacks, both from the outgoing Clinton administration, Richard Clarke who spanned both administrations and daily briefings, b) Bush was warned one month before the attacks that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack planes to attack the U.S. and c) Bush ignored everything until the last second when, on 9/4, he finally had a meeting to discuss what Clarke and others had talked about months prior.

A simple google search will find lots of information. It all boils to the Allies insisting on an "unconditional surrender" while the Japanese were trying to negotiate and end to the war with continuation of the imperial rule and without an occupation by foreign military. Especially after Germany fell, the Japanese were very aware that they would be promptly invaded by the Soviet Union if the war went on so they were actively negotiating for peace. The US could have ordered a cease-fire any time in the months leading up to the Hiroshima bombings and signed any one of the Japanese proposals, but it was not politically acceptable to leave the Japanese government in power. After the bombings, leaving the Emperor as a "spiritual" leader was a last-minute concession to finish up the negotiations (otherwise the Soviets would have annexed Japan and the US didn't want that).

I did a simple google search, and I discovered that you are full of shit.
There was no "Truman already had knowledge of intercepted messages indicating that the Japanese were prepared to surrender."
What Truman had was knowledge of was that the Japan had instructed the ambassador to Russia to try to get Russia to intercede on their behalf for a negotiated end to hostilities, and Truman knew that the Russians refused to discuss it with the ambassador.

Here's the actual ultra document.
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...
The ambassador (Sato) was the one that said Japan should surrender, and Tojo basically told Sato to shut up and not even mention that he had said that. Sato wasn't stating the government's position - he was just an ambassador and a few thousand miles away.

The US could have ordered a cease-fire any time in the months leading up to the Hiroshima bombings and signed any one of the Japanese proposals, but it was not politically acceptable to leave the Japanese government in power.

Bullshit. There were no proposals from the Japanese government to sign.
As for "not politically acceptable to leave the Japanese government in power", it wasn't a political issue. It was a"not being stupid" issue.

As for the idea of negotiating a surrender with Japan, why on earth does anyone think that Japan should get a better deal than Germany?

Also, the "must save the Emperor" was important, but several members of the war council held the position that the Emperor was superfluous and that they would sacrifice the Emperor if that would stave off surrender. After all, another Emperor could be installed later on.

Let us see if one of these others suit your tastes, lazy idiot.

http://www.voltairenet.org/art...
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldw...
http://www.counterpunch.org/19...
http://web.stanford.edu/class/...

Lawmakers can fix broken laws, and even repeal them.

They could, but they don't (at least in the US, probably true in general). There's been an extraordinary growth in laws and regulations over the decades.

"me of use were on BSD, VAXes and KLs quite awhile before there was Turbo C."
"c did not take off on the PC for a while and when it did it was Turbo C that was the first really popular compiler."
I was referencing just the PC market is is clear by my statement.

" ADA is still a joke and like I said before it's great if you want career job security but not popular or really worthy on a resume."
Maybe not as the only language but here are a list of large systems written in Ada
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeld...
The list of Boeing Aircraft as well as the Atlas V and Delta IV are to my mind pretty interesting jobs but yes it is a niche area but one that pays well.

Top ten languages based on what? Python? Yes a lot of FOSS projects are in Python and it is a nice scripting language but number 2?
Your jumping up and down and frothing at the mouth has made it clear that you do not like Ada. That does not mean that the idea that a government or company when contracting for a software project should not specify the language used, OS, and or libraries used for the project. It also does not mean prove that it was a bad idea or that it is a bad language.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi came to power during World War II after an Anglo-Soviet invasion forced the abdication of his father Reza Shah. During Mohammad Reza's reign, the Iranian oil industry was briefly nationalized under the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh before a U.S. and UK-backed coup d'état deposed Mosaddegh and brought back foreign oil firms

I'm not sure if i should point at you and laugh because you aren't capable of reading, or because you're not even as accurate as wikipedia..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Be that as it may, even the CIA has acknowledged what they did through FIOA releases. So please, feel free to argue with the CIA who, after 60 years, said "yeh, we did it" and see where that gets you. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...

As for Reagan.. yeh, all that tells me is you probably weren't alive during the time, or too young to remember what was going on. He wasn't yet president, but as he confirmed in 1991, him and his republican posse were playing behind the curtain undermining Carter as they went. Pretty much everyone knew what had happened right afterwards anyway... right after Reagan was elected, the Iranian started accepting compromises to their "demands," and the hostages were released the day Reagan was sworn in.

So i'm sorry you have to read wikipedia to get a history lesson, and that you can't be bothered to actually read all of a single article on the Shah. You might check out the national archives to to see the CIA papers admitting what they did, unless of course, you think the CIA is lying bout that to cover up.. um.. i don't know, maybe a weather balloon traveling back in time to crash in Roswell after sucking ships in the Bermuda Triangle into an alternate reality to hide the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the last rational conservative.

If you pass sledgehammer legislation like the ADA, common sense behavior gets replaced with lawyering and bad things happen. And the people who passed the legislation in the first place say that their intentions were good, blame lawyers and blame the people who opposed the legislation in the first place, and finally call for more legislation to fix the problems that the first legislation caused.

This is the result:

https://regulatorystudies.colu...

I was under the impression that Ada is still widely used in many mission-critical systems. For example, the latest Boeing planes' software (777 and 787) is nearly all written in Ada. I haven't heard about another language making inroads in those applications, but I suppose it's possible. More likely IMO is that the relative percentage of mission-critical software has shrunk compared to the explosion of commercial software.

Keep in mind language "popularity" is very industry-specific, so it's often a bit misleading to look at global rankings of language popularity. For example, in my own industry (videogames), C++ is completely dominant for game code, C# is very popular for tools, and Lua is popular as an embedded scripting language. If you look at Lua on it's own, it typically ranks pretty low compared to most languages, but there's no doubt it would be much higher if constrained to just my industry.

Perhaps undeservingly... http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~adagroup/sigada-website/lawlis.html

Oh my... do you really want to talk about the cold war?

Sure.

Yes, the US did undermine democracies during the cold war but only when they were seen to be allied with Soviets.

Seen by people with a clue, or seen by people who thought "willingness not to be hostile towards the Soviet Union" constituted an alliance, or seen by the predecessor to British Petroleum to be a bunch of pesky nationalizers?

Would it matter to you if I pointed out that a fair number of democracies were subverted by the soviets as well? I think not.

You are correct - it wouldn't matter because 1) I already knew it and 2) "they did it, too" is insufficient for me to overlook our doing it.

Would it matter if I said that the calculation was that if the soviets gained a foothold they'd use it to project power and undermine other countries?

No, because I'm not convinced that they would have gained that sort of foothold in, say, Guatemala or Iran.

Except facts and history do not agree with you.

Fact is that Japan offered to surrender BEFORE the bombs were dropped. They had one condition, that their emperor would not be harmed. The US required unconditional surrender.

The US wanted to a) test the effects of radiation on humans (primarily civilian targets were chosen), and b) the US wanted to drop the bombs as a demonstration to (their allay), the Soviet Union.

Not a position piece, but plenty in there to support the above assertions:

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...

I did not know about the offer to surrender with conditions. I do not see a lot of evidence for (a) being a significant factor, but can certainly believe that (b) was a consideration.

You didn't know about the offer to surrender because the actual Japanese government never made such an offer, that is neither the War council nor the Imperial council.
An individual Japanese Naval officer in Europe said he thought it could be arranged, but that person did not appear to represent Japan in any meaningful way.

Except facts and history do not agree with you.

Fact is that Japan offered to surrender BEFORE the bombs were dropped. They had one condition, that their emperor would not be harmed. The US required unconditional surrender.

The US wanted to a) test the effects of radiation on humans (primarily civilian targets were chosen), and b) the US wanted to drop the bombs as a demonstration to (their allay), the Soviet Union.

Not a position piece, but plenty in there to support the above assertions:

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...

I did not know about the offer to surrender with conditions. I do not see a lot of evidence for (a) being a significant factor, but can certainly believe that (b) was a consideration.

Except facts and history do not agree with you.

Fact is that Japan offered to surrender BEFORE the bombs were dropped. They had one condition, that their emperor would not be harmed. The US required unconditional surrender.

The US wanted to a) test the effects of radiation on humans (primarily civilian targets were chosen), and b) the US wanted to drop the bombs as a demonstration to (their allay), the Soviet Union.

Not a position piece, but plenty in there to support the above assertions:

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...

Rumsfeld wanted to take a selfie with Sadam

Not quite a selfie, but Rumsfeld got his photo op with Saddam in 1983. Or did you mean a selfie with Saddam's head separated from his body?

I'm a fucking SHILL? For pointing out that it's perfectly reasonably to point out that the NSA does plenty of good? Sounds like you had your uninformed fucking mind up way before you stopped into this thread. The Boston Marathon Bombing happening is hardly the purview of the NSA in the first place- it was a couple of kids with some low fucking tech. The amount of monitoring necessary to catch that would be totalitarian, and ESPECIALLY if you expected them to do it with HUMINT. That's LUDICROUS. Is anything bad that happens an argument against the NSA? Not only is that the FBI's job, it's also a pretty low flying target for any three letter agency in the first place.

Lets see what some basic googling can find.
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/...

Expunged? Fuck that. Just because there's been some serious oversteps when it comes to preemptive monitoring of citizens doesn't mean that the agency needs to go away. That's ludicrous.

Bullshit - it was tit for tat posturing and it was most likely over before any missiles could even get off the boat.

No No No my brother not only were the missiles off the boat they were operational and the Soviet troops on the ground were armed with tactical nukes.

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/...

That was their throw weight against our eastcoast population centers. Their other delivery system at the time was using Turboprop bombers on one way missions to the continental U.S. Admittedly their might not have been much left for them to come home to, but using men in a suicide mission as primary planning is poor.

While at the we were 1/3 to 1/2 way done building the 41 for freedom (our fleet of 41 boomers).

I do not see how you can look at this and see an outcome where we gave up nothing, and the Russians had to dismantle a major strategic system and publicly lost face with their allies and the rest of the world, Kennedy getting his nuts handed to him.

I will give you this Kennedy was a damned dangerous president, and his failure with the bay of pigs and the Berlin Wall, created the impression Kruschev would be able to roll him. If it wasn't for the fact he had the fear our military would escalate by design or accident to stiffen his spine, that crisis could have gone very badly indeed.

Oh, I think I can name at least one, similarly redacted and everything, wouldn't want to reveal US involvement...

I don't know if you're getting your info from The Instutitute for Historical Review or Fox News, or somewhere like that, but we have the actual intercepts of communications in which Togo explicitly says to ambassador Sato that Japan is willing to surrender territories gained: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war." The War Department had these intercepts summarized/interpreted and ready for dissemination on 12 July 1945. This information was used and discussed in the run-up to dropping the bomb. We also have these discussions where the people deciding to drop the bomb or not considered the one request, to allow the emperor to live and remain considered "divine"; and we have the records of that committee rejecting this possibility. Further we have the Stimson memo that suggests that nukes be used to indicate to Stalin that he needs to slow down in Europe. Of course he knew we had the nuke, because his spies already had him building his own copy. Anyway, we've got all this info, and yet people still come back with, well, lies circulated by people who don't want to accept nuclear realpolitik. Here's the Togo-Sato intercepts: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.... I think you can get the rest of it here: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/....

Regarding: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war."
I've never seen any indication that those words were actually made by Japan to Russia (or to anyone).
You should have noted from the links you gave that regarding asking Russia to negotiate a peace, "Hirota made no suggestion to that effect".

Look at the context of the intercept; it's just part of an communication from Tojo to a diplomat regarding what to say when making an attempt to keep Russia out of the US-Japan part of WWII, it's not actually an offer to Russia, nor is it an actual statement of Japan's desired outcome post-war. Read the whole thing again. In the other link you gave, "Another intercept of a cable from Togo to Sato shows that the Foreign Minister rejected unconditional surrender and that the emperor was not “asking the Russian’s mediation in anything like unconditional surrender.”

Keep in mind that the Allies had long made it clear that Japan could surrender at anytime.
Japan had that option. If they wanted peace, they could surrender. It's that simple.
The Japanese response to our peace offer, the Postdam Declaration, was for Prime Minister Suzuki tell the Japanese press the government's commitment to ignore the Allies' demands and fight on.

I do admit that I exaggerated - I do not know if Japan intended to keep all of China, but they did make it plain they intended to keep Korea, Taiwan and some other pieces for "economic necessities", and those lands that Japan considered to already should have been part of Japan.

Anyway, what I'm talking about the contacts and discussions made by representatives of Japan's Navy and apparently some of Japan's banks made in Switzerland through the BIS and Allen Dulles OSS etc.
These were independent feelers not officially sanctioned by Japan's government and therefore had no actual weight, but they did show that not all of Japan was in "fight-to-the-death" camp. However, the position taken by those persons making the feelers was opposite to the position taken by those in control in Japan and they were afraid of being called up for treason, which technically they were.
As far as I can tell the European feelers were disconnected from the Imperial government when Togo Shigenori became foreign minister after Hideki Tojo was sacked.

non-imperial government European feelers:
https://www.cia.gov/library/ce...

I don't know if you're getting your info from The Instutitute for Historical Review or Fox News, or somewhere like that, but we have the actual intercepts of communications in which Togo explicitly says to ambassador Sato that Japan is willing to surrender territories gained: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war." The War Department had these intercepts summarized/interpreted and ready for dissemination on 12 July 1945. This information was used and discussed in the run-up to dropping the bomb. We also have these discussions where the people deciding to drop the bomb or not considered the one request, to allow the emperor to live and remain considered "divine"; and we have the records of that committee rejecting this possibility. Further we have the Stimson memo that suggests that nukes be used to indicate to Stalin that he needs to slow down in Europe. Of course he knew we had the nuke, because his spies already had him building his own copy. Anyway, we've got all this info, and yet people still come back with, well, lies circulated by people who don't want to accept nuclear realpolitik. Here's the Togo-Sato intercepts: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.... I think you can get the rest of it here: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/....

Regarding: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war."
I've never seen any indication that those words were actually made by Japan to Russia (or to anyone).
You should have noted from the links you gave that regarding asking Russia to negotiate a peace, "Hirota made no suggestion to that effect".

Look at the context of the intercept; it's just part of an communication from Tojo to a diplomat regarding what to say when making an attempt to keep Russia out of the US-Japan part of WWII, it's not actually an offer to Russia, nor is it an actual statement of Japan's desired outcome post-war. Read the whole thing again. In the other link you gave, "Another intercept of a cable from Togo to Sato shows that the Foreign Minister rejected unconditional surrender and that the emperor was not “asking the Russian’s mediation in anything like unconditional surrender.”

Keep in mind that the Allies had long made it clear that Japan could surrender at anytime.
Japan had that option. If they wanted peace, they could surrender. It's that simple.
The Japanese response to our peace offer, the Postdam Declaration, was for Prime Minister Suzuki tell the Japanese press the government's commitment to ignore the Allies' demands and fight on.

I do admit that I exaggerated - I do not know if Japan intended to keep all of China, but they did make it plain they intended to keep Korea, Taiwan and some other pieces for "economic necessities", and those lands that Japan considered to already should have been part of Japan.

Anyway, what I'm talking about the contacts and discussions made by representatives of Japan's Navy and apparently some of Japan's banks made in Switzerland through the BIS and Allen Dulles OSS etc.
These were independent feelers not officially sanctioned by Japan's government and therefore had no actual weight, but they did show that not all of Japan was in "fight-to-the-death" camp. However, the position taken by those persons making the feelers was opposite to the position taken by those in control in Japan and they were afraid of being called up for treason, which technically they were.
As far as I can tell the European feelers were disconnected from the Imperial government when Togo Shigenori became foreign minister after Hideki Tojo was sacked.

non-imperial government European feelers:
https://www.cia.gov/library/ce...

I don't know if you're getting your info from The Instutitute for Historical Review or Fox News, or somewhere like that, but we have the actual intercepts of communications in which Togo explicitly says to ambassador Sato that Japan is willing to surrender territories gained: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war." The War Department had these intercepts summarized/interpreted and ready for dissemination on 12 July 1945. This information was used and discussed in the run-up to dropping the bomb. We also have these discussions where the people deciding to drop the bomb or not considered the one request, to allow the emperor to live and remain considered "divine"; and we have the records of that committee rejecting this possibility. Further we have the Stimson memo that suggests that nukes be used to indicate to Stalin that he needs to slow down in Europe. Of course he knew we had the nuke, because his spies already had him building his own copy. Anyway, we've got all this info, and yet people still come back with, well, lies circulated by people who don't want to accept nuclear realpolitik. Here's the Togo-Sato intercepts: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.... I think you can get the rest of it here: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/....

I don't know if you're getting your info from The Instutitute for Historical Review or Fox News, or somewhere like that, but we have the actual intercepts of communications in which Togo explicitly says to ambassador Sato that Japan is willing to surrender territories gained: Japan "has absolutely no idea of annexing or holding territories she occupied during the war." The War Department had these intercepts summarized/interpreted and ready for dissemination on 12 July 1945. This information was used and discussed in the run-up to dropping the bomb. We also have these discussions where the people deciding to drop the bomb or not considered the one request, to allow the emperor to live and remain considered "divine"; and we have the records of that committee rejecting this possibility. Further we have the Stimson memo that suggests that nukes be used to indicate to Stalin that he needs to slow down in Europe. Of course he knew we had the nuke, because his spies already had him building his own copy. Anyway, we've got all this info, and yet people still come back with, well, lies circulated by people who don't want to accept nuclear realpolitik. Here's the Togo-Sato intercepts: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.... I think you can get the rest of it here: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/....

Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.

Amit Ronen is the Director of GWU's Solar Institute.

That doesn't mean he's wrong, but he does have a horse in the race, so to speak.

As long as Hussein was the US attack dog, going after Iran, then the conservatives backed him 100%. Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, 1983.

Actual rather than rhetorical opposition to such use was evidently not perceived to serve U.S. interests; instead, the Reagan administration did not deviate from its determination that Iraq was to serve as the instrument to prevent an Iranian victory. Chemical warfare was viewed as a potentially embarrassing public relations problem that complicated efforts to provide assistance. The Iraqi government's repressive internal policies, though well known to the U.S. government at the time, did not figure at all in the presidential directives that established U.S. policy toward the Iran-Iraq war. The U.S. was concerned with its ability to project military force in the Middle East, and to keep the oil flowing.

So during the Iran/Iraq war, the Regan administration wanted to keep Iraqi oil flowing and engage in a poxy war with Iran. The brutal nature of the Hussein regime was of no consequence, and the reality that Iraq was using chemical weapons was ignored and treated as a public relations issue.

Then Hussein invaded Kuwait and things spun 180 degrees. The conservative/neo-con policy establishment decided that "regime change" in Iraq was the single most important policy goal in the Middle East. Figures like Perle, Wolfowitz and Kristal started the Project for the New American Century in the late 90's. One of their major themes was getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

Richard Perle, who later became a core member of PNAC, was involved in similar activities to those pursued by PNAC after its formal organization. For instance, in 1996 Perle composed a report that proposed regime changes in order to restructure power in the Middle East. The report was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm and called for removing Saddam Hussein from power, as well as other ideas to bring change to the region. The report was delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two years later, in 1998, Perle and other core members of the PNAC—Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, and John Bolton—"were among the signatories of a letter to President Clinton calling for the removal of Hussein."

Suddenly the chemical weapons that were ignored during the Iraq/Iran war were such an immediate danger that it was critical that the US back the invasion of Iraq. Many of the people who were in or supporters the GW Bush administration when it was backing Hussein were in or supporting the New American Century Project and calling for Hussein's overthrow. (And then there were the fabrications and lies about biological and nuclear weapons. but that's another successfully covered up conspiracy.)

Remember, this was all years before the September 11th attacks. They wanted to get Hussein in real bad way.

Then the World Trade Center attack occurred, and the neo-con propaganda machine whet into high gear claiming that Hussein, not Iraq the country, but their leader, was World Enemy Number One. Then the US invaded the wrong country, and now is in a fight with ISIS, which is arguably worse then Iraq under Hussein. Would ISIS even exist if the US hadn't occupied Iraq? How come no one even asks this question?

There is no rational case for the policy shift from pro-Hussein to anti-Hussein in the US right wing. As a person or as a political figure he did not change very much between the Regan, George Herbert Walker Bush and George Bush eras. The only thing that changed is that he went from be an attack dog for the US, to attacking US i

Re: the generations of embargo and The Bay of Pigs.
Something really interesting must have happened in the past with events surrounding the Bay of Pigs invasion and its CIA backers.
"CIA SUCCESSFULLY CONCEALS BAY OF PIGS HISTORY
D.C. CIRCUIT SPLIT DECISION RULES CIA DRAFT HISTORY CAN BE KEPT SECRET INDEFINITELY"
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/... (May 21, 2014)
""expose an agency's decision making process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion within the agency and thereby undermine the agency's ability to perform its functions.""
So if that is kind of passion a CIA draft can invoke years later, the need for an endless embargo seems to still hold sway.
Its just part of a long list of Covert United States foreign regime change actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but there seems to be something special about Cuba for the US political elite.

Eisenhower signed the American-British-Soviet test moratorium in 1958. It was indeed 'a formally concluded and ratified agreement between countries', or what intellectually honest people call a treaty. There is no requirement for treaties to have that word in their title. There is no requirement for treaties to not be reciprocal or non-binding. What is a requirement is for a person to be intellectually honest while attempting to prove a point, a pointless point in this case, should they wish to not appear as an asshole.

So, would you like to try again with less weasel word bingo?

OK, nameless coward. Show me the test ban document that was "signed" and ratified in 1958 in the form of a binding bilateral or multilateral treaty or equivalent. You can't, because no such document exists or ever existed.

Read:
"October 31, 1958. The United States began a voluntary nuclear test moratorium in hopes that the USSR would agree to do the same. The Soviets resisted at first, completing tests on November 1 and 3, before beginning a self-imposed twelve-month ban."

Read:
"On 22 August 1958, the day after the experts had finished their report, Eisenhower announced that the United States would halt nuclear testing for one year if the Soviet Union (and the United Kingdom) would do likewise. To determine whether they would make the moratorium permanent, the three powers agreed to begin test ban negotiations in Geneva on 31 October. ... The Geneva test ban negotiations, which lasted from late 1958 through early 1962 ..."

Read:
"As a sign of good faith, Eisenhower proposed a 12-month moratorium on further U.S. nuclear tests. This voluntary ban was to begin on October 31, 1958 - the date for the opening of test ban negotiations ... and was conditioned by similar restraint by Moscow. ... The Soviets, who had never agreed to the moratorium, fired two more shots on November 1 and 3. [discussion of U.S. restraint in continuing the moratorium anyway] In fact, both the United States and the Soviet Union observed a voluntary moratorium for the next 12 months. ... on August 26, 1959 Eisenhower extended the one-year moratorium ... [and so on]"

Words, and especially terms, have meaning. Making up a "treaty" where none existed is either prevarication or heedless ignorance.

Who's the blowhard?

Propose it to the NASA Cubesat Launch Initiative.

Operation Northwoods

The alternative I would like to see would be to forbid the company from doing business for a time equivalent of what the prison sentence would be.

Imagine if the US wasn't bought and paid for? If an oil company poisoned the gulf like what happened with the Deepwater Horizon (11 dead and massive damage to the fishing industry and the environment), the US government would simply pull its charter and be done with it: that company would cease to exist.

All the other corporations would thereafter straighten up and fly right, lest the same thing happen to them. (Or they would try to buy the government and defang it like it is now).

Really? Nothing that Bush did was anything like this?

The problem with backup tapes is they dont work in the way people think they do after the 1980's.
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/...
"electronically shred more than 5000 e-mail notes in the memory banks of their computer systems, as the Iran-contra scandal breaks."
"Subsequently, investigators from the FBI and the Tower Commission use the backup takes to reconstruct the Iran-contra scandal."
The data on backups would be clean, internal, bureaucratic, everyday office work expected to be fall under court orders, FOIA one day, staff reviews, security audits.
Staff know to keep that side in perfect condition.

The US gov has learned from a lot its past court cases and legal issues around having real data backups.
Never again will data be kept as it was in the past: backup and for a court to find: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/...
"Career staff at the White House Communications Agency order the November backup tapes of the e-mail system to be saved instead of recycled as usual. Subsequently, investigators from the FBI and the Tower Commission use the backup takes to reconstruct the Iran-contra scandal."
Iran–Contra affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Contra_Affair

"To live outside the law you must be honest" The coal industry may not be outside the law, but the same principle applies. You may lie to others about your business, that's business as usual. But when you begin to believe your own lies that's insanity, and leads to bad ends. Even excluding any climate effects, the externalized costs of the coal industry make it more expensive to society than any power source which has NOT been exempted from EPA regs, including all the renewables. These guys who get their income from the coal industry are, pure and simple, on the dole. http://solar.gwu.edu/index_fil... http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/el... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.cleanair.org/Downwi... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.aeaweb.org/articles... http://apo.org.au/sites/defaul... http://www.eea.europa.eu/press...

This may sound crass, but this is a problem that'll solve itself in a couple of decades

It's not crass, it's just a biological fact. That's what pisses me off about people attacking social security and medicare, that problem will solve itself over time. Expenses will climb to a peak and then level off as the population declines. By 2035 that big, fat swath of baby boomers will start running into the meat grinder of old age.

Focus on cost control and the actuarial tables will take care of the rest.

I agree that China's emissions are a major concern (much less so for India), but that does not absolve the US' own responsibilities as the second-largest emitter (not to mention its past contributions too). When the US and others have cleaned up their own acts, more pressure can be brought to bear on China to follow suit (though at least it is making a start). To wait for others to act first is Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale.

the massive amount of money necessary for it would be available from the sale of [STEP's] byproduct, elemental coal

I think you're jumping more than a few guns there. The process has only just been experimentally demonstrated, the "elemental coal" of which you speak is a coating of solid carbon on an electrode, and even that needs a reaction temperature of over 750C (which implies significant solar concentration). We know nothing about engineering challenges scaling this up outside the laboratory, or what sort of costs or return it might involve. In fact, most of the attention so far seems to be on producing cement with it (still good for reducing emissions).

It sounds like STEP could one day be a useful part of our energy mix, but it's far from being a magic bullet, and it's certainly not going to attract major investment for a while yet.

All these renewable energies appear to be offered in the form of electricity, and cars do not yet run on that except for some very slippery-through-the-air, very expensive cars that most of us can't afford.

You might want to take another look at the electric car industry; there's rather more there than just Tesla Motors, and much more on the way. Every major manufacturer is working on electric vehicles, and some have been working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles too (such as this Silverado). Again, we're not talking about turning off the oil today, but phasing it out as electric cars become more widespread (plug-in hybrids are a perfect intermediate stage).

bring industry back to the USA

I'm sure most Americans would agree with you there, but how to do that is not nearly so clear, and is the subject of much debate. Reducing income taxes usually means reducing services too, which many citizens and companies depend on, so it's not a clear-cut answer. Shifting to consumption taxes tends to hit poorer communities hardest, so that's a problem too. Personally I think full automation would be a good approach, but that's a different discussion. In any case, it's at best tangential - from the perspective of CO2, there's little point moving industry back to the US until the US takes a clear lead in reducing its own per-capita emissions.