Or some simple solution we think isn't feasible will be once we reduce energy expectations, such as the solution they already have in Nepal for their electric vehicles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD1gPAoJdHA
Yes, those vehicles probably aren't safe around Excursions and Escalades, but if you restricted vehicle sizes on roads we could stop killing our society with convenience.
I did forget about nuclear. It's a finite resource, though. The sun is too, but if we still haven't gotten off this rock in a few billion years, we'll have only ourselves to blame. Or an asteroid.
Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun. The only question is which source is the most economically (from an energy standpoint) obtainable and environmentally sustainable.
Wind and sun to electric current seem to be the best bets, since they don't require any intermediate steps like biomass or super old biomass, also known as oil. Solar-thermal molten salt storage for overnight and cloudy weather with natural gas backups will probably be the winner for much of our electricity needs. Colder climates will rely on wind and geothermal differential generators.
The important thing is that we invest now in technologies that allow high efficiency transfers of electricity, because we're going to need to balance the load across the country. This, in combination with building efficiency improvements and abandoning the urban sprawl model, should have us well on our way to sustainability.
Public education is doing poorly because the US ended trade skills training and tries to force everyone into college, and because it's low on our list of spending priorities. Education spending has been stagnant compared to the spending on imprisonment, the military, and transportation.
If you think that Blackwater or other private contractors in Iraq provide better service for less money than the US military, you're delusional or misinformed.
The Soviet Union imploded because of corruption and military spending and many other reasons. A better example would be China since they're still around, but that wouldn't help your case since their command economy is spanking the western world in productivity and growth, and has been for some time.
The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufacture, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
I really don't agree. When a locally controlled government operates a utility, it's not really a monopoly, is it? The job of connecting people to the internet goes to a more open and transparent organization of people that will probably to the same quality of work, but have no incentive to screw a person over for money.
On a more practical level, what's the incentive for a county level internet provider to charge $100 for installation if they only need $50 to cover the cost? What's the incentive for a for-profit organization to do the same thing? Is that money likely to be used to improve your installation or give the boardroom another bump in bonuses?
If you feel the county charge is too high, you can complain to someone who can actually change things instead of getting bounced around a call center in India. You can get your friends to attend the committee meeting, sue the government, and even demand to see their books to see if they are charging a fair rate. If it's AT&T you're just shit out of luck.
Those are unfortunate, but good examples of what to privatize and what not to. I don't think utilities and liquor stores and performing arts centers are apple to apple comparisons.
How does your city do with utilities? If they were owned by a private corporation, do you think you would have more or less influence on them? Would they be more or less expensive? Are these good or a bad things for your community? Those are the important questions to ask.
Will it fail just like municipal electric, water, sewer, and telephone?
At some point I thought all of these private corporations suing the government because they can't compete with the government for efficiency would cause some light bulbs to go off. As long as it's implemented and controlled at the county level, doesn't prohibit the existence of private offerings, and pays for itself, what exactly is the problem?
Do you really want to choose the tyranny of Comcast or AT&T over that of a local city or county meeting?
It's a product of both. Do you understand that the world is not a series of binary options? Do you imagine that the CIA would obviously pick the political movement with the greatest chance of success to throw their money and intelligence behind?
Does that invalidate the calls for democracy? Of course not. Does the probable involvement of the CIA mean I don't support democracy in Iran? Of course not. But for me to point out the obvious is like poison in your eyes, for some reason I don't understand. But isn't it strange that there is never any US news coverage of democratic movements in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? But that's a topic for another time.
My point is, the United States government does not and has never cared about democracy, unless it has coincided with their own goals. The historical evidence for this is substantial, pervasive, and in my opinion, undeniable. In light of this realization, we need to stop mucking around in the affairs of sovereign countries. We have no business and no right to tell anyone outside of our own borders what they should and should not do. There would be no need to overthrow the Islamic Republic if we hadn't overthrown Mosaddeq in 1953 and put the Shah into power. Let me quote a summary of that coup, and you tell me if it sounds familiar.
Soon, massive protests, engineered by Roosevelt's team, took place across the city and elsewhere with tribesmen paid to be at the ready to assist the coup. Fake anti- and pro-monarchy protesters, both paid by Roosevelt (as he reports in his book, cited), violently clashed in the streets, looting and burning mosques and newspapers, leaving almost 300 dead. The pro-monarchy leadership, chosen, hidden and finally unleashed at the right moment by the CIA team, led by retired army General and former Minister of Interior in Mosaddeq's cabinet, Fazlollah Zahedi joined with underworld figures such as the Rashidian brothers and local strongman Shaban Jafari,[40] to gain the upper hand on 19 August 1953 (28 Mordad). The military joined on cue: pro-Shah tank regiments stormed the capital and bombarded the prime minister's official residence, on Roosevelt's cue, according to his book. Mosaddeq managed to flee from the mob that set in to ransack his house, and, the following day, surrendered to General Zahedi, who was meanwhile set up by the CIA with makeshift headquarters at the Officers' Club. Mosaddeq was arrested at the Officers' Club and transferred to a military jail shortly after.
You're telling me that you get no sense of deja vu from this narrative? You eliminate the possibility of CIA involvement today just because you want to believe that the movement is 100% organic?
It's nice to be an idealist when lives aren't at stake. But as history has shown, the United States military and covert agencies do far more harm than good for democracies. Leave Iran to Iranians. It may take them longer to take back their own country without our support, but if we are involved, their chances of long term success are actually worse.
for any assertion i make, you can bring me solid factual historical evidence by the truckload to refute what i say completely
So your worldview has no basis in historical reality...
its when you try to make sense of it all, to think about it, to put it in context, some perspective, some scale, to put the pieces together, that your prejudice generating machine reveals itself to have nothing to do with history at all
...and that proves that you're right. That's a fascinating piece of psychology.
Arguing with you is like arguing with a creationist, who's entire perspective hinges on accepting their version of the bible as fact before anything else can be established. It's a ridiculous assumption to start with. You seem to be unable to process criticism for US foreign policy, or accept that what happened did happen. This is despite the fact that every historical incident you claim is half true has been confessed to by the CIA and the Pentagon through the declassification of documents.
So let's start with the assumption that the United States government has a foreign policy that is totally neutral after 1950, beginning in the year you choose. Regardless of what year you pick, that will be a year when the US military and CIA have troops inside the borders of another sovereign nation imposing their will without the consent of the local populace.
We can even forget that fact for a moment, if you want to give us your take on Iranian history, and why there is no evidence to support the notion that the CIA is involved in the current instability. Notice, I didn't say "responsible for" or "due entirely to the involvement of." Let's see how balanced your historical perspective is, or if you just cheerlead for Langley and the Pentagon because you don't know any better.
I wasn't the person bringing up the French Revolution.
ii is useful to understand the previous era to understand why people think the way they do. but history is not an arcade of victimization that the usa or any other country is bound to forever... you don't really understand history. all you know is propaganda talking points from a dead era
How is historical fact propaganda? You can't just take history that disproves your belief system and call it propaganda. That's a recipe for perpetual self delusion.
does the turkish slaughter of millions of armenians define and limit turkish identity and behavior today?
I'm not talking about the Ottoman Empire. How about this:
The U.S. support of this coup was acknowledged by the CIA Ankara station chief Paul Henze. After the government was overthrown, Henze cabled Washington, saying, "our boys [in Ankara] did it." This has created the impression that the USA stood behind the coup. Henze denied this during a June 2003 interview on CNN Turk's Manset, but two days later Birand presented an interview with Henze recorded in 1997 in which he basically confirmed Mehmet Ali Birand's story. The US State Department itself announced the coup during the night between 11 and 12 September: the military had phoned the US embassy in Ankara to alert them of the coup an hour in advance.
Is 1980 ancient history?
is japan forever bound by its war crimes in world war ii? is any discussion of rwanda nothing more than a rote recycling of talking points about the 1994 genocide?
Wait, now 1994 is ancient history? You're going to have to clarify yourself.
none of us are prisoners of history. any country that escaped the manipulations of the usa in past eras understands that far better than you do
Such as?
stop playing the blame game. that's not enlightenment via historical understanding, that's merely an exercise in reflexive recrimination... again: none of us are prisoners of history. where past atrocities are known, you learn from them, and move on. you don't sit there immobilized in perpetual blame
You're actually becoming incoherent here. Are you saying that people shouldn't be held responsible for their actions? Are you saying that if Indonesia invaded and killed a few hundred thousand Filipinos and took their land, twenty years from now they should be okay with it? Do you actually believe what you are saying?
in fact your entire screed is more of an illumination of your own psychological failures in terms of learned helplessness and rationalizing your own inaction about how to behave in this world than any true historical understanding
You keep saying historical understanding, but you haven't submitted your own timeline of important events for the establishment of the governments of Iran. This leads me to believe you are full of shit.
let me ask you something: is a simple organic popular uprising even possible in your braindead cynical world?
If it's in an area that the US doesn't want to control, sure. And it's happened all over South America, where we only overthrew about half of their governments. Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and some others have thrown of the chains we bound them with. I doubt you have the slightest idea of what I'm talking about, but here's a good place to start:
it's all secret societies and backroom deals and pulled strings?
No, it's usually an imperial power pulling strings with the local leadership to retain their influence. It's not even a secret, really.
the french revolution was started by german princes?the american civil war was the machinations of british imperialists?
I'm sorry, are you from the past?
the 1979 iranian revolution was started by russian kgb? you realize this stupidity is on the same level as your thinking about what is going on in iran right now. you realize that, right?
Well, suspecting the KGB would be stupid. However, we just spent 400 million dollars in Iran for covert military operations. Can you name any other country where we've covertly spent half a billion dollars in the last year?
the number of people in the streets: really just fucking consider for a moment the SHEER NUMBER of people in the fucking streets. oh right, that's a mossad/ cia/ mi6 lie i'm swallowing, right?
Who are your sources? Are you in Iran? There are tens of thousands of protesters on both sides, but I haven't seen any confirmed figures. I don't doubt that there were problems with the election. I don't doubt that many Iranians want a truer democracy. But I also don't doubt that the CIA is fully engaged in trying to topple their current government. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignoring the last 60 years of history.
you honestly believe, even if china could give groups in the usa a trillion dollars, that a popular uprising could take hold? you really believe just a satchel of money is all it would take to foment revolution here? your faith in democratic institutions is that shallow and that cynical? your view of human nature is that craven and that brutal?
No, I said they could get a million people to march. Being successful in America would be difficult, since we are not being threatened by an external force, we are not in a total economic collapse, and everyone is well fed under the current administration. Your inability to grasp this nuance is the sort of naivete that I'm talking about.
you honestly believe, that millions of iranians, across all classes and ages and all geographic areas, are acting on the motivations of the cia!
you're a paranoid schizophrenic retard
I said nothing of the sort. To quote one of my favorite lines from an AC: The words... they mean things.
i'm sorry, i'm not trying to replace a conversation with a name calling contest
You are, but it's just because you're out of your depth.
Last year congress approved 400 million dollars for covert operations in Iran. We just tried to overthrow Venezuela in 2002, where thousands of people marched against Chavez in the capital. They were mostly rich business people and the upper middle class, stirred up by the private televisions stations, upset that peasants were getting government sponsored help and seizing private assets in order to nationalize them. Sound familiar?
In any society, you can find people who want to overthrow the government. If China decided to spend a few billion dollars fomenting a war against Obama, they could drum up enough support to get a million people marching. Just think of all the Evangelicals who believe that Obama will be sponsoring baby killing marathons at abortion clinics.
Just because you're too stupid to understand nuance in politics doesn't mean it isn't there. I think there is a genuine movement in Iran, but I also know that the CIA would go to any length to undermine any government, and they've done so in the past. And yes, the CIA would kill civilians to foment more confrontations between the ruling party and the democratic movement. They have no shame and no conscience.
We'll find out in five years than the hundreds of millions of dollars approved last year were for the purpose of overthrowing the Iranian government. That'll be the second time we've ousted their government. Should be good for relations in the future, don't you think?
We can sell censorship tools to China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, then sell them some weapons so they can kill off the bits of their populace they don't like. Why not sell them F-22s? Hell, let's sell them some biological weapons and help them finish their nuclear weapons programs. If there's a dime to be made, we should make it! Arming the world and the policing it has worked out well for us so far, hasn't it?
There's an ocean of difference between selling a product on an open market, and selling a product directly to a dictatorship when you know it's going to be used to suppress the populace. This is known as "unethical behavior," something corporations and the Pentagon know nothing about. It requires a person or a group of people to have a real set of values that they don't violate on a regular basis for power or profit.
As late as July, 1990, one month before Iraqi troops stormed into Kuwait city, officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second installment of the $1 billion in loan guarantees, despite the looming crisis in the region and evidence that Iraq had used the aid illegally to help finance a secret arms procurement network to obtain technology for its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program. Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1992
Nvidia is also trying to get someone in their corner for the upcoming fight against Intel during their licensing and patent wars. Good news for VIA and anyone else not stuck in the battle of monopolies.
If he's postgrad, I would imagine there are female postgrads at the school. Who wants to bother with some 18 year old girl still resolving daddy issues?
Furthermore, who the hell modded me down? What is wrong with an education and having a good time?
Geeks who don't get laid are to blame, I think, so here's some unsolicited advice: a common misperception among geeks is that girls wanted to be treated like a flower. Which is true - sometimes. Take them out to dinner, hang out with them and do new and interesting things out on the town. And on the third or fourth date, fuck them until dawn. Make sure you have lots of condoms and lots of lube, and don't try any weird shit unless she asks you to. And, most importantly, do not confuse your lust with love, and scare her off with some romantic bullshit.
If she's not down with any of that, move on. She has issues that you can't solve. Ask another girl out, and try again. Believe it or not, there are women out there who like sex just as much as you do, if they're not encumbered by religious guilt trips, past negative sexual history, or insecurity.
Go back to school. Have sex with college girls while you still can. Go to any open lectures and take some off the wall classes. Study abroad or save your money for six months and party in Brazil. Meet some people who have lofty ideas, and try to get jobs at companies with the same.
You aren't going to learn anything but how to take shit and wallow in misery at your current job. If you think that's a valuable skill that you need to learn, then stay.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's like a million dollars. I don't call that a deal, friend.
The molten salt thing looks promising.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night
As do zinc air batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc-air_battery
Perhaps NASA will have a breakthrough with modern flywheel batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_battery
Or some simple solution we think isn't feasible will be once we reduce energy expectations, such as the solution they already have in Nepal for their electric vehicles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD1gPAoJdHA
Yes, those vehicles probably aren't safe around Excursions and Escalades, but if you restricted vehicle sizes on roads we could stop killing our society with convenience.
I did forget about nuclear. It's a finite resource, though. The sun is too, but if we still haven't gotten off this rock in a few billion years, we'll have only ourselves to blame. Or an asteroid.
Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun. The only question is which source is the most economically (from an energy standpoint) obtainable and environmentally sustainable.
Wind and sun to electric current seem to be the best bets, since they don't require any intermediate steps like biomass or super old biomass, also known as oil. Solar-thermal molten salt storage for overnight and cloudy weather with natural gas backups will probably be the winner for much of our electricity needs. Colder climates will rely on wind and geothermal differential generators.
The important thing is that we invest now in technologies that allow high efficiency transfers of electricity, because we're going to need to balance the load across the country. This, in combination with building efficiency improvements and abandoning the urban sprawl model, should have us well on our way to sustainability.
Lars Ulrich doesn't even know how to play the drums.
Just a few points.
Public education is doing poorly because the US ended trade skills training and tries to force everyone into college, and because it's low on our list of spending priorities. Education spending has been stagnant compared to the spending on imprisonment, the military, and transportation.
If you think that Blackwater or other private contractors in Iraq provide better service for less money than the US military, you're delusional or misinformed.
The Soviet Union imploded because of corruption and military spending and many other reasons. A better example would be China since they're still around, but that wouldn't help your case since their command economy is spanking the western world in productivity and growth, and has been for some time.
The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufacture, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
I really don't agree. When a locally controlled government operates a utility, it's not really a monopoly, is it? The job of connecting people to the internet goes to a more open and transparent organization of people that will probably to the same quality of work, but have no incentive to screw a person over for money.
On a more practical level, what's the incentive for a county level internet provider to charge $100 for installation if they only need $50 to cover the cost? What's the incentive for a for-profit organization to do the same thing? Is that money likely to be used to improve your installation or give the boardroom another bump in bonuses?
If you feel the county charge is too high, you can complain to someone who can actually change things instead of getting bounced around a call center in India. You can get your friends to attend the committee meeting, sue the government, and even demand to see their books to see if they are charging a fair rate. If it's AT&T you're just shit out of luck.
Those are unfortunate, but good examples of what to privatize and what not to. I don't think utilities and liquor stores and performing arts centers are apple to apple comparisons.
How does your city do with utilities? If they were owned by a private corporation, do you think you would have more or less influence on them? Would they be more or less expensive? Are these good or a bad things for your community? Those are the important questions to ask.
Will it fail just like municipal electric, water, sewer, and telephone?
At some point I thought all of these private corporations suing the government because they can't compete with the government for efficiency would cause some light bulbs to go off. As long as it's implemented and controlled at the county level, doesn't prohibit the existence of private offerings, and pays for itself, what exactly is the problem?
Do you really want to choose the tyranny of Comcast or AT&T over that of a local city or county meeting?
i stopped reading here
I can't say I'm surprised. You know some great sounding words, but they are backed by little more than a thesaurus.
It's a product of both. Do you understand that the world is not a series of binary options? Do you imagine that the CIA would obviously pick the political movement with the greatest chance of success to throw their money and intelligence behind?
Does that invalidate the calls for democracy? Of course not. Does the probable involvement of the CIA mean I don't support democracy in Iran? Of course not. But for me to point out the obvious is like poison in your eyes, for some reason I don't understand. But isn't it strange that there is never any US news coverage of democratic movements in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? But that's a topic for another time.
My point is, the United States government does not and has never cared about democracy, unless it has coincided with their own goals. The historical evidence for this is substantial, pervasive, and in my opinion, undeniable. In light of this realization, we need to stop mucking around in the affairs of sovereign countries. We have no business and no right to tell anyone outside of our own borders what they should and should not do. There would be no need to overthrow the Islamic Republic if we hadn't overthrown Mosaddeq in 1953 and put the Shah into power. Let me quote a summary of that coup, and you tell me if it sounds familiar.
Soon, massive protests, engineered by Roosevelt's team, took place across the city and elsewhere with tribesmen paid to be at the ready to assist the coup. Fake anti- and pro-monarchy protesters, both paid by Roosevelt (as he reports in his book, cited), violently clashed in the streets, looting and burning mosques and newspapers, leaving almost 300 dead. The pro-monarchy leadership, chosen, hidden and finally unleashed at the right moment by the CIA team, led by retired army General and former Minister of Interior in Mosaddeq's cabinet, Fazlollah Zahedi joined with underworld figures such as the Rashidian brothers and local strongman Shaban Jafari,[40] to gain the upper hand on 19 August 1953 (28 Mordad). The military joined on cue: pro-Shah tank regiments stormed the capital and bombarded the prime minister's official residence, on Roosevelt's cue, according to his book. Mosaddeq managed to flee from the mob that set in to ransack his house, and, the following day, surrendered to General Zahedi, who was meanwhile set up by the CIA with makeshift headquarters at the Officers' Club. Mosaddeq was arrested at the Officers' Club and transferred to a military jail shortly after.
You're telling me that you get no sense of deja vu from this narrative? You eliminate the possibility of CIA involvement today just because you want to believe that the movement is 100% organic?
It's nice to be an idealist when lives aren't at stake. But as history has shown, the United States military and covert agencies do far more harm than good for democracies. Leave Iran to Iranians. It may take them longer to take back their own country without our support, but if we are involved, their chances of long term success are actually worse.
for any assertion i make, you can bring me solid factual historical evidence by the truckload to refute what i say completely
So your worldview has no basis in historical reality...
its when you try to make sense of it all, to think about it, to put it in context, some perspective, some scale, to put the pieces together, that your prejudice generating machine reveals itself to have nothing to do with history at all
...and that proves that you're right. That's a fascinating piece of psychology.
Arguing with you is like arguing with a creationist, who's entire perspective hinges on accepting their version of the bible as fact before anything else can be established. It's a ridiculous assumption to start with. You seem to be unable to process criticism for US foreign policy, or accept that what happened did happen. This is despite the fact that every historical incident you claim is half true has been confessed to by the CIA and the Pentagon through the declassification of documents.
So let's start with the assumption that the United States government has a foreign policy that is totally neutral after 1950, beginning in the year you choose. Regardless of what year you pick, that will be a year when the US military and CIA have troops inside the borders of another sovereign nation imposing their will without the consent of the local populace.
We can even forget that fact for a moment, if you want to give us your take on Iranian history, and why there is no evidence to support the notion that the CIA is involved in the current instability. Notice, I didn't say "responsible for" or "due entirely to the involvement of." Let's see how balanced your historical perspective is, or if you just cheerlead for Langley and the Pentagon because you don't know any better.
dude, the cold war is history
I wasn't the person bringing up the French Revolution.
ii is useful to understand the previous era to understand why people think the way they do. but history is not an arcade of victimization that the usa or any other country is bound to forever... you don't really understand history. all you know is propaganda talking points from a dead era
How is historical fact propaganda? You can't just take history that disproves your belief system and call it propaganda. That's a recipe for perpetual self delusion.
does the turkish slaughter of millions of armenians define and limit turkish identity and behavior today?
I'm not talking about the Ottoman Empire. How about this:
The U.S. support of this coup was acknowledged by the CIA Ankara station chief Paul Henze. After the government was overthrown, Henze cabled Washington, saying, "our boys [in Ankara] did it." This has created the impression that the USA stood behind the coup. Henze denied this during a June 2003 interview on CNN Turk's Manset, but two days later Birand presented an interview with Henze recorded in 1997 in which he basically confirmed Mehmet Ali Birand's story. The US State Department itself announced the coup during the night between 11 and 12 September: the military had phoned the US embassy in Ankara to alert them of the coup an hour in advance.
Is 1980 ancient history?
is japan forever bound by its war crimes in world war ii? is any discussion of rwanda nothing more than a rote recycling of talking points about the 1994 genocide?
Wait, now 1994 is ancient history? You're going to have to clarify yourself.
none of us are prisoners of history. any country that escaped the manipulations of the usa in past eras understands that far better than you do
Such as?
stop playing the blame game. that's not enlightenment via historical understanding, that's merely an exercise in reflexive recrimination... again: none of us are prisoners of history. where past atrocities are known, you learn from them, and move on. you don't sit there immobilized in perpetual blame
You're actually becoming incoherent here. Are you saying that people shouldn't be held responsible for their actions? Are you saying that if Indonesia invaded and killed a few hundred thousand Filipinos and took their land, twenty years from now they should be okay with it? Do you actually believe what you are saying?
in fact your entire screed is more of an illumination of your own psychological failures in terms of learned helplessness and rationalizing your own inaction about how to behave in this world than any true historical understanding
You keep saying historical understanding, but you haven't submitted your own timeline of important events for the establishment of the governments of Iran. This leads me to believe you are full of shit.
let me ask you something: is a simple organic popular uprising even possible in your braindead cynical world?
If it's in an area that the US doesn't want to control, sure. And it's happened all over South America, where we only overthrew about half of their governments. Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and some others have thrown of the chains we bound them with. I doubt you have the slightest idea of what I'm talking about, but here's a good place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_U.S._regime_change_actions
it's all secret societies and backroom deals and pulled strings?
No, it's usually an imperial power pulling strings with the local leadership to retain their influence. It's not even a secret, really.
the french revolution was started by german princes?the american civil war was the machinations of british imperialists?
I'm sorry, are you from the past?
the 1979 iranian revolution was started by russian kgb? you realize this stupidity is on the same level as your thinking about what is going on in iran right now. you realize that, right?
Well, suspecting the KGB would be stupid. However, we just spent 400 million dollars in Iran for covert military operations. Can you name any other country where we've covertly spent half a billion dollars in the last year?
the number of people in the streets: really just fucking consider for a moment the SHEER NUMBER of people in the fucking streets. oh right, that's a mossad/ cia/ mi6 lie i'm swallowing, right?
Who are your sources? Are you in Iran? There are tens of thousands of protesters on both sides, but I haven't seen any confirmed figures. I don't doubt that there were problems with the election. I don't doubt that many Iranians want a truer democracy. But I also don't doubt that the CIA is fully engaged in trying to topple their current government. Anyone who thinks otherwise is ignoring the last 60 years of history.
you honestly believe, even if china could give groups in the usa a trillion dollars, that a popular uprising could take hold? you really believe just a satchel of money is all it would take to foment revolution here? your faith in democratic institutions is that shallow and that cynical? your view of human nature is that craven and that brutal?
No, I said they could get a million people to march. Being successful in America would be difficult, since we are not being threatened by an external force, we are not in a total economic collapse, and everyone is well fed under the current administration. Your inability to grasp this nuance is the sort of naivete that I'm talking about.
you honestly believe, that millions of iranians, across all classes and ages and all geographic areas, are acting on the motivations of the cia!
you're a paranoid schizophrenic retard
I said nothing of the sort. To quote one of my favorite lines from an AC: The words... they mean things.
i'm sorry, i'm not trying to replace a conversation with a name calling contest
You are, but it's just because you're out of your depth.
I even submitted that as a story last year. I just liked their summary. Most slashdotters don't read anything longer than a few paragraphs.
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=746591
Students of history are not as naive as you are.*
Hopefully you are better at proof reading.
Students of history as not as naive as you are.
Last year congress approved 400 million dollars for covert operations in Iran. We just tried to overthrow Venezuela in 2002, where thousands of people marched against Chavez in the capital. They were mostly rich business people and the upper middle class, stirred up by the private televisions stations, upset that peasants were getting government sponsored help and seizing private assets in order to nationalize them. Sound familiar?
In any society, you can find people who want to overthrow the government. If China decided to spend a few billion dollars fomenting a war against Obama, they could drum up enough support to get a million people marching. Just think of all the Evangelicals who believe that Obama will be sponsoring baby killing marathons at abortion clinics.
Just because you're too stupid to understand nuance in politics doesn't mean it isn't there. I think there is a genuine movement in Iran, but I also know that the CIA would go to any length to undermine any government, and they've done so in the past. And yes, the CIA would kill civilians to foment more confrontations between the ruling party and the democratic movement. They have no shame and no conscience.
The CIA.
We'll find out in five years than the hundreds of millions of dollars approved last year were for the purpose of overthrowing the Iranian government. That'll be the second time we've ousted their government. Should be good for relations in the future, don't you think?
Indeed. Business is business!
We can sell censorship tools to China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, then sell them some weapons so they can kill off the bits of their populace they don't like. Why not sell them F-22s? Hell, let's sell them some biological weapons and help them finish their nuclear weapons programs. If there's a dime to be made, we should make it! Arming the world and the policing it has worked out well for us so far, hasn't it?
There's an ocean of difference between selling a product on an open market, and selling a product directly to a dictatorship when you know it's going to be used to suppress the populace. This is known as "unethical behavior," something corporations and the Pentagon know nothing about. It requires a person or a group of people to have a real set of values that they don't violate on a regular basis for power or profit.
Often these things come back to bite one in the ass:
As late as July, 1990, one month before Iraqi troops stormed into Kuwait city, officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second installment of the $1 billion in loan guarantees, despite the looming crisis in the region and evidence that Iraq had used the aid illegally to help finance a secret arms procurement network to obtain technology for its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program.
Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1992
Nvidia is also trying to get someone in their corner for the upcoming fight against Intel during their licensing and patent wars. Good news for VIA and anyone else not stuck in the battle of monopolies.
If he's postgrad, I would imagine there are female postgrads at the school. Who wants to bother with some 18 year old girl still resolving daddy issues?
Furthermore, who the hell modded me down? What is wrong with an education and having a good time?
Geeks who don't get laid are to blame, I think, so here's some unsolicited advice: a common misperception among geeks is that girls wanted to be treated like a flower. Which is true - sometimes. Take them out to dinner, hang out with them and do new and interesting things out on the town. And on the third or fourth date, fuck them until dawn. Make sure you have lots of condoms and lots of lube, and don't try any weird shit unless she asks you to. And, most importantly, do not confuse your lust with love, and scare her off with some romantic bullshit.
If she's not down with any of that, move on. She has issues that you can't solve. Ask another girl out, and try again. Believe it or not, there are women out there who like sex just as much as you do, if they're not encumbered by religious guilt trips, past negative sexual history, or insecurity.
Go back to school. Have sex with college girls while you still can. Go to any open lectures and take some off the wall classes. Study abroad or save your money for six months and party in Brazil. Meet some people who have lofty ideas, and try to get jobs at companies with the same.
You aren't going to learn anything but how to take shit and wallow in misery at your current job. If you think that's a valuable skill that you need to learn, then stay.
...like moveon.org?