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Unabomber, Pam Am flight 103 ,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Then in the 90's
1993 WTC bombing, timothy mcveigh, etc.

And that is the ones I remember and 1 minute with google. People are always blowing shit up in someones name.

The meta-data information provided by the President is a fucking cover story for hiding their spy games program. It's already been exposed that they are doing much more than saving meta-data; they're collecting word for word, every communication domestically and foreign, saving the content of our communications.

Lets focus on the meta-data for a minute thing: according to Bill Binney, previous NSA director on technology that helped design the system, anybody can store meta-data and equipment that fits inside a 20 by 12 foot room. FOR ALL COMMUNICATIONS, WORLD WIDE. So of course Verizon, AT&T, and these others douches can store this information. In a room probably the size of 5 by 5, because they'll be storing it themselves ; and providers are already storing this information anyway, which has been available for law enforcement use for some time. The Bluffdale data center in Utah is big enough to store 100 years of content data though, .. which means they're using it to store actual profiles and content of people, not just meta-data. Details @ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... "NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst"

On top of that, they have a massive satellite and radar system with a variety of capabilities, which is being used to target Americans during continuous black operations. Mind reading capability, tracking from space, watching our movements wherever we are. look at the details @ http://www.oregonstatehospital...

http://wallstreetonparade.com/...

If you work for 50 years and receive the typical long-term return of 7 percent on your 401(k) plan and your fees are 2 percent, almost two-thirds of your account will go to Wall Street. This was the bombshell dropped by Frontline’s Martin Smith in this Tuesday evening’s PBS program, The Retirement Gamble.

This is not so much a gamble as a certainty: under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.

Documentary here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Yup:

U.S. Navy warships enter Black Sea ahead of Sochi Games

Two U.S. Navy ships entered the Black Sea Wednesday as part of a Pentagon security plan ahead of the Sochi Olympics. The ships will be on standby to assist in the evacuation of American athletes and spectators in the event that threats are made to the 2014 Games.

Nuclear is very clearly part of our energy solution, and it is time that we, as green environmentalists, accept that.

If nothing else, there's the simple matter of all the existing nuclear waste. It can't be wished away.

The light water reactors use maybe 3% of the available energy and leave a hot mess behind. It's irresponsible to ignore it for the next 300,000 years (if that were even possible on societal scale).

No, what needs to happen is that highly-radioactive waste needs to be brought down to something that will decay to background levels on a timescale that we can manage.

Fortunately, we have the technology to do that. It just so happens that the cleanup process will generate all the power the world needs for most of a century. Our enemy is the governments that prevent that technology from being utilized (Branson is one who has been trying to get approval for years). Of course, the people who put all the government roadblocks in place to prevent the commercialization of such technology have been making mint peddling carbon taxes and selling fear about global warming.

Sorry but that is quite easy to prove to be bullshit, just look at the megacities like NYC and LA and how much lower their bandwidth and much higher their costs are compared to Asia.

The simple fact is thanks to monopolies/duopolies and cherry picking the USA is in the top 10 for ISP prices but in service we are worse than countries like Romania. This is not gonna change as long as we let the ISPs control the last mile, in fact we already paid the ISPs to the tune of 200 billion to provide the USA with nationwide 50mbps broadband and all we got was a low res Goatse and bonuses for all the CEOs. If the ISPs refuse to pay back the 200 billion with interest we should take control of the lines and open them up to competition as we did during the days of dialup. If they want a monopoly? Tell them they can have 15 years exclusivity for every FTTH they provide but the current situation? Its a total scam, they are treating bits like they are a scarce commodity (Protip: they aren't, the ISPs are being allowed to massively oversell and outright lie about actual speeds) and now that Net Neutrality is dead? Watch prices soar.

and the Supreme Court rules that student speech can be limited by the school admin already.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june07/scotus_speech_3-19.html

You seem to be suggesting that intelligence agencies are wrong to engage in spying. I like the bit about "disinfect with sunlight" as a touch of irony. Spy agencies work in the shadows. Apparently you don't want them to work at all. You may be missing some other pieces as well.

George Washington, Spymaster

Benjamin Franklin

The Second Continental Congress created the Committee of Secret Correspondence in 1775, which was charged with gathering intelligence and "corresponding with our friends in Great Britain and other parts of the world" to gain information that would be helpful to the American cause and to forge alliances with foreign countries. Benjamin Franklin was one of the original members of this committee, which was the forerunner of the CIA.

You can't have it both ways

Look, every extreme weather event is caused by global warming. So are the moderate ones, so shut up and pay me a carbon tax while I repress the alternatives.

Well that would be cool, but I'm not sure you're correct. Afaik we don't have the technology to simultaneously observe and decode genomic data during cell replication phases.

I believe we currently deduce it has occurred through comparison of genomic data. I.e. we compare an antecedent and descendant cell, if there are novel changes then it has mutated. But we don't and haven't observed it occurring at this level. As in watch it happen real-time (which is what I meant in case there is confusion).

Or maybe Sir Richard Dawkins says it best:

Richard Dawkins, Professor of Zoology, Oxford University, said, ‘Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it has not been observed while it’s happening.’
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript349_full.html

That was in 2004 and I readily accept the possibility of this changing (and it eventually will if it hasn't already).

Can you point me to some papers to support your claims?

Happy new year!

I found the episode of History Detectives in which the story of the Moon Museum etched chip is covered. See:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/video/2097342856//

I see that Belgium seems to have a problem with "cribbage."

Belgium: Terror Suspects Convicted, Sentenced
Belgium | Al Qaeda's New Front

Here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/view/

The NSA knew about some of the 9-11 hijackers, but it was lost in the noise (and in lack of interdepartmental information sharing). The solution, suck in more noise? Makes little sense to me.

I don't think that is quite right.

NSA speaks out on Snowden, spying

Gen. Keith Alexander: Well, the reality is if you go and do a specific one for each, you have to tell the phone companies to keep those call detail records for a certain period of time. So, if you don’t have the data someplace you can’t search it. The other part that's important, phone companies-- different phone companies have different sets of records. And these phone calls may go between different phone companies. If you only go to one company, you'll see what that phone company has. But you may not see what the other phone company has or the other. So by putting those together, we can see all of that essentially at one time.

John Miller: Before 9/11, did we have this capability?

Gen. Keith Alexander: We did not.

John Miller: Is it a factor? Was it a factor?

Gen. Keith Alexander: I believe it was.

What Gen. Alexander is talking about is that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in touch with an al Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The NSA did not know their calls were coming from California, as they would today.

Gen. Keith Alexander: I think this was the factor that allowed Mihdhar to safely conduct his plot from California. We have all the other indicators but no way of understanding that he was in California while others were in Florida and other places.

The NSA knew about some of the 9-11 hijackers, but it was lost in the noise (and in lack of interdepartmental information sharing). The solution, suck in more noise? Makes little sense to me.

The 6th? Really? When did the NSA start a criminal prosecution?

Once that prosecution was brought to an actual trial, who was denied a jury per the 7th?

I'm, of course, assuming that they were involved in this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/al-qaeda-in-yemen/relatives-of-americans-killed-in-yemen-drone-strikes-file-suit-against-u-s/
which would violate both the 6th and 7th amendments
If you want to argue that they weren't involved, I can't say much. To me it just seems logical that they were.

Of course we must bring up the 10th amendment, because this is Slashdot, where we've forgotten that for the last hundred years of political history, national security has been a responsibility of the whole nation rather than the individual states.

"The amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered. There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment or that its purpose was other than to allay fears that the new national government might seek to exercise powers not granted, and that the states might not be able to exercise fully their reserved powers" - United States v. Darby Lumber, 312 U.S. 100, 124 (1941)
i.e. all rights and powers not granted to the federal government in the constitution remain the rights and powers of the states or individuals. The point of the amendment is to cover "The unknown" The Federal government was not given the right to invade our privacy in the constitution, and now that it's something that's possible to take in near totality it's clear that governance of that privacy should be left to the states should the constitution allow it. Though I believe other amendments protect it from even the states.

After declaring war on the United States in 1996, the international terrorist organization known as Al Qaida, which comprised elements of the armed forces and government of Afghanistan, conducted an attack on the United States of comparable magnitude to the attack by the Empire of Japan on Perl Harbor in 1941 in terms of loss of life and economic damage on 11 September 2001. They attacked targets in both New York City and Washington DC, having attacked American embassies and military forces previously, and many other targets subsequently. The conflict continues.

The alternative would be Insulin Coma Therapy, at least for some disorders. Not practiced in the West any more.

Sources: Insulin Coma Therapy

The famous mathematician John Nash (depicted in A Beautiful Mind*) was treated with it.

If you suffer from Nash's malady, don't read my current sig.

* Book , movie , trailer , documentary , DVD.

The alternative would be Insulin Coma Therapy, at least for some disorders. Not practiced in the West any more.

Sources: Insulin Coma Therapy

The famous mathematician John Nash (depicted in A Beautiful Mind*) was treated with it.

If you suffer from Nash's malady, don't read my current sig.

* Book , movie , trailer , documentary , DVD.

The morally bankrupt tactics are on the part of al Qaida and its associates who deliberately slaughter noncombatants by many means. The blinkered views of some in the West are of aid to them.

You are fundamentally confused about the source of the war against al Qaida - it is their decision, they declared war and began attacks killing many people years before the US made a serious response. They want a war of conquest. They want to restore the "glory of Islam" by restoring the Caliphate government that was dissolved in 1924 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and starting a world-wide conflict to bring all nations to the Muslim faith under Islamic rule. They want to take back lands formerly governed by Muslims, including the country of Spain, and al Qaida is not alone in that goal.

Alarm in Spain over al-Qaeda call for its "reconquest"
HAMAS Targets Spain

Please explain to me how it is the fault of the US that al Qaida and Hamas want to reconquer Spain?

This is about them, not about the US. You are simply mistaken.

And this is Captain Picard's office, not Captain Kirk's.

Did you always say that before or after this lady?

The relevant bit:

"The Hygiene Hypothesis," is that children who are around numerous other children or animals early in life are exposed to more microbes, and their immune systems develop more tolerance for the irritants that cause asthma. She is now researching the levels of allergy and asthma in children who live in villages as compared with children who live on a farm and are exposed to livestock.

According to this "hygiene hypothesis,'' the human immune system evolved two types of biological defenses. When one defensive system lacks practice fighting bacteria and viruses, perhaps from an overly sanitary lifestyle, the other system becomes too powerful and overreacts -- as an allergic reaction -- to harmless substances like pollen.

My problem is that the government allowed the telecom industry to charge the public to build the infrastructure to build high-speed and they've taken the money and done nothing with it. And the government hasn't taken the industries to task.

Google is not getting tax breaks for their current buildout. Kevin Lo, head of the Google Fiber rollout, specifically says that's not even a criteria. They are much more interested in gaining access to poles, getting accurate maps of where poles are, and in getting rapid approval of their construction permits.

AT&T, on the other hand, already got over $200 billion in tax breaks to deploy broadband, and didn't. So no, "all this regulation" did not make it more expensive to upgrade their infrastructure. It made it much much cheaper to upgrade their infrastructure, and instead of actually upgrading their infrastructure, as the law said they must, AT&T and their antecedents booked it as profit and paid their executives over a billion dollars in bonuses.

So yeah, let's level the playing field. Let's take $200 billion from AT&T and give it to Google.

Sorry, but that is simply wrong.

In 2012 defense spending was $677.8 billion, and should be falling from there due to cuts and sequestration. US participation in the war in Iraq is over, and Afghanistan will be winding down next year. Even if intelligence weren't counted in that we know the budget is about $90 billion, so it is well under $1T whereas Federal spending is more than $3.5T. In 2013 defense spending should be about 4% of GDP. If you examine this chart you will see that there are many sectors of the economy that are equal to or larger than 4%. And note that the long term trend for defense spending is downward as a percentage of GDP.

And as a correction, healthcare is approximately 17.6% of GDP, not 11%. That makes it roughly equal to 4x the size of defense spending at present.

As far as South Korea goes, US defense spending is about equal to the GDP of Florida, not much more than that of Illinois or Pennsylvania, and well under that of Texas, California, and New York. Many US states are the size of foreign countries in both area and population.

It is also worth remembering that defense spending is a composite of spending on many different goods and services, such as civilian and military salaries and benefits, construction, equipment, land, food, petroleum, ammunition, spare parts, weapons and equipment, services of many types, and so on, involving many different companies.

The bottom line is that it is ridiculous to think that the US would go to war based on the advocacy of any single company, or even the defense industry.

Although overall that was a very enjoyable film, that particular section is an unserious polemic consistent with the fawning over Chomsky* in the film.

As to your comment about nothing changing in the last 15 years, do you mean terrorists trying to attack the US? I'll guess not, I'm not sure that concern is one you'd have even though Bin Laden issued his fatwa declaring war against the US the year before it came out and attacked two US embassies in Africa causing a large loss of life and limb the year after.

* There's a certain irony in this since the monologue is regarding a purely rhetorical bombing of a village whereas Chomsky was a denier of the Cambodian genocide and associated with Holocaust deniers.

Actually, it's not eradicated, and it's actually making a comeback (thanks to the anti-vaxxers).

You're mistaken. No known human has contracted any form of naturally-occurring smallpox (i.e. not laboratory grown) since 1977 -- and we actually know the first and last name of the last person who ever did.

You're probably thinking of some other disease. There are lots of them; smallpox is the only one we've ever gotten rid of.

Japanese SuperSub

Good documentary.

PBS has a great documentary about its design and construction. You can even watch it online for free. (Cookies probably required.)

What I'm saying is every species on this planet seems to serve some purpose, we've just been too short sighted to recognize them. The reasons may go far deeper than many people are willing to believe are possible. The intelligence of certain animals have over time been shown to be far greater than what was then understood.

Saw an hour long Nova episode about a guy who took on the job of being the 'mother' of orphaned turkey chicks. He lived with them for a year, learned a lot about how they 'speak' to each other in a language, saw how they 'grieved' when some of their brood died of an unknown disease. Here is the link to that show: http://video.pbs.org/video/2168110328/

In my 50+ years I've learned to keep my mind more open to many concepts that as a young man I could not have grasped as possible. As to animals, from what little I have seen, there's still a lot more for humans to learn and discover. Of course, YMMV. :)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/health-care-costs-_n_3998425.html

http://kff.org/health-costs/

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html

I'm glad you base your outlook on your anecdotal evidence. You're part of the problem.

"So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare."

If that's the case then the USA must be the greatest country in the world.

I got this the same way we know Napoleon lost at waterloo or that the civil war happened or that anything else in history happened. There has been investigations into it, the history was documented, distributed, and objections noted. We have fragments of writings dating back quite a long ways too.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/origins-written-bible.html

Believe it or not, we know quite a bit about early religious people of all religions. This is even true when there is not written documentation surrounding it available. Everyone in the tribe was expected to memorize the scriptures and recite them- a tradition somewhat carried on in Jewish practice to this day. Part of their social standing came from their ability to do so. We even have roman literature describing the Jews doing so.

Cattle is no money and never was, it is a barter item.

Well I would have said so, too, but I found that PBS' NOVA described cattle as the first form of money. I thought it was an interesting assertion, so I repeated the claim. It's certainly debatable.

So, 2000 years before christ metal pieces where already 'stamped' with a 'value'?

Yea, pretty much. There were bronze age metal pieces that were stamped to provide a value, often called "bronze cowrie". You've heard of a "shekel", right? It was a standard weighing of gold or, more typically, silver. The Anatolian traders were known to "stamp" their units of metal to avoid weighing during trade - this was around 3000 B.C.

I'm looking forward for your Ph.D. thesis. That will be a real eye opener.

Typical American idiot - figures only academics with doctorates should know anything about history. Everything important you'll hear about on MSNBC and Fox News, right? No need for regular people to learn something so useless as "history", right?

In a prelude to the more recent gross attacks on democracy, the US and UK have both been consistently shitting on whistleblowers for many decades.

Snowden's method will probably only work if your leak will make you famous. For everyone else, anonymity would be advised.

The author of Spyblog has been documenting the progress of the UK's seemingly-inexorable descent into a Stasi police state for about 10 years.

In 2006, he started posting tips on whistleblowing. This has since evolved into a more comprehensive website.

http://ht4w.co.uk/

... Where did he train?

The Marine Corps. There are 3 levels: marksman, sharpshooter and expert. He was rated as a sharpshooter in 1956. In a 1959 test, his ability declined to marksman.

By the way, his brother (still alive) feels Lee was a whack job that was doing it on his own. Didn't know he had a brother near his own age — the surprises never end.

You mean like how they currently add acetaminophen to most opiates (check out your next codeine prescription) so that if you take too much you'll suffer liver damage?

Indeed.

"The drug acetaminophen, which is the active ingredient in the popular Tylenol, among others, is widely considered safe when taken correctly. Yet, the pain reliever can lead to liver damage that is often severe or even fatal when taken in doses greater than recommended. The problem is, however, that the margin between a safe dose and a potentially harmful dose is slim. Taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above the maximum daily dose - or just two additional extra strength pills a day - has been reported to cause liver damage, according to the [Food and Drug Administration]. "

Article: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/09/acetaminophen-deaths-cast-shadow-on-popular-pain-reliever.html

I'm saying that unless there were journalists informed of the fiasco early on, you won't get any detailed reporting for a few months because serious investigative journalism takes time. It is not like the 24-hr news networks where they report every innuendo and rumor because they want to be the first to scoop something.

It's debatable how "newsworthy" this could have been in a general news publication -- how you build a web site is technical and even good technology choices made by talented and experienced people can be open to debate. It would probably be hard to make interesting reading, probably along the lines of trying to explain financial derivatives or credit-default swaps.

The problem is that the public finds Miley Cyrus gyrating on stage more "interesting" than explaining how changes in the derivatives regulations in the 1990s are partially responsible for the financial crisis or what happened during the meltdown.

At the end of the day, this is the most significant web site launch in Federal government history (at least in terms of profile, if not in actual citizen impact) and there probably should have been reporters engaged in the entire development process and hopefully cultivating the kind of sources who would expose deviations from standard software development, weird product choices and deviations from traditional methodologies.

I would give it some time before someone reports an in-depth story of how it happened. Most likely it won't be from the likes of CNN or Fox or MSNBC. Also everyone was so focused on the shutdown that they were not paying attention to the website.

I'm saying that unless there were journalists informed of the fiasco early on, you won't get any detailed reporting for a few months because serious investigative journalism takes time. It is not like the 24-hr news networks where they report every innuendo and rumor because they want to be the first to scoop something.

It's debatable how "newsworthy" this could have been in a general news publication -- how you build a web site is technical and even good technology choices made by talented and experienced people can be open to debate. It would probably be hard to make interesting reading, probably along the lines of trying to explain financial derivatives or credit-default swaps.

The problem is that the public finds Miley Cyrus gyrating on stage more "interesting" than explaining how changes in the derivatives regulations in the 1990s are partially responsible for the financial crisis or what happened during the meltdown.

At the end of the day, this is the most significant web site launch in Federal government history (at least in terms of profile, if not in actual citizen impact) and there probably should have been reporters engaged in the entire development process and hopefully cultivating the kind of sources who would expose deviations from standard software development, weird product choices and deviations from traditional methodologies.

I would give it some time before someone reports an in-depth story of how it happened. Most likely it won't be from the likes of CNN or Fox or MSNBC. Also everyone was so focused on the shutdown that they were not paying attention to the website.

Also, how does a T-Rex imitate a Pterodactyl... flapping its little arms vainly?

Rawr.

Clearly you are unfamiliar with Dinosaur Train and Buddy the T-Rex who was hatched into a family of Pteranodons. http://www.pbs.org/parents/dinosaurtrain/about/meet-the-characters/

Frontline did a story on this on PBS. It's worth a watch. Everyone should. Effectively, theirs not much researches can do I'm afraid. Nothing short of genetic engineering and what not, the chemical common denominators used as antibiotics (while not harming the host) is pretty much useless to these new evolved forms of bacteria.

If not, pony up some details.

Stories abound of people who have lost under the ACA, some of whom have lost big. You don't need some random /. member to tell you his story when similar stories have aired on every major news network for the last few weeks. Here's one from PBS, a relatively unbiased source that few would claim was rooting for the failure of the ACA.

And there are plenty MORE stories about people getting screwed by insurance companies BEFORE the ACA. Even with the ACA, it's still the insurance companies screwing you.

Okay, /. loves car analogies, so here's one. Let's say in the near future the technology for self-driving cars is well enough refined for the mass market. Now let's say failures in the automatic driving system will cause 1,000 deaths per year from traffic accidents, but the automatic driving system will save 10,000 deaths per year. Should we implement the system in order to save a net of 9,000 deaths per year, or should we deny it because it'll cause 1,000 deaths per year?

If not, pony up some details.

Stories abound of people who have lost under the ACA, some of whom have lost big. You don't need some random /. member to tell you his story when similar stories have aired on every major news network for the last few weeks. Here's one from PBS, a relatively unbiased source that few would claim was rooting for the failure of the ACA.

I think PBS Frontline is a fairly non-biased source of information:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interviews/pollan.html

So most people think of a cow as something that's out grazing, and then is taken to the slaughterhouse. ... No, not true. Cows see very little grass nowadays in their lives. They get them on corn as fast as they can, which speeds up their lifespan, gets them really fat, and allows you to slaughter them within 14 months.

The problem with this system, or one of the problems with this system, is that cows are not evolved to digest corn. It creates all sorts of problems for them. The rumen is designed for grass. And corn is just too rich, too starchy. So as soon as you introduce corn, the animal is liable to get sick.

It creates a whole [host] of changes to the animal. So you have to essentially teach them how to eat corn. You teach their bodies to adjust. And this is done in something called the backgrounding pen at the ranch, which is kind of the prep school for the feedlot. Here's where you teach them how to eat corn.

You start giving them antibiotics, because as soon as you give them corn, you've disturbed their digestion, and they're apt to get sick, so you then have to give them drugs. That's how you get in this whole cycle of drugs and meat. By feeding them what they're not equipped to eat well, we then go down this path of technological fixes, and the first is the antibiotics. Once they start eating the [corn], they're more vulnerable. They're stressed, so they're more vulnerable to all the different diseases cows get. But specifically they get bloat, which is just a horrible thing to happen. They stop ruminating.

"Tort Reform" is a red herring foisted by insurance companies. reducing the ability for patients to protect themselves when medical practitioners screw up does nothing to reduce costs and does everything to undercut the little guy.

healthcare costs so much in the U.S. because primary and preventative care are lacking, and the "market" has emphasized high-cost hospital care and pharmaceuticals. in short, capitalistic greed is unchecked. sad, but unsurprising, really.

government is needed to step in and counter this trend. left to their own devices, the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical companies will just continue to jack up prices, while our population does little to increase overall health.

Wrong company. It is more like Amgen is making things worse. If you want to give yourself a good scare watching the latest Frontline episode on superbugs is a great way to do it. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/health-science-technology/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/dr-brad-spellberg-antibiotic-resistance-is-everyones-fault/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmare-bacteria/

Scariest thing I've watched in a long time.

It should be noted that 'people smuggling' isn't related to slavery; it's the politicised term for the people who help refugees get to Autralia. The efforts to stop people smugglers are about the current Australian government's (xenophobic) anti-refugee policies; they're the result of domestic politics, not a cooperative effort to stop human trafficking.

It's not actually xenophobia when you attempt to enforce your national borders.

The situation between Indonesia and Australia is similar to the situation between Mexico and the U.S., where the Mexican government in some cases actually busses illegals to the U.S. border in order to aid their illegal immigartion into the U.S.. While most illegals are economic refugees, the bussing mostly involved "undesirables" in Mexico, which included Mexican criminals, but more frequently were refugees from Guatamala and El Salvador, which Mexico preferred to make "not their problem". PBS did a documentary on this a while back:

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/beyondtheborder/immigration.html

The "cooperation" being negotiated in this case is primarily dealing with people using Indonesia as a transit point, and less so export of Indonesian "bad apples", just as with the U.S. (although Indonesia will happily export locally grown Al Qaeda to get rid of them). A significant number of these come from the Middle East, including a large portion of them from Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Lebanon. Here are some examples:

http://www.niqash.org/articles/?id=3308
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13920705000600

One of the agreements being negotiated has been buying unused boats which could be made sufficiently seaworthy to get from Indonesia to Australia:

http://qz.com/118198/australias-election-frontrunner-thinks-buying-broken-indonesian-boats-will-stave-off-asylum-seekers/ ...but it benefits Tony Abbot's opponents to find ways to undermine that plan as much as possible, and it benefits Indonesian politicians to be complicit in that, and seize on any excuse, lest the illegal immigrant refugees end up stuck in Indonesia instead (Indonesia doesn't want them either). So at this point, it's largely an argument between the mostly empty regions of Australia and the more densely populated regions (analogous to the red state/blue state U.S. division that had Arizona enforcing immigration laws that the U.S. federal government would not).

So basically, politics, not Snowden.

An electricity grid needs either some big stable supplies or a lot of diversity and over provisioning to be able to keep up with demand spikes

The US was on a steady path leading to a nuclear grid until 1977, when Carter declared a moratorium on spent fuel processing. This caused more concern than alarm in the nuclear power industry, whose plants all had pools for temporary storage. Everyone thought it would be ironed out shortly, the government would step in to manage a secure facility to recycle plutonium and store long term waste. Then the China Syndrome [movie,1979], Three Mile Island [incident,1979] occured 12 days apart and everything came to a halt.

The only notable grid building that has occurred since then haas been the steady accumulation of coal-fired power plants over the years, a slight increase in nuclear, and only recently a shift to natural gas. That's it. There's your electrical grid.

Everything else has been incorrect projections and wasted money. Discussion of coal and natural gas power generation a topic? Nope, actually there has been twenty years of hype on solarand
wind, alternatives that are regiional at best, and upon any climate disruption that would generate cloud cover or disrupt wind patterns (no matter what the storage technology) would be a slate-wiper. Solar and Wind have presumed the building of branch feeders, there never was money for that. T. Boone Pickens lost his shirt on wind or let us say, provided a cautionary tale for other billionaires.

Solar subsidies will not just dry up... they will disappear overnight as the true crisis begins. Be it economic implosion or reigning in of government spending, the correction will be huge and sudden.

So now we are riding the crest of a natural gas glut which may last 30 years. I am hesitant to drop the 'hundreds' of years figure because it would be achieved with escalating difficulty and they wish to mass export it out of the country today. After that things looks pretty bleak. More coal??

That is why folks like me seem kind of desperately agitated on these forums at times. We're not adverse to personal self-sufficiency or conservation, we just see a terrible crisis ahead.

Part of the reason for the agitation in these discussions is that we are being presented with a steady stream well-meant suggestions for personally navigating the crisis, as if a little money ahead and a bit of ingenuity can mitigate the risk. And we do sense risk and danger.

That is why when we discuss the state of the grid we tend to sweep wind and solar off the table. Too aggressively, sure -- it is an aspect of our sense of dread, NOT an insensitivity to the usefulness and and cleverness of those sources.

We feel pressed on the matter. We are thinking of a long harsh Winter, just ONE country-wide ice storm which is possible, a serious further economic downturn, and the prospect of going to war over oil (again) or the dollar losing its reserve strength (happening!). All of these things, along with a hypothetical ~30 year glut of natural gas means there is perhaps still time to save the grid (and our way of life) if we get serious about fission and LFTR now, urgently.

Otherwise we are heading for THIS: a true blackout American Blackout. Never mind the unlikely cyberattack scenario, I do not even believe a Carrington Even EMP would take out that many points at once... and their time frame is a little extreme, "Day 10" events might occur at Week 10...

Thorium LFTRs would not in themselves save us if our lo

Here's a link after a casual search: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/07/12/july-12-2013-bloodless-surgeries/19167/

There is a lot more research from more scholarly sources but if you'd like to look into it more I'm sure this will take you down the rabbit hole.

I can't think of even one good deed either of those two fascist bastards have done.

While I think it's ironically named, given some of the other anti-science things they have done (funded anti-global warming research), the "David H. Koch Fund for Science" is one of the funders of Nova.

See at the bottom of http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/