Are you kidding? Long past time that our government started framing the issue in this way since, in reality that's just exactly what it is.
While virulent teabagging " Nixon and Reagan were too far left / let's end-the- EPA ! " narcissists who compromised their rationality by coke-snorted their way through the 80s go apoplectic over some poor NAFTA-shafted Mexican coming over to trim their freaking hedges, the specter of massive uncontrolled global destabilization borne of crop failures, oceanic dead-zones and mass population migrations is hurtling towards reality.
Think carbon trading is going to cost you money? Try ponying up for perpetual, open-ended colossal military and intelligence efforts that dwarf the Iraq and Afghanistan efforts combined.
If the fundie freaks want to think they inhabit a child-like universe characterized by a perfect moral justice personally overseen by Santa-God then that's their business....until they start trying to make everyone else live in their land of make-believe as Sen Inhofe (OK) in determined to do:
Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that âoeas long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.â My point is, Godâ(TM)s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.
There's a strong argument to be made that democracy has already failed. It's possible that we've waited so long we cannot stop runaway greenhouse gas emissions.
No one really knows with certainty if the methane-sequestering perma-frost will go into a positive feedback loop or not.
Whatever the probability of that or some other unforeseen positive feedback loop accidentally being invoked, like the runaway acidification of the oceans wiping out marine life and toppling the food chain- the fact is we've - strike that - CONSERVATIVES - have brought us so close to what we knew to be the edge of disaster that it's now possibly nothing more than a matter of chance whether we live or die.
A system of government that permits its nation and people to be brought to the brink of a known, well understood and scientifically proven extinction process- save for luck- is pretty much the definition of a failed system of government.
We may be in for a future in which our civil liberties and standard of living are simply going to be greatly curtailed, whether we like it or not.
The first organizing principle of any society is not democracy, not "freedom of speech" or "freedom of religion" or any specific set of freedoms at all. It's survival.
Rest assured that whether we survive or not, we WILL implement a form of government that maximizes our chances of doing so at the expense of everything else. Have no doubt about that at all.
We need to act right now. Right this very second. Right this very election. We can do a lot worse than implementing the set of recommendations known as the Princeton Wedges.
This approach is distinguished by it's immediate implementability. It doesn't rely on any single silver bullet. It doesn't rely on merely possible future technological advances. The cost is bearable, even minimal and the benefits are not just ecological long term ones but also immediate economic ones.
It's time for America to man-up, get up, shake off the dreamlike, narcissistic just-so fairy-tales promulgated by the sociopathic and mentally enfeebled forces in our society and do what it
That's what I thought. It's easy enough to Google your way to the truth about the falsifiability of climate change unless you're taken in by bad arguments and psedoscience of course.
But nothing's going to change your mind so why should I waste even one second on arguing you when I could spend that same time cleaning my gun?
And you will change your mind as a result ? Is that what is on the table? Because the alleged non-falsifiability of AGW is all that's stopping you from believing it?
Don't kid yourself that public debates such as those that occur here on slashdot don't make a difference; they do. Public opinion is changing and the reason is not that the government has released illustrated pamphlets, it's because just ordinary individuals everywhere, acting on their own initiative and motivated by their own conscience and understanding are waging an public war against deniers online, over dinner tables and in the media.
.
If you doubt that we're effective, here's some good news for your efforts (about three quarters of the way down under the heading - Global Warming and Extreme Weather Events:)
We've both made our thoughts clear already. I just find myself having to reply anyway. The easy construct "one rouge team" is problematic -in the extreme - in reality.
There's the secrecy issue. Then there's the problem of finding people who both have the access they would need to alert bin Laden and also the indubitable sincerity and uncompromising world view that would permit them to keep that secret to only themselves for what appears to be years.
But even given such a fortunate (not!) assembly of well placed, die-hards you still have the fact that just because they're "one rogue team" it exactly means they are NOT the ISI en toto or even a structurally enduring and functional part of the ISI. Yet that is what is being asserted by those who think the ISI was complicit. A rogue team could exist, but the fact that they're rogue means they're not majority.
I work with people every day that have no job to do. I'm not talking about the typical "I'm the backbone of the company and without me they'd sink" attitude that so many people have. I mean they literally sit and play solitaire all day. They aren't doing bad work, because they don't have any to do.
I have no idea where you work. I too work with people who literally play solitaire all day and once in a while get up to see how it's going. They're managers and I''ve learned to shuffle my feet on the way to their cube b/c they really hate being caught out with that little card game on their screen...
But I have a different experience than you. The way it works at my company, you're golden if you have allies at the top and otherwise you're expendable. They've fired the BEST developers we had b/c those developers looked crosseyed to Mr Well Connected and believe me when I say the firing was just a matter of crossing the Ts and dotting the Is - a mere formality, based on a falsifiexd evaluation of not even their work product but their "communication ability" or some such shit.
So that's my data point. If you want a view with more gravitas and a wider range of experience from someone in HR who did the firing , then I heartily recommend the now classic book Corporate Confidential
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company-Know/dp/0312337361
where the author buttresses everything I just said.
Firing is no problem in the US even if you're a minority and even if you're over 40. They're not the least bit intimidated by the law, nor are they going to allow themselves to become dependent on a performer so don't even think of trying to obtain job security through excelling - they just see that as you trying to top them from the bottom, and it pisses them off.
. Learn how to be liked by people who no one would describe as other than cretinous, or be fired. Really.
Get real. What do you think a retirement / pension "guarantee" ever was? And what happened to those promises? Chapter 7, that's what happened. Look at all the workers who were promised future benefits in lieu of today's pay and then none of it ever materialized.
IBM is like, the MOST cynical place to work after Intel, which IS the WORST place to work, ever.
Yes it is; the ISI is shot through with people who are tali sympathizers. Some of those are in a position of power in the ISI and they're in a position to tell their underlings what to do the same way your boss is, except with the implicit threat of personal harm added in if you don't do it. It's just like any other organization in which there are power struggles. There's in fighting and conniving and looking the other way and wanting to hang on to your job.
Look at how Chicago was when Al Capone was there. look at the corruption. Were ALL those people in the city and police and courts and papers corrupt in their hearts? Of course not. We're all familiar with this dynamic.
And remember, that wasn't even that long ago for the US
That's why we don't want the drone program run by Pakistan.
If that strikes you as unlikely, consider this. bin Laden had every reason to be paranoid- the full power of the US intelligence community was looking for him. One leaking person and it's game over. What's he going to do?
Not let anyone not in his family or his inner circle know where he is. Even if the majority of the upper echelon of Pakistani armed forces was FOR him- and they're not- but even if that was true, he'd still have to worry about someone telling someone etc until someone who will take the reward money finds out.
No one is going to risk that.
In one sense it's like The Biggest Secret In The World. Those kinds of things people can't help but blab.. it's just the way it is and he knew it.
The reaction from the upper echelon was basically "great1" when he got popped. Remember he was sworn to overthrow the secular government of Pak. If the majority was in favor of that, it would have already happened. Tali sympathizers are shot throughout the military like buckshot, so the US doesn't trust them (because of the same dynamic which didn't permit bin Laden to trust anyone) to run the drones, but that's not the same situation at all as the military being in cohoots with tali.
It's not black and white at all.
I am a card carrying liberal, but the liberals who are against the drone strikes really live in some universe I have never been to. The drone strikes are a great way to undermine the taliban's power. The people they kill are the ones who make a difference in how things go in that country. If it goes, if the civilian government is overthrown by tali, we have tali-with-the-bomb. What do you think happens next?
In warfare there surface leaders who lead the followers. It's not just a numbers game, it's an identity game also,. Some people are instigators and cheerleaders and they are very effective. Not just anyone can step in and take their place and get the same effect. Killing specific individuals is great in two ways- one, it minimizes civilian death. The other is it lets you pick out the most important players.
If there was some magical way we could kill the enemy after they were fond guilty in a fair US trial that somehow didn't jeopardize nat. sec., where the person was whisked here... we'd do it. War sucks, but in Waz we are only at war because the alternative is far far worse.
Pakistan's fundies , just like our fundies in the US, may use terror to intimidate the voice of Pakistan's progressives, but rest assured if they got into power, banning websites with which they disagreer would be the first order of the day, just as Rick Santorum was planning to make p0rn sites illegal.
But there are tens of thousands of expat Pakis who can and do put up websites to combat extremeist thoughts and if they're not blocked in Pakistan, there's little the fundies in Pak cn do to stop people in Pak from accessing them.
Think of the whole thing as a sort of distributed Voice of America. What are they going to do?
The more people are exposed to liberal ideas, the more liberal the next generation becomes. Look at what's happening to the conservatard hatred of homosexuality in the US. They themselves admit they've lost "this battle" against gay acceptance. That's the power of ideas.
Conservatism relies on fear of things your personally ignorant of to whip its followers up into a frenzy. What will happen if the slaves are freed? What will happen if women get the vote? What will happen if we desegregate? What will happen if we intermarry? What will happen if we legalize homosexuality? What will happen if the government takes over heathcare?
Once people are exposed to these things, it turns out they're actually good in ways the conservatives just couldn't imagine.
People don't change, but people grow old and die and their children make new laws based on their own understanding of reality. That understanding can either be informed and acquainted with the things it's legislating about or it can read some holy book day and night and pray away the gay.
It's on. It's on between the forces of darkness- the religious fundies in every nation- and civilization. My bet is on civilization. Let's roll.
I am actually happy about this ruling because MS is a major pusher of software patents. This spreads the pain back to them. Perhaps they'll decipher a market signal in that pain.
The government can't be seen offending their own people. They're more progressive than they let on. Because of the threat of violence from the religious fundies, the progressives often disguise their actions or appear to be "arguing for" something they are actually against.
All of the institutions in Pakistan have to walk lines between the progress the lawyers and intellectuals and professors want to see happen and what the religious fundies will tolerate. It's not that different in the US. as the etch-a-sketch positioning in the Republican primaries reveal. You can't alienate that much of your (stupid) electorate and expect to get or stay in power.
The government and most of the military in Pakistan hates the Taliban as much as anyone and was as glad as we were when we did bin Laden Of course they had to act outraged.
Pakistan is chock -o-block full with highly intelligent forward looking progressives who aren't drinking the Kool-aid. That's why the drone program is a great thing. The religious head cases in Waziristan are hated by many Pakis as much as they're hated by us, and both the Pakistan government and its military smile every time a fundie gets dished out to him what he earnestly sought to dish out to civil society.
Just like with any other country, you can't understand the international headlines unless you have at least a basic grasp of the domestic politics.
Climate change is shorthand for " the global, very very long term -multiple centuries long - changing of the atmospheric conditions which give rise to climate and especially temperature "
From the paper :
the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the airâ(TM)s heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.â
I don't think I need to elaborate anymore for this group of readers to understand what the difference is. Nor do I need to elaborate on which news outlets malignantly misrepresented this paper's findings and what those news outlets motivations were.
This is a little case study of what the deniers in the media have systematically done to the the science of climate change and to public opinion of climate change.
Unless you're talking about QM or Post Modernism, there are not many realities, there is one. That reality includes the certainty of catastrophic, civilization-ending climate change if we continue on our present course.
Such climate change is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.
The individuals who have elected to lie to the American public regarding the reality and cause of climate change represent the same national security threat and form a distinct class of criminal that society has every right to pursue, prosecute and punish.
You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
You cannot yell "no fire" in a burning theater.
You cannot conspire to conceal the reality of an impending iceberg because you are a first class passenger profiting from delay and you know you can bribe your way onto a lifeboat leaving others to die.
Misrepresenting this paper's conclusions is a criminal, generationicidal act.
And liberals feel the same way about you. The thing is, if conservatives continue to succeed in getting the US to do nothing about global warming , liberals are going to get to do something about it. Conservatives will be desperately trying to hide the fact that they ever watched FoxNews or read RedState or took their science from Rush Limbaugh or were ever one of those "crazy asshole conservatives...."
From abolition to women's suffrage, from food safety to product safety from evolution denialism and the Scopes Trial (haven't learned much since then, have you, Tennesee conservatards) from segregation and intermarriage laws to laws against homosexuality conservatives never pass up a chance to line up on the losing side of history in this country.
But with global warming, it's taken to a whole new level. Now you're literally a clear and present danger to national security of the United States, which is just how the CIA et. al . see you BTW.
But it's not just the national security of the US it's also every nation on earth adn THEIR intelligence agencies.
. Hey, how do you think that's going to work out for ya?
It's like a political suicide pact.... that's one good thing that will come out of all this.. the country will be unified in its wholesale and irreversible rejection of "conservatism" and will come to see it the same way everyone now sees Bull Conners and the Klan.
Thanks for being the suicide bombers of your own "movement" and ensuring that when people watch old FoxNews clips it will be just like watching the Nazis goosestepping under the Arc D'Triumph.
Hey,we could have done it without you, but it wouldn't have been so decisive.. and...spectacular...
It's not black and white like that. It's not "everyone knows or no one can look". It's controlling who looks. Yes that is not democratic and will not lead to the optimum results if your ONLY goal is to study it for defensive purposes- against Mother Nature or terrorists.
But that can't be your only goal. Your goal has to be to minimize the likelihood that terrorists will use it in the first place, or learn from it and do something just as vile against which we have no immediate defense.
So we have an optimization problem. If we secret away and no one looks, we run the risk that terrorist or MN will unleash it and we'll have nothing to defend ourselves with. If we just let it go public, you're HELPING the terrorists as per above.
Like everything else in life there is no silver bullet solution or perfect approach. You have to assign probabilities to outcomes and try to maximize your result.
The way to do that is let's study it in a secure environment. That way, we learn about but the terrorists are shut out.
Is there a scenario whereby Bruce Willis Lone Rouge Researcher secretly studied in his basement and was the only one with an effective vaccine the day the terrorist struck? Are we preventing such a virtuous outcome by following keeping our secrecy in place?
That scenario exists ( in Hollywood especially) but it's much less likely than the alternative where we helped the terrorists inadvertently.
This is a judgement thing.. this is a maturity thing and also an experience thing where experience means roughly, having spent serious time running the scenarios informed by real world and possibly classified information.
People don't just naturally come to the conclusions game theorists do without studying and reasoning with the benefit of informed tested theories. This is something like that. You have to be a specialist to really think through what to do here. Yes that does sort of leave you and me with layman's opinions out of the decision making process. That's what it is to be alive at a time when just everything has been advanced to the point where only specialists really understand shit. It's inherently undemocratic if you think everyone's opinion should count for the same amount in every domain..
OK and this is material to my point in what way? Glad someone pointed it out, I am. But the way it was implied as a counter-argument. How did it form an effective counter argument? It didn't . Great to point things out, I corrected my statement. Now what? I'm extra extra right whereas before I was just right.
Exactly. No one has any evidence that Germans are fundamentally different than anyone else in terms of fundamental goodness or badness. When we look at what the Nazis did, we're looking into what WE might do as much as present day Germans might do- no more and no less. It's what humans are capable of. Look at what Americans did to their slaves.. look at what Cambodians did to themselves. Look at what happened in Serbia and Rwanda. This is not a "German story or fault. It's a human story and a human fault. Case closed.
I know they're a no death penalty country, but in this case, why not make an exception? Just arrest try and execute anyone found guilty of belonging to or supporting a neo-Nazi party no matter if it's actual Nazis or it's some offshoot created to get around the German ban on Nazis. Mp
You could say the same thing for more than half the Nazis high command during WWII also- they got sucked into something they didn't really understand yadda yadda yadda.
Why play games with these people? What does it take for humanity to learn a lesson. Just kill them. No , really. Just kill them. In the US too. just kill them. Fuck your civil liberties and free speech rights . Nazis et. al. don't get civil liberties and free speech rights.
OBVIOUSLY this man is a moral derelict and in fact, an economic terrorist. I demand that RIAA go after him with everything they have, in fact, I think they're COMPELLED to unless they want their inaction to be used as evidence against them in some future trial.
I want RIAA lawyers on this yesterday. With that many pirated movies and his advanced age, your average RIAA lawyer will barely have to lift his nose up off his coke mirror to get him sent to prison for the rest of his life.
Also, seize everything he's worked for his entire life and give it to the Hollywood moguls.
We need to make an example of people who think they can flout the law like this.
When I was a kid we went to the Corning glass museum in Corning NY. There they had a show room where they displayed all the stuff they could do with glass
I seem to remember one display in which a flame was applied to one side of a piece of glass and a pot of water was on the other side with a thermometer in it to show the temp was just room temp, despite being subjected to open flame , separated only by that pane of glass.
I wonder what ever became of that technology and why today it's not in every window in the world . The energy savings would be incredible- most air conditioning- heat or cooling- escapes through your window which has an R value of 2 or in the case of insulated glass unit (IGU) at best an R-value of 8.
Self cleaing windows save water and that's a Good Thing, but heat blocking glass saves energy and that's a Very Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? Long past time that our government started framing the issue in this way since, in reality that's just exactly what it is.
While virulent teabagging " Nixon and Reagan were too far left / let's end-the- EPA ! " narcissists who compromised their rationality by coke-snorted their way through the 80s go apoplectic over some poor NAFTA-shafted Mexican coming over to trim their freaking hedges, the specter of massive uncontrolled global destabilization borne of crop failures, oceanic dead-zones and mass population migrations is hurtling towards reality.
Think carbon trading is going to cost you money? Try ponying up for perpetual, open-ended colossal military and intelligence efforts that dwarf the Iraq and Afghanistan efforts combined.
If the fundie freaks want to think they inhabit a child-like universe characterized by a perfect moral justice personally overseen by Santa-God then that's their business ....until they start trying to make everyone else live in their land of make-believe as Sen Inhofe (OK) in determined to do:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/zingularity/2012/03/09/james-inhofe-says-god-decreed-there-will-be-no-global-warming/
Inhofe:
Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that âoeas long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.â My point is, Godâ(TM)s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.
There's a strong argument to be made that democracy has already failed. It's possible that we've waited so long we cannot stop runaway greenhouse gas emissions.
No one really knows with certainty if the methane-sequestering perma-frost will go into a positive feedback loop or not.
Whatever the probability of that or some other unforeseen positive feedback loop accidentally being invoked, like the runaway acidification of the oceans wiping out marine life and toppling the food chain- the fact is we've - strike that - CONSERVATIVES - have brought us so close to what we knew to be the edge of disaster that it's now possibly nothing more than a matter of chance whether we live or die.
A system of government that permits its nation and people to be brought to the brink of a known, well understood and scientifically proven extinction process- save for luck- is pretty much the definition of a failed system of government. We may be in for a future in which our civil liberties and standard of living are simply going to be greatly curtailed, whether we like it or not.
The first organizing principle of any society is not democracy, not "freedom of speech" or "freedom of religion" or any specific set of freedoms at all. It's survival.
Rest assured that whether we survive or not, we WILL implement a form of government that maximizes our chances of doing so at the expense of everything else. Have no doubt about that at all.
We need to act right now. Right this very second. Right this very election. We can do a lot worse than implementing the set of recommendations known as the Princeton Wedges.
http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/
This approach is distinguished by it's immediate implementability. It doesn't rely on any single silver bullet. It doesn't rely on merely possible future technological advances. The cost is bearable, even minimal and the benefits are not just ecological long term ones but also immediate economic ones.
It's time for America to man-up, get up, shake off the dreamlike, narcissistic just-so fairy-tales promulgated by the sociopathic and mentally enfeebled forces in our society and do what it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_VOC0zYkJU Any questions?
That's what I thought. It's easy enough to Google your way to the truth about the falsifiability of climate change unless you're taken in by bad arguments and psedoscience of course.
But nothing's going to change your mind so why should I waste even one second on arguing you when I could spend that same time cleaning my gun?
And you will change your mind as a result ? Is that what is on the table? Because the alleged non-falsifiability of AGW is all that's stopping you from believing it?
The science of course does not say any form of that.
You don't even get what science is or how science is conducted, yet you hold forth.
Once again, we have to beat down the conservatards with: "at long last Sir, have you no shame?".
I think the answer is painfully obvious.
Don't kid yourself that public debates such as those that occur here on slashdot don't make a difference; they do. Public opinion is changing and the reason is not that the government has released illustrated pamphlets, it's because just ordinary individuals everywhere, acting on their own initiative and motivated by their own conscience and understanding are waging an public war against deniers online, over dinner tables and in the media.
. If you doubt that we're effective, here's some good news for your efforts (about three quarters of the way down under the heading - Global Warming and Extreme Weather Events:)
http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Extreme-Weather-Climate-Preparedness.pdf
Highlight- 69% of Americans believe global warming is effecting the weather in the US.
then there's this, via TomDispatch.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/science/earth/americans-link-global-warming-to-extreme-weather-poll-says.html
and this:
63% of respondents believe the United States should move forward to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/30/473484/public-opinion-the-death-of-public-support-for-global-warming-action-is-greatly-exaggerated/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d3e9d40391-TD_McKibben5_3_2012&utm_medium=email
and this:
65% of Americans backed the idea of imposing mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions/other greenhouse gases
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/10/461246/gallup-americans-have-more-guts-than-obama-support-mandatory-controls-on-co2-emissions/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d3e9d40391-TD_McKibben5_3_2012&utm_medium=email
and this:
75% now support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/26/471840/poll-75-of-americans-support-co2-regulation-60-support-revenue-neutral-carbon-tax/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d3e9d40391-TD_McKibben5_3_2012&utm_medium=email
There's the secrecy issue. Then there's the problem of finding people who both have the access they would need to alert bin Laden and also the indubitable sincerity and uncompromising world view that would permit them to keep that secret to only themselves for what appears to be years.
But even given such a fortunate (not!) assembly of well placed, die-hards you still have the fact that just because they're "one rogue team" it exactly means they are NOT the ISI en toto or even a structurally enduring and functional part of the ISI. Yet that is what is being asserted by those who think the ISI was complicit. A rogue team could exist, but the fact that they're rogue means they're not majority.
I work with people every day that have no job to do. I'm not talking about the typical "I'm the backbone of the company and without me they'd sink" attitude that so many people have. I mean they literally sit and play solitaire all day. They aren't doing bad work, because they don't have any to do.
I have no idea where you work. I too work with people who literally play solitaire all day and once in a while get up to see how it's going. They're managers and I''ve learned to shuffle my feet on the way to their cube b/c they really hate being caught out with that little card game on their screen...
But I have a different experience than you. The way it works at my company, you're golden if you have allies at the top and otherwise you're expendable. They've fired the BEST developers we had b/c those developers looked crosseyed to Mr Well Connected and believe me when I say the firing was just a matter of crossing the Ts and dotting the Is - a mere formality, based on a falsifiexd evaluation of not even their work product but their "communication ability" or some such shit.
So that's my data point. If you want a view with more gravitas and a wider range of experience from someone in HR who did the firing , then I heartily recommend the now classic book Corporate Confidential http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company-Know/dp/0312337361 where the author buttresses everything I just said.
Firing is no problem in the US even if you're a minority and even if you're over 40. They're not the least bit intimidated by the law, nor are they going to allow themselves to become dependent on a performer so don't even think of trying to obtain job security through excelling - they just see that as you trying to top them from the bottom, and it pisses them off.
. Learn how to be liked by people who no one would describe as other than cretinous, or be fired. Really.
Get real. What do you think a retirement / pension "guarantee" ever was? And what happened to those promises? Chapter 7, that's what happened. Look at all the workers who were promised future benefits in lieu of today's pay and then none of it ever materialized.
IBM is like, the MOST cynical place to work after Intel, which IS the WORST place to work, ever.
Yes it is; the ISI is shot through with people who are tali sympathizers. Some of those are in a position of power in the ISI and they're in a position to tell their underlings what to do the same way your boss is, except with the implicit threat of personal harm added in if you don't do it. It's just like any other organization in which there are power struggles. There's in fighting and conniving and looking the other way and wanting to hang on to your job.
Look at how Chicago was when Al Capone was there. look at the corruption. Were ALL those people in the city and police and courts and papers corrupt in their hearts? Of course not. We're all familiar with this dynamic.
And remember, that wasn't even that long ago for the US
That's why we don't want the drone program run by Pakistan.
If that strikes you as unlikely, consider this. bin Laden had every reason to be paranoid- the full power of the US intelligence community was looking for him. One leaking person and it's game over. What's he going to do?
Not let anyone not in his family or his inner circle know where he is. Even if the majority of the upper echelon of Pakistani armed forces was FOR him- and they're not- but even if that was true, he'd still have to worry about someone telling someone etc until someone who will take the reward money finds out.
No one is going to risk that.
In one sense it's like The Biggest Secret In The World. Those kinds of things people can't help but blab.. it's just the way it is and he knew it.
The reaction from the upper echelon was basically "great1" when he got popped. Remember he was sworn to overthrow the secular government of Pak. If the majority was in favor of that, it would have already happened. Tali sympathizers are shot throughout the military like buckshot, so the US doesn't trust them (because of the same dynamic which didn't permit bin Laden to trust anyone) to run the drones, but that's not the same situation at all as the military being in cohoots with tali.
It's not black and white at all.
I am a card carrying liberal, but the liberals who are against the drone strikes really live in some universe I have never been to. The drone strikes are a great way to undermine the taliban's power. The people they kill are the ones who make a difference in how things go in that country. If it goes, if the civilian government is overthrown by tali, we have tali-with-the-bomb. What do you think happens next?
In warfare there surface leaders who lead the followers. It's not just a numbers game, it's an identity game also,. Some people are instigators and cheerleaders and they are very effective. Not just anyone can step in and take their place and get the same effect. Killing specific individuals is great in two ways- one, it minimizes civilian death. The other is it lets you pick out the most important players.
If there was some magical way we could kill the enemy after they were fond guilty in a fair US trial that somehow didn't jeopardize nat. sec., where the person was whisked here ... we'd do it. War sucks, but in Waz we are only at war because the alternative is far far worse.
Pakistan's fundies , just like our fundies in the US, may use terror to intimidate the voice of Pakistan's progressives, but rest assured if they got into power, banning websites with which they disagreer would be the first order of the day, just as Rick Santorum was planning to make p0rn sites illegal.
But there are tens of thousands of expat Pakis who can and do put up websites to combat extremeist thoughts and if they're not blocked in Pakistan, there's little the fundies in Pak cn do to stop people in Pak from accessing them.
Think of the whole thing as a sort of distributed Voice of America. What are they going to do?
The more people are exposed to liberal ideas, the more liberal the next generation becomes. Look at what's happening to the conservatard hatred of homosexuality in the US. They themselves admit they've lost "this battle" against gay acceptance. That's the power of ideas.
Conservatism relies on fear of things your personally ignorant of to whip its followers up into a frenzy. What will happen if the slaves are freed? What will happen if women get the vote? What will happen if we desegregate? What will happen if we intermarry? What will happen if we legalize homosexuality? What will happen if the government takes over heathcare?
Once people are exposed to these things, it turns out they're actually good in ways the conservatives just couldn't imagine.
People don't change, but people grow old and die and their children make new laws based on their own understanding of reality. That understanding can either be informed and acquainted with the things it's legislating about or it can read some holy book day and night and pray away the gay.
It's on. It's on between the forces of darkness- the religious fundies in every nation- and civilization. My bet is on civilization. Let's roll.
I am actually happy about this ruling because MS is a major pusher of software patents. This spreads the pain back to them. Perhaps they'll decipher a market signal in that pain.
The government can't be seen offending their own people. They're more progressive than they let on. Because of the threat of violence from the religious fundies, the progressives often disguise their actions or appear to be "arguing for" something they are actually against.
All of the institutions in Pakistan have to walk lines between the progress the lawyers and intellectuals and professors want to see happen and what the religious fundies will tolerate. It's not that different in the US. as the etch-a-sketch positioning in the Republican primaries reveal. You can't alienate that much of your (stupid) electorate and expect to get or stay in power.
The government and most of the military in Pakistan hates the Taliban as much as anyone and was as glad as we were when we did bin Laden Of course they had to act outraged.
Pakistan is chock -o-block full with highly intelligent forward looking progressives who aren't drinking the Kool-aid. That's why the drone program is a great thing. The religious head cases in Waziristan are hated by many Pakis as much as they're hated by us, and both the Pakistan government and its military smile every time a fundie gets dished out to him what he earnestly sought to dish out to civil society.
Just like with any other country, you can't understand the international headlines unless you have at least a basic grasp of the domestic politics.
Climate change is shorthand for " the global, very very long term -multiple centuries long - changing of the atmospheric conditions which give rise to climate and especially temperature "
From the paper :
the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the airâ(TM)s heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.â
I don't think I need to elaborate anymore for this group of readers to understand what the difference is. Nor do I need to elaborate on which news outlets malignantly misrepresented this paper's findings and what those news outlets motivations were.
This is a little case study of what the deniers in the media have systematically done to the the science of climate change and to public opinion of climate change.
Unless you're talking about QM or Post Modernism, there are not many realities, there is one. That reality includes the certainty of catastrophic, civilization-ending climate change if we continue on our present course.
Such climate change is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.
The individuals who have elected to lie to the American public regarding the reality and cause of climate change represent the same national security threat and form a distinct class of criminal that society has every right to pursue, prosecute and punish.
You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
You cannot yell "no fire" in a burning theater.
You cannot conspire to conceal the reality of an impending iceberg because you are a first class passenger profiting from delay and you know you can bribe your way onto a lifeboat leaving others to die.
Misrepresenting this paper's conclusions is a criminal, generationicidal act.
Slashdot should not aide and abet mass murder.
And liberals feel the same way about you. The thing is, if conservatives continue to succeed in getting the US to do nothing about global warming , liberals are going to get to do something about it. Conservatives will be desperately trying to hide the fact that they ever watched FoxNews or read RedState or took their science from Rush Limbaugh or were ever one of those "crazy asshole conservatives...."
From abolition to women's suffrage, from food safety to product safety from evolution denialism and the Scopes Trial (haven't learned much since then, have you, Tennesee conservatards) from segregation and intermarriage laws to laws against homosexuality conservatives never pass up a chance to line up on the losing side of history in this country.
But with global warming, it's taken to a whole new level. Now you're literally a clear and present danger to national security of the United States, which is just how the CIA et. al . see you BTW.
But it's not just the national security of the US it's also every nation on earth adn THEIR intelligence agencies.
. Hey, how do you think that's going to work out for ya?
It's like a political suicide pact.... that's one good thing that will come out of all this.. the country will be unified in its wholesale and irreversible rejection of "conservatism" and will come to see it the same way everyone now sees Bull Conners and the Klan.
Thanks for being the suicide bombers of your own "movement" and ensuring that when people watch old FoxNews clips it will be just like watching the Nazis goosestepping under the Arc D'Triumph.
Hey,we could have done it without you, but it wouldn't have been so decisive.. and...spectacular...
Just do us all a favor and keep denying reality.
It's not black and white like that. It's not "everyone knows or no one can look". It's controlling who looks. Yes that is not democratic and will not lead to the optimum results if your ONLY goal is to study it for defensive purposes- against Mother Nature or terrorists .
But that can't be your only goal. Your goal has to be to minimize the likelihood that terrorists will use it in the first place, or learn from it and do something just as vile against which we have no immediate defense.
So we have an optimization problem. If we secret away and no one looks, we run the risk that terrorist or MN will unleash it and we'll have nothing to defend ourselves with. If we just let it go public, you're HELPING the terrorists as per above.
Like everything else in life there is no silver bullet solution or perfect approach. You have to assign probabilities to outcomes and try to maximize your result.
The way to do that is let's study it in a secure environment. That way, we learn about but the terrorists are shut out.
Is there a scenario whereby Bruce Willis Lone Rouge Researcher secretly studied in his basement and was the only one with an effective vaccine the day the terrorist struck? Are we preventing such a virtuous outcome by following keeping our secrecy in place?
That scenario exists ( in Hollywood especially) but it's much less likely than the alternative where we helped the terrorists inadvertently.
This is a judgement thing.. this is a maturity thing and also an experience thing where experience means roughly, having spent serious time running the scenarios informed by real world and possibly classified information.
People don't just naturally come to the conclusions game theorists do without studying and reasoning with the benefit of informed tested theories. This is something like that. You have to be a specialist to really think through what to do here. Yes that does sort of leave you and me with layman's opinions out of the decision making process. That's what it is to be alive at a time when just everything has been advanced to the point where only specialists really understand shit. It's inherently undemocratic if you think everyone's opinion should count for the same amount in every domain..
OK and this is material to my point in what way? Glad someone pointed it out, I am. But the way it was implied as a counter-argument. How did it form an effective counter argument? It didn't . Great to point things out, I corrected my statement. Now what? I'm extra extra right whereas before I was just right.
Exactly. No one has any evidence that Germans are fundamentally different than anyone else in terms of fundamental goodness or badness. When we look at what the Nazis did, we're looking into what WE might do as much as present day Germans might do- no more and no less. It's what humans are capable of. Look at what Americans did to their slaves.. look at what Cambodians did to themselves. Look at what happened in Serbia and Rwanda. This is not a "German story or fault. It's a human story and a human fault. Case closed.
Nano and mole. gen. Any dissenters? I didn't think so.
Why play games with these people? What does it take for humanity to learn a lesson. Just kill them. No , really. Just kill them. In the US too. just kill them. Fuck your civil liberties and free speech rights . Nazis et. al. don't get civil liberties and free speech rights.
I'll go out on a limb and say that the obverse is also true- a decrease in analytic thinking increases religious thinking.
OK, so it's an unusually thick and short limb.
OBVIOUSLY this man is a moral derelict and in fact, an economic terrorist. I demand that RIAA go after him with everything they have, in fact, I think they're COMPELLED to unless they want their inaction to be used as evidence against them in some future trial.
I want RIAA lawyers on this yesterday. With that many pirated movies and his advanced age, your average RIAA lawyer will barely have to lift his nose up off his coke mirror to get him sent to prison for the rest of his life.
Also, seize everything he's worked for his entire life and give it to the Hollywood moguls.
We need to make an example of people who think they can flout the law like this.
When I was a kid we went to the Corning glass museum in Corning NY. There they had a show room where they displayed all the stuff they could do with glass
I seem to remember one display in which a flame was applied to one side of a piece of glass and a pot of water was on the other side with a thermometer in it to show the temp was just room temp, despite being subjected to open flame , separated only by that pane of glass.
I wonder what ever became of that technology and why today it's not in every window in the world . The energy savings would be incredible- most air conditioning- heat or cooling- escapes through your window which has an R value of 2 or in the case of insulated glass unit (IGU) at best an R-value of 8.
Self cleaing windows save water and that's a Good Thing, but heat blocking glass saves energy and that's a Very Good Thing.
I wish I could mod you up. I can't resist a partaking in a denier beatdown however.