Domain: staradvertiser.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to staradvertiser.com.
Comments · 10
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Re:Road blocked by boulders
These are the same people who cared so little they brought invasive ants up with them; I can't say disturbing the site surprises me.
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Re:More religious whackjobs
Those are all good points, but the sovereignty activists don't care. Each of them envisions themselves the new king or queen; this is about petty attempts at grabbing power, nothing more. They really don't care if they are wrong about the telescope as long as it gives them something to rally around (Hawai'i resident here; I have actually heard this said by an anti-TMT activist).
They don't want the economic or educational benefits the telescope would bring; poor and uneducated are good for the leaders. They want racial discontent more than then want tolerance; perceptions of persecution are good for the leaders. You can point out to these activist leaders out that Hawaiian sovereignty is an inherently racist idea (it's no better than the scumbag white nationalist groups, not in my book; all race based nationalism is immoral bronze age bullshit). You can point out that everyone born in Hawai'i is an American citizen equal under the law. You can point out the economic problems that would occur the instant Hawai'i left the US, if that were to happen, and that life for their supporters would become much harder. They do not care, and they don't care if Hawai'i goes to shit, as long as they are the rulers of shit mountain.
That's what this is really about. They want people poor, uneducated, angry, and easy to manipulate for their own benefit. None of the benefits the TMT would provide to Hawai'i County's public education system (like the high school robotics program they fund) and economy? That's great to them. They sure as hell don't want other people educating kids. And they do want people to say stupid shit like 'Hawaiians are anti-science' because it creates an us vs them environment (DO NOT SAY 'Hawaiians are anti-science' as some people have; that's racist and not true. Hawaiian does not equal anti-TMT activist). So we are not talking about a benevolent group here. Keep in mind, every year people do off road racing and snow boarding and other things on Maunakea, and leave all sorts of garbage, and no one cares about that. The Mauna is only sacred in so far as a political point can be made, in other words, they don't really give two shits about mountain or the telescope or the supposed sacredness, only what they can gain from it. Or course, if they really cared, they wouldn't be doing shit like introducing invasive ants.
Additionally, I'd like to point out that if they were really all about ancient Hawaiian traditions, they would realize that there was nothing prohibiting building things on Maunakea and that ancient Hawaiians were active stargazers. There is nothing at all suggesting that this would be offensive. The protestors also seem to be ignoring the fact that their presence on the Mauna would, in contrast, be offense; only the ali'i and kahuna were allowed on the Mauna, not commoners like them (of course, in the modern State of Hawai'i, we are all equals and Maunakea is open to all; there are no castes of people). It's no different than the Christian groups that make up their religion as they go along and pick and choose what parts of the Bible they like in order to justify their current inane actions. It's just like a lot of stuff that seems anti-science on the outside; it's all about someone's power or wealth, you just have to find out who, and in this case it is the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.
Hope that clear up some of the situation here. And the thing is, all of their legal, cultural, economic, scientific, and environmental arguments are complete fabricated bullshit. So whenever the telescope is built (because there is literally no good reason to block it) they are just going to use it as more 'proof' that they are being repressed, and that no one listens to or cares about Hawaiian voices (not
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Re:Price Controls?
Diverting 93% of the water to grow lettuce in the desert since 1920 had nothing to do with it.
Also, ignore the arctic ice that's been increasing for three years, the antarctic ice that's always grown and hit a new record in 2014, snow in Hawaii, and the great lakes that have frozen early,and that have frozen over compete the last two years. Ignore Niagara falls that has frozen over two years in a row and ignore all the record cold around the country. Ignore the fact we kill killed half the worlds trees in the last 100 years and where we do theres drought and ignore the fact the IPCC did not admit trees ate CO2 until 2010. Ignore the fact NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis in 2010 and ignore the fact the climate models now have 95% error.Ignore the fact corals have genes that upregulate to ignore acidification and warming and ignore the fact pollution (I'm especially looking at you big oil) has gotten worse while we're distracted by this nonsense. Ignore the fact not a single IPCC prediction ever came true.
And especially ignore NAA/NOAA when they say "there has been no warming this century"
Creation science, social science, climate science... if you have to add "science" to a word to give it legitimacy, it's not science any more than the Democratic People's republic of North Korea is a democracy. Real sciences yield natural laws to quote Feynman.
Instead, look at 01% of a country that is 2% of the world.
Refs:
1) Ice
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://news.ku.dk/all_news/201...
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/ear...
http://www.nasa.gov/content/go...2) records:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/vide...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
http://www.staradvertiser.com/...
https://www.facebook.com/video...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/febru...
http://www.latimes.com/local/l...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...3) Trees:
http://www.pri.org/stories/201...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.agu.org/news/press/... -
Re:Did they have a warrant?
The documents indicate the FBI in Seattle
Where is the reference to those documents?
The warrant does not say that “communication” would be a bogus news story that appeared to be published online by The Seattle Times.
These words appear in neither of the articles. Where did they come from or are you making them up?
At the point they got the tip they knew it was a teen and had little creditable threat.
Can you refer to anywhere that they already knew he was a 15 year old and the threat was not credible? Even if he was, when I was fifteen I could have built a bomb quite easily. You seem to be reading documents that I have not seen. Please show the links to those documents.
By the way, this is what a reference looks like.
You wonder why the FBI got involved. According to this The local police asked for help.Police in Lacey, near Olympia, sought the FBI's help as repeated bomb threats prompted a week of evacuations at Timberline High School in June 2007.
Bomb threats over the internet where the local police ask for help will get help from the FBI.
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Re: Land of the Free!
Bear in mind I'm not against law-abiding hunters, but in fact irresponsible hunters do endanger local populations. My neighbors (who have a horse farm) were basically living in fear when a group of hunters illegally parked on their property and started a hunt without permission.
A quick google search finds similar stories
http://missoulian.com/news/local/libby-hunter-charged-with-shooting-man-while-pursuing-wounded-deer/article_6e1ae68a-5cf6-11e3-912c-001a4bcf887a.html
http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/20100726_Landowners_fight_hunter_trespassing.html?id=99220354 -
Re:Ruin the US wheat crop, get a prize!
It also ups the ante in the arms race of evolution, which isn't universally seen as a good thing.
It certainty is a bad thing, which is why millions of people protested conventional breeding when late blight overcame the conventionally bred resistances in tomato and when hessian flies overcame conventionally bred resistance in wheat. Oh wait, that never happened because it would be absolutely idiotic, yet somehow, when genetic engineering is involved, the same basic facts of population genetics are suddenly terrible and proof that the technique itself is bad. Perhaps it is because the vast vast majority of the opposition to genetic engineering is coming from those with no background in agricultural or plant science and thus due to their complete lack of context it seems reasonable to them.
Calling objection "hysteria" doesn't make it so. Some protesters are quite enlightened and think long term.
And most of the protesters are the agricultural equivalents to the anti-vaccine movement. And when you are doing little in the way of scientifically justifying your concerns, instead preferring to use bunk science, fearmongering, and outright vandalism on non-corporate projects and farmer's fields, you shouldn't be surprised when you get characterized poorly. Hell, there is no small opposition to even things like Golden Rice (biofortified with -carotene) and the Arctic apple (which does not oxidize when cut). I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason as to why that is, if not unscientific hysteria, because this stuff isn't looking good.
Just about everything carries risk (again for context, even conventional breeding conventional breeding carries risk), just about everything has some negatives that come with the positives, there are actual issues, and not every genetically engineered organisms will necessarily turn out to be a good thing. But to paint the anti-GMO movement as a whole as anything even remotely reasonable would be like saying young earth creationists simply have a dispute with the minor details of a few phylogenies.
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Re:Oh dear
There is so much disinformation about the drop yield of GMOs (from both sides) that I have given up trying to figure out the truth
There are no crops modified to increase intrinsic yield, just for traits that contribute to yield, so yield improvements depend on the trait and the situation. In the case of insect resistant crops, the gain is fairly modest in developed countries, something like 3-4% I think, however, this is because developed countries were already spraying pesticides. Obviously, replacing one pesticide for another, if they both work about as well, will not increase yield much. The situation is different in developing countries like South Africa, India, China, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, where they might not have those pesticides to add. There they increase yields a good bit more, up to 30-40$. What the authors of studies like Failure to Yield don't get (well, judging by their very careful wording, I think the authors did get this, but tried to put a negative spin on things) is that GE crops, in developed countries anyway, are not actually meant to increase yield, they are meant to be useful in other ways, and that the modest increase in yield is just a benefit, though to be fair I'm not sure how Monsanto markets that though. They also don't get that the benefits of a GE crop in one place will be different than the benefits somewhere else.
The second type of GE crop is the herbicide tolerant ones. I'm not really certain off the top of my head how much those have contributed to yield, but again, that is not what they are meant to do anyway. They are meant to make weed control easier, although they have had some environmental benefits through promoting no-till agriculture, which prevents soil degradation and fertilizer runoff (which leads to unsophistication in aquatic environments and eventually dead zones, like the massive one in the Gulf of Mexico due to agricultural runoff), and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
The last type of GE crop currently used virus resistance (well, there is another type, since Monsanto recently got its DroughtGard corn approved, but that one is not grown yet since they just got approval).. If you read up on the story of the Rainbow papaya (pdf), you will find that it saved the Hawaiian papaya industry. The papaya ringspot virus was threatening to wipe out all papaya production on the islands until the University of Hawaii developed the Rainbow papaya. Yields then increased. In terms of increasing yield, that is a very clear success story, although is often ignored by the anti-GMO groups, and when they do talk about it they consider it a failure because as a result of anti-GE fearmongering it has export issues (might makes right I guess), although those restrictions were recently lifted. And the GMO papayas have a new type of pest the non-GMO ones don't have: people with machetes.
I get how it can seem like both sides are full of it (zealous ignorant activists on one hand and a corporation with a profit motive on the other, both obviously biased and not to be fully trusted), but the general scientific consensus is that they do, in general, increase yields, at least for the insect resistant and virus resistant ones anyway.
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Tabled
State lawmakers have tabled a proposal that would have required Internet service providers to retain all Hawaii consumers' subscriber data and browsing histories for a minimum of two years.
Introduced a way to combat Internet-related crime, House Bill 2288 received support from Honolulu's police and prosecutor departments and one individual, but was otherwise greeted with vehement opposition at a hearing Thursday.
Opponents of the legislation expressed concerns about privacy and the costs associated with storing such large volumes of data.
Others told House members the sweeping Hawaii proposal made the widely-protested "Stop Online Piracy Act" and "Protect Intellectual Property/IP Act" before look mild by comparison.
The House Economic Revitalization and Business Committee decided to hold off on state action to see what happens with online piracy legislation in Congress.
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Re:$40 for Obama
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Re:And yet-
"...to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate.
This one puzzled me.Well, there's University of Hawaii--
With the exception of the 2007 Sugar Bowl season, the athletic department has run at a deficit every year since 2002, most recently with $2 million shortfalls in consecutive years leading to a net accumulated deficit of more than $10 million.
And
After nearly 2 1/2 hours of often passionate public testimony, presentations and discussion, the Board of Regents [of the University of Hawaii] voted 11-3 to approve a mandatory $50-per-semester fee for all full- and part-time Manoa students beginning the spring 2011 semester.
The fee is calculated to raise nearly $2 million, about $1.85 million of which will be kept by the athletic department...