So, the CIA, who have operated outside the law since inception, have claimed that they didn't train OBL? What a fucking surprise!
Let me ask you a philosophical question. If an organization is charged with defending a country, and that organization has unlimited funding, no oversight, is inherently paranoid, and more subtly, is aware that it will only have these powers if the American people believe that they are always in danger, do you think that same organization would ensure the success in intercepted terrorist plans which have "acceptable" outcomes in order to have the resources to stop possibly "unacceptable" outcomes?
The CIA and British intelligence decided on their own, and with fewer than 100 people succeeded in, overthrowing a democratically elected government in 1953. And stated specifically it was so we could control their nationalized oil industry. God only knows what they are doing today.
In context, the great majority of the bible has no relevance to any modern person. We treat illness with medicine instead of sacrificing birds. We treat women as equals. We no longer support slavery, or view people as property. Instead of believing that prayer can help the blind see, we perform medical procedures that are successful in reality instead of mythic history.
The philosophy of Jesus, which is similar to and no better than the positive philosophies of many of history's great thinkers, does not merit attachment to such a dogmatic prison of mediocre morality.
If you read nothing but apologetics, everything can be rationalized away. Thus apologetics only prove that you will continue to believe whatever you want to believe in. It's why you haven't read ten books defending the Qur'an or the Book of Mormon or Scientology. But the real leap of faith for any religion is making the obvious mistake of claiming infallibility. I could see room for saying, "This is the truth, in the best way it could be interpreted by people, and it's somewhat flawed." But dogmatic religion requires belief in perfection, and nothing in our universe is perfect or even wholly predictable.
The internal failure of the concept of any Judeo-Christian God was illustrated thousands of years ago by Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
If God cares, why not beat the devil and prevent further suffering today, or a hundred or a thousand years ago? It's like raising animals in an environment that guarantees their suffering, in order to "save" them. It makes no sense at all to any rational person.
Read the whole thing. Has some good advice, but it's pretty obvious to anyone that the codified New Testament is a derivative work of other Pagan religions, strong-armed into place by an empire desperate to unite and control their territory via a new, all-inclusive religion. I think that safely explains why Paul (Roman Citizen and a Jew?) was so adamant about rules and the inclusion of gentiles.
If you're a student of history, and you believe that many books are more reliable than one book, you can even trace the evolution of the Jewish and Christian faith based on what cultures they were exposed to historically, and then find new subsequent "revelations" in the OT and NT. One of the most obvious changes is in Genesis, where all references to multiple Gods have been removed for "clarity." You also have the official doctrine of "diabolical mimicry," where the ripoff of Dionysus, Osiris, Mithras, etc., is explained by believing that the devil foresaw the coming of Christ and invented other religions to prematurely discredit it. Just like the dinosaurs which receive no mention have a huge fossilized record which was placed here to "test" our faith. The four gospels don't even agree on what kind of man Judas was.
The Old Testament is simply more fun because it's the rantings of an angry desert tribe, trying to prove their God was tougher than the others. Blatant liberalization of old world ideas is definitely a message you should take away from the NT. Just as shellfish and pork are no longer abominations, most ideas from 2000 years ago are no longer relevant to society. Sorry.
The Bible is so inconsistent and obviously self-defeating that it has to be read in small bits, cherry picked over years for it to be passed off as believable. When I finally walked away from it in disgust, the church leaders begged me to just believe it was true before I read it, and then it would make more sense. If you read it from beginning to end, it's too obvious, and one reason Christians are the least literate of their own book among other religious followers.
You need to learn the bible for insight into much of western thought, but you should also learn it for the fun that can be had with it's biblically ignorant followers.
First, ask them what the ten commandments are. This will trip 95% of them up and they'll walk away without bothering you. If they say that the commandments are not important, tell them you think the same about the rest of the Bible.
Claim you don't believe in Yahweh because you don't believe in infanticide. They'll give you a strange look, and then ask them to read Psalm 137:9, which is in context, Jews daydreaming about smashing their enemies' infants to pieces.
Ask them if they eat lobster, or if there's a girl in the group, if they wear pants. If they say yes, ask them why they support the homosexual agenda, since all three are abominations according to the bible.
They will go to great lengths to explain away why what they do or don't is covered by some painful translation-based loopholes, and what everyone else does is what's really wrong. This is the basic definition of a hypocrite, which concerns my favorite scripture:
'As he taught, Jesus said, "Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.'
Don't get me wrong, the world would be a great place of everyone followed the advice of Jesus, but most of them have never read more than ten pages of their Holy Book.
The true meaning of free in free market is that once the corporations get large enough in size, they are free to do whatever the hell they want.
Every successful economy has a well regulated system with many free market elements, but never a truly free market. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to provide a counter example.
Companies only believe in the free market when it suits them, so they don't deserve it. The only way to keep prices low is to intelligently regulate and keep the corporations small and relatively powerless so they don't have the resources to buy their way into the government's good graces.
Without stiff and proper rules keeping corporate interests separate from government interests, you always end up with corrupted governments relaxing regulations and robbing public resources for private profit, or as they like to call it, privatizing. Notice under the Bush administration that all of the deregulation and plundering of public property has resulted in a highly unstable economy. When you eliminate so many rules that the only thing stopping the resulting mega corporation from ripping people off are the inherent ethics guiding a company, you'll quickly be reminded that the only moral standard they answer to is the bottom line.
They have been doing that since the 70s, when it was shown that minorities were being racially profiled and either not receiving loans or paying higher interest. And while that is still the case thirty years later, the current problem has nothing to do with thirty year old legislation, and everything to do with corporate faith that their newly unregulated wagers will still be covered by our tax dollars. This year alone they will receive 130 billion dollars in bail outs, just for Fannie, Freddie, and Bear Stearns. That's about 50 billion more than we'll spend on "education."
There's an excellent BBC documentary called Super Rich that has some interesting interviews straight from the horses' mouths.
When the banks wrote the mortgages and held them, they were less likely to give money to unqualified buyers. When they were allowed to repackage the debt and sell it to other corporations, to no one's surprise, everyone got greedy and started trading the debt.
I like certain libertarians ideals, but the fact is that regulation is to industry what police are to neighborhoods. If you take a cop off a beat, crime will go up. If you take your eyes off corporate shenanigans, they will go up. This has been obvious from the days of Enron. What we need is reasonable regulation with national standards, state enforcement, and some new laws against the revolving door between business and government. There should be a separation of business and state, for the sake of both.
Of course, you can always argue that the fact that there was regulation that was removed led to the crisis. But you'd be wrong.
There are over 50,000 hits for "nasa faked moon landing." How many times do the stories I mentioned appear on the front page of any news organization? How many front page stories are there about sports?
Google counts aren't very revealing for measuring media exposure.
How many times do you hear about the fact that Walmart could not expand and make as much profit without the existence of government welfare programs? Or that the FBI employs fewer than fifty people who know Arabic? I can link you to one story about each of these items, but try to find them on your own. Now look for meaningless stories about sports, celebrities, fashion, celebrity news. There are tens of thousands of individually written stories about Brangelina's baby, but as far as I can see, not a single major news organization wrote anything about the Secretary of Defense claiming that the government had lost 2.3 trillion dollars on September 10th, 2001. How in the world is that just a coincidence?
Sure, you hear about "scandals," which is little more than confirmed political gossip. The real and sensible criticism of government and business simply isn't covered, though it does exist. You have to look for it, because no news corporation is going to endanger their profit, their friends, or their access to government power for the sake of society.
When Israel takes out a terrorist, they often kill civilians, but the repulsive part is that the victims of the apartheid have a custom you don't understand? I'd prefer we arm the Palestinians equally with the Israelis, and then see how different the peace negotiations go in the next round.
The executive branch itself has long used propaganda, regardless of what "party" is in power. The problem you have is that you're unable to see how narrow your vision is. Only the most "radical leftists" argued that we have no business invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, and they received no serious coverage in the lead-up to the invasion. But when Russia responds to actual military attacks right on their own border, the same people leading us to Iraq say that "in the 21st century, you don't invade other nations."
The military censors what we're allowed to see from the Iraq War. Newspaper editors voluntarily censor what they put in their paper, so they don't piss off people in power they need access to in order to have news to sell. And sometimes they fake the news, and sometimes they report faked news, like the single letter that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and yellowcake uranium in one page, which is now recognized as a complete forgery, conjured up by the government to ease our entry into war. And yet the propaganda that sent men and women to die in Iraq, and kill tens of thousands of civilians isn't worth mention in your little tirade.
We live in a state of unbelievably underperceived hypocrisy, and you still have your blinders on. If you don't believe it, just look at the photos on the front page of CNN, which you see as left, during the opening of the Iraq war and the opening of the war in South Ossetia.
Why would an obviously biased organization cover wars so differently? How is it that people only suffer when Russian tanks are on the move? Why aren't there pictures of dead civilians when bombs are dropped by billion dollar airplanes instead of strapped to terrorists?
You still believe in "them" versus "us." And whenever the government changes who "they" are, you follow right along.
You'd use flywheels instead. Bury some huge buggers in the ground in vacuum sealed containers, weighing many tons, and spin them up when the grid can't handle the load. When the wind dies, slow them down and keep sending energy to the grid.
It's a reliable way to store energy that's almost completely recyclable since made out of inert materials, and it uses the same concepts used in hydroelectric dams that have been running for decades. They've even put it in a bus or a tram somewhere in England instead of using batteries.
Well, I can't go into detail, but I'm sure I'm a reputed crackpot anyway. I've spoken to more than one person ranked in a certain military branch, but they're career and obviously no one who wants to move up the ladder is going to say anything publicly. Basically what they said is that the attacks were real, but we knew they were coming. I imagine it was kept at the highest levels, where secrets are kept. Just take a look at everything from the Pentagon Papers, or released documents from CIA ops that were run by very few people - we overthrew Iran in '53 with less than one hundred people who even knew about the operation, which the person writing the after-action report called "excessive."
What I think happened is that the Bush Administration saw it as their chance to have their Pearl Harbor event as a pretext to complete the job of securing the middle east, especially what was left of Iraq. No matter what the talking heads say these days, oil wins wars. The Germans were at a severe disadvantage because they were cut off from their supply. It's one of the main reasons their North African theater collapsed onto itself, and we went to war with Japan shortly after we stopped sending them oil.
Anyway, I think some top level officials got a hold of the plans, and they staged the NORAD exercises to make sure the plans were executed successfully. I think both planes that weren't flown into the towers were shot down, one over PA, and another over the ocean. The Pentagon was hit to add fear to the whole equation, in my opinion with some sort of missile or simple explosion. I was glued to the news that day and every single news center started off with "We have reports of an explosion at the Pentagon." There are so many holes in the official story of that I really believe it was a purely American military operation, whether it was carried out by the CIA or some other covert group with US assistance I don't know.
I think the planes causing the collapse of the building is something no one saw coming, and something they continue to draw out in order to avoid direct questions about Flight 93 and the Pentagon. So, yes the civilian government is dumb, but they can carry out extremely complicated and covert military ops that never touch civilian eyes.
But perhaps the time for irony has passed. The thing that pisses me off is that Clinton lied about sex, and we all slap our knee and go on with ourselves. Bush knowingly invades a country with no plausible pretext, kills and maims a few hundred thousand people, and we're supposed to keep chuckling. Democrats and Republicans are equally cowards and chickenhawks, but at least the democrats don't go around waving their guns whenever some idiot across the world rattles his.
The insane cowardice and greed from Cheney, Reagan, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Bush II is absolutely the reason our economy (and culture, in my opinion) is in the toilet. Look at any deficit per GDP graph and any graph showing what we spend on the military since WWII. Every time we spend less money on war, our economy does better, and our debt goes down, and the dollar as a result becomes stronger. Why do you think they hated Bush I so much? He responded with appropriate action to Iraq in Kuwait, raised taxes to balance the budget instead of giving more breaks to the wealthy, and kept his secret prisons and genocidal right wing para-military campaigns in Latin America hush-hush. They hate Clinton because he raised taxes for the wealthy and cut military spending, and kept quiet about the embargoes that killed God knows how many Iraqi civilians.
What's the difference between McCain and Obama on Iran? Obama would talk to them before he'd consider dropping a nuke. He's right of Nixon for chrissakes, and I'll take Nixon over McCain any day.
Gah. This is offtopic and rambling. But I can't keep laughing about it, even on TDS or TCR.
Cultural evolution does not require biological evolution. That's why racism in the US was acceptable 50 years ago to the "establishment" and is, at least officially, no longer acceptable.
Further, there is no reason to assume that other cultural imperfections cannot be overcome. In my view, consumerism can be replaced with a hybrid of socialist intent and capitalist mechanism. Energy resources can be shared through diplomacy and shared research for replacements rather than becoming the source of conflict and war.
It's a real pity that the hierarchies in place have such a strangle-hold on hope. In the last hundred years democratic movements have pushed and helped achieve many equal rights for women, minorities, and more recently indigenous people around the world. Protesting a war before it's even fought is something brand new to this century, and a sign that we are evolving much faster than biology could explain.
Then that Korean fuckwit, with enough military power, can blow you up without asking first.
The UN arrives at international consensus all the time, with very reasonable compromises for both sides, that the populations of both sides often are in favor for. For instance, declaring the Middle East a nuclear free zone for everyone - Israel, the US, and Iran. This is supported by everyone, except the governments of US and Israel. The US doesn't join the International Criminal Court because their first subject may be Henry Kissinger, or even GW Bush. Thus you can't expect the current government elite to make any move that could endanger themselves or their friends.
If you don't believe in law, then fine, we can continue to be an outlaw state, burning and pillaging at our whim. But when you are on the receiving end of the bullet, try not to complain.
First of all, let's remember that the Georgians and the Russians have been provoking each other for years over this issue. They have both violated the ceasefire and it will probably be a while before we know who violated the ceasefire lines first.
You lament the invasion, and similarly George Bush stated, "Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected... We have urged an immediate halt to the violence and a stand-down by all troops. We call for the end of the Russian bombings." Mr Putin expressed similar reservations about Iraq in April 2003:
...Mr Putin elaborated... when he warned of the perils of undermining sovereign nations and diplomacy in the "export of capitalist, democratic revolution".
"If we allow ourselves to do that, the world will end up on a slippery slope toward an endless series of military conflicts. We cannot allow that to happen."
Be sure to watch the media over the next few days - you'll see pictures of dead and wounded, buildings destroyed, and many other realities of war. Now ask yourself why you don't see any of those images from Iraq. Ask why we saw silhouetted shots of helicopters and long views of nighttime explosions instead of what was really happening on the ground.
We can see on both sides that morality is of little importance. Unfortunately, since we have taken Iraq unilaterally, Russia is free to take Georgia unilaterally, and any other province they can get away with. All they have to do is claim that their national security is threatened, which is a more grounded claim. Georgia is on the Russian border, not thousands of miles away, and they are dealing with their own problems in Chechnya.
It is time to give real power to the UN and the ICC in order to avoid more death and destruction. Unless states submit themselves to a common rule of international law, there will never be a chance for peace.
If you start out within the parameters of sustainability, it does make a difference. Is it impossible to recycle the water used in these processes? It doesn't have to be potable - my severely uneducated guess is that it's used for thermal cooling and aiding in cleaning or chemical processes. If it's heated and rises as steam, it can be used as a heat source while it's condensed back into water. If it's used for cutting or forming, it can be recycled after recovering useful bits of material.
You'd still have to ship some water but it may be far less than what the plant uses on a daily basis once you "fill it up" the first time. The other benefit of being in the desert is you have a major heat source for distillation if the process requires clean h2o.
Well, a smart idea would be to move all of our high tech manufacturing to the hottest deserts we have. You can build earth sheltered factories to save on A/C, cover the roof and surrounding area with solar panels for virtually unlimited electrical supply, bury some flywheel energy storage to keep necessities going at night. If solar panels turn out to be unsustainable, simpler thermal power plants could be used.
You have an endless supply of sand for glass and silicon. You make non-perishable goods that can be moved out slowly and efficiently (solar/thermal powered electric rail or whatever). To make it really sustainable you could use the same transportation to import recycled or recyclable plastics for the rest.
Our current answer is using fuel that's guaranteed to run out. We should shop direct for our energy.
the place we provided them with arms and *we* wrecked the place?
We prolonged the war, and left our highly trained and armed Mujaheddin allies - who are now "evil" - twisting in the wind.
our only sin in Afghanistan from the 80's is walking away after the Russians went home, we should have given them a ton of money to build up their infrastructure (conditionally based on human rights of course)
Oh, that's funny. Because the Taliban would disqualify, yet we gave them 43 million in 2001. Crazy!
The point being, the 432nd are doing what they were told, just as every German officer did as they were told. They are placated by the same propaganda - we kill with honor and glory because we are righteous and spare every life possible; they kill because they are evil and simply want to destroy the world.
In this case, we aren't participating in concentration camps, but we are killing tens of thousands of civilians because they have a strategically valuable position and a natural resource that's worth at least one hundred trillion dollars. You can rationalize all you want. If genocide is vile, why didn't we invade Rwanda? Why aren't we in Darfur? Why did we sell weapons to Suharto so he could wipe out the East Timorese?
This is the litmus test of humanity - can you treat others as you treat yourself, and do you have a set of moral principles which always applies? The answer for America for sixty five years has been unequivocally no.
If killing "only one million more" civilians than soldiers is a success as viewed by you, then perhaps you finally see the point.
The difference between a church and a cult is popularity, and the difference between a terrorist attack and a war is the body count. If you're proud of our death toll in unprovoked wars this century, which is approaching ten million, I'll happily call myself a moron if you can call yourself a psychopath.
However, characterizing the work of the 432nd as equivalent to terrorist bombings is hyperbolic extremism. The work that I witnessed was remarkable in that the UAV squadrons have the time and take the effort to minimize collateral damage to both civilians and religious institutions.
Here's a bit of Nazi propaganda. Can you please tell me the difference?
Our revenge will not be a kind of military triumph or punishment, which our whole nation demands today. We want to put an end to unscrupulous mass murder by an extreme and drastic blow. A peaceful observer might think that the time is near when half the earth will go flying through the air. Subordinating technique to an ordering will is the last great task of Western culture. In this sense, the great masters of weaponry of our century are the true teachers. We count ourselves among them. In all our campaigns we looked for rapid decisions that saved human lives. The losses among the Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, French, Greeks and Serbs were so small because we won classic military victories. Expert surgery by a leading doctor usually saves a life, whereas a butcher tortures his victim with ever new procedures. We did it the first way, while the English are unable to win a decision on the battlefield. Instead they care nothing for European humanity, bringing miseries upon them.
We can both agree, perhaps, that every war America fights is a major failure. Since we kill many times more civilians in every conflict than soldiers or terrorists.
Your answer may be to say that you're sorry, I'd prefer to stop the killing altogether. Treat sovereign nations as you'd expect to be treated. But that would require the sort of courage that our leadership has lacked since the end of WWII, and belief in moral values that we have since tossed out the window.
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So, the CIA, who have operated outside the law since inception, have claimed that they didn't train OBL? What a fucking surprise!
Let me ask you a philosophical question. If an organization is charged with defending a country, and that organization has unlimited funding, no oversight, is inherently paranoid, and more subtly, is aware that it will only have these powers if the American people believe that they are always in danger, do you think that same organization would ensure the success in intercepted terrorist plans which have "acceptable" outcomes in order to have the resources to stop possibly "unacceptable" outcomes?
The CIA and British intelligence decided on their own, and with fewer than 100 people succeeded in, overthrowing a democratically elected government in 1953. And stated specifically it was so we could control their nationalized oil industry. God only knows what they are doing today.
In context, the great majority of the bible has no relevance to any modern person. We treat illness with medicine instead of sacrificing birds. We treat women as equals. We no longer support slavery, or view people as property. Instead of believing that prayer can help the blind see, we perform medical procedures that are successful in reality instead of mythic history.
The philosophy of Jesus, which is similar to and no better than the positive philosophies of many of history's great thinkers, does not merit attachment to such a dogmatic prison of mediocre morality.
If you read nothing but apologetics, everything can be rationalized away. Thus apologetics only prove that you will continue to believe whatever you want to believe in. It's why you haven't read ten books defending the Qur'an or the Book of Mormon or Scientology. But the real leap of faith for any religion is making the obvious mistake of claiming infallibility. I could see room for saying, "This is the truth, in the best way it could be interpreted by people, and it's somewhat flawed." But dogmatic religion requires belief in perfection, and nothing in our universe is perfect or even wholly predictable.
The internal failure of the concept of any Judeo-Christian God was illustrated thousands of years ago by Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
If God cares, why not beat the devil and prevent further suffering today, or a hundred or a thousand years ago? It's like raising animals in an environment that guarantees their suffering, in order to "save" them. It makes no sense at all to any rational person.
Read the whole thing. Has some good advice, but it's pretty obvious to anyone that the codified New Testament is a derivative work of other Pagan religions, strong-armed into place by an empire desperate to unite and control their territory via a new, all-inclusive religion. I think that safely explains why Paul (Roman Citizen and a Jew?) was so adamant about rules and the inclusion of gentiles.
If you're a student of history, and you believe that many books are more reliable than one book, you can even trace the evolution of the Jewish and Christian faith based on what cultures they were exposed to historically, and then find new subsequent "revelations" in the OT and NT. One of the most obvious changes is in Genesis, where all references to multiple Gods have been removed for "clarity." You also have the official doctrine of "diabolical mimicry," where the ripoff of Dionysus, Osiris, Mithras, etc., is explained by believing that the devil foresaw the coming of Christ and invented other religions to prematurely discredit it. Just like the dinosaurs which receive no mention have a huge fossilized record which was placed here to "test" our faith. The four gospels don't even agree on what kind of man Judas was.
The Old Testament is simply more fun because it's the rantings of an angry desert tribe, trying to prove their God was tougher than the others. Blatant liberalization of old world ideas is definitely a message you should take away from the NT. Just as shellfish and pork are no longer abominations, most ideas from 2000 years ago are no longer relevant to society. Sorry.
The Bible is so inconsistent and obviously self-defeating that it has to be read in small bits, cherry picked over years for it to be passed off as believable. When I finally walked away from it in disgust, the church leaders begged me to just believe it was true before I read it, and then it would make more sense. If you read it from beginning to end, it's too obvious, and one reason Christians are the least literate of their own book among other religious followers.
You need to learn the bible for insight into much of western thought, but you should also learn it for the fun that can be had with it's biblically ignorant followers.
First, ask them what the ten commandments are. This will trip 95% of them up and they'll walk away without bothering you. If they say that the commandments are not important, tell them you think the same about the rest of the Bible.
Claim you don't believe in Yahweh because you don't believe in infanticide. They'll give you a strange look, and then ask them to read Psalm 137:9, which is in context, Jews daydreaming about smashing their enemies' infants to pieces.
Ask them if they eat lobster, or if there's a girl in the group, if they wear pants. If they say yes, ask them why they support the homosexual agenda, since all three are abominations according to the bible.
They will go to great lengths to explain away why what they do or don't is covered by some painful translation-based loopholes, and what everyone else does is what's really wrong. This is the basic definition of a hypocrite, which concerns my favorite scripture:
'As he taught, Jesus said, "Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.'
Don't get me wrong, the world would be a great place of everyone followed the advice of Jesus, but most of them have never read more than ten pages of their Holy Book.
The true meaning of free in free market is that once the corporations get large enough in size, they are free to do whatever the hell they want.
Every successful economy has a well regulated system with many free market elements, but never a truly free market. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to provide a counter example.
Companies only believe in the free market when it suits them, so they don't deserve it. The only way to keep prices low is to intelligently regulate and keep the corporations small and relatively powerless so they don't have the resources to buy their way into the government's good graces.
Without stiff and proper rules keeping corporate interests separate from government interests, you always end up with corrupted governments relaxing regulations and robbing public resources for private profit, or as they like to call it, privatizing. Notice under the Bush administration that all of the deregulation and plundering of public property has resulted in a highly unstable economy. When you eliminate so many rules that the only thing stopping the resulting mega corporation from ripping people off are the inherent ethics guiding a company, you'll quickly be reminded that the only moral standard they answer to is the bottom line.
They have been doing that since the 70s, when it was shown that minorities were being racially profiled and either not receiving loans or paying higher interest. And while that is still the case thirty years later, the current problem has nothing to do with thirty year old legislation, and everything to do with corporate faith that their newly unregulated wagers will still be covered by our tax dollars. This year alone they will receive 130 billion dollars in bail outs, just for Fannie, Freddie, and Bear Stearns. That's about 50 billion more than we'll spend on "education."
There's an excellent BBC documentary called Super Rich that has some interesting interviews straight from the horses' mouths.
When the banks wrote the mortgages and held them, they were less likely to give money to unqualified buyers. When they were allowed to repackage the debt and sell it to other corporations, to no one's surprise, everyone got greedy and started trading the debt.
I like certain libertarians ideals, but the fact is that regulation is to industry what police are to neighborhoods. If you take a cop off a beat, crime will go up. If you take your eyes off corporate shenanigans, they will go up. This has been obvious from the days of Enron. What we need is reasonable regulation with national standards, state enforcement, and some new laws against the revolving door between business and government. There should be a separation of business and state, for the sake of both.
Of course, you can always argue that the fact that there was regulation that was removed led to the crisis. But you'd be wrong.
There are over 50,000 hits for "nasa faked moon landing." How many times do the stories I mentioned appear on the front page of any news organization? How many front page stories are there about sports?
Google counts aren't very revealing for measuring media exposure.
How many times do you hear about the fact that Walmart could not expand and make as much profit without the existence of government welfare programs? Or that the FBI employs fewer than fifty people who know Arabic? I can link you to one story about each of these items, but try to find them on your own. Now look for meaningless stories about sports, celebrities, fashion, celebrity news. There are tens of thousands of individually written stories about Brangelina's baby, but as far as I can see, not a single major news organization wrote anything about the Secretary of Defense claiming that the government had lost 2.3 trillion dollars on September 10th, 2001. How in the world is that just a coincidence?
Sure, you hear about "scandals," which is little more than confirmed political gossip. The real and sensible criticism of government and business simply isn't covered, though it does exist. You have to look for it, because no news corporation is going to endanger their profit, their friends, or their access to government power for the sake of society.
When Israel takes out a terrorist, they often kill civilians, but the repulsive part is that the victims of the apartheid have a custom you don't understand? I'd prefer we arm the Palestinians equally with the Israelis, and then see how different the peace negotiations go in the next round.
The executive branch itself has long used propaganda, regardless of what "party" is in power. The problem you have is that you're unable to see how narrow your vision is. Only the most "radical leftists" argued that we have no business invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, and they received no serious coverage in the lead-up to the invasion. But when Russia responds to actual military attacks right on their own border, the same people leading us to Iraq say that "in the 21st century, you don't invade other nations."
The military censors what we're allowed to see from the Iraq War. Newspaper editors voluntarily censor what they put in their paper, so they don't piss off people in power they need access to in order to have news to sell. And sometimes they fake the news, and sometimes they report faked news, like the single letter that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and yellowcake uranium in one page, which is now recognized as a complete forgery, conjured up by the government to ease our entry into war. And yet the propaganda that sent men and women to die in Iraq, and kill tens of thousands of civilians isn't worth mention in your little tirade.
We live in a state of unbelievably underperceived hypocrisy, and you still have your blinders on. If you don't believe it, just look at the photos on the front page of CNN, which you see as left, during the opening of the Iraq war and the opening of the war in South Ossetia.
Why would an obviously biased organization cover wars so differently? How is it that people only suffer when Russian tanks are on the move? Why aren't there pictures of dead civilians when bombs are dropped by billion dollar airplanes instead of strapped to terrorists?
You still believe in "them" versus "us." And whenever the government changes who "they" are, you follow right along.
You'd use flywheels instead. Bury some huge buggers in the ground in vacuum sealed containers, weighing many tons, and spin them up when the grid can't handle the load. When the wind dies, slow them down and keep sending energy to the grid.
It's a reliable way to store energy that's almost completely recyclable since made out of inert materials, and it uses the same concepts used in hydroelectric dams that have been running for decades. They've even put it in a bus or a tram somewhere in England instead of using batteries.
Well, I can't go into detail, but I'm sure I'm a reputed crackpot anyway. I've spoken to more than one person ranked in a certain military branch, but they're career and obviously no one who wants to move up the ladder is going to say anything publicly. Basically what they said is that the attacks were real, but we knew they were coming. I imagine it was kept at the highest levels, where secrets are kept. Just take a look at everything from the Pentagon Papers, or released documents from CIA ops that were run by very few people - we overthrew Iran in '53 with less than one hundred people who even knew about the operation, which the person writing the after-action report called "excessive."
What I think happened is that the Bush Administration saw it as their chance to have their Pearl Harbor event as a pretext to complete the job of securing the middle east, especially what was left of Iraq. No matter what the talking heads say these days, oil wins wars. The Germans were at a severe disadvantage because they were cut off from their supply. It's one of the main reasons their North African theater collapsed onto itself, and we went to war with Japan shortly after we stopped sending them oil.
Anyway, I think some top level officials got a hold of the plans, and they staged the NORAD exercises to make sure the plans were executed successfully. I think both planes that weren't flown into the towers were shot down, one over PA, and another over the ocean. The Pentagon was hit to add fear to the whole equation, in my opinion with some sort of missile or simple explosion. I was glued to the news that day and every single news center started off with "We have reports of an explosion at the Pentagon." There are so many holes in the official story of that I really believe it was a purely American military operation, whether it was carried out by the CIA or some other covert group with US assistance I don't know.
I think the planes causing the collapse of the building is something no one saw coming, and something they continue to draw out in order to avoid direct questions about Flight 93 and the Pentagon. So, yes the civilian government is dumb, but they can carry out extremely complicated and covert military ops that never touch civilian eyes.
But perhaps the time for irony has passed. The thing that pisses me off is that Clinton lied about sex, and we all slap our knee and go on with ourselves. Bush knowingly invades a country with no plausible pretext, kills and maims a few hundred thousand people, and we're supposed to keep chuckling. Democrats and Republicans are equally cowards and chickenhawks, but at least the democrats don't go around waving their guns whenever some idiot across the world rattles his.
The insane cowardice and greed from Cheney, Reagan, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Bush II is absolutely the reason our economy (and culture, in my opinion) is in the toilet. Look at any deficit per GDP graph and any graph showing what we spend on the military since WWII. Every time we spend less money on war, our economy does better, and our debt goes down, and the dollar as a result becomes stronger. Why do you think they hated Bush I so much? He responded with appropriate action to Iraq in Kuwait, raised taxes to balance the budget instead of giving more breaks to the wealthy, and kept his secret prisons and genocidal right wing para-military campaigns in Latin America hush-hush. They hate Clinton because he raised taxes for the wealthy and cut military spending, and kept quiet about the embargoes that killed God knows how many Iraqi civilians.
What's the difference between McCain and Obama on Iran? Obama would talk to them before he'd consider dropping a nuke. He's right of Nixon for chrissakes, and I'll take Nixon over McCain any day.
Gah. This is offtopic and rambling. But I can't keep laughing about it, even on TDS or TCR.
Cultural evolution does not require biological evolution. That's why racism in the US was acceptable 50 years ago to the "establishment" and is, at least officially, no longer acceptable.
Further, there is no reason to assume that other cultural imperfections cannot be overcome. In my view, consumerism can be replaced with a hybrid of socialist intent and capitalist mechanism. Energy resources can be shared through diplomacy and shared research for replacements rather than becoming the source of conflict and war.
It's a real pity that the hierarchies in place have such a strangle-hold on hope. In the last hundred years democratic movements have pushed and helped achieve many equal rights for women, minorities, and more recently indigenous people around the world. Protesting a war before it's even fought is something brand new to this century, and a sign that we are evolving much faster than biology could explain.
Then that Korean fuckwit, with enough military power, can blow you up without asking first.
The UN arrives at international consensus all the time, with very reasonable compromises for both sides, that the populations of both sides often are in favor for. For instance, declaring the Middle East a nuclear free zone for everyone - Israel, the US, and Iran. This is supported by everyone, except the governments of US and Israel. The US doesn't join the International Criminal Court because their first subject may be Henry Kissinger, or even GW Bush. Thus you can't expect the current government elite to make any move that could endanger themselves or their friends.
If you don't believe in law, then fine, we can continue to be an outlaw state, burning and pillaging at our whim. But when you are on the receiving end of the bullet, try not to complain.
First of all, let's remember that the Georgians and the Russians have been provoking each other for years over this issue. They have both violated the ceasefire and it will probably be a while before we know who violated the ceasefire lines first.
You lament the invasion, and similarly George Bush stated, "Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected... We have urged an immediate halt to the violence and a stand-down by all troops. We call for the end of the Russian bombings." Mr Putin expressed similar reservations about Iraq in April 2003:
Be sure to watch the media over the next few days - you'll see pictures of dead and wounded, buildings destroyed, and many other realities of war. Now ask yourself why you don't see any of those images from Iraq. Ask why we saw silhouetted shots of helicopters and long views of nighttime explosions instead of what was really happening on the ground.
We can see on both sides that morality is of little importance. Unfortunately, since we have taken Iraq unilaterally, Russia is free to take Georgia unilaterally, and any other province they can get away with. All they have to do is claim that their national security is threatened, which is a more grounded claim. Georgia is on the Russian border, not thousands of miles away, and they are dealing with their own problems in Chechnya.
It is time to give real power to the UN and the ICC in order to avoid more death and destruction. Unless states submit themselves to a common rule of international law, there will never be a chance for peace.
If you start out within the parameters of sustainability, it does make a difference. Is it impossible to recycle the water used in these processes? It doesn't have to be potable - my severely uneducated guess is that it's used for thermal cooling and aiding in cleaning or chemical processes. If it's heated and rises as steam, it can be used as a heat source while it's condensed back into water. If it's used for cutting or forming, it can be recycled after recovering useful bits of material.
You'd still have to ship some water but it may be far less than what the plant uses on a daily basis once you "fill it up" the first time. The other benefit of being in the desert is you have a major heat source for distillation if the process requires clean h2o.
Well, a smart idea would be to move all of our high tech manufacturing to the hottest deserts we have. You can build earth sheltered factories to save on A/C, cover the roof and surrounding area with solar panels for virtually unlimited electrical supply, bury some flywheel energy storage to keep necessities going at night. If solar panels turn out to be unsustainable, simpler thermal power plants could be used.
You have an endless supply of sand for glass and silicon. You make non-perishable goods that can be moved out slowly and efficiently (solar/thermal powered electric rail or whatever). To make it really sustainable you could use the same transportation to import recycled or recyclable plastics for the rest.
Our current answer is using fuel that's guaranteed to run out. We should shop direct for our energy.
If the softest target is a public bus with parents taking their kids to work than *NO*.
If you have a B-52 instead of a vest full of explosives, does it count if they accidentally die?
Are you shitting me? the Russians invaded
Oops. Sounds like you believe a story instead of the facts.
The Afghan government repeatedly requested the introduction of Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 1978.
the place we provided them with arms and *we* wrecked the place?
We prolonged the war, and left our highly trained and armed Mujaheddin allies - who are now "evil" - twisting in the wind.
our only sin in Afghanistan from the 80's is walking away after the Russians went home, we should have given them a ton of money to build up their infrastructure (conditionally based on human rights of course)
Oh, that's funny. Because the Taliban would disqualify, yet we gave them 43 million in 2001. Crazy!
The point being, the 432nd are doing what they were told, just as every German officer did as they were told. They are placated by the same propaganda - we kill with honor and glory because we are righteous and spare every life possible; they kill because they are evil and simply want to destroy the world.
In this case, we aren't participating in concentration camps, but we are killing tens of thousands of civilians because they have a strategically valuable position and a natural resource that's worth at least one hundred trillion dollars. You can rationalize all you want. If genocide is vile, why didn't we invade Rwanda? Why aren't we in Darfur? Why did we sell weapons to Suharto so he could wipe out the East Timorese?
This is the litmus test of humanity - can you treat others as you treat yourself, and do you have a set of moral principles which always applies? The answer for America for sixty five years has been unequivocally no.
If killing "only one million more" civilians than soldiers is a success as viewed by you, then perhaps you finally see the point.
The difference between a church and a cult is popularity, and the difference between a terrorist attack and a war is the body count. If you're proud of our death toll in unprovoked wars this century, which is approaching ten million, I'll happily call myself a moron if you can call yourself a psychopath.
However, characterizing the work of the 432nd as equivalent to terrorist bombings is hyperbolic extremism. The work that I witnessed was remarkable in that the UAV squadrons have the time and take the effort to minimize collateral damage to both civilians and religious institutions.
Here's a bit of Nazi propaganda. Can you please tell me the difference?
Our revenge will not be a kind of military triumph or punishment, which our whole nation demands today. We want to put an end to unscrupulous mass murder by an extreme and drastic blow. A peaceful observer might think that the time is near when half the earth will go flying through the air. Subordinating technique to an ordering will is the last great task of Western culture. In this sense, the great masters of weaponry of our century are the true teachers. We count ourselves among them. In all our campaigns we looked for rapid decisions that saved human lives. The losses among the Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, French, Greeks and Serbs were so small because we won classic military victories. Expert surgery by a leading doctor usually saves a life, whereas a butcher tortures his victim with ever new procedures. We did it the first way, while the English are unable to win a decision on the battlefield. Instead they care nothing for European humanity, bringing miseries upon them.
We can both agree, perhaps, that every war America fights is a major failure. Since we kill many times more civilians in every conflict than soldiers or terrorists.
Your answer may be to say that you're sorry, I'd prefer to stop the killing altogether. Treat sovereign nations as you'd expect to be treated. But that would require the sort of courage that our leadership has lacked since the end of WWII, and belief in moral values that we have since tossed out the window.