Well, to be fair as secretary of state she appears to have followed the direction of the president. There have been worse examples (including one who barricaded himself in his office and refused to resign under Lincoln).
The "innocent until proven guilty" bit is refering to the opinion that should be held by a juror, not to facts in the world. Were I a juror I would require that his guilt be proven. As I'm in the role of a reader of an article about it, I cannot take the same stance, lest I not have an opinion about anything.
Yes, it *IS* the task of a court, and in particular of a jury, to decide legal guilt. But legal guilt is not actual guilt, and, in fact, often gets things wrong. (Not, however, as often as a biased and illegally acting police officer.)
To the police he should have been a suspect. They apparently murdered him. But even this, alone, would not have set off a civil disturbance. That is clear evidence that this is a part of a pattern of behavior on the part of the police such that the community believed them to be habitually violent thugs biased against the community. (It's not proof, but only strong evidence, that this is an actuality.)
I'm *NOT* saying he wasn't maltreated. In fact I suggested that he was probably murdered. But I'm also saying that I the evidence indicates that he was not an innocent (which doesn't mean he was guilty of anything in particular).
Please note the distinction between "an innocent" and "innocent".
Clearly by "the people" you mean those people currently holding power. For some reason those are the people that I think *should* be held most accountable.
How about "both". I don't think he was a maltreated innocent, but he didn't deserve summary execution (if you can call illegal assault resultlng in murder execution). And it wouldn't have inspired public rage if he wasn't merely the tip of the iceberg.
Additionally, according to experts (Synanon) heroin is less addictive than tobbacco. So why demonize it?
I do agree that most drug dealers should be incarcerated...but for selling fraudulent merchandise. (I'm informed by the press that most black market drugs are mixed with various harmful substances other than the drug. And this time I suspect that they are telling the truth. For reasons suggested by Thoreau's "A Trout in Milk".)
There may, indeed, have been some people who were sufficiently scared by 9/11 to think that the change in laws was desireable, but I've never met one. There certainly weren't enough to get the laws changed in less than a month. But certain people in power saw an opportunity and used it, and it MUCH harder to get a law repealed.
I don't think the country, as in most of the people living there, was ever in favor of the draconian and unconstitutional changes in the law. That doesn't much matter when both major parties are in favor of increasing the centralization of power (no matter what they say...watch what they *do*, and remember they are always willing to lie to you).
Actually, MSWindNT wasn't that stable, but I've heard that the recent releases actually are pretty stable. I'll never be able to test though, since I won't agree to the EULA.
Also, I never experienced any real problems even with an unmodified MSWind95. The problems started when you installed additional software or hardware. (Yes, the 49.7 days bug existed, but it doesn't exist in the final version of MSWind95. I've got a machine that's running that, and has been up for years. It doesn't get much use, but there are a couple of abandoned programs that I can't export data from.)
No, Orwell visited fascist Spain, and wrote a fictionalized version set in a venue English speakers could identify with. (I've heard that it's called 1984 because he was reporting on 1948.)
You are assuming that the parties are monolithic blocks, which is incorrect. Many of them will grandstand on an issue that is not supported by their party if they think it will help their reelection, and some will do it for ideological reasons even if their party is on the opposite side.
BOTH parties are trying to centralize control. Both parties are trying to do what different constituencies want. And both are actually more interested in supporting the goals of unspoken backers. Neither of them puts the good of either the country or of the citizenry first, but both will take stands that allow them to claim to do so...to different constituencies.
There's that, but there's also the question of how small a percentage of those "skilled in the art" should need to consider something obvious before someone is granted a monopoly on it? To me it seems that this percentage should clearly be much less than 1% if there are 1000 skilled practitioners of the art. If there are more than 10,000 practitioners it should clearly be less than 0.1%. This would require an unwieldy jury size.
So I propose that if there is an independent invention of the same invention the patent should be immediately voided...or at least converted from a monopoly to a duopoly. (FWIW the telephone had three patents applied for by different people before the first one was granted. Why should *one* of them be granted a monopoly? [I think all three were in the US, and that the one in Russia is not one of the three, but this could be a mistake.]) But note that my proposal does not require that the separate invention be filed for before the first patent is granted. It's my belief that most "inventions" are never patented because the inventor considers them obvious. So the main result of patents is to retard the state of the art and centralize control...and that it's the centralization of control that is the main driving force behind the clamor for patent protection.
"Wipe out agriculture" is probably incorrect, but wipe out agricultural regions is not an overstatement, as deserts will appear in new places, and so will rainy areas. Even places that aren't seriously affected due to changes in rainfall will need to switch to different crops due to changes in temperature. Some places, however, will become much more productive. But they won't be the places that have been that way in the past.
That said, it is probable that the net agricultural production will be sharply reduced. The newer areas will be closer to the poles, and there's a lot less land there than there is closer to the equator.
I don't think you have properly evaluated the costs of your proposed mitigation measures. And most ocean acidification derives directly from the carbon dioxide level, not from agricultural chemicals. (Though they do tend to produce the "dead zone"s.)
So far, at least, urban farming is either only usable in low density "cities", which means lots of fast transport, or to produce high cost greens for local gourmet restaurants. And sea-steading is mainly feasible for multi-millionaires, who don't care about maintenance costs.
Of course, it's been awhile since I checked those expenses. Perhaps some "technological advance" has made them practical. But I'd be really surprised. Sea water is intensively corrsive, and barnacles seem to grow on nearly anything.
I'm sorry, but parts of Antarctica are already melting. That's not 200 years away, that's last year and the year before.
If you want to say "total meltdown of Antacrtica" has been postponed for 200 years, I suspect you're being unreasonably pessimistic. The mountain tops will probably stay covered in ice for considerably longer. But in between those extremes things are variable depending on what actions we take now, and so are the results.
Now we get to the paper you referenced. In the first place I don't think either of us really understand it. (I know that I don't.) In the second place he's comparing a historical record in a few spots at a time that we don't have detailed information about to current models that are based on much greater amounts of information. He could be right. But most current models have been underestimating the actual melting, due to things like not including wave driven fragmentation. So I don't think he is. (And that article was published in 2005, so it doesn't include all the data that current models are based on.)
That said, I'll admit that I'm much more aware of models of the Arctic than of the Antarctic. Perhaps they aren't underestimating the melt rate, or at least not as much.
If you are talking about the parties, you have a point. If you are talking about the adherents of the parties, you need your eyes/ears checked.
For some reason the Republican party has become attractive to a wide spectrum of lunatics who are also science deniers. Some of them have a clear economic motive, to the point where I sometimes attribute their speeches/actions to malice rather than ignorance and close-mindedness. This was not the case even as recently as the 1970's, and I wasn't paying attention when it happened. The Democratic party is attractive to lunatics, also, but most of *them* aren't science deniers. I don't know why the difference happened. (Please note: There is a big difference between the party powers and the supporters, though there is overlap, and the Republicans actually seem to support the feelings of them supporters more accurately than do the Democrats.)
Yes, but there are degrees of danger. I'll agree that it's probably too late to avoid ocean acidification, considerable sea level rise, and Arctic meltdown. Antarctic meltdown is probably still partially avoidable, though it's uncertain how much melting is already committed to.
But if we *don't* start addressing the problem seriously now, total Antarctic melting will happen. That means a sea level rise in at least the meters category, if not the dekameters. If we were to seriously address the problem starting today we could probably hold the sea level rise to the decimeter range. So it's not too late to avoid some of the problems, even though there are other problems that are now unavoidable.
As for "geoengineering"....ugh! The dangers can be worse than the risks avoided, and due to the feedback loops it's not always clear which are the safer choices.
There was a big change during the Vietnam War, when few citizens thought it was reasonable to send people over to kill and be killed, but the government drafted people into that anyway. So colleges stopped failing students. Unfortunately, when the draft was repealed, that policy wasn't. It sounds like things have gotten *much* worse in the intervening years.
There are many variations of this. One I *think* works (but I don't have the skill to check) is that the universe is "sort of" like a simulation, where only macroscopic items have a defined state, but the macroscopic items have defined contents and a defined energy spectrum, and when you arrange to "look closely" at one of those items, it alters the state of the rest of the item in a computationally conservative way, such that you can't detect the difference until you start getting really close to the limits of the simulation, at which point you get results that are statisticly chosen to confirm the conditions of the macroscopic item. So if you split off a bound pair of subatomic particles, they are so pair has defined characteristics, but there is no definition of the components until you look.
Think of it as a way of simplifying the model so that it can run faster on the host computer. The actual "host computer" may not really exist, but if it did, this would be the most efficient way to program it.
You are assuming that they care. But what they're probably regretting is that they haven't killed all to ones convicted on fraudulent evidence.
O, wait, you said "people". You didn't mean officials.
N.B.: The laws are made and enforced by organizations composed of people who hold power. They *like* holding power. And they are quite willing to kill innocent people to keep it. Some of them would cavail at mass murder.
You left out 1 1/2 considerations: 1) Most of the antibiotics in use are essentially identical to antibiotics long existing in soil bacteria, and so there will have been a long development process where bacteria resistant to the antibiotic mechanism will have had an evolutionary advantage to compensate for the extra costs (which don't usually appear to be excessively high, probably due to long refinement).
another half) Most bacteria can freely share genetic mechanisms for things like coping with environmental stresses. So when one strain of bacteria develops a capability, it is likely to soon get widely shared with other quite different strains.
So, yeah, keeping resistant bacteria from appearing is going to depend on developing antibacterial mechanisms that there isn't a long history of pre-adaptive mechanism development. And since some of the adaptive mechanisms are pretty generic (like pumping out a wide variety of chemicals that you don't expect to have in your body [think kidneys]) this is likely to be quite difficult.
The charges (as given in the summary) didn't explicitly mention Monstanto. Personally, I believe that GMO foods are a good idea...as long as they aren't patented, and are evaluated for safety by people who don't have a financial stake in the result.
Please remember that before the reformation it was often forbidden for someone not authorized by the church to read the scriptures. The wide availability of the Bible is something that didn't happen until the protestant schisms.
It all depends on how you define "gens". It originally meant killing all of the descendants of any of several particular individuals. With a modification of that definition to "some great-grandparent", then the US definitely did commit genocide against some native americans. If you modify it to great-great-grandparent, then it is probable that the US committed genocide. If you modify it to great-great-great-grandparent then it is unlikely that the US committed genocide. But there were certainly occasions when it tried.
I will freely admit that I did not examine your links, as I have no way to evaluate their accuracy. Possibly the historynewsnetwork site was trustworty, OTOH, I would not be willing to give much weight to the posting of a columnist unless I knew a great deal about him.
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Well, to be fair as secretary of state she appears to have followed the direction of the president. There have been worse examples (including one who barricaded himself in his office and refused to resign under Lincoln).
It you actually believe that, I have a fine bridge to sell you.
The "innocent until proven guilty" bit is refering to the opinion that should be held by a juror, not to facts in the world. Were I a juror I would require that his guilt be proven. As I'm in the role of a reader of an article about it, I cannot take the same stance, lest I not have an opinion about anything.
Yes, it *IS* the task of a court, and in particular of a jury, to decide legal guilt. But legal guilt is not actual guilt, and, in fact, often gets things wrong. (Not, however, as often as a biased and illegally acting police officer.)
To the police he should have been a suspect. They apparently murdered him. But even this, alone, would not have set off a civil disturbance. That is clear evidence that this is a part of a pattern of behavior on the part of the police such that the community believed them to be habitually violent thugs biased against the community. (It's not proof, but only strong evidence, that this is an actuality.)
I'm *NOT* saying he wasn't maltreated. In fact I suggested that he was probably murdered. But I'm also saying that I the evidence indicates that he was not an innocent (which doesn't mean he was guilty of anything in particular).
Please note the distinction between "an innocent" and "innocent".
Which people?
Clearly by "the people" you mean those people currently holding power. For some reason those are the people that I think *should* be held most accountable.
How about "both". I don't think he was a maltreated innocent, but he didn't deserve summary execution (if you can call illegal assault resultlng in murder execution). And it wouldn't have inspired public rage if he wasn't merely the tip of the iceberg.
Additionally, according to experts (Synanon) heroin is less addictive than tobbacco. So why demonize it?
I do agree that most drug dealers should be incarcerated...but for selling fraudulent merchandise. (I'm informed by the press that most black market drugs are mixed with various harmful substances other than the drug. And this time I suspect that they are telling the truth. For reasons suggested by Thoreau's "A Trout in Milk".)
To be fair, the police have, occasionally, committed violence and mass murder against white communities. Usually separatist religious groups.
There may, indeed, have been some people who were sufficiently scared by 9/11 to think that the change in laws was desireable, but I've never met one. There certainly weren't enough to get the laws changed in less than a month. But certain people in power saw an opportunity and used it, and it MUCH harder to get a law repealed.
I don't think the country, as in most of the people living there, was ever in favor of the draconian and unconstitutional changes in the law. That doesn't much matter when both major parties are in favor of increasing the centralization of power (no matter what they say...watch what they *do*, and remember they are always willing to lie to you).
Actually, MSWindNT wasn't that stable, but I've heard that the recent releases actually are pretty stable. I'll never be able to test though, since I won't agree to the EULA.
Also, I never experienced any real problems even with an unmodified MSWind95. The problems started when you installed additional software or hardware. (Yes, the 49.7 days bug existed, but it doesn't exist in the final version of MSWind95. I've got a machine that's running that, and has been up for years. It doesn't get much use, but there are a couple of abandoned programs that I can't export data from.)
No, Orwell visited fascist Spain, and wrote a fictionalized version set in a venue English speakers could identify with. (I've heard that it's called 1984 because he was reporting on 1948.)
You are assuming that the parties are monolithic blocks, which is incorrect. Many of them will grandstand on an issue that is not supported by their party if they think it will help their reelection, and some will do it for ideological reasons even if their party is on the opposite side.
BOTH parties are trying to centralize control. Both parties are trying to do what different constituencies want. And both are actually more interested in supporting the goals of unspoken backers. Neither of them puts the good of either the country or of the citizenry first, but both will take stands that allow them to claim to do so...to different constituencies.
There's that, but there's also the question of how small a percentage of those "skilled in the art" should need to consider something obvious before someone is granted a monopoly on it? To me it seems that this percentage should clearly be much less than 1% if there are 1000 skilled practitioners of the art. If there are more than 10,000 practitioners it should clearly be less than 0.1%. This would require an unwieldy jury size.
So I propose that if there is an independent invention of the same invention the patent should be immediately voided...or at least converted from a monopoly to a duopoly. (FWIW the telephone had three patents applied for by different people before the first one was granted. Why should *one* of them be granted a monopoly? [I think all three were in the US, and that the one in Russia is not one of the three, but this could be a mistake.]) But note that my proposal does not require that the separate invention be filed for before the first patent is granted. It's my belief that most "inventions" are never patented because the inventor considers them obvious. So the main result of patents is to retard the state of the art and centralize control...and that it's the centralization of control that is the main driving force behind the clamor for patent protection.
"Wipe out agriculture" is probably incorrect, but wipe out agricultural regions is not an overstatement, as deserts will appear in new places, and so will rainy areas. Even places that aren't seriously affected due to changes in rainfall will need to switch to different crops due to changes in temperature. Some places, however, will become much more productive. But they won't be the places that have been that way in the past.
That said, it is probable that the net agricultural production will be sharply reduced. The newer areas will be closer to the poles, and there's a lot less land there than there is closer to the equator.
I don't think you have properly evaluated the costs of your proposed mitigation measures. And most ocean acidification derives directly from the carbon dioxide level, not from agricultural chemicals. (Though they do tend to produce the "dead zone"s.)
So far, at least, urban farming is either only usable in low density "cities", which means lots of fast transport, or to produce high cost greens for local gourmet restaurants. And sea-steading is mainly feasible for multi-millionaires, who don't care about maintenance costs.
Of course, it's been awhile since I checked those expenses. Perhaps some "technological advance" has made them practical. But I'd be really surprised. Sea water is intensively corrsive, and barnacles seem to grow on nearly anything.
I'm sorry, but parts of Antarctica are already melting. That's not 200 years away, that's last year and the year before.
If you want to say "total meltdown of Antacrtica" has been postponed for 200 years, I suspect you're being unreasonably pessimistic. The mountain tops will probably stay covered in ice for considerably longer. But in between those extremes things are variable depending on what actions we take now, and so are the results.
Now we get to the paper you referenced. In the first place I don't think either of us really understand it. (I know that I don't.) In the second place he's comparing a historical record in a few spots at a time that we don't have detailed information about to current models that are based on much greater amounts of information. He could be right. But most current models have been underestimating the actual melting, due to things like not including wave driven fragmentation. So I don't think he is. (And that article was published in 2005, so it doesn't include all the data that current models are based on.)
That said, I'll admit that I'm much more aware of models of the Arctic than of the Antarctic. Perhaps they aren't underestimating the melt rate, or at least not as much.
If you are talking about the parties, you have a point. If you are talking about the adherents of the parties, you need your eyes/ears checked.
For some reason the Republican party has become attractive to a wide spectrum of lunatics who are also science deniers. Some of them have a clear economic motive, to the point where I sometimes attribute their speeches/actions to malice rather than ignorance and close-mindedness. This was not the case even as recently as the 1970's, and I wasn't paying attention when it happened. The Democratic party is attractive to lunatics, also, but most of *them* aren't science deniers. I don't know why the difference happened. (Please note: There is a big difference between the party powers and the supporters, though there is overlap, and the Republicans actually seem to support the feelings of them supporters more accurately than do the Democrats.)
Yes, but there are degrees of danger. I'll agree that it's probably too late to avoid ocean acidification, considerable sea level rise, and Arctic meltdown. Antarctic meltdown is probably still partially avoidable, though it's uncertain how much melting is already committed to.
But if we *don't* start addressing the problem seriously now, total Antarctic melting will happen. That means a sea level rise in at least the meters category, if not the dekameters. If we were to seriously address the problem starting today we could probably hold the sea level rise to the decimeter range. So it's not too late to avoid some of the problems, even though there are other problems that are now unavoidable.
As for "geoengineering"....ugh! The dangers can be worse than the risks avoided, and due to the feedback loops it's not always clear which are the safer choices.
There was a big change during the Vietnam War, when few citizens thought it was reasonable to send people over to kill and be killed, but the government drafted people into that anyway. So colleges stopped failing students. Unfortunately, when the draft was repealed, that policy wasn't. It sounds like things have gotten *much* worse in the intervening years.
There are many variations of this. One I *think* works (but I don't have the skill to check) is that the universe is "sort of" like a simulation, where only macroscopic items have a defined state, but the macroscopic items have defined contents and a defined energy spectrum, and when you arrange to "look closely" at one of those items, it alters the state of the rest of the item in a computationally conservative way, such that you can't detect the difference until you start getting really close to the limits of the simulation, at which point you get results that are statisticly chosen to confirm the conditions of the macroscopic item. So if you split off a bound pair of subatomic particles, they are so pair has defined characteristics, but there is no definition of the components until you look.
Think of it as a way of simplifying the model so that it can run faster on the host computer. The actual "host computer" may not really exist, but if it did, this would be the most efficient way to program it.
You are assuming that they care. But what they're probably regretting is that they haven't killed all to ones convicted on fraudulent evidence.
O, wait, you said "people". You didn't mean officials.
N.B.: The laws are made and enforced by organizations composed of people who hold power. They *like* holding power. And they are quite willing to kill innocent people to keep it. Some of them would cavail at mass murder.
You left out 1 1/2 considerations:
1) Most of the antibiotics in use are essentially identical to antibiotics long existing in soil bacteria, and so there will have been a long development process where bacteria resistant to the antibiotic mechanism will have had an evolutionary advantage to compensate for the extra costs (which don't usually appear to be excessively high, probably due to long refinement).
another half) Most bacteria can freely share genetic mechanisms for things like coping with environmental stresses. So when one strain of bacteria develops a capability, it is likely to soon get widely shared with other quite different strains.
So, yeah, keeping resistant bacteria from appearing is going to depend on developing antibacterial mechanisms that there isn't a long history of pre-adaptive mechanism development. And since some of the adaptive mechanisms are pretty generic (like pumping out a wide variety of chemicals that you don't expect to have in your body [think kidneys]) this is likely to be quite difficult.
The charges (as given in the summary) didn't explicitly mention Monstanto. Personally, I believe that GMO foods are a good idea...as long as they aren't patented, and are evaluated for safety by people who don't have a financial stake in the result.
Unfortunately....
Please remember that before the reformation it was often forbidden for someone not authorized by the church to read the scriptures. The wide availability of the Bible is something that didn't happen until the protestant schisms.
It all depends on how you define "gens". It originally meant killing all of the descendants of any of several particular individuals. With a modification of that definition to "some great-grandparent", then the US definitely did commit genocide against some native americans. If you modify it to great-great-grandparent, then it is probable that the US committed genocide. If you modify it to great-great-great-grandparent then it is unlikely that the US committed genocide. But there were certainly occasions when it tried.
I will freely admit that I did not examine your links, as I have no way to evaluate their accuracy. Possibly the historynewsnetwork site was trustworty, OTOH, I would not be willing to give much weight to the posting of a columnist unless I knew a great deal about him.