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Iraq Swears By Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector
jggimi writes "According to the New York Times, more than fifteen hundred remote sensing devices have been sold to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior, at prices ranging from $16,500 to $60,000 each. The devices are used for bomb and weapon detection at checkpoints, and have no battery or other power source. Sounds great, but according to a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, they work on the same principle as a Ouija board — the power of suggestion. He described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod. Even though the device has been debunked by the US Military, the US Department of Justice, and even Sandia National Laboratories, the Iraqis are thrilled with the devices. 'Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,' said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives."
where those billions and billions of dollars went.
they shouldn't be allowed to have the bomb. On the plus side, there an easier target.
Maybe I should sell them my ballistic missile protection rock. Only 10 million dollars, and if you are hit by an ICBM contact me for a full refund.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What a hilarious quote. See? They're not so different from us after all.
I am interested in purchasing your bomb-repelling rock.
With people like that Iraq is doomed to remain the well of ignorance, superstition and tribal violence that it is, and that it has been for hundred of years.
... is alive and well. And it takes critical thinking with the possible addition of someone qualified and able to conduct statistical analysis to show someone there is no magic.
Sure, it finds bombs, but youre spending hours wandering around and forgetting about the time you didnt find a bomb.
But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board”
So in effect, this device will justify my search of anyone that I feel has a bomb. Even if I know it's bogus (and I'd not be surprised if the Iraqis do know this), it permits me to search anyone I want just because I feel they may have a bomb. I'd not be surprised if there was some correlation between suspicious-looking-folks and folks-with-bombs, so the power of unbounded searching is probably (somewhat) effective.
On the other hand, if they really do believe that these devices work, then the bombers may share those beliefs. That, also, could deter bombings.
Either way, it's a win for Iraq ... well, if you don't care about human rights and the millions of dollars.
Even a stopped clock's minute hand is right 24 times a day.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Because our 'good men' made the mess in the first place. If you make a mess, clean it up. That's good advice for a pre-schooler, and good advice for presidents.
Qxe4
It works on a very simple principle, that is used in many devices sold today: the company that makes them probably kicks half the price back to the official who authorized the purchase.
IMO, this is just the placebo effect.
From what I understand, detecting bombs is based on looking for something out-of-place, something that shouldn't be there. Give somebody one of these things, and they start trusting their instincts more and voila, more bombs are being detecting because of the magic stick.
Why should our good men and (and a few women) have to die to 'help' these people?
I agree insofar as "these people" refers specifically to "heads of Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives" who are wasting a lot of money, refusing to admit they bought snake oil, and then handing them out to Iraq's own good men (and probably not many women) who are putting their lives on the line.
Because those people are assholes and any country deserves better than that.
nothingtoseeheremovealong
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
It may still have a benefit if the terrorists also have such a blind belief in the technology. If they know there are bomb detectors at the gate, they will be less likely to try to sneak a bomb through.
Qxe4
Anyone see the Bugs Bunny cartoon (@6:40) where he was working on an assembly line during WW2? He had a little hammer that he would tap bombs with to see if they were good or not. Of course one after another was a dud, until finally...
I guess if your divining rod detects a suicide bomber... then what? They detonate? I guess it is 100% effective in that case. Bomb detected.
Better known as 318230.
In fairness, it might be possible that these wands are actually functioning as a *mild* deterrent, if some of the terrorists have been fooled into thinking that the wands will detect their bombs. This is not enough to justify their cost or the foolishness of relying on them alone to detect bombs, but at least it might mean that the wands aren't contributing entirely negative value to those who are using them.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Here in the U.S., a great many of our police departments and even federal agencies spend millions on a technology that is equally ridiculous and unprovable in any sort of peer-reviewed scientific study: Lie detectors. If we can have our lie detectors, then surely the Iraqis are entitled to their bomb sniffing dowsing rods.
The proponents of these devices, when confronted with the undeniable technical worthlessness of them, inevitably retreat to the claim that the actual benefits come from the psychology of having people being "investigated" by the devices believe that they are actually capable of something, and then watching their reactions.
They also double as tiger repellent rocks. Since use of the rocks, nation building is way up and tiger maulings are way down. With less than 2 tiger maulings a day in the green zone.
Dear General Jehad al-Jabiri,
You may be surprised to hear from me. I am Mrs. John Mutube, former wife of the late general in charge of Nigerian counterterrorism forces. Upon his death I was amazed to discover 15000 (FIFTEEN THOUSAND) special BOMB DETECTION RODS. As my party has fallen out of favor, I find myself destitute. So I am offering you full possession of these BOMB DETECTION RODS for only the cost of shipping. Since the devices are heavy, I must ask that you pay for postage so I can deliver you the rods. Send either money order or credit card particulars to
Mrs. John Mutube
123 Mutube Street
Benin, Nigeria
I look forward to your successful counterterrorism endeavor.
I am, yours truly,
Mrs. John Mutube
#DeleteChrome
All that use of this device shows is that bombs are rare enough in practice that strict security is unwarranted. It's certainly cheaper security theater than the TSA's sniffers and X-Ray machines. It works because the population believes it works. It'd never go over in the more-educated United States.
Sure, my local politicians are incompetent and corrupt.
But I see now that it could be much worse!
They also clean your fuel injectors and turn your enemies into newts!
Oh I know what you mean.
I mean, before America showed up it was a happy place. They had flowing meadows, and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It isn't like anyone in the US uses dousing rods to find water. Oh wait? What's that they do. Well, at least they don't construct electronic devices which they claim do things which they don't? Oh wait, what's that about all sorts of alternative medicine devices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone? I suppose I don't even need to bother to list all the other fun beliefs, like astrology, ghosts, electronic voice phenomena. Oh and doesn't the federal government still use lie detector tests despite the scientific consensus that they don't work? Yeah, despite all that, let's make a big deal about what the people in Iraq are doing. After all, they are primitive foreigners. There's no way good, right-thinking Americans would act that way.
True, but lie detectors do actually measure things. Heart rate, etc. They're not accurate, but they're not magical either.
This is completely retarded, instead of the lie detector's mostly retarded.
Something I learned from P&T:B.... Clench your ass muscle to fool lie detectors.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
When I was living in NY, I worked with a fellow who had his well pointed out by a local Dowser. It cost him $300 in 1990.
And for $300, he would tell you exactly where you should dig, precisely how far you should dig, how much water you were going to get (GPM), how long it would last, whether it was subject to drought or could be relied upon during dry spells. He could also eliminate sources with salt, sulfur, iron, calcium and anything else you don't want in your water. He'd take a wire flag and write the instructions for the driller on the flag, then stick it precisely where they were supposed to drill.
The catch?
The Dowser gave his guarantee in writing, with a quadruple your money back if anything was less than what he promised. Goes dry? Not enough flow? Muddy, salty, iron, sulfur? He'll pay you $1200.
When I heard the story from my co-worker, the old fellow hadn't needed to pay anyone back in the 20 years he'd been doing it. Dunno if he's still alive now, though.
And I'm not sure he'd want to try this out with explosives if he still is.
[End Of Line]
" 'Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,' said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives."
Did GWB personally appoint these people?
Vietnam is going to look like a walk in the park...
I got better...
Oh don't worry, I've got a saying for every situation. Here's one you may have heard, "leave a place better than you found it." Or at very least don't leave it worse than you found it. If we had left Iraq a few years ago and let it fall into civil war, things would have been bad.
That's the altruistic way of looking at it. If you want a more selfish reason to keep supporting them, try this one: the middle east is likely to be an important region of the world for years to come, until we find alternatives to oil. Don't you think it would be useful to have a contingent of power in the heart of the area? Cheney and Bush sure did.
In any case, it's silly for you to get upset about Iraq because we've been withdrawing according to schedule for many months now. If you don't like the schedule, that's fine, maybe you can come up with an argument against it.
Qxe4
Why should our good men and (and a few women) have to die to 'help' these people?
They have oil, and lots of it. As do their neighbours. You seriously have not heard? There is no other reason.
The US alone uses something like 20 million barrels a day and rising, while production is well under half that and falling.
That's a billion dollars per day, and set to rise dramatically as production fails to rise with global demand.
In all fairness to the Iraqis, much of modern forensics "science" is in a similar state in this country. Do you really believe they can match a smudged fingerprint to a single person with 100% accuracy? Then can't match DNA with that accuracy. Of course with DNA they have statistical controls, so they actually have a clue what their accuracy is.
Here's how it really works, the investigators interview everyone they think may have had something to do with it, they decided who they think is guilty and then they look for the evidence to match what they already think is true. This is the same basic principle the Iraqi bomb-detecting dousing rod works on.
So until we are in a place where everyone has a basic understanding of scientific principles, and everyone has a mind inquisitive enough to ask "does this really make sense" we will always be in a place where someone can hold up some scientific sounding technojaron and people will believe him as long as they want it to be true.
Can those of us who never supported the war get a tax break? I wholeheartedly agree that those who made this mess should clean it up.
Otherwise, they'd start complaining about all of the false-positives from the devices.
Not for using known-bogus props as an excuse to conduct searches, which would be clever, but for deliberately paying $60,000 for each of them!
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
And then America showed up and they finally got all that.
The dowser explodes, thereby simultaneously indicating where the bomb was and disposing it.
What? Too soon?
Yeah, me too. It really sucks to be a part of society sometimes, because everyone around you wants to do something different. I hated the Iraq war from the beginning, but at the time, most people actually supported it, so I had no choice but to go along.
Society has disadvantages, but most of the time the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Qxe4
Yeah, when the Americans showed up, they were all like, "Hey lady, eat the apple off that tree of knowledge." The region went to shit after that.
I don't know how much a real bomb detector cost, but it'll probably be more expensive than these bogus wands.
The people who bought this probably knew it doesn't work but they use it anyway to give whoever they are protecting a (false) sense of security.
Because America has been fooled to wage the tribal wars of others. Why did Hitler want genocide on the Jews anyway?
Because our 'good men' made the mess in the first place. If you make a mess, clean it up. That's good advice for a pre-schooler, and good advice for presidents.
It's also a recipe for an endless, bloody war. Especially when the populace doesn't want you there and the politicians you are supporting are massively corrupt.
Before America showed up they had a tyrant dictator who had the good sense to stay out of religious disputes in an area where people with religious disputes are prone to making their case with guns and bombs, even if it means taking their own lives.
We then invaded this not-so-idyllic nation with not so much as a whit of an idea about what to do to turn such a place into a thriving democracy, when doing so would be plainly unfair to the minorities in the religious disputes.
Democracy works when reasonable people come together and are willing to make decisions and sacrifices for the betterment of all the people. It does not work, sadly, in nations where it has been forced into existence replacing an existing corrupt government that the people had no faith in, and no reason to believe in the new government.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but it seems to me that the way to bring "peace" to the Middle East would be through reason, brutally slow diplomacy and encouraging expression of ideas and open debates, encouraging education of children male and female, etc. Basically, using the thin edge of the wedge. Instead we came in with guns and bombs, things these people are all too familiar with, and the ones who don't like us responded in kind.
That's like saying it is ok for me to shit in my roommates bed because he hardly ever cleans.
No post about polygraphy is complete without a link to antipolygraph.
For anyone interested, the site has a lot of great information, including a free book that goes into intimate details regarding how polygraphs are operated and how their results are interpreted to mean either "truth" or "lies". They even have the operator's handbooks and interpretation guides for giving an examination and information on how to "beat the box".
Very interesting stuff -- doubly so for anyone who might sometime be in a position where taking a polygraph is required for a job or security clearance.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
A quick search suggests that polygraphs normally outperform random chance. By how much seems to be highly variable.
It appears the scientific evidence is that polygraphy is not sufficiently sensitive or specific to be useful as legal evidence, but there's a big difference between a functional but inaccurate technique (i.e. one that outperforms guessing) and one that doesn't.
So... let's get this right...you give the guy a divining rod and then tell them to them to wander around a suspected mine field holding this thing. When it dips (or crosses, you found a mine). Yup, that'll work. Hard to believe we can't seem to win this war.
Michael Shermer, famous Skeptic, gave a TED speech on "why people believe strange things." He actually brought one of those detectors out on stage, and said that US public schools were buying it as a marijuana detector, and paying hundreds of dollars for it. Looking at the image in the article, it appears to be the same device.
There is likely to be something similar to a placebo effect (in addition to confirmation bias and other psychological pitfalls) that will reinforce the idea that this works for officials there. If they believe it works, it is likely at least some bombers will, too. So it has a deterrent effect that is likely measurable. Therefore if they do some correlation studies later, they are likely to find places that do use these will have lower rates of incident (as long as you don't compare to places with actual bomb detection).
'Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,' said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives.
I'd be interested to see some numbers on this. It's all fun and games until the other guy turns out to be right, you know.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
That's like saying it is ok for me to shit in my roommates bed because he hardly ever cleans.
hahaha insightful, informative and funny! :)
Are we colonizing? I hope not! That would be an impossible task!
Are we raping and pillaging? Nope!
What the hell are we doing there, other than spending money?
What a WASTE.
Obama's demonstrating that he's powerless to take command of the military.
Sounds great, but according to a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack they work on the same principle as a Ouija board -- the power of suggestion.
Guaranteed to find bombs or your money back!
I have to suggest this to some of those Does It Work? shows...the ones I don't like.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I would have modded your comment Insightful instead of Funny, we really do have a short memory :(
On a lighter note, there is a old saying where I came from,
"Smart/Cunning folks will never go hungry as long as fools live"
That's like saying it is ok for me to shit in my roommates bed because he's an asshole.
Let me fix that for you.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I agree. Then Damned Lief Erickson had to go and put his first settlement here after some other vikings discovered it and let him and his father know about it.
Then the Copycat wannabe Columbus came here.
At least the Vikings were consistent, they simply killed and burned everything. The "pilgrims" bullshitted the native Indians before killing them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Isn't it obvious that this guy is getting a kickback from the sales of these B.S. rods? Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, Esquire, is getting a percentage of every rod sold to the Iraqi government. This is why he has to endorse them! $10 bucks says he OKs every procurement of these rods personally.
His grandiose statements ("I know more about bombs than anyone in the world"), his reliance on personal opinion ("I don't care what Sandia, et al, say"), his inability to accept the facts in front of him ("you need more training"), and his position within the government make this an obvious conclusion. Which is why he is being investigated. I hope the Washington Post writes a follow-up when he bails out of Iraq with his immoral gains.
Just as you don't attribute to negligence what stupidity can easily explain, you don't attribute to stupidity was GREED can easily explain.
~Sticky
//DUH!
I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” General Jabiri said. “I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.
There is no other reason?
I understand they have oil and we want it, but there are PLENTY of other reasons to be there, even if you are too stupid to stop listening to politicians to realize it.
The genocide and torture being a couple reasons off the top of my head.
Get some perspective, not everything is done for money alone, even if you're too blinded by ignorance to realize it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Lebanese Army (Beirut), the Chinese Police (Bejing) , The Thailand Police (Bangkok) also acquired this equipment to detect all types of forbidden substances. This eas done to increase job results and to reach from now on a new level in terms of security and detection of threats.
I can't say I'm surprised, but I am DEEPLY disturbed.
If you are an American, Englishman, Frenchman, German, Australian, Canadian or other western individual your country, civilisation and way of life depends 110% on keeping those barrels of oil flowing into your trucks, tractors, machinery and cars.
Without those barrels of oil your lifestyle will go back to 1900's style in many ways and quite a few of you will die. Coal of course can pick up the slack in many areas of energy production but then be prepared for the pollution and death that it brings...1900 style fogs of coal particles. Food production will decrease and the labour needed to produce it will go up by tenfold so without being alarmist millions of people in the less fortunate parts of the world will die without the wealth of cheap western food that much of that oil grows that keeps them fed.
As for the environment and CO2 emmissions without oil, what we're putting out now will be like a trickle compared to using coal.
It seems rather hypocritical to me to rail against Blood for Oil while living extremely comfortably in an advanced western society directly reaping the benefits of having that oil in the fuel tank of your car or providing power to your public transport or the plastic for nearly every type of luxury possible and fertiliser for your food that makes tomatoes and potatoes worth less than $1000 a tonne. Especially hypocritical is the western metro, urban left who have the more than anyone else on the entire planet to lose if the oil stops...
I guess it's easier to project the guilt onto the big bad rich white men. Kinda like how many junkies blame their dealers for the state of their own lives...
I was wondering if any of their psychic bomb testers stared at goats but odds are the staring had nothing to do making them pass out but had more to do with Saturday night.
I used to be skeptical. My old uncle used to hold a modified coat-hanger in one hand and float a pen over a map with the other. He found many many many oil and gas well locations this way and was never plagued by dry holes. Loads of dowsing stories he had. He would vacation and come back with gold nuggets. He astounded a freshly retired naval officer friend by globe dowsing the secret location of his submarine. He showed me articles with pictures of grunts in Viet Nam finding Charlies tunnel entrances with modified bucket handles.
We had several discussions about what was really happening here. From what we and others could figure , the dowsing rod, pendulum or whatever is used is only and indicator of intuition. The trick, my uncle said was to enter an alpha state of mind or it wouldn't work. This we tested with a biofeedback machine and it seemed to be so. Other untested thoughts we had were; perhaps the magnetic sensing nerves in your nose work in conjunction with your brain and any ferric or bioelectric signature of the sought item. This wasn't disproved, but , he also would think of yes/no answer questions and get 95% + accuracy upon investigation.
I never attained his accuracy, but, I still find lost items around the house pretty well.
When science can quantify intuition, then I believe we will be able to experiment more. Till then, if it works for you use it, others have for centuries. If you don't have any faith it it, you won't be able to do it for sure. It doesn't have anything to do with anything supernatural , only biological as far as I have seen. No debunking necessary. It remains an obscure talent among those who can control their own alpha.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
C'mon, at least buy them from the Chinese for a $100 or less a piece.
Maybe they'll finally find some of the WMDs!
Then again, maybe these are surplus US Army units. It's good to see the Army recoup some of its investment by pawning them off on the Iraqis after we realized they weren't capable of finding hidden explosive devices. Hoo-ah!
Eh ... it's no real loss to society when idiots like that have a defective dowsing rod. For some fun reading, check out OmniNerd's experiment with Ouija Boards - http://www.omninerd.com/articles/Do_Ouija_Boards_Work_The_Fact_and_Fiction
That's like saying it is ok for me to shit in my roommates bed because I'm an asshole.
So close, and yet, so far...
The modifying factor you are looking for is the operator listening to test subjects speaking and picking the obvious lies. I think that you would get exactly the same success rate if the lie detector wasn't even plugged in.
Also consider the history of the lie detector - it was adopted at a time when the FBI was infamous for being corrupt and taking kickbacks. Also consider the inventor, not an expert in any feild at all related to it but simply the guy that wrote the "Wonder Woman" comics.
It is a scam, one in the long history of snake oil scams where the trick is that the mark does not understand the principles of how the thing is supposed to work.
I really truly believe that at least *part* of the explanation of this also goes to the old "Security Theater" idea - maybe you can't actually *make* the public safer, but the Iraqi military can say "we spent 1 Million on bomb-detecting equipment" (or whatever the value is). Who cares that the bomb detecting equipment is useless? People, most of whom (in any society - even the the "First World" nations) are more than willing to believe flim-flam claims (or feel inadequate to question the claims of others, at least, and so accept the word of those others), will then feel 'safer' knowing that the military is using 'bomb detectors' to stop bombs.
Of course, as the recent car-bombings in Iraq have shown, these 'bomb detectors' aren't getting the job done. Hopefully, as people keep dieing from bomb blasts, someone in the government will look for *real* solutions instead of quackery.
Well...he'll clean it *now*, wont he?
"I don't care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them," General Jabiri said. "I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."
Sound pretty defensive about the devices. As if they paid a fortune that could have been spent on just about anything else, and found out that they're worthless, but doesn't want to let on.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
http://www.ade651.com/ade651in.html
Making "data" more plural by adding an "s" means it's more scientific! (not)
Substances Recognition:
Black Powder, Used Weapons, Fireworks, all types of Ammunition, ...), Dynamite, RDX, TNT, Nitroglycerine, Tetryl, Grenades, Mines, Amphetamine, Cocaine, Crack, Heroine, Marijuana, Cannabis, Morphine, Ivory, Human research, Bank notes,
Ammonium Nitrate (ANFO-ANNIE), Chinese Czech and Russian Semtex, Plastic (C4, C1,
It detects marijuana AND cannabis, this is a wonder device, people!
It's funny, but people seem to be tolerant of their own messes more readily than somebody else's, especially when it's their country. I'm not saying we didn't make a lot of things better, but if you want gratitude for coming in and fixing somebody else's country, man, the bar is high. Especially when you have all kinds of ethnic and religious fault lines running through the country, which pretty much means every time you scratch your ass, millions of people on one side win and millions on the other lose.
My problem with the war all along was that once the original WMD rationale didn't pan out, there wasn't any kind of strategic focus. I caught some flack from my fellow liberals when I said, well, doing such and so is probably good, or the surge will probably reduce violence. But the problem was never that there weren't worthwhile things to get done. It was that the "and then what happens" part seldom got thought through very far, and the "and then after that" part about never. We would invade "and then we'd be greeted as liberators." Ok and what happens after that? We'd rebuild X schools, yeah that's good. But then what happens after that? If we use much higher troop levels, we can control violence better (well, duh). And then what? Actually the surge was probably the most promising piece of strategy in the war, because there actually *were* a lot of things we wanted to be able to do in the breathing space that gave us. But we didn't know *how* to do them and most of them didn't happen.
And there was never a sequence of milestones that ended like this: "and then Iraq was able to manage its own internal and external security and most of our guys get to come home." Maybe it wasn't humanly possible to envision a series of milestones like that, between the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shia and the outside interference from Iran and Jihadi groups. Still, much of the strategic thinking in Washington seemed to amount to this: we were fighting there so we could get to keep on fighting there.
That's the problem with sending our good men and women -- and even the *bad* men and women too like those shits in the Abu Ghraib photos -- to die.. It's not that there aren't imaginable goals that are worth the cost, or that even helping the people of Iraq isn't worth the cost. It's that without a better strategy, the only certain payoff for the death of one of guys has been that we get to send *more* of our guys to be killed. That's a mindset that has for any practical purpose accepted defeat, but won't admit it for political reasons.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If that means I get my "stimulus" money back.
Maybe we went to war because you, personally, did not do enough to prevent it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
before America showed up it was a happy place. They had flowing meadows, and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles
Like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? :)
That's like saying it is ok for me to shit in my roommates bed because he hardly ever cleans.
Yes, it actually is ok to do that if he never cleans.
This is great. We now have a large pool of people who qualify to win the JREF million dollar prise. If just one of them can prove in a double blind test then they can win the money and get out of Iraq. Science be praised.
Ascii artist &
Maybe not, but they probably weren't spending tens of millions of taxpayers money on useless junk (and remember the GDP of Iraq is 100 times smaller than that of the US, so it is a much greater chunk of money than it would appear at first).
Ok I actually read this today (sorry but im calling out a great deal of this discussion as being just based on reaction the the summary and prior comments) and found it absurd myself, but not something I could instantly write off.
From TFA:
"During an interview on Tuesday, General Jabiri challenged a Times reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Despite two attempts, the wand did not detect the weapons when used by the reporter but did so each time it was used by a policeman."
Well.... Shit. What does 'detect' mean here? This last unfinished thought could (stated differently) totally skew the article in the opposite direction. Im not saying it is anything more that a divining rod - because I dont know - but the level of technical depth in the article / argument is as nonexistant as it purports the devices to be. There isnt a single mention of 'what works' and 'how stuff works' on the US side other than 'large and expensive.'
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Why did Hitler want genocide on the Jews anyway?
Because they didn't like his paintings and it was the in thing to do at the time...
One guy takes the dowsing rod, or whatever you want to call it and walks ahead of the convoy. When he steps on a mine, it goes off. You've found the mine. Better yet, if these things are made of relatively strong steel, you can generally find them. Usually several hundred yards away. Pound it back into shape, hand it to the next guy and you're back in business.
Lets see you do that with any of the newfangled electronic devices our troops use.
Have gnu, will travel.
I think the main point is that there are other places in the world that have genocide, torture, slavery, and all sorts of terrible things going on. The place we invaded happened to be the one that was strategically important, and I didn't see any evidence that they were just the first in line before we solved all of those other problems.
Of course, I don't buy into the notion that we wanted to go in and "steal" the oil. It's perfectly reasonable to have a strong interest in the stability of the unstable region that produces your energy supply. In fact, if our leadership wasn't interested in the Middle East for the oil, they'd be ignoring their duties. When people from certain countries bitch that we're only interested in their oil, I often can't help but think, "Yeah, it's a real shame that we don't hang out with repressive backward thugocracies more often... just for the company."
Depending on how you look at it, stopping a monstrous regime is either icing on the cake or a good excuse for doing what you wanted to do anyway. Still, I don't think that we should make any mistake about whether or not energy security was the major reason we went in. Without oil, it's pretty easy just to add Iraq to the list of countries we don't bother with because they're murderous dictatorships, unstable hellholes with constant tribal warfare and genocide, or whatever else.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
My Grandfather made a living finding water wells using a Dowsing rod. For him, it worked every time.
I use survey of watershed areas, and known Geological formations to make an estimated guess as to underground water movement.
While both are guesses, it makes sense that an uneducated or more superstitiously natured person would simply choose what makes sense to them. Sure, mine is an educated guess, but my Grandfather did find hundreds of wells in his time. You can't really argue with results. Even if those results are based of your subconscious hunch rather than your conscious facts.
But what I remember was how that inanimate branch turned into a straining, curving, living thing as it dived toward the ground. In my mind there was simply no way you could hold a branch and make it do that -- the branch itself wanted to do it, and did it.
Yes, you can. Ever so slightly - those old guys got the trick down - twists both sides of the 'Y' that they're holding. The end will point down just as you said.
It's an easy trick. Try it! With practice you can do it with just a slight twist with the fingers and no one will notice.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Oh, you make it seem so easy!! What more could I have done? It is not easy to go against the majority, the best thing is to convince the majority that it's a bad idea. At the time I had trouble even convincing my friends that the war was a bad idea. I would do better at that now, but going against the majority is still not easy. Do you have any idea for how to do it? I would be interested to hear.
Qxe4
The proponents of these devices, when confronted with the undeniable technical worthlessness of them, inevitably retreat to the claim that the actual benefits come from the psychology of having people being "investigated" by the devices believe that they are actually capable of something, and then watching their reactions.
There is some truth to that. A criminal, when confronted by an authority figure with a pseudo-scientific device that claims to know when they are lying, will sometimes confess.
After all, most criminals aren't that bright (well, the ones that get caught), and don't know that the polygraph is a sham.
You think. The few reasonable controlled studies that have been done tend to disagree with you. Polygraphs perform fairly poorly, and probably perform better under laboratory conditions than they do in the wild, but they do appear to do better than chance, under controlled conditions.
Sorry, the ad hominem attack on the inventor doesn't really carry any weight, being a logical fallacy and all.
We may use lie detectors, but lie detector results aren't admissible evidence in court (which brings up why we even have them, but anyway).
These guys are using "technology" that doesn't actually do *anything* as a basis for stops and searches.
I think there's a difference.
1) Point the rod at the nearest bystander.
2) Shoot and kill the bystander with a rifle.
3) Search the body of the dead bystander. If said body is wrapped in explosives - Congratulations! Your bomb detector rod has worked successfully. Otherwise if the body lacked explosives, this means your bomb detector rod is not properly calibrated. Return to step 1 and repeat instructions until your rod is calibrated.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
2. They use their fingers and twist the rods to cross - it's a really easy trick. Easier than the "Y" branch mentioned above.
3. If they're so good, then why don't they go for: oil, gold, uranium, diamonds, etc...
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Really? Do you have a reason to think that the majority of the populace doesn't want us there? Because as far as I can tell, they do want us there; at least until they are strong enough to take care of themselves.
Are you aware of how counter-insurgancy works, and the surge which is making it possible for us to leave Iraq in relative peace? Basically, we put enough soldiers in to defend the people as long as they would tell us who the bad guys were. We had to rely on informants.....if they didn't want us there, we never would have gotten enough informants to make a difference.
If the majority didn't want to cooperate with the US, the violence of 2004-2006 wouldn't have ended. At that time a large part of the country favored Al Qaeda as much as they favored the US. However, Al Qaeda has been very helpful in making us look good by making themselves look even worse. At least we don't shoot people's fingers off for smoking a cigarette, or force the women to 'marry' our soldiers. In comparison to Al Qaeda the US looks really good.
Qxe4
I can't believe anyone could be sick enough to come up with this. As if scammers arent bad enough on their own, now we have homicidal scammers. I hope these sick bastards enjoy their blood money.
Oh really? Are you entirely sure about that from a peer reviewed research situtuation and not a "roll up and buy the magical snake oil" situation? Also why does this research disagree with more than sixty years worth of work from others that debunked it on occasion?
Also don't mistake a statement of who purchased it and who invented it as an attack instead of a way to put it in context. The situation where the FBI was highly corrupt at the time is relevant and the inexperience of the inventor is also relevant.
Because they're good men. Because they care about people. Often good men even want to help bad people in hopes they will become good someday. And even if most of the people are bad, at least some of them are good people who deserve our help. And because they remember how many good men died to help us.
Actually if you're candian you have quite a bit more oil than they do :D
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
Canada #2
Iraq #4.
If we stopped exporting the stuff we'd have enough for ourselves for a longgg time.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
This company from the UK is defrauding consumers.
And in doing so is potentially responsible for hundreds of deaths.
And people wonder why skeptics have to take things so seriously...
I stole this Sig
I had a roommate like that once. His room made a great place to dump bodies. Wonder what ever happened to him?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I've seen it done to locate metal pipes many times and tried it myself at home. It works. Get two metal rods about 2 feet long, bend the ends to hold in your hand and walk slowly, when over a metal object they ends will come together. Watched a guy locate an entire septic system using this on TV once.
Also consider the inventor, not an expert in any feild at all related to it but simply the guy that wrote the "Wonder Woman" comics.
I'd say that makes him an expert in drawing hot, tall, brunettes. That's enough qualification for me on any endeavor.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
hey, stuffing the variable 'Before' with a much larger value than anticipated is basically the same as exploiting a buffer overflow, isn't it? perhaps English needs better memory management :D
My rod can detect sexy bombshells too.
Table-ized A.I.
Way I see it, if you live in a Democracy you kind of have to take responsibility for the monumental fuck-ups of your leaders. Our system isn't supposed to be so easily subverted to achieve the personal ambitions of one person. I'm pretty sure the fact that it was means that we did something wrong.
Mind you I won't lay the entire blame at your feet personally, except that it's somewhat comedic to do so.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You and I know these devices do nothing, the guys waving them around at the checkpoints know they do nothing but the would-be bombers aren't quite as confident. All it takes is one nervous twitch and WHAM! They are detained, searched and questioned. Find one needle in the haystack this way and soon the word gets around. This is quite a fine bit of social engineering, IMHO. Too bad about the exorbitant price tag.
Whoah, that's the best analogy I've ever read. I'm retiring mine and using yours from here on out!
Expensive placebos are more effective.
A good old fashioned oil purge. Then the Middle Eastern nations will have no money coming in. It's pretty hard to create suicide bombers when you have no money to buy supplies or send them out and you main interest in life is killing, not furthering your people.
Unlike in 1900, there's nuclear power, filters for fine dust coal particles, the possibility to more efficiently use wood and wind power, and more - even the fertilizers can be effectively replaced, including the inorganic ones, as there's no direct dependency on oil (neither on its byproduct natural gas, which is actually what's used - even inorganic fertilizer can and has been produced without it).
If there's a transition period rather than an immediate cut-off (and loosing Iraq does not equal a total loss of all oil sources), we can survive this change with only some years lost in economic growth. And that's only if the immense investments in "new" areas don't come with important break-throughs that actually boost the economy (thinking of fusion and fission here, and be it just the giant ball of fire in the sky).
Well if he never finds it, then your fine.
Way I see it, if you live in a Democracy you kind of have to take responsibility for the monumental fuck-ups of your leaders. Our system isn't supposed to be so easily subverted to achieve the personal ambitions of one person. I'm pretty sure the fact that it was means that we did something wrong.
Yes, and at that time I was extremely upset with Bush for a while for pushing us towards an unpopular war. Then one day I heard a commentator who said essentially, "these people who say, 'no blood for oil' don't realize that most Americans would answer them and say, 'why not?" That's when I realized it's a much deeper problem than a single politician going over the deep end. The fact is a good portion of the country views the world as a wild place that soon is going to drag us into another world war and we need to be prepared for it.
Because so many people in the US are ok with war, even if the rest of us all get together and write to our government, it will still not make a difference. There are very few people who see world peace as any kind of serious possibility, but that is mainly because they haven't really thought about it much. What needs to happen is a change in the way our country sees things; and it can happen, although it may be slow. I do what I can to help people see more clearly, and as I grow older, more experienced, and more capable, I am having more and more success at doing so. But I am always happy to hear other ways I can help.
Qxe4
Considering that the FBI reviewed the case for the polygraph's validity (back when it was first made), and concluded that it was a sham, you are wrong.
It is not an ad-hominem to point out that a non-expert suddenly invented a seemingly miraculous device that is eerily similar to a magical device used by a comic book heroine he also invented.
Polygraphs are faith-based devices. They serve no scientific purpose.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
They call these things mysteries for a reason.
If you travel through the Middle East, you see these things everywhere. Especially Lebanon. Every parking garage and big building uses these. When you ask anyone about those, 9 out 10 people say they work, and the other one is merely skeptical. If you look at one closely, it's just a plastic piece of crap with a metal rod. "There's a sucker born every minute".
Shit, you should have stole the magic Y-shaped branch and sold it for $16,000!!!1!
Uh, if the Iraqi's are so dumb to order thousands of these Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector's, and have been fighting someone and themselves in some manner for years and years. What makes you expect they are going to respect your way of approaching them? They only respect strength. I've been to the Middle East, the hot environment will turn you into a screaming radical too. I swam in the Persian Gulf, the water is HOT! This is the problem with the Middle East, and Israel too, heat makes people radical and dumb.
I mean, before America showed up it was a happy place. They had flowing meadows, and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles.
I'll take a stable dictatorship with relative peace and at least some semblance of rule of law over an unstable pseudo-democracy with an ongoing religious/ethnic civil war with no end in sight in the background any day.
The genocide and torture being a couple reasons off top of my head.
Get some perspective, not everything is done for money alone, even if you're too blinded by ignorance to realize it.
Which is why we marched into Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and post war Cambodia, right?
Wait, they didn't have oil...
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Then one day I heard a commentator who said essentially, "these people who say, 'no blood for oil' don't realize that most Americans would answer them and say, 'why not?" That's when I realized it's a much deeper problem than a single politician going over the deep end. The fact is a good portion of the country views the world as a wild place that soon is going to drag us into another world war and we need to be prepared for it.
Presenting an opinion as being popular is one of the most common propaganda techniques.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Are you saying we can use a dowsing rod to find my car? SWEET!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Umm, no. Most of Canada's oil comes from Canada. On the east coast it's sometimes cheaper to ship oil from western Europe, but that's about it.
Without the barrels from the Middle East, Canada would get richer if anything. Or invaded :/
They do actually have something other than a person's arm arbitrarily controlling it.
I think if the Middle East was destroyed in a big war here's what would happen
1) The price of the remaining gasoline would be sky high. Evreryone would drastically reduce their car usage.
2) Cities would set up bus services, running on natural gas. People would telecommute.
3) The electricity supply would be fine since it is natural gas, coal or nuclear
4) The military have their own supplies of fuel
There would be a period of austerity, like the UK in WWII. Probably gasoline would be rationed.
This would last for a few months. During that time EU farmers would grow crops for biodiesel and bioethanol on formerly "set aside" land, garages would convert cars to run on those or on natural gas. Vast numbers of electric vehicles and bicyles would be made and sold. Huge fortunes would be spent on plants to extract oil from Canadian tar shales and all the other currently uneconomic sources of oil, and every single one would be tapped.
So there'd be a wobbly period for a few months, but after that things would be fine. Though I suspect that we'd never go back to using oil the way we do now. Basically there's a path away from oil. At the moment oils is cheap enough for that not to make sense economically. If oil suddenly became very expensive I think it would happen very quickly.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It doesn't matter if it actually, scientifically works -- all that matters is if the person being scanned THINKS it might work. The security person would be looking at the reaction of the person being scanned to find out if there is something to be worried about in the front left jacket pocket.
Would you mind pointing out the actual hypocrisy that you're perceiving? Let me see if I understand you: "1. You enjoy the benefits of oil. 2. You don't want people to die to ensure cheap access to that oil. 3. Therefore you're a hypocrite." I'm completely missing how 1 and 2 lead to 3. Isn't it possible that I want to pay more for oil? Or that I want our country to work to eliminate our dependence on oil? Or I believe that fighting for the oil is actually a terrible way to accomplish our goals? Why, if I enjoy the benefits of oil, must I accept sending our military abroad to fight for it?
Do you actually have a point, or are you just enjoying pretending to have won a point against them filthy city dwellin' lib'ruls?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
That's absurd reasoning. Oil can't be replaced with coal, it doesn't have nearly the same energy density and can not (efficiently) be used for transportation like oil. Without oil, a society dependant on oil will collapse. Frankly, I'd rather see that happen sooner than later. I'm under 30 which means that the oil will likely run out during my lifetime. The Americans wars for oil can't stop that fact. So I don't see what is hypocritical about pointing out that Bash and his junta are war criminals and 50 years ago men like them were hanged in tribunals?
Do you somehow believe that I, personally, have benefited from the Iraq war?
Football Odds
Win every battle, loose the war.
Wrong. Solar is nearly as cheap as burning oil or coal to make electricity RIGHT NOW. Yes, it only works in the day, but if it came down to it, we could adapt. (via variable pricing : in the extreme case, power at night could cost 5 to 10 times what it does in the day)
We could use solar energy to convert biomass, or coal, or CO2 from the air right into vehicle fuel. Obviously the plants that did this would only run in the day time.
The fuel would probably be synthetic methane : it's the simplest to make, obviously, and can be readily transported and stored. (hint : another name for it is natural gas, and there are cars and trucks you can buy right now that will run on it, and it's possible to convert virtually any gasoline burning vehicle to run on it)
If you're wondering, nuclear is off the table. As it stands right now, it's already more expensive to create energy using nuclear power at current prices for building and running a reactor than solar or wind. INCLUDING the cost of energy storage. (underground caverns filled with compressed air is how you store wind or solar energy) Yes, you do need some methane/natural gas to use the compressed air, but you can get that a couple of ways, including from gassifying coal.
The reason all this conversion hasn't already happened? Because the cost of the wars is not included in the price of oil. If the U.S. government were funding the wars with extra taxes on oil products (even just to make the payments on bonds used to fund the wars), we'd already be frantically converting to electric and natural gas cars, since gas would be at least $5 a gallon.
It doesn't make unprovoked invasions into foreign countries moral though.
"True, but lie detectors do actually measure things. Heart rate, etc. "
They measure lots of things. However there is no basis for how those things predict a lie.
But in place like where it is done, the water table is usually very high. So you cab dig ANYWHERE and get the same freaking result. Heck dowser pretend there are underground river where you dig. No there aren't. Basically go to randi.,org and look on dowser testing. They do no better than blind luck. The guy never had to give back money in 20 years, not because he is efficacious, but because you litterally live over huge amount of water. Look at the video where they had dowser search for pipe with running water. And laugh.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Whether dowser are fooling themselves or not into thinking bthis works, this is the ideomotor effect which make the Y shaped branch move wiki on ideomotor effect when properly tested dowsing DO NOT WORK.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Actually, since we started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our military forces have been burning *much* more oil than we have been able to extract from Iraq.
This is a good part of the reason why petroleum is more than twice the price it was before.
Stop the wars and the price of oil will plummet.
You are right ... America showed up about 100 years ago
A sklightily longer search would demonstrate you that with people wanting to beat the polygraph, they work as good as blind chance. Withpeople UNAWARE that polygraph are snake opil which only mneasure a few physiological parameter which are not always correlated to lie, but also to other stuff, in other word in you use it as a magic truth wand , they can impress and LEAD THE PERP to admit the truth. In fact it has been demonstrated that most if not all operator use posychological trick during AND MOST importantly AFTER the test to gather info. Fact is, it only works if you are 1) unaware 2) do not believe in your lie. Even in such case , look at antipolygraph.org you reach MAYBE a 60% rate barely above chance. It is useful to coerce some unknowing perp, but to c atch spy or good liar a useless piece of woo.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I hope Scientology doesn't find out about this. Within a year, the Iraqi military would be at Operathing Thetan Level 3 in order to detect bomb enturbulation.
Lie detectors ARE completely retarded. An honest person who is nervous about the detector will fare badly, while a sociopath can lie away all day and never get noticed.
The only thing they are useful for is a as a physiological tool to put the person being interrogated at a disadvantage.
Google for "coal gassification" or "synthetic natural gas".
Sure, plain oil coal doesn't have the energy density, but natural gas has enough for running cars and trucks, at least. (airliners would need to be fueled using the remaining reserves of oil or using a biodiesel like fuel product. Unfortunately, this would boost ticket prices considerably from current levels since about 1/3 the cost of a ticket today is fuel. That in turn would make high speed electric trains more economically feasible)
'Democracy works when reasonable people come together and are willing to make decisions and sacrifices for the betterment of all the people.'
Ahhh... so thats why democracy hasn't shown any sign of being a successful form of government.
Probably because a few of our troops don't make up for the tens of thousands of their people that we murdered so Bush and company could get richer.
Nobody seems to have noticed the name that should be remembered. Jim McCormick, the leader of ATSC (UK) Ltd., the London-based company that has sold hundreds of the devices to Iraq’s Interior Ministry.
The money he got is stained with blood of the bomb victims, but a scum like him wouldn't even care. Why does Earth carry miscreants of his kind? He deserves to be a bomb victim himself, nothing else.
Man is very good in detecting suspicious behaviour. So one only needs to make them confident to use this capability. It's like placebo.
cb
If you arrived at my home uninvited break down my door and force your way into my home at gunpoint. Refusing to leave when I repeatedly ask you to on the basis that you want to clean up the glass may not be the best idea.
We were bombing Iraq long before we invaded. We invaded with no cause and then forced them to elect their own government. That government then passed a proposal telling us to leave their country. We ignored that so we can 'rebuild'. Of course we are mostly using their money to do this rebuilding and paying that money to US contractors (what happened to the Iraqis who built the infrastructure we blew up in the first place).
The whole argument that we have to stay to clean up the mess only stands because everyone refuses to mention the fact that the Iraq democratically elected government have legally and publically asked us to get the hell out of their country repeatedly.
Hey man, go back and look at the polls. You can see for yourself that it was popular. It's true that propaganda is a part of the American political system, but you're going a bit too far there.
Most people did favor invading Iraq, unfortunately.
Qxe4
I now understand American foreign policy.
"In any case, it's silly for you to get upset about Iraq because we've been withdrawing according to schedule for many months now. If you don't like the schedule, that's fine, maybe you can come up with an argument against it."
Actually I think the burden falls on someone to come up with a reason why we should have a schedule instead of full immediate withdrawl.
"Oh don't worry, I've got a saying for every situation. Here's one you may have heard, "leave a place better than you found it." Or at very least don't leave it worse than you found it. If we had left Iraq a few years ago and let it fall into civil war, things would have been bad."
That sounds like Iraqs problem. Seeing as they democratically elected a government and one of the first acts passed by their government was a demand that the US withdraw its invading force from their territory.
I throw a rock through your window. I then refuse to leave when you ask repeatedly because I have an obligation to disrespect your wishes and rights in favor of cleaning up the glass. Finally, I sell your car to a chop shop and pay the money to my brother to fix your window.
Thats what we are doing to Iraq... well maybe it isn't fair to compare breaking a window to murdering tens of thousands of Iraqis with no cause...
Right, because we're so much smarter than the Iraqis. We have never had dumb/superstitious people in charge of our military.
The company selling these rods has paid some big money to high up officials for this deal. It should be extremely obvious.
They are paying millions of dollars for something that has no proven effect and is much cheaper to manufacture and was abandoned by the USA army. No, superstition won't do the trick.
I believe that the company first tried to sell these to USA army. Didn't work. Nobody was foolish enough to sign the papers and those people corrupt enough were able to get their 'donations' from other sources with more believable product. So, the company decided to sell these to Iraqs, handed out a bit money to a few officials and... profit.
Thats true. Most people would think "Why not?" but they would never say it out loud.
The problem is that Bush and Co. were the ones getting the oil money. If gas were $0.50/gallon and we weren't moving on to Afghanistan you might hear a little less complaining around here.
There is no other reason.
Think again, the US is just being used and worn down. This situation is artificially created so it can be used to expand. America is hated because they protect israel, they stab you in the back once you get weak. Get streetwise, pull out now. Airdrop some weapons and supplies for the weaker tribes to defend with maybe.
"Really? Do you have a reason to think that the majority of the populace doesn't want us there?"
Well according to the philosophy on which our nation is founded. The people of Iraq democratically electing a government that in turn has passed numerous measures saying they are capable of taking care of themselves and telling us to leave means that is what the populace wants.
"Of course, I don't buy into the notion that we wanted to go in and "steal" the oil. It's perfectly reasonable to have a strong interest in the stability of the unstable region that produces your energy supply."
ROFL That would imply that 'we' the politicians do things to promote the interests of the nation when in fact 'we' the politicians do things because 'we' invest heavily in companies like Haliburton and stood to personally make millions off the bloodshed in Iraq. Some of it in negotiating leverage for the family oil interests and a lot of it from selling Iraqi oil and then using the proceeds to hire american contractors 'we' invested in to rebuild Iraq (which we blew up).
Don't ask me how it works - those witching sticks are just dead wooden sticks in my hands. But, I've seen it work, so I have to believe in it.
No, you don't. As Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
We use the scientific process precisely because we can't just trust ourselves. A few weeks ago, I climbed on a mountain, sat in the grass, and watched the clouds. Suddenly, the clouds started to move backwards and forwards. It's a miracle! I've seen it with my own eyes! Well, no. It's an optical illusion that some people get when staring into a bright light for too long.
Likewise, since all experiments have shown that dowsing rods work exactly as well as random chance, the most likely explanation for your father in law's ability is that he's able to subconsciously deduce where pipes go and where they are broken based on the effects these things have on the environment. That also explains why it doesn't work for you.
As soon as it starts getting tough, we'll notice that we have more uranium than we can ever use. Ten years later, we'll be self sufficient for energy again.
FSM, forgive me for responding to the troll, but s/he did get modded to +5.
[clever sig]
".....more than fifteen hundred remote sensing devices have been sold to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior, at prices ranging from $16,500 to $60,000 each."
-Guess who's money they used. No, really, go on and guess!
"The devices are used for bomb and weapon detection at checkpoints"
-The only time these things detect bombs is after the bomb detonates, the force of which moves the 'antenna' when the device is suddenly sent flying through the air, along with the unfortunate officers manning the now former checkpoint.
"...they work on the same principle as a Ouija board"
-It's called the Bullshit Effect, which is part of the 'Bullshit Paradox', i.e. "You can't bullshit a Bullshitter". Like real bullshit, it keeps accumulating until someone shoots the offending bull, or in this case, the officer that keeps touting the effectiveness of the devices. As long as those officers are still alive, this kind of bullshit will only keep accumulating.
"Even though the device has been debunked by the US Military, the US Department of Justice, and even Sandia National Laboratories, the Iraqis are thrilled with the devices."
-You expect anything less from people who think they will get 72 virgins in heaven if they kill an infidel?
"Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,' said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives."
-I think Baghdad Bob changed his name, because this sounds exactly like something he'd say.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Actually I think the burden falls on someone to come up with a reason why we should have a schedule instead of full immediate withdrawl.
Here's one for you: # of soldiers/(# boats/planes/teleportation pods * # seats)*# days for round trip.
Can't leave any faster than that (unless you're suggesting they walk home).
If you seriously think you can move several hundred thousand people 6,000 miles quickly on anything other than a schedule, share whatever you're smoking.
Also, learn to use quote tags. Your post is 'nigh unreadable.
Uh, we did march into Somalia. And Bosnia. Pretty sure those were Clinton's wars. Granted we didn't occupy them with 100,000 troops, but blame Clinton for that. Bush was still pretending to be a Texan back then.
We shouldn't have invaded Iraq in the first place. It was a bad idea.
By 2006 the problem was worse than 'being polite'; Al Qaeda had a strong presence in Iraq, which would have caused serious problems for us in the future if we had just left. The surge worked and Al Qaeda was driven out, with the help of the Iraqis. I have no problem with the current withdrawal plan: these things take time, after all.
Qxe4
After all We found bodies, lots, lots of bodies, established they were killed by Saddam's WMD, and then we failed to find WMD.
The conclusion of democrats : "there are no WMDs". I don't know what to say.
Perhaps you'd like to buy a few bomb detectors ? They're not cheap but very accurate.
Wrong. Solar is nearly as cheap as burning oil or coal to make electricity RIGHT NOW. Yes, it only works in the day, but if it came down to it, we could adapt. (via variable pricing : in the extreme case, power at night could cost 5 to 10 times what it does in the day)
Stopped reading here. You are so clueless it is hysterical. Really, my sides hurt. Every time I see this absurd, ignorant myth it just ticks me off.
Photovoltaic may only work during the day, but solar-thermal power works 24/7.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#High-temperature_collectors
Specifically note:
Since the CSP plant generates heat first of all, it can store the heat before conversion to electricity. With current technology, storage of heat is much cheaper and more efficient than storage of electricity. In this way, the CSP plant can produce electricity day and night. If the CSP site has predictable solar radiation, then the CSP plant becomes a reliable power plant. Reliability can further be improved by installing a back-up system that uses fossil energy. The back-up system can reuse most of the CSP plant, which decreases the cost of the back-up system.
Heat is stored in a fluid reservoir underground and used to generate electricity 24/7.
And let's not forget religious freedom, a secular state, and secular schools.
This is not to say that Saddam was a nice guy, or that Iraq was a great place. Nobody claims this; using it as an argument is a false dichotomy. Iraq was a crappy place. It's just that today, it is even crappier.
Why? Here in the UK, the price of "gas" (petrol) at my local forecourt is $7.91 (converted to US$) - and we're not frantically moving to anything except marginally more efficient diesels, and generally bigger heavier chassis...
Hey man, go back and look at the polls. You can see for yourself that it was popular. It's true that propaganda is a part of the American political system, but you're going a bit too far there.
I don't think, it's possible to overstate the role of propaganda in American society.
Most people did favor invading Iraq, unfortunately.
Most people didn't have any opinion on this whatsoever -- until propaganda literally beaten it into their brains.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It seems rather hypocritical to me to rail against Blood for Oil while living extremely comfortably in an advanced western society directly reaping the benefits of having that oil...
It is not hypocritical to believe that we should all obtain our oil on the free market. Note that the Iraq war has *not* made oil cheaper: in fact it has got five times more expensive. The Iraq war has not improved the lifestyle for those of us in the belligerent countries.
I guess it's easier to project the guilt onto the big bad rich white men. Kinda like how many junkies blame their dealers for the state of their own lives...
In the four years I spent as a drug counsellor I never heard any drug users blaming their dealers for 'the state of their own lives'.
Almost invariably, a drug users dealers are his friends and his friends are his dealers. Drug 'pushers' are mythical beasts.
....but isn't it illegal to sell stuff from the UK that has been proved not to do what you claim?
The cosmetics industry has had to be very careful for years to avoid guaranteeing youthful looks....
Cars, trucks, powerplants, home heating, can all run on natural gas of wich my western country has plenty. And Shell is already making diesel fuel out of natural gas. And then there is bio diesel. And nuclear, wind, solar and salt/sweet water mixing alternatives for electricity.
Also consider the inventor, not an expert in any feild at all related to it but simply the guy that wrote the "Wonder Woman" comics.
The man you're referring to is William Marston, and to be fair, he did get his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard.
When the dousing rod flies 300 feet into the air, you've found the bomb.
Is the device the black pistol-looking thing in the hand of the guy in the foreground, or the wooden broom handle being held by the background guard?
I feel that under scientific analysis, both would have the same detection rate.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
How can the parent post have been modded insightful? It's completely moronic. The people that are concerned about blood for oil are not against purchasing oil, they are against unfair trade, hegemony, and starting wars in order to get oil. The idea of obtaining oil from oil producing countries in a fair manner by trade amongst mutually respected trading partners is neither hypocritical nor unrealistic.
Looking at the issue of generating power, there are several choices available, and coal is one of those, but so also is nuclear, wind and solar. They're more expensive, and any tiny amount more expensive than oil means they wont be used right now, but they're not *massively* more expensive, its not like ten times or even a hundred times, it's like, well here is one view of coal vs nuclear which evalutes it as 30 dollars per megawatt hour instead of 29.1 ...
Next, you discussed distribution of power, specifically I felt you feel that using coal to generate power means that it's no longer possible to power machinery on farms, or to power transport.
Even today, we have electric powered:
It seems reasonable to suppose that if we wished to, we could make electrically powered farm machinery too. Sure, there may be issues, like disposing of old batteries, but they are not I feel insurmountable issues, and I feel they are not issues that will push our civilisation back to the dawn of the 1900s are you are proposing...
You mean he stayed out of religious disputes by ironing them out. Look up how nicely Saddam treated the Shi'ites. Saddam made sure the Sunnis had the upper hand. The Shi'ites are still pissed off at the Sunnis and the Sunnis took offense that they could no longer screw the Shi'ites as back in the good ol' days under Saddam. Saddam helped to create the civil war. I will agree the U.S. took the lid off without realizing what a pressure cooker was underneath.
And Saddam didn't have the good sense to stay out of religious disputes with neighbors. Attacking a newly theocracy-thugacracy in Iran isn't the mark of someone who respects religious disputes.
"the way to bring "peace" to the Middle East would be through reason" Nice sentiment, and totally unrealistic. Islam will not allow your reason which probably includes something on the order of freedom of religion. Islam's idea of freedom of religion is that non-Muslims get to bow down to their Muslim rulers.
Of course. Someone with a little power finds someone who supports the opposing political party, voila, they can "find" a bomb.
It seems rather hypocritical to me to rail against Blood for Oil while living extremely comfortably in an advanced western society directly reaping the benefits of having that oil in the fuel tank of your car or providing power to your public transport or the plastic for nearly every type of luxury possible and fertiliser for your food that makes tomatoes and potatoes worth less than $1000 a tonne. Especially hypocritical is the western metro, urban left who have the more than anyone else on the entire planet to lose if the oil stops...
It is only hypocritical if we actually had a choice. The fact that we have been lucky enough to be born into the receiving end of the oil-based economy does not mean that we have to shut up about it. On the contrary, it is very hypocritical to defend Blood for Oil just because you're the one enjoying the benefits. "Oh yes, murder for money is totally OK, because I'm paid off by the assassin!" I find your morals objectionable!
Lemon curry???
So in effect, this device will justify my search of anyone that I feel has a bomb. Even if I know it's bogus (and I'd not be surprised if the Iraqis do know this), it permits me to search anyone I want just because I feel they may have a bomb.
You know, I really don't think they need to bother much about permission to search anyway.
Lemon curry???
-1 Your Falling Isn't Intelligent Enough
-1 FSM Hates You
-1 It's Not Censorship, You Stupid Fuckstick.
Dude, I suspect ultra cheap photovoltaics + compressed air caverns is cheaper than powered mirrors and a heat reservoir.
Reason? The technology for mirrors and solar thermal has existed for 30+ years with little improvement
The technology for ultra-cheap thin film photovoltaics JUST got invented as of a couple years ago. And nanosolar and the rest of the firms are still working on ramping up the mass production.
Go for it.
Crusading invaders begone already! Oil thieving raping and murdering flag waving puppy tossing wastes of life. . .
P.S.
Begone with a flag draped over your personal first class compartment you American piece of shit.
"No boom?"
"No boom."
"No boom TODAY. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow."
(you know where it's from)
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.
Oh, that that's why democracy failed in the US.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Polygraphs perform better than random chance, certainly.
Interrorgations do not use random chance when there isn't a polygraph available; they use trained professionals.
Hmm, perhaps not, but before the "liberation" there were not hundreds of thousands of dead people, essential infrastructure in ruins, daily bombings, lootings, and kidnappings.
It's all a matter of degree. For instance, NJ traffic sucks during rush hour, but it would suck a lot worse if someone were firing machine guns at the stopped cars, wouldn't you agree?
Is your point that people can only criticize a system if they remove themselves from it entirely? That seems kind of silly.
In your view, can we only criticize Windows if we switch to Macs?
You do understand that Canada EXPORTS OIL right? (and a LOT OF IT).
And, just to build on your argument, Saddam didn't stay out of religious disputes between Israel and the Palestinians. He offered a $25,000 reward to the families of suicide bombers. (See: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129914&page=1&page=1 ) So if your family was really poor and had no other opportunities, you could ensure some financial income to your family by blowing yourself up and taking a group of Israeli civilians along with you. This, I'm sure, helped convince many people to become suicide bombers who might have otherwise never gone down that path.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There was only one time that Dousing worked: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-05-14/
As a side note, I've long said that I could have been rich had I not had any morals and had become a spammer. Now, I guess I can add selling dousing equipment to the list. Curse my parents for raising me the right way! I could have been a millionaire were it not for these pesky morals!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
But surely somebody wandering around with a dowsing rod is an excellent way of clearing a minefield. As long as there's a steady queue of volunteers.
And I thought that democracy works when the oligarchy can create false dichotomies and get people to squabble over trivial differences to distract them from the real issues. Unfortunately it does not work as well in places where the real issues are such that the populace cannot be easily distracted from them (e.g., "will my kids have anything to eat tomorrow?" or even "will they still have a father by next week?").
Because our 'good men' made the mess in the first place. If you make a mess, clean it up. That's good advice for a pre-schooler, and good advice for presidents.
I agree.
Tell it to the European nations that fucked up the place in the early 1900s.
Not saying the US is blameless, but the US sure didn't own half the region until the 1940s either.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
If the rods go flying off in different directions at high speed, there are explosives nearby. Well I guess WERE explosives nearby, technically. (yes I read the article and realise they're not using ACTUAL dowsing rods)
I didn't know that, but that still doesn't change the experimental evidence that makes every police force that uses it a laughing stock that may as well be reading tea leaves.
It can of course be a useful tool for corrupt police that want to have some sort of evidence when there is none, but corrupt police forces in the third world manage quite nicely in that area without an expensive bit of scam machinery.
Before America showed up they had a tyrant dictator who had the good sense to stay out of religious disputes in an area where people with religious disputes are prone to making their case with guns and bombs, even if it means taking their own lives.
Bullshit. He happily waded into religious and ethnic disputes with the Shiites and Kurds, respectively. That's how he maintained and grew his power. The difference was that he was ruthless and brutal enough to keep the opposition down.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Islam's idea of freedom of religion is that non-Muslims get to bow down to their Muslim rulers.
Spoken like a true, uneducated, bigot. Islam doesn't teach hatred any more than Christianity does. Of course, the Crusades were clear proof that Chrisitianity isn't all roses and rainbows either so...
That said, Saddam was a nut-case but he had a handle on how to rule in the environment he was in. Bush/Cheney, et al, simply didn't understand the situation they were provoking and didn't listen to the educated people who did understand the region and what was about to happen.
Diplomacy does work, it's jut not a short term or quick solution. It takes generations, not months. Realistic or unrealistic is only a matter of perspective and how long you're willing to take to achieve peace. As far as I'm concerned, achieving peace she be the pre-eminent goal of any government, because it is the best thing for the citizens, and as such, it should be achieved at any rate that works.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
...the way to bring "peace" to the Middle East...
Actually, "peace" is the one thing Iraq did have before the Americans showed up. Now they don't even have that.
Clearly, civilization existed before oil, so it's not a necessary condition. The best thing that could happen in America is a sudden disappearance of all oil. It would take money, therefore political power away from Exxon and the like. There would be immediate rewards for those who could bring energy innovation we need to the market. Then middle east fundimentatists could go back to the 16th century where they belong.
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be plausible.
It's posts like these that make me realize that the Iraqis aren't overly superstitious and ignorant. They are perfectly normal, relative to my fellow Americans.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
My guess is that because the user has to walk very slowly to use these things, they notice stuff on the ground that they wouldn't normally see.
You brought up hatred and Christianity, nice straw men but beside the point. Read the Koran re what it says about unbelievers, and then there is the pesky Jew problem Islam has. Islam doesn't preach hate, simply the subjugation of all who are not Muslim.
Diplomacy takes generations, eh? So how are we to judge this diplomacy against mere societal drift. In the middle east, your diplomacy is thought of as interfering.
Since you can pretty much hit a landmine by walking into a random patch of Iraqi desert and throwing a rock, I don't find it surprising that any land mine sensing divining rod would have at least some random chance of success. I think that past research has shown that any tool that is picking arbitrary points on a grid will find positive results for "hidden" items (explosive or not) with a frequency of occurrence that matches the normal distribution. I encourage you to read The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow for a better description than I can give.
Anyone else have visions of that one nation who sent mine-clearing teams to Kuwait following the first Gulf War... complete with 20 foot bamboo poles to probe the ground in front of them?
Actually Iraq was a stable country with a high quality of life and much more freedom for it's citizens than they have now - there was religious tolerance (remember Tariq Aziz was a Christian, not a Muslim) and women were allowed to dress as they pleased - including in western style.
Now that Iraq has been "liberated" and (ahem) cleared of WMDs, it's a backet case of radicalism since there's no effective power to enforce the peace.
Of course it wasn't a democracy (nor is it now) and it was ruled by a ruthless dictator, but I have to wonder how many Iraqi's view the current situation as an improvement.
The needle is stuck on "ITS A BOMB!"
Which works for me as the solution is to blow it up remotely. Just means that everything gets blown up remotely. Works for me, better safe than sorry! :)
Puppy tossing?!! Now THAT'S over the line, mister.
Apparently, Iraq excels at producing superstitious wackjobs even more than we do.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Let's see : Who has easy access to explosives and could do some scientific testing on said devices, apply a little critical thinking and discredit the whole concept to a relatively large audience... I wonder?
My left arm is all scars and I consider that a valid excuse...
Here's a simple test that they can do to prove it's effectiveness. Place 9 empty boxes, and one with a bomb in it. Place their payroll in with the bomb. They've got one chance to pick the box with the bomb, or their paychecks are toast.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
If anyone bothered to think about how the machine works, it is clearly a nervousness detector, not a "lie" detector. If someone becomes nervous when they answer a question, the examiner marks it as a "lie."
For example, if you take a person from a sexually repressed society, and the examiner asks them if they had sex today, the machine would probably detect it as a "lie." If someone has an anxiety disorder or just have high stakes in the test, most, if not all, of the questions will probably be flagged as "lies."
The main problem (besides the fact they are used in the first place) is that apparently, most "lie" detector examiners are incompetent idiotic (or possibly deceptive) bastards. That, and half the idiots on the planet think those machines actually detect lies.
If used properly, I suppose in some cases it may help steer an investigation in the correct direction. But, more likely it would just paint a target on anyone who has certain types of psychological problems. (and possibly physical ones too)
Really, the related problem in the US today is self-righteousness. Most of the people here think they can run everyone else's lives better than people running their own lives. From what I've seen, the opposite is true.
Self-righteous spoiled bastards ruin other people's lives by cluelessly interfering to "help," and when it goes south or negatively effects other people, they just place the blame on someone else or say the policy needs to be "tweaked." While some people do screw up their own lives, most people run their own lives just fine.
Many people for the Iraq war justify it by saying we are helping the Iraqis. Perhaps the war did help them, but is keeping troops there really helpful now? Do we have a reason for staying? No matter if there was justification for Iraq (though lying about WMDs was "unacceptable" as the politicians say.), it seems having troops there is interfering with their right to run their own lives, and wasting lots of our resources.
Let them take care of the terrorists in their country themselves. I would like to add I think our troops are doing a great job, but I think it would be better for them to do something else. In fact, with China's aggressive moves and problems on the southern border, I would be more comfortable if they were home, to be honest.
Actually I think the burden falls on someone to come up with a reason why we should have a schedule instead of full immediate withdrawl.
Seeing as they democratically elected a government and one of the first acts passed by their government was a demand that the US withdraw its invading force from their territory.
The reason we have a schedule instead of immediate withdrawal is because the agreement with the Iraqi government includes a schedule, not a demand for immediate withdrawal.
Seriously, the Iraqi government was and still is weak. It required the presence of U.S. forces to insist upon that government's validity, otherwise that act and every other act this nascent government passed would have been worth less than the paper it was written on. The Iraqi government knows this, so don't use them as a justification for immediate withdrawal, because they don't agree with you. We aren't refusing to leave, we're staying for exactly as long as we were asked!
Invading Iraq was retarded, and the retardation that went into that decision was extended to the planning and thus the result was a disaster. The Iraqis didn't ask for 'liberation' of any kind, and they certainly didn't ask for the kind they got. But once that happened anyway, the situation became a lot more complicated than an analogy to broken windows can contain.
Thank God we're getting out, anyway. Hopefully by then the Iraqi government is strong enough to sustain itself without us. Though that's more likely than the Iraqi government not being a corrupt extension of the religious militia that makes up most of its military and government. Not that there's anything we can do about that at this point!
The enemies of Democracy are
Note that the Iraq war has *not* made oil cheaper: in fact it has got five times more expensive. The Iraq war has not improved the lifestyle for those of us in the belligerent countries.
Unless you're an executive for an oil company. Or a defense contractor. Or a general contractor who does both. For them the Iraq War was a smashing success.
The enemies of Democracy are
There's another explanation. What if George Bush is, in fact, an idiot who believes the words coming out of his own mouth? All of a sudden, everything falls into place.
STFU that's a secret!!! >8-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Do democrats really suck that much at propaganda that they couldn't counter the Bush administration? If the US citizens weren't so eager to go to war, he never would have been able to convince.
Qxe4
The whole argument that we have to stay to clean up the mess only stands because everyone refuses to mention the fact that the Iraq democratically elected government have legally and publically asked us to get the hell out of their country repeatedly.
Publicly they may have been asking us to leave, but privately and legally they asked us to stay for a while. The reason? Because when that government was first formed, it literally had zero power anywhere our marines were not present to enforce it. The people in power knew that their power entirely hinged upon our presence, and would evaporate like so much acetone the second we left. It was years before more than a handful (all Kurdish) of Iraqi Army forces would even show up when needed. The police were nothing more than targets for bombers. Now they've eventually become less of a joke, but can still only deal with people like al Sadr by negotiating cease fires. They can't actually fight him (and got their asses handed to them when they tried).
Still more time passed, and in late 2008 the Iraqi government was hoping that by the middle of 2009 they would not need U.S. combat forces in the cities, and by the end of 2011 they would not need us at all, and that is the basis for the current withdrawal agreement.
There are more actors in play here than the Iraqi government and the U.S. occupation forces. Neither of those was responsible for the bombings of two weeks ago. Invading was stupid, but leaving immediately after the first elections would have been stupid too. Our stupidity in invading resulted in chaos in the aftermath of the fall of the government. The stupidity of leaving would have resulted in the fall of the government, and more chaos.
I hate it too, but there's a reality here that involves more players than just the newly formed Iraqi government and U.S. occupation forces.
The enemies of Democracy are
Europeans are weak, often racist, and couldn't fix things even if they tried.
Qxe4
I don't know what else one could expect from a bunch of tribal wackos?
"but privately and legally they asked us to stay for a while."
Citation please.
'If you seriously think you can move several hundred thousand people 6,000 miles quickly on anything other than a schedule, share whatever you're smoking.'
Last I checked the plan was to withdraw over a term of years not a the few weeks that transportation concerns would restrict us to.
Actually, Iraq had one of the best healthcare systems in the middle east, until the US imposed sanctions which drove the place into severe poverty
polygraphs normally outperform random chance. By how much seems to be highly variable.
The polygraph is only a prop. It's the person asking the questions and watching the responses that's deciding whether truth is being told or not. That's why it's highly variable.
Actually the surge was probably the most promising piece of strategy in the war, because there actually *were* a lot of things we wanted to be able to do in the breathing space that gave us.
One thing that doesn't get talked about much, and which I didn't know at the time when I was pessimistic about "The Surge", is that the troop buildup only represents about half of the strategy. The other half, which was brilliant and something we should have done long ago, was to engage (read: buy out) all the Sunni leaders. It's basically the same tack we took with the tribal warlords in Afghanistan where it also worked. In one fell swoop we not only denied al Qaeda in Iraq their major source of local support, we actually got their former allies to fight them for us. It also helped reduce the sectarian violence. Best use of money in Iraq in a long time as far as I'm concerned.
We should have done that a long time ago, the problem was that Rummy was incapable of seeing beyond Sunni == Bathist == Enemy.
Anyway, you're right that the problem was that the only purpose of The Surge was to create a window of opportunity for other things to happen, which didn't. Though most of those things were political, as in they needed the Iraqi government to take the lead, and well they just couldn't get them done. Go figure, the Iraqi government is as full of corruption and people interested only in themselves and their power at the expense of the country as ours (if not more so). :P
The enemies of Democracy are
I can't find an FBI report on the polygraph, but this report seems very close to what you're referring to. It was written by the US Office of Technology Assessment in 1983, in response to a house of representatives request.
The report basically concludes that the polygraph's utility can't really be estimated because of high variability in the results of published studies and that regardless, polygraph screening is a really bad idea because, even in the optimistic case, the sensitivity and specificity of the technique isn't anywhere near what you'd need for a screening system.
The report also summarizes several review and primary studies:
(bold face mine)
The OTA report is old, but widely cited, including by anti-polygraph organizations. The report does indeed conclude that polygraph-based lie detection is not a viable technique.
Now read carefully. Nowhere have I said that using a polygraph to try to detect lying is a good idea, should be admissible as evidence, is reasonably accurate or performs (at all) under all circumstances.
However, as poor a technique as it is, the polygraph is a) based on reasonable mechanisms (they don't violate the laws of physics), b) can be assessed scientifically and c) appears to per
I fully agree, a polygraph is a poor choice to use as a lie detector, but the technique is not actually pseudoscience. The uses it is put to may be based on pseudoscience, but the device itself is not. There is no good reason why your pulse, breathing, etc. cannot change when you are lying, and it appears that, at least in some people, some of the time, they do.
Dowsing, on the other hand, violates the known laws of physics. There is good scientific reason to believe that the devices described in the article not only do not work but cannot work.
?
Just exactly how retarded do you have to be to see that the above steaming pile of third grade level "I got caught lying and now will make a stupid excuse" imbecility was worth a mod point?
We are. Demonstrably. Save the cultural relativism, we're as bad as they are bullshit for a country where it might actually work, in this case you chose poorly.
So, you'd argue a policy that to this point, has worked flawlessly, is inferior to something that has been repeatedly scientifically disproven, and is therefore a total fraud and danger to troops and think that makes sense?
You think a KNOWN, PROVEN LIE is better than a policy that has irrefutably worked?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
The last eight words of what you quoted are the most important in the entire report.
The New York Times has been scammed in the past. They probably sent a reporter to find out what was being done to eliminate IEDs. Since the truth would involve letting the bombers know what technology the US has been working on, the reporter was told that they were using divining rods.
Let's see what happens when the NYT figures out that their plan to reveal top secret information has been sabotaged.
I'm a sucker for empirical data. If dowsing rods are getting the job done, then hooray for dowsing rods. If they're not, then boo for dowsing rods. It would be even poorer science than, oh, say, 'belief in dowsing rods' to draw conclusions without objective data. Either those things are working, or they're not. But in either case, the answer ought to be clear from the numbers, so there's no reason to get belief involved. _If_ they seem to be getting the job done, then maybe the thingies are acting as placebos for the people using them. Sort of like people who are natural lie-detectors just thought they were responding to gut feelings until micro expressions were discovered. Maybe what's being detected isn't the explosives, but that the owner of the suspect item is acting like someone with a bomb, which starts the dowser's brain working on likely hiding places for the packet of suck, which in turn triggers an ideomotor effect in the 'dowser'. How much of this would be conscious, and how much subconscious would vary widely from person to person, with those not aware of the process thinking, "Holy Shit! This thing is amazing!"
I guess I'd have to disagree. We sent a few troops, but made no significant effort to interrupt the holocausts there were going on, and pretty much continued unabated. My recollection is that we sent something like 12,000 troops to Bosnia, and fewer to Somalia. None to Rwanda, none to post war Cambodia. If we are really serious that our purpose was/is to protect innocent civilians from internal warfare, we're not very consistent as to where we decide to do so.
My larger point is that a lot of really shitty things happen around the world, and we don't have the resources or ability to stop all, or even most of them. We made a loud noise about doing so in Iraq, and I think I wonder why there, why then? The only answer that I can come up with is that the location of the conflict, in the center of one of the largest oil producing regions of the world, made it seem like we had to invest in stability, so as to not interrupt the flow of commerce by interrupting the flow of oil.
Tactically, this appears to have proven to be a bad decision. It's not at all clear that the situation for the average Iraqi has improved, we certainly haven't improved our position with the Islamic militants, and we've spent ourself nearly into poverty, and continue to do so.
It's minorly interesting that it was the republicans that were stupid enough to start this, but I would feel exactly the same if it was the democrats. Stupid is stupid, and invading Iraq was stupid.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Democrats indeed suck at propaganda compared to Republicans. Not that in a particular case of war they bothered to try in the first place.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Exactly, they all voted for it. Later even Hillary basically had to say, "Well it seemed like a good idea at the time."
Qxe4
without being alarmist millions of people in the less fortunate parts of the world will die
Jeez, thanks a mill for not rubbing out faces in the really scary stuff.
"Later"?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Thing is, they were the first to tell you they had no clue how or why they could dowse out water, but they could.
Sorry, until you've got a controlled study showing your little "witches" perform better than random chance, I'm gonna remain skeptical. Meanwhile, you should send one over to JREF... if her "powers" are real, she could win a million bucks!
Randi is (was?) an entertainer, not a scientist. His public "debunkings" have included such science as "if I can duplicate the effect through trickery it's fake" regardless of zero evidence that any such trickery was originally used. That's not a "controlled study," he starts with a known result.
I knew Delbert Merrill socially, he was an inventor and engineer who had a long career in industry. He tried dowsing when water couldn't be found on a property, and was successful. He developed a method swinging a pendulum over a map, and it seemed to work for him.
One night we were visiting him, and he showed us his rod. Two nylon rods, about two feet long and 0.1 inch diameter, similar to the nylon rods used to bind computer listings in those days. The business end was bound with non-metalic material, I think fishing line, and the hand grips were 1/4 inch bakelite (or similar) rigid non-conducting tubing, and the ends of the nylon had just been kinked 90 degrees to keep the handles from falling off. There was no way someone holding those bakelite handles could apply bend or torsion to those rods.
He walked across the property, saying that there was a stream in the area, and as he walked along the rods visibly bent. He offered to let us try it, and two of three people felt the tug, including me. The other person who had success was blind, could not have seen where the rods bent, and also got a strong bend at the same spot.
I never tried dowsing again, but Delbert Merrill did locate water on some property I was trying to buy, after three dry wells had been drilled. He predicted slight sulpher in the water, in an area not known for that, and predicted the depth within five feet and the flow within three gal/min.
I see that in upstate NY National Grid finds gas lines by dowsing as well as their little meters, the meters have false positives on any metal, not just gas lines. The sum of these experiences strongly suggests that there is an effect, sensible people like gas companies and engineers seem to find it usefully reliable, I wouldn't discard their experience casually.
Finally, Randi is an entertainer, some of the televised "debunkings" are far from scientific method:
- everyone can't reproduce the effect
- it doesn't work every time
- the effect can be created as an illusion by a professional
If those are valid criteria, they prove that pitchers can't throw a curve. Personally I'll put it in the "there's something there" category, since the people I have met who have produced measureable success make no money at it, don't care if people believe in it, and don't publicize the ability, I find profit, zeal, or fame to be unlikely motivation for trickery.
Really? Do you have a reason to think that the majority of the populace doesn't want us there? Because as far as I can tell, they do want us there; at least until they are strong enough to take care of themselves.
Really? Put yourself in the shoes of an Iraqi:
And on top of all that, we haven't stopped the violence. That Iraqi's now have the population equivalent of a 911 every month instead of every day is small comfort. There are families where the women have stayed in mourning robes for years because family members keep getting killed before the mourning period is over.
So if you were an Iraqi - why in God's name would you want the U.S. military occupying your country?
OK, so I take it you have no actual evidence as to what the populace thinks, you are just making stuff up based on what you think. So, in the spirit of information, I will turn you to the website of someone who has been to Iraq.
Here is a good overview of the Anbar region of Iraq, and here is a rather gruesome description of life under Saddam. The situation is significantly more nuanced than you understand. Unfortunately no one takes polls of the Iraqi people so it is hard to get a good general overview of what people think, but anecdotal evidence beats what you have, which is guess work.
Read through that guy's website, and you'll see he does actual interviews with Iraqis living in Iraq. Of course not every Iraqi likes Americans being there, but once again the reality is much more nuanced than you seem to understand.
Qxe4
Okay I see you're projecting:
OK, so I take it you have no actual evidence as to what the populace thinks, you are just making stuff up based on what you think.
With a cannon:
The situation is significantly more nuanced than you understand.
Iraqis have wanted us to GTFO. For years . So do, please, stop spouting pro-war talking points like it's still 2003.
The second link, a poll taken in 2008, shows that only 38% of Iraqis wanted the Americans to leave immediately. The rest wanted America to stay longer. Frankly there isn't much to argue about at this point, since American troops have already withdrawn from the cities, and presumably will continue the exit according to schedule, but it's better to base your opinion in fact than guessing, as you surely know.
In closing, here's a fun quote:
I braced myself. "How do you feel about the U.S. bombing this mosque?" I [asked the mosque's caretaker]. "I don't know," he said, as if he had never even pondered the question. "It's okay, I suppose. I am grateful. If they had not done it this place would still be a toilet."
As you see, the guy's attitude is almost one of indifference. As if bad things are going to happen no matter what, and he'll just keep doing his thing, whether it is because of Baathists or Al Qaeda or Americans, makes little difference to him.
Qxe4
Laughable. Seriously, put your Charles Craphammer talking points and lame annecdote down for two seconds and put yourself in the shoes of an Iraqi. Or, in the shoes of a veteran of the Soviet armed forces:
Oh, and since you want polls, here's more.
I'm not sure you understand how counterinsurgency fighting works. The rules for engagement are actually different, especially now in Afghanistan. You should check it out.
Secondly, the only poll you linked to that showed that most Iraqis wanted Americans to leave immediately was from 2006. Things have changed since then, and Iraqi opinion is not the same. This is reflected in the other poll you linked to, from 2007, which shows that most Iraqis wanted the Americans to stay longer. So public opinion has shifted in favor of America staying longer.
Qxe4
I'm not sure you understand how counterinsurgency fighting works.
I'm not sure you understand how a quagmire works. It's when you're stuck in an open ended war and the very people you are "fighting for" are frequently the same ones shooting at you.
Things have changed since then, and Iraqi opinion is not the same.
Laughable. What part of "our invasion destroyed their country, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions while supporting massively corrupt puppets" do you not understand? Just because the media has decided the Iraq occupation is so 2006 doesn't mean that violence and bombings aren't still a part of everyday life.
This is reflected in the other poll you linked to, from 2007, which shows that most Iraqis wanted the Americans to stay longer. So public opinion has shifted in favor of America staying longer.
I'm not sure you know how reading comprehension works. The first sentence in the Washington Post article from 2007:
Continuing to argue that Iraqi's want us there is like arguing that Miramax made a wise decision in passing up Lord of the Rings, after it made Time Warner a few billion dollars and nearly a dozen Oscars. Simply bizarre.